Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 983

‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’

‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what’s the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.’

‘Orin, I’m trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.’

‘All—’

Tm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I’m a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I’m sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into believing it’s really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras’ objectives look? The Noie Störkraffs? Shining Path’s? The Belgian CCCY? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists’ objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?’^k

‘Poor C.U.S.P.s?’

‘Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you’re a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’

‘All I—’

‘Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn’t about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you’ve erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?’

‘Me tell the truth? Me lie?’

‘What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone?’

‘Or what?’

‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

‘Think nothing of it. I know you didn’t mean it.’

‘I hate losing the temper.’

‘You don’t sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. ‘These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’

‘That chew’s going to eat right through your membranes. It’s a vicious vice. I’m urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal’s door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other arm in over from behind like it’s not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.