Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 926
David Foster Wallace
Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze around his neck from the monitor’s removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth and nostrils. He came in and shook a few hands and used the stall next to Postal Weight and left; he wasn’t playing today.
J. L. Struck was applying an astringent to areas of his jaw.
An hysterical rumor that the Quebec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Quebec J.D.C. and — W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Quebec adult
Across the wall on the Female side we could easily hear Thode and Donni Stott invoking Camilla, goddess of speed and light step. Thode had had an hysterical tantrum after breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn’t showed for the Females’ pre-match Staff thing and looked to be AWOL. Loach et al. had outfitted Ted Schacht with a complex knee-brace with jointed aluminum struts down both sides and a coin-sized hole in the elastic over the kneecap for dermal ventilation, and Schacht was lumbering around between the stalls and the locker with his arms straight out and his weight on his heels pretending to walk like Frankenstein. Several people talked to themselves at their lockers. Barry Loach was down on one knee shaving Hal’s left ankle for tape. A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal had his hands on Loach’s shoulders as the tape went on. A match-wrap is two horizontal layers just above the malleolus knob-thing, then straight down and four times around the tarsus just in front of the joint, so there’s a big gap for flexion of the joint, but a compacting and supportive wrap. Then Loach puts a liner-sock and a wick-sock over the tape, then slides on the little inflatable AirCast deal and pumps it to the right pressure, checking with a little gauge, and Velcros it just tight enough for support plus max-flexion. Hal was on the bench with his hands on Loach’s shoulders through the whole little routine. Everybody’s had his hands on Loach’s shoulders at one time or another. Hal’s shave and wrap take four minutes. Schacht’s knee and Fran Unwin’s hamstring thing each take over ten. Wayne’s quarter looked like it was dancing on his knuckles. Because of the towel over his head all you could see was a very thin oval section of his face, like an almond on its end. Wayne got to have a small disk-player in his locker, and Joni Mitchell was playing, which nobody ever minded because he kept it very low. Stice was blowing a purple bubble. Freer was trying to touch his toes. Traub and Whale, also on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach if the pre-match locker room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as if all this had been done and said so many times before it made you feel it was recorded, they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub heard as