Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 987

‘Who’s this you’re talking to you can’t call back?’ Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

Hal lowers the phone but doesn’t cover it. ‘It’s Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven’t tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering Quebec’s cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.’ Hal cocks his head slightly. ‘This could be Poutrincourt’s so-called Separation and return’s real meaning, it occurs to me.’

‘Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’

‘He’s all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. ‘Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you’re pretty sure he can afford it!’ Pemulis’s hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. ‘Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don’t just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.’

‘Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,’ Orin says.

‘O., he’s right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I’ll use your pager if you like.’

Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books and gear to the west window, where he’s making broad involved gestures with a person or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window’s big sill keeps Hal from being able to see. Hal’s underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is saying:

‘Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist cells all suddenly divert their terror’s energies away from Canada and suddenly start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the insurging.’

‘I don’t have to picture it. It’s what’s going on. The C.P.C.P.¹ makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children’s programming around Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’