Infinite jest

13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling in for Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out in the office playing some sort of hand-held sports game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on. Cartridges not allowed after 0000h., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year. Though Bruce Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the-couch rule if his legs weren’t twisted over and his feet on the floor. All the Ennet House viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400 InterLace NNE downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all transmissions except one line’s four straight redissemms of ‘The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,’ and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult. Ken Erdedy has started to smoke cigarettes and sits smoking, joggling one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather couch. Kate Gompert sits cross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward so her forehead touches her foot. It looks like some kind of spiritually advanced yoga position or stretching exercise, but it’s really just the way Kate Gompert has been sitting on the sofa all night every night since Wednesday’s free-for-all unpleasantness with Lenz and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole House is still reeling and spiritually palsied. Day’s bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd with dress shoes and black socks and a velour bathrobe, but Day’s proven kind of admirably resistant to caring what other people think, in a way.

‘Like you really care.’ Kate Gompert’s voice is toneless and hard to hear because it issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs.

‘It isn’t a question of caring or not caring,’ Day says quietly. ‘I meant only that I identify to an extent.’

Gompert’s sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs.

Bruce Green doesn’t snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white tape. Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to them.

Day speaks softly and doesn’t cross his legs to incline over to the side toward her. ‘When I was a little boy —’

Gompert chuffs air again.

‘— just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to avoid the boys who took my violin case and played keep-away over my head with it, one summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the window, blowing out, acting as an exhaust fan.’

‘I know from exhaust fans, believe you me.’

‘The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this resonance that produced it.’

‘A thing.’

‘As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.’

‘But it was inside you, though.’

‘Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.’

‘Was it triangular? The shape? When you say billowing, do you mean like a triangle?’

‘Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly.’

A mirthless laugh into the ankle. ‘Alcoholics Anomalous.’

Day hasn’t switched legs or moved, and he isn’t looking at her ear or her scalp, which are in view. ‘In just the way any child will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted.’

‘But you still forgot and went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside you.’

Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says ‘His head’s shaped like a mushroom.’ Day has no idea what he was referring to or talking about.

‘Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede.’

‘The triangular horror.’

‘It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me.’

It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing anybody in particular. ‘The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum laude. One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’

‘But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’

‘It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.’

‘Tell me all about it.’

‘I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt.’

Gompert’s head isn’t all the way up, but now it’s about halfway up; her forehead has a major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone. She’s looking roughly halfway between straight ahead and Day beside her. ‘And there was this idea underneath that you’d brought it on, that you’d wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time. You like despised yourself for waking it up.’

Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’s head is in no way mushroom-shaped, though it is large and — in the rubber infant-mask — apt to appear to the adult viewer kind of grotesque. ‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.’

Green in his sleep cries out something that sounds like ‘For God’s sake no Mr. Ho don’t light it!’ His swollen black eyes and R.E.M.’s non sequiturs, plus the capering 130-kilo infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring into space, all backed by the blurps and wonks of Gene M.’s hand-held game in the office, give the dark living room a dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere.

Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. ‘It’s never come back. Over twenty years. But I’ve not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like a day at the foot-masseur’s compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising inside me.’

‘Billowing.’

‘Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss.’

‘I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.’

‘Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if they mean a place.’ Kate Gompert is now looking at him. Her face doesn’t look better but does look different. Her neck’s clearly stiff from having been contorted.

‘From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,’ Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, ‘I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I’d surely kill myself.’

‘Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.’

‘Oh God please,’ Green says very distinctly.

Day says: ‘There is no way it could feel worse.’