Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 899

Eventually the buzzer stopped.

The phrase ‘More tattoos than teeth’ also kept going through Gately’s head as it bobbed (the head), even though he had no idea where the phrase came from or who it was supposed to refer to. He hadn’t been to Billerica Minimum yet; he was on bail that Whitey Sorkin had bonded.

The taste of the M&M’s couldn’t cut the weirdly sweet medical taste of hydromorphone in Gately’s mouth. He watched an old stovetop-burner’s crown of blue flame shimmer in the shine of the urine.

During a ruddled sunset-light period Fackelmann had had a small convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants and Gately hadn’t had the coordination to go to Fackelmann’s side during the seizure, to help and just be there. He had the nightmarish feeling that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was. 10-mg. injections of the Blue Bayou kept the feeling at bay for shorter and shorter periods. He’d never heard of somebody having a convulsion from an O.D., and Fackelmann had indeed seemed to bounce to his version of back.

The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo.

They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and Fackelmann took a cotton and sopped up candy-dyed urine off the floor and cooked up with urine. Gately appeared to himself to be repulsed by this. But there was no question of trying to get to the stripped kitchen for the distilled-water bottle. Gately was tying off his right arm with his teeth, now, his left was so useless.

Fackelmann smelled very bad.

Gately nodded out into a dream where he was on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides said PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE. In his stu-porous recall over four years later in St. E.’s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that wouldn’t end and wouldn’t go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream, or is in a dream, and it’s now that his fever returns to new heights and his line on the heart monitor gets a funny little hitch like a serration at the 1st and 3rd nodes, which makes an amber light flash at the nurse’s station down the hall.

When the buzzer sounded again they were watching the flames-film late at night. Now poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s voice came to them through the intercom. The intercom and apt.-complex-front-doors-unlocker button were all the way across the living room by the apartment door. The ceiling bulged and receded. Fackelmann had made his hand into the shape of a claw and was studying the claw in the light of the TP’s flames. Mt. Dilaudid was badly caved in on one side; a disastrous avalanche into Lake Urine was a possibility. P.H.-J. sounded drunk as a Nuck. She said to let her in. She said she knew they were in there. She used party as a verb several times. Fackelmann was whispering that it was a lie. Gately remembers he actually had to prod himself in the bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom. His Unit felt small and icy cold against his leg in the wet jeans. The ammoniac smell of urine and the breathing ceiling and drunk distant female voice … Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen, grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet. His rising was more like the floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler. The apt. floor below him feinted right, left, circling for an opening to attack. The luxury windows hung with starlight. Fackelmann had made his claw come alive into a spider and was letting the spider climb slowly down his chest-area. The starlight was smeary; there were no distinct stars. Everything out of the line of fire of the cartridge-viewer was dark as a pocket. The buzzer sounded angry and the voice pathetic. Gately put his foot out in the direction of the buzzer. He heard Fackelmann telling his hand’s claw’s spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire. Then when Gately put his foot down there was nothing there. The floor dodged his foot and rushed up at him. He caught a glimpse of bulged ceiling and then the floor caught him in the temple. His ears belled. The impact of the floor against him shook the whole room. A box of laminates teetered and fell and fanned clear laminates all over the wet floor. The viewer fell off the wall and cast ruddled flames on the ceiling. The floor jammed itself against Gately, pressing in tight, and he grayed out with his scrunched face toward Fackelmann and the windows beyond, with Fackelmann holding the spider out in mid-air at him for his inspection.