Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1064

a. (Which of course assumes there’s a point.)

[367] Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s’ cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately’s biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.

[369] For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it’s maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone.

[371] An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient.

[372] Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker’s automatic percentage (usually 10 % subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms.

[374] With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne.

[375] Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as ‘Dizzy Dick Disorder’ or sometimes just ‘3-D.’

[376] Knoll Laboratories’ good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations.

[377] A ‘Phillips Screwdriver,’ vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a ‘lowball.’

[378] (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)

[379] See Note 144 supra.

[380] The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace³ solid-field HD digital imaging.

a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché’s seminal corporation’s name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television’s term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning… A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing.