Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 31

The only entertainment cartridges anywhere in the apartment, a foul-tempered search reveals, are those which have arrived in Wednesday’s U.S.A. postal delivery, left on the sideboard in the living room along with personal and professional faxes and mail the medical attache declines to read until it’s been pre-scanned by his wife for relevant interest to himself.

The sideboard is against the wall opposite the room’s electronic recliner under a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica. The padded cartridge-mailers with their distinctive rectangular bulge are mixed haphazardly in with the less entertaining mail. Searching for something to unwind with, the medical attache tears the different padded mailers open along their designated perforations. There is an O.N.A.N.M.A. Specialty Service film on actinomycete-class antibiotics and irritable bowel syndrome. There is 1 April Y.D. A.U.’s CBC/PATHÉ North American News Summary 40-minute cartridge, available daily by a wife’s auto-subscription and either transmitted to TP by unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play ROM self-erasing disk. There is the Arabic-language video edition of April’s Self magazine for the attache’s wife, Nass’s cover’s model chastely swathed and veiled. There is a plain brown and irritatingly untitled cartridge-case in a featureless white three-day standard U.S.A. First Class padded cartridge-mailer. The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A., and the return-address box has only the term ‘HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!’ with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address or incorporated logo. Though by birth and residence a native of Quebec, where the language of discourse is not English, the medical attache knows quite well that the English word anniversary does not mean the same as birthday. And the medical attache and his veiled wife were united in the eyes of God and Prophet not in April but in October, four years prior, in the Rub’al Khali. Adding to the padded mailer’s confusion is the fact that anything from Prince Q-----’s legation in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. would carry a diplomatic seal instead of routine O.N.A.N. postage. The medical attache, in sum, feels tightly wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes are supposed to be embossed. The medical attache is puzzled by the cryptic mailer and face and case and unlabelled entertainment, and preliminarily irritated by the amount of time he’s had to spend upright at the sideboard attending to mail, which is not his task. The sole reason he does not throw the unlabelled cartridge in the wastecan or put it aside for his wife to preview for relevance is because there are such woefully slim entertainment-pickings on his wife’s irritating Americanized tennis-league evening away from her place at home. The attache will pop the cartridge in and scan just enough of its contents to determine whether it is irritating or of an irrelevant nature and not entertaining or engaging in any way. He will heat the prepared halal lamb and spicy halal garnish in the microwave oven until piping-hot, arrange it attractively on his tray, preview the first few moments of the puzzling and/or irritating or possibly mysteriously blank entertainment cartridge first, then unwind with the news summary, then perhaps have a quick unlibidinous look at Nðss’s spring line of sexless black devout-women’s-wear, then will insert the recursive surf-and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, hoping only that his wife will not return from her tennis league in her perspiration-dampened black ankle-length tennis ensemble and remove his dinner tray from his sleeping neck in a clumsy or undeft fashion that will awaken him, potentially.