Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1012
David Foster Wallace
‘Q-’
‘Apparently it’s the noise, she can’t take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says she hasn’t set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in — you’d have to ask Hallie. The Volvo was already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went to The Stork’s funeral, which was off the grounds. Now she’s got a tri-modem and videophony out the bazoo, though she’d never use a Tableau, I know.’
‘Q.’
‘Well it’s been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she’s never been diagnosed or treated for it is that in her the Disorder doesn’t prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he’d felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway he’d just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments. Actually we’ve been close all our lives, notwithstanding that Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you’d ever want to get within a click of. I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain’s. Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in
