Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 30

Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife’s Arab Women’s Advanced League tennis night with the other legation wives and companions at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is not around wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Töblerone hits Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves, and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment’s inability to control his appetites for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attache to remain in personal attendance all evening on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves, rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q-----.

So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U., when the medical attache is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-volume fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical attache on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attache does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and — worst — of course no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet where the medical attache’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. And even if he weren’t far too exhausted and tightly wound to venture back into the damp urban night to pick up entertainment cartridges, the medical attache realizes that his wife has, as always on Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic-immunity license plates, without which your thinking alien wouldn’t even dream of trying to park publicly at night in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.

The medical attache’s unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living room’s lavish TP receives also the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from the service are so technologically and cryp-tographically complex that the attache has always left the whole business to his wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons and abbreviations almost at random, the attache is able to summon up only live U.S.A. professional sports — which he has always found brutish and repellent — Texaco Oil Company-sponsored opera — which the attache has seen today more than enough of the human uvula thank you very much — a redisseminated episode of the popular afternoon InterLace children’s program ‘Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’ — which the attache thinks for a moment might be a documentary on bipolar mood disorders until he catches on and thumbs the selection-panel hastily — and a redisseminated session of the scantily clad variable-impact early-A.M. ‘Fit Forever’ home-aerobics series of the InterLace aerobics-guru Ms. Tawni Kondo, the scantily clad and splay-limbed immodesty of which threatens the devout medical attache with the possibility of impure thoughts.