Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1005

[195] Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi-Crocodile Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the crack with some weird fake-wood-resin, so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a whole new institutional table.

[196] E.g. ‘Kid, sobriety’s like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it’; they’d rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them.

[197] (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.)

[198] Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: ‘The central activity of the MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dangerous drugs and other techniques [sic] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service Division employees, agents, and contractors.’ — Civil Action #80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980.

[199] Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.’s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule C–IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties.

[200] Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss’s analysis, which you can bet was developed outside Gately’s earshot.

[201] Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside of hinges, etc.

[202] Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to go anywhere near it.

[203] Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic.

[205] Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank. Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub.

[206] Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that ‘To hear the squeak’ is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada’s euphemisms for sudden and violent de-mapping.

[207] L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable ‘va chier, putain!’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context.

[209] E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome’s fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo-Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they’re pale. Hal at the height of his toss, knees more bent than he’d like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up over Axford’s head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid’s hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx’s U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy Wingo’s front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. They’re not in a straight line; they’re more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet off what looks like Longwood’s synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year’s seniors out in the pavilion’s webbed chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. Clarke’s cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman’s call. Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the whole court’s tilted.