Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 986

‘But you have the … Mr. Hope,’ Pemulis stage-whispers.

‘One moment please.’ Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers ‘Where’s your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I bought retail from you not three days ago?’

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. ‘Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. Nobody’s going to like exploit you.’

And then it’s hard to extract the hand and phone. ‘O., I’m going to have to book out of here in just about one second.’

‘Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject’s crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.’

‘I don’t have to respond,’ Hal says.

‘Correct.’

‘I just listen and then break the connection.’

‘Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day’s full-toll.’

‘I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation’s over and we can go.’ Hal’s directing all this more at Pemulis, who’s pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

‘All set? This is it. Are you set?’

‘So go already.’

‘Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists’ big object has always been to independently secede, and if they’ve got about a snowball’s chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that the maps now say it’s Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don’t the Separatists in Quebec use the fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we’ll take the Concavity with us when we secede, it’ll be our problem not yours, it’ll go on the maps as Québecois and not Canadian, it’ll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada’s pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa’s parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.’s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don’t they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don’t see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada’s persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn’t your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?’