Infinite jest

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one’s toes, inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind him knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature’s clutching hand just mm. away from the trailing boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved artfully aside, long-practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians’ faces very clearly as his odor preceded him like a shock-wave. A man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind of artful veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony’s breath came in great ragged stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim-pursuit. He felt the Creature’s hand grope for purchase on the remains of his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was not mourned. The Thing’s own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she hurled still came from the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted a pole with a meaty sound Tony had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself about the head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead son. The moment after the impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight, not banking on pursuit from the other one, this black Creature screaming and just off his tail. For the first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for Help and to Stop The Bitch, and Poor Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling Help! and For God’s Sake Stop Her, flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade-device among Harvard Square crews. But now the black Creature had closed to within mm., and now it had real hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome Creature’s hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid-stride at the thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the street or gutter. Their shoes’ toes formed complex and variable rhythms on the pavement; sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly just behind. Bold-print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION flashed past; Antitoi Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. Krause and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked intersection. Poor Tony shouted Help! and Please! The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those simply horrid dreams where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. and just before its talons close on the back of your collar you wake up sitting bolt upright; except this horrid Creature’s-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on and on, storefront and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the periphery due right. Antitoi Ent.’s discreet back door was accessible by a parking alley that cut west off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller and dumpster-lined north-south alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had occasionally slept, when out late and short of train-fare) was within underhand-toss distance of the Canadian brothers’ rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other hand clamped tight to the wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the Creature by the time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would keep It from seeing just which hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. He feinted around a bodega’s sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping the Creature would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the stacked fruit. It did not. It was still right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape cranberries was discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons before. Its breath had a ragged implacability about it. It was all too clearly in this for the long haul. It was no longer shouting Stop or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony’s breaths felt flamish. It sounded as if he were weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could not; he hadn’t the breath to spare; black specks floated upward through his vision; only certain of the streetlamps worked; his heartbeat was zuckungzuckungzuckung. Poor Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its uppers were not straps and could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The entrance to the parking alley west was between a Tax Preparer’s and something else; it was right around here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with opaque centers and floated upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was post-seizure, infirm, not to mention Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs; he could barely stay on his toes; he had not consumed food since before the library’s men’s room stall, which was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping past; an elderly person went down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere a rape-whistle blew; the Tax Preparer’s had the odd storefront announcement ON PARLE LE POR-TUGAIS ICI. Its hand’s finger knocked the rim of Tony’s leather collar with each footfall until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of the chignon he held clamped to his head with a hand. Poor Tony’s father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s green strings had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly long-nailed fingers were twining for purchase in his wig’s hair when they hit the Preparer’s and Tony cut a sharp right, breaking a heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead as the Creature’s momentum carried it past the alley’s recessed mouth. Krause whimpered raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotiating broken glass and the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop! with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go.

Having traced — through the strenuous technical interview of the sar-torially eccentric cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom they had traced through the regrettably fatal technical interview of the young burglar^[300] whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved considerably lower than that of his room’s computer’s machinery — having traced their best chances at a copy to the hapless Antitois’ establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. then several days to find it there, the real Entertainment.

A.F.R.’s U.S.A. cell’s leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower, had allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or dismantled. In all other respects, the search had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orderly, with time taken. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off the shop’s back room. Each cartridge of the shop’s exhaustive shelves was sampled by a volunteer, then discarded in one of the huge metal coffre d’amas in the alley outside the shop’s rear door. A detail had been assigned to roll the extinguished Antitoi brothers in construction-plastic and place them in a room of storage off the back room. This was for hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured an oilskin windowshade for the front door’s glass, also some printed signs which read CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No person had knocked at the door after the first hours, thus.

Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found an example of the rival F.L.Q.’s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely stamped smiling face and the ‘IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’ embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to be rolled into the room of storage and strapped in, in order to verify this, and Fortier allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look after his aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer and kissed both his face’s cheeks as he was rolled in and fitted by M. Broullîme with EEG wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage.

Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void. Then another from this box, also wet: also blank. Two blanks. Done. D’accord. Fortier, philosophical, counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration — he and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored. A.F.R. wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As well, chiefly, now to determine: could this copy of DuPlessis itself be copied? This was the real objective: a Master cartridge.^[301] Unlike the F.L.Q., les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had no interest in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity’s return. Not in re-Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its charter’s dissolution. The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this — if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and disseminate the Entertainment, Quebec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede, to face on its own the wrath of a neighbor struck down by its own inability to say ‘Now’ to fatal pleasures.[302]

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow fashion.

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search’s middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans’ field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.