Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 69

‘So drugs, then, you’re saying you feel may be a factor,’ the doctor interrupted.

The depressed young woman’s face emptied once more. She engaged briefly in something the staffers on Specials called the Thousand-Meter Stare.

‘Not “drugs,” ‘ she said slowly. The doctor smelled shame in the room, sour and uremic. Her face had become distantly pained now.

The girl said: ‘Stopping.’

The doctor felt comfortable saying once again that he was not sure he understood what she was trying to share with him.

She now went through a series of expressions that made it clinically impossible for the doctor to determine whether or not she was entirely sincere. She looked either pained or trying somehow to suppress hilarity. She said ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me. I’m worried you’ll think I’m crazy. I have this thing with pot.’

‘Meaning marijuana.’

The doctor was oddly sure that Kate Gompert pretended to sniff instead of engaging in a real sniff. ‘Marijuana. Most people think of marijuana as just some minor substance, I know, just like this natural plant that happens to make you feel good the way poison oak makes you itch, and if you say you’re in trouble with Hope — people’ll just laugh. Because there’s much worse drugs out there. Believe me I know.’

‘I’m not laughing at you, Katherine,’ the doctor said, and meant it.

‘But I love it so much. Sometimes it’s like the center of my life. It does something to me, I know, that’s not good, and I got told point-blank not to smoke, on the Parnate, because Dr. Garton said no one knew what certain combinations do yet and it’d be roulette. But after a while I always think to myself it’s been a while and things will be different somehow this time if I do, even on the Parnate, so I do again, I start again. I’ll start out doing just like a couple of hits off a duBois after work, to get me through dinner, because dinner with my mother and me is — well, but and pretty soon after a while I’m in my room with the fan pointed out the window all night, doing one-hitters and exhaling at the fan, to kill the smell, and I make her say I’m not there if anybody calls, and I lie about what I’m doing in there all night even if she doesn’t ask, sometimes she asks and sometimes she doesn’t. And then after a while I’m smoking joints at work, at breaks, going in the bathroom and standing on the toilet and blowing it out the window, there’s this tiny window up high with the glass frosted and all filthy and cobwebby, and I hate having my face up next to it, but if I clean it off I’m afraid Mrs. Diggs or somebody will be able to tell somebody’s been doing something up around the window, standing there in high heels on the rim of the toilet, brushing my teeth all the time and using up Collyrium^[30] by the bottleful and switching the console to audio and always needing more water before I answer the console because my mouth’s too dry to talk, especially on the Parnate, the Parnate makes my mouth dry anyways. And pretty soon I’m totally paranoid they know I’m stoned, at work, sitting there in the office, high, reeking and I’m the only one that can’t tell I reek, I’m like so obsessed with Do They Know, Can They Tell, and then after a while I’m having my mother call in sick for me so I can stay home after she goes in to work and have the whole place to myself with nobody to worry about Do They Know, and smoke out the fan, and spray Lysol all over and stir Ginger’s litter box around so the whole place reeks of Ginger, and smoke and draw and watch terrible daytime stuff on the TP because I don’t want my mother to see any cartridge-orders on days I’m supposed to be in bed sick, I start to get obsessed with Does She Know. I’m getting more and more miserable and fed up with myself for smoking so much, this is after a couple weeks of it, is all, and I start getting high and thinking about nothing except how I have to quit smoking all this Bob so I can get back to work and start saying I’m here when people call, so I can start living some kind of damn life instead of just sitting around in pajamas pretending I’m sick like a third-grader and smoking and watching TP again, and so after I’ve smoked the last of whatever I’ve got I always say No More, This Is It, and I throw out my papers and my one-hitter, I’ve probably thrown about fifty one-hitters in dumpsters, including some nice wood and brass ones, including a couple from Brazil, the land-barge guys must go through our sector’s dumpster once a day looking to get another good one-hitter. And anyways I quit. I do stop. I get sick of it, I don’t like what it does to me. And I go back to work and work my fanny off, to make up for the last couple weeks and get a leg up on like building momentum for a whole new start, you know?’