Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 869

Then at some point Pemulis’s head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it.

‘Mmyellow,’ he said.

I pretended to shade my eyes. ‘Howdy there stranger.’

It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court.

“s up?’ he said, not moving from the doorway.

I could see my asking him where he’d been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I’d just been lying here on the floor.

‘Lying here is all,’ I told him.

‘So I just got told,’ he said. ‘The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’

It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. ‘See for yourself,’ I said.

Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical. He didn’t look very good; his color wasn’t good. He had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum.

He said ‘Thinking?’

‘The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’

‘Feeling a little punk?’

‘Can’t complain.’ I rolled my eyes up at him.

He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported squat he sometimes liked.

The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms … and then of C.T.’s misadventure at Himself’s funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family’s traditional plot in L’Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded.

‘Incster?’ Pemulis said after a time.

A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

‘Hal?’ Pemulis said.

‘Javol.’

‘We’ve got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’

I didn’t say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis’s cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with.

‘I’m thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’

‘I’m a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’

‘I was meaning could we go somewheres.’

‘So this urgency all of a sudden?’ I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’

‘Seen your Mums around lately?’

‘Haven’t seen her all week. Doubtless she’s over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.’ I paused. ‘I haven’t seen him all week either, come to think,’ I said.