Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1058
David Foster Wallace
[328] (though never unveiled)
[329] (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles)
[330] (given the guy’s track record with ingestion)
[331] Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson’s
[332] 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.
‘Gracious me and mine,’ Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he’d crossed to keep the foot from joggling.
‘Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt’s been up to see him. Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne’s going to be OK.’
‘Well thank heavens for that load off everyone’s mind,’ Pemulis said.
It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs’ Office. Mrs. Inc’s ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody’d said if anybody higher up than deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn’t know if this was good or bad.
‘Let’s make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.’ Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint’s show. His face kind of came apart when he smiled. ‘With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you’re pulled from the locker room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge anything’s untoward with Wayne.’
Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their soundproof doors at I435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne’s said about anything, or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn’t shown facial-feature one in their room since the apocalyptic broadcast. It’d taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little pecker’s Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the ‘drine on Wayne’s cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and Schtitt’s megaphone outside.
‘I’m in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Pos-salthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’
‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’
Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.
