Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 895

Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it. Gately comes sharply around when he feels the little rough tongue on his forehead — not unlike Nimitz the M.P.’s little pet kitten’s hesitant tongue, when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period when the kitten disappeared and the garbage disposal wouldn’t run right for days and the M.P. sat hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in his hands, just sat there for several days, and Gately’s Mom went around pale as hell and wouldn’t go near the kitchen sink for days, and rushed to the bathroom when Gately finally asked what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When Gately gets his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz’s. The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who’s leaning way over Gately’s railing and … fucking licking Gately’s forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy’s map — no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith’s breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn’t quite sleep.