Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 73

Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. And skin so clean-sheet-white it almost glows; an evident immunity to the sun’s UV; in pine-shaded twilight he is almost glowingly white, as if cut from the stuff of moons. He has a way of focusing his whole self’s concentration very narrowly, adjusting his legs’ spread for the varicoceles and curling one arm over the other and sort of drawing himself in around the pipe he attends to. Mario can sit motionless for really long periods. When Schtitt exhales pipe-smoke in different geometric shapes they both seem to study intently, when Schtitt exhales he makes little sounds variant in plosivity between P and B.

‘Am realizing whole myth of efficiency and no waste that is making this continent of countries we are in.’ He exhales. ‘You know myths?’

‘Is that like a story?’

‘Ach. A made-up story. For some children. An efficiency of Euclid only: flat. For flat children. Straight ahead! Plow ahead! Go! This is myth.’

‘There aren’t any flat children, really.’

‘This myth of the competition and bestness we fight for you players here: this myth: they assume here always the efficient way is to plow in straight, go! The story that the shortest way between two places is the straight line, yes?’

‘Yes?’

Schtitt can use the stem of the pipe to point, for emphasis: ‘But what then when something is in the way when you go between places, no? Plow ahead: go: collide: kabong.’

‘Willikers!’

‘Where is their straight shortest then, yes? Where is the efficiently quickly straight of Euclid then, yes? And how many two places are there without there is something in the way between them, if you go?’

It can be entertaining to watch the evening pines’ mosquitoes light and feed deeply on luminous Schtitt, who is oblivious. The smoke doesn’t keep them away.

‘When I am boyish, training to compete for best, our training facilities on a sign, very largely painted, stated WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN.’

‘Gosh.’

It’s a tradition, one stemming maybe from Wimbledon’s All-England locker rooms’ tympana, that every big-time tennis academy has its own special traditional motto on the wall in the locker rooms, some special aphoristic nugget that’s supposed to describe and inform what the academy’s philosophy’s all about. After Mario’s father Dr. Incandenza passed away, the new Headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, either Mrs. Incandenza’s half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the version, C.T. had taken down Incandenza’s founding motto — TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST^[32] — and had replaced it with the rather more upbeat THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE.