Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 871

Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. ‘This is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?’

‘Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that’s for sure.’

There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes against the indirect lights.

Pemulis finally said ‘Well, I’m going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice without a fucking forehead.’

‘Have an analog for me,’ I said. ‘Let me know if there’s word on the meet. I’ll eat if I’m going to have to play.’

Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he was high overhead and upside-down. ‘So are you going to get up and go up and get dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’

Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I rotated it. ‘Will you do me a favor? Get Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency out for me. It’s about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down in the entertainment-case. Cue it up to about 2300, 2350 maybe? The last five minutes or so.’

‘The third shelf down,’ I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. ‘They’ve got all Himself’s stuff together on the third shelf.’

He scanned. ‘Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend? I haven’t even heard of half your Dad’s shit that’s here.’

‘It’s Friend, not Fiend. Either it’s mislabeled or the label’s peeling. And they’re supposed to be alphabetized. It ought to be right next to Flux in a Box:

‘And me using the poor guy’s lab,’ Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis’s feet were bare and I looked at the calluses on his heels. He tossed the cartridge’s case carelessly on a couch or chair behind me and looked down. ‘What the fuck’s Fun with Teeth supposed to be about?’

I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. ‘Pretty much what it says it’s about.’ The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity. We’d all had to fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement launches that spring. And commercial airlines hadn’t yet had data on high-altitude Dioxin levels over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New Brunswick coast, which I’m told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service itself was simply that a circling gull scored a direct white hit on the shoulder of C.T.’s blue blazer, and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit, a large blue-bodied fly flew right into his mouth and was hard to extract. Several persons laughed. It was no huge or dramatic thing. The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone.