Infinite jest

PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

‘You can’t say it’s only a U.S. thing,’ Steeply said again. ‘I went through school when mu!ticulturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It’s a woman covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’

‘This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.’

‘These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with her. Apparently she’s simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the young Oriental men who know of the myths can’t resist, according to the myths.’

‘And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,’ Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d’Amherst outdoor rink, M. Mar-athe’s breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.

‘Killed outright, usually. The pleasure’s too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s.’

Marathe sniffed.

‘The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.’

Marathe coughed.

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bio-luminescent. They seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fau-teuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe’s betrayal, despite language.^[222] The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply’s B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one’s superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Quebec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney ‘the God’ Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud’s boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. ‘A false dawn.’

‘No,’ Steeply said, ‘but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’

‘L’Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse.’ Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.

Steeply said ‘The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk’s so beautiful that mortal Québecois eyes can’t take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.’

‘In most versions an opal.’

‘A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’

Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed.[223]

Marathe said ‘The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.’

‘Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk’ said Steeply. He was smoking either his last or one of his purse’s pack’s last cigarettes — the American’s habit to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.

A hidden bird twittered.

‘The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’

‘And haven’t we come a long way,’ Steeply said ironically.

‘This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type’s temptation, I think.’

‘Whereas your type’s a man of only actions, ends,’ Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the night’s bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site’s payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe’s teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun’s top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.

Rémy Marathe’s resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of his field-persona’s electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply’s face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.

The cloudless sky above the east’s Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch in his windbreaker’s pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this.

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. ‘You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes’ straps …” He gestured slightly.

Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone’s dust with the toes of his shoe. ‘It looks like there might be things.’

‘I must soon leave.’ Marathe’s hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling’s pebbled grip. Tt has been good to be in the air for a night. Soon I must leave,’

‘Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plopping down wherever you wish. Possibility of things … crawling up.’ He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. ‘I’d never realized.’