Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

As a nod to Orin’s own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night’s had started with a wide-angle shot of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy person—Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a teaching pro in the Carolinas—when the dream’s screen tightens on him and abruptly dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there’s the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface and air, and after some interval the dream’s Orin struggles up from this kind of visual suffocation to find his mother’s head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza’s, the Moms’s disconnected head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet’s own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he’s still staring at, into, and somehow through his mother’s face. As if the Moms’s head was some sort of overtight helmet Orin can’t wrestle his way out of. 2 In the dream, it’s understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the phylacteryish bind of his mother’s disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night’s Subject’s note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head ...