Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 45

Avril and C. T. know nothing about Hal’s penchants for high-resin Bob Hope and underground absorption, which fact Hal obviously likes a lot, on some level, though he’s never given much thought to why. To why he likes it so much.

E.T.A.’s hilltop grounds are traversable by tunnel. Avril I., for example, who never leaves the grounds anymore, rarely travels above ground, willing to hunch to take the off-tunnels between Headmaster’s House and her office next to Charles Tavis’s in the Community and Administration Bldg., a pink-bricked white-pillared neo-Georgian thing that Hal’s brother Mario says looks like a cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its stomach.[3] Two sets of elevators and one of stairs run between the lobby, reception area, and administrative offices on Comm.-Ad.’s first floor and the weight room, sauna, and locker/shower areas on the sublevel below it. One large tunnel of elephant-colored cement leads from just off the boys’ showers to the mammoth laundry room below the West Courts, and two smaller tunnels radiate from the sauna area south and east to the subbasements of the smaller, spherocubular, pro to-Georgian buildings (housing classrooms and subdor-mitories B and D); these two basements and smaller tunnels often serve as student storage space and hallways between various prorectors’[4] private rooms. Then two even smaller tunnels, navigable by any adult willing to assume a kind of knuckle-dragging simian posture, in turn connect each of the subbasements to the former optical and film-development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza (now deceased) below and just west of the Headmaster’s House (from which facilities there’s also a fair-diametered tunnel that goes straight to the lowest level of the Community and Administration Bldg., but its functions have gradually changed over four years, and it’s now too full of exposed wiring and hot-water pipes and heating ducts to be really passable) and to the offices of the Physical Plant, almost directly beneath the center row of E.T.A. outdoor tennis courts, which offices and custodial lounge are in turn connected to E.T.A.’s Lung-Storage and — Pump Rooms via a pargeted tunnel hastily constructed by the TesTar Ail-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp., which together with the folks over at ATHSCME Industrial Air Displacement Devices erects and services the inflatable dendriurethane dome, known as the Lung, that covers the middle row of courts for the winter indoor season. The crude little rough-sided tunnel between Plant and Pump is traversable only via all-fours-type crawling and is essentially unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy’s smaller kids’ Tunnel Club, as well as with certain adolescents with strong secret incentive to crawl on all fours.

The Lung-Storage Room is basically impassable from March through November because it’s full of intricately folded dendriurethane Lung-material and dismantled sections of flexible ducting and fan-blades, etc. The Pump Room is right next to it, though you have to crawl back out into the tunnel to get to it. On the engineering diagrams the Pump Room’s maybe about twenty meters directly beneath the centermost courts in the middle row of courts, and looks like a kind of spider hanging upside-down — an unfenestrated oval chamber with six man-sized curved ducts radiating up and out to exit points on the grounds above. And the Pump Room has six radial openings, one for each upcurving duct: three two-meter vents with huge turbine-bladed exhaust fans bolted into their grilles and three more 2M’s with reversed ATHSCME intake fans that allow air from the ground above to be sucked down and around the room and up into the three exhaust vents. The Pump Room is essentially like a pulmonary organ, or the epicenter of a massive six-vectored wind tunnel, and when activated roars like a banshee that’s slammed its hand in a door, though the P.R.’s in full legit operation only when the Lung is up, usually November-March. The intake fans pullground-level winter air down into and around the room and through the three exhaust fans and up the outtake ducts into networks of pneumatic tubing in the Lung’s sides and dome: it’s the pressure of the moving air that keeps the fragile Lung inflated.