Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1009

[223] Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur’s anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called ‘Fast Fourier Transforms,’ though what the hell ‘ALGOL’ is is anybody’s guess, unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, ‘I’algol,’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.

[227] A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.

[228] National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified Services.

[229] The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services’ most elite and least specific division, which on Hugh Steeply’s latest field-assignment is paying his salary, though his checks and alimony’s garnishment are routed through something called the ‘Foundation for Continental Freedom,’ which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy.

[230] Charlestown/Southie street term for meters.

[231] Powdered vitamin B₁₂, convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always preferred B₁₂ to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him this allergic thing where he got very tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips.

[232] Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine’s broken down into benzoylecgonine, methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and one reason not everybody is wired to enjoy Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield unpleasant neurosomatic fallout in certain systems: e.g. in Don Gately’s neurosystem, spider angiomas and a tendency to pluck at the skin on the backs of his hands, due to which tendency he’s always loathed and hated coke and most cokeheads; in Bruce Green’s system, binocular nystagmus and a walloping depression even while the coke-high’s still on that accounts for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic face hidden in the crook of his big right arm; in Ken Erdedy an unstoppable rhinorrhagia that sent him to the Emergency Room both times he ever did cocaine; in Kate Gompert blepharospec-ticity and now instant cerebral hemorrhage because she’s on Parnate, an M. A.O.-inhibiting antidepressant; in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control he snorted Bing only once. Hemispasms of the oral labia are a common effect of coke-hydrolysis, one mild enough so that people can get them and still enjoy Bing very much; the spasming can range from a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and Foss to an alternating series of Edvard Munch-Jimmy Carter-Paliaccí-Mick Jagger-like expressive contortions so severe that everyone in a room except for them is embarrassed. In former cokehead Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that led directly to his early choice of career. Randy Lenz also gets nystagmus, but of the right eye only, as well as vascular constriction, diuresis extremus, phosphenism, compulsive tooth-grinding, megalomania, phobophobia, euphoric recall, delusions of persecution and/or homicidal envy, sociosis, postnasal drip, a mild priapism that makes the diuresis a dicey and gymnastic affair, occasional acne rosea and/or rhinophyma, and — especially if there’s synergism from almost a whole pack of filterless Winstons and four cups of nipple-hardeningly strong and alkaline B.Y.P. coffee — confabulation concurrent with a manic garrulousness sufficient to cause lingual tendinitis, pulmonary phasece, and a complete inability to send from his presence anyone who seems at all willing to listen to him.