Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 904
David Foster Wallace
Mario’s bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis’s burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. ‘Is it you’re sad about not getting to play if the Quebec players are canceled?’
‘And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,’ Coyle said disgustedly.
‘Frozen,’ I corrected him.
‘Except but now listen to Stice’s explanation.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said.
‘For the bed hovering.’
Mario looked at Coyle. ‘You said bolted.’
‘I said
‘Let me guess,’ I said.
‘Let him guess,’ Mario told Coyle.
‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. ‘Slice’s explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.’ One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle.
‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said.
‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’
I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. ‘Did you guys hear sausage-analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’
Mario asked again if I were sad.
Coyle said ‘I was
Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack’s straps with practiced ease.
Coyle said ‘I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?’
‘There’s no denying The Dark’s raised his game this fall though.’
‘There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,’ Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright.
‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’
Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofes-sionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required
