Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1015
David Foster Wallace
‘But so it’s early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I’ve never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn’t kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind —’
‘Q.’
‘In the Moms’s family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad’s plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms’s home town’s wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I’d have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold garden. It’s March and it’s
‘So then I’m let’s say thirteen, which means Hallie’s four. The Moms is in the backyard garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The situation is ambiguous between whether it’s the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. The old machine, full of gas I’d slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn’t know what’s wrong when the thing won’t work and to stand there wringing her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother’s stride behind it is like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she’s leaving drunken staggery footprints behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There’s something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she’d be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn’t even
‘Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces on both toes. We’ve been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden’s dirt is just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he’s holding out something small and dark and he’s coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand resolves into something that just doesn’t look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he’s getting ready to bawl. That’s with a