Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 46
David Foster Wallace
When the courts’ Lung is down and stored, Hal will descend and walk and then hunch his way in to make sure nobody’s in the Physical Plant quarters, then he’ll hunch and crawl to the P.R., gear bag in his teeth, and activate just one of the big exhaust fans and get secretly high and exhale palely through its blades into the vent, so that any possible odor is blown through an outtake duct and expelled through a grille’d hole on the west side of the West Courts, a threaded hole, with a flange, where brisk white-suited ATHSCME guys will attach some of the Lung’s arterial pneumatic tubing at some point soon when Schtitt et al. on Staff decide the real weather has moved past enduring for outdoor tennis.
During winter months, when any expelled odor would get ducted up into the Lung and hang there conspicuous, Hal mostly goes into a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and climbs onto a toilet in a stall and exhales into the grille of one of the little exhaust fans in the ceiling; but this routine lacks a certain intricate subterranean covert
Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the place’s inception, there’s always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.’s special demands — dexedríne or low-volt methedrine[5] before matches and benzodiazapenes[6] to come back down after matches, with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding Comm. Ave. nightspot[7] or beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle, mushrooms or X or something from the Mild Designer class[8] — or maybe occasionally a little Black Star,[9] whenever there’s a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again … this circular routine, if your basic wiring’s OK to begin with, can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence and sometimes into one’s like early twenties, before it starts to creep up on you.
