Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 39

The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the hotter the shower’s water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like coming out of the drain while he’s in there.

Sometimes they’re in the bowl of the toilet first thing in the A.M., dog-paddling, trying to get to the side and climb up. He’s also not crazy about spiders, though more like unconsciously; he’s never come anyplace close to the conscious horror Himself had somehow developed about the South-west’s black widows and their chaotic webs — the widows are all over the place, both here and Tucson, spottable on all but the coldest nights, their dusty webs without any kind of pattern, clotting just about any right-angled place that’s dim or out of the way. Terminex’s toxins are more effective on the widows. Orin has them out monthly; he’s on like a subscription plan over at Terminex.

Orin’s special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There’d been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he’d refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies’ eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; par-ents’d come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside’s mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father’s desiccated youth.