Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names—anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression—but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency—sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying—are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who’s being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who’s not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing sp...

flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have persona...

Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.

‘Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’

CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for.

its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she’d had a flashback of reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club’s rink’s ‘Wee Blades’ Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between a bonk and a clang, and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for help.

He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility.

Your monkey-languages’ exclamatories have an explosive ricocheting sound to them. As in a component of boing to every word.

Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’ Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’ She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more

than is appropriate.’ ‘But what if they don’t?’ ‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’ ‘What else?’ ‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.” ’ Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data-Search Face, which Mario liked. ‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’

Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she’s doing it when she’s doing it. ‘Whether or not we’re discussing anyone in particular, then.’ Mario smiles at her. ‘Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself”—“He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky.

‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It’s sometimes called “suppression,” ’ with the fingers out to the sides again. ‘Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being

that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical person in question. There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you’re sensitive to it. You are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.’

‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds. ‘Skkkkk.’ ‘Booboo?’ ‘Skk-kkk.’ ‘Mario.’ ‘Hal!’ ‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’ ‘I don’t think I was.’ ‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’ ‘Is it dark or is it me?’ ‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’ ‘So it’s dark then.’ ‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’ ‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’ ‘Sorry Boo.’ ‘Numerous times.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘I think I slept right through it.’ ‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’ ‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’ ‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’ ‘…’ ‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’ ‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’ ‘…’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’ ‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, a...

For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau.’

‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’ ‘You’re saying this is love? This isn’t love. I’ll know when it’s love because of the way it’ll feel. It won’t be about spinal fluid and despair believe you me, Bucko. It’ll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that second forward you know you’re not going to be alone and in hell. You’re not half the guy I started to think you might have been, Ray.’ ‘I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.’ ‘This is love? It’s like you were chained to her. It’s like if you tried to get on with your own life the pain of the clinical depression came back. It’s like the clinical depressi...

‘I’m not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone. I’m not the one they suspect. Pemulis publicly dosed his opponent at Port Washington. It was impossible to miss. The kid was a devout Mormon. The dose was impossible to miss. Sales of Visine bottles of pre-adolescent urine during quarterly tests have been noted, it turns out, and classed as a Pemulis production.’ ‘Selling Visine bottles?’

‘Hey Hal?’ ‘And of course you’re hurt, Boo, that I’ve tried to hide all of it from you.’ ‘I’m zero percent hurt, Hal.’ ‘And of course you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you when of course you knew anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn’t even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just really really tired and nightmare-ridden.’ ‘I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it’s right to.’ ‘Marvelous.’ ‘I feel like you’re the only one who knows when it’s right to tell. I can’t know for you, so why should I be hurt.’ ‘Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.’ ‘I wasn’t hurt. I don’t want you to be sad.’ ‘You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It’s called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll go away. You don’t have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar’s enough.’ ‘You’re scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.’ ‘Jesus it’s like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?’ ‘And you can’t use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis’s penises.’ ‘….’ ‘The sun’s thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.’ ‘It’s been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I’m bat...

Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that

the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.

there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin’s mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she’d be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp’s white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp’s conic metal shade, if they’d promise to return it and not mark it up.

The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and his legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale way. He says Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really speak, carried it on through the animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders—only to find, near the end, that your very own child had himself become blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that his son had become what he (the wraith) had feared as a child he (the wraith) was. Gately’s eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and boy’s nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not se...

Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody comes right out and says so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life.

Gately can’t quite make out if it’s like a monologue or if he’s asking questions and she’s responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know?

In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next life’s mother. This is why Moms are ...

their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death’s explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly becomes his vision of the Death’s Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over ...

A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn’t remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before. I couldn’t remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.

Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she’d just got really interested in watching the thumb flex and twiddle. She was saying ‘It’s strange, not knowing it’s coming, then standing up there to speak. Folks you don’t know. Things I don’t realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I thought before I spoke. This isn’t like that.’ She seemed to be addressing herself to the thumb. ‘I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the “But For the Grace of God,” and you were right, they just laughed. But I also… I hadn’t realized til I found myself telling them that I’d stopped seeing the “One Day at a Time” and “Keep It in the Day” as trite clichés. Patronizing.’ Gately noticed she still talks about Recovery-issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn’t talk about other stuff with. Her way of still keeping it all at arm’s length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks. It was all right; Gately’s own way of keeping it at arm’s length at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out. He smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as encouragement. She said ‘And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. In counselling I’d just smile ...

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something. 350 So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can’t help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm—the closest Gately’d ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who’d borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second’s wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.’s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal fr...

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it’s so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called 13th-Stepping 351 and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance’s betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let’s not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA’s stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relationships for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn’t done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A 13th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself. Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he’s supposed to be there to help would be dicking over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale. Gately sees it’s probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincid...

Gately’s good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.’s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy’s balls and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn’t rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he’s powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and bends forward, crumpling around Gately’s hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams higher and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately up with a start, his left arm through the railing and twisted with the force of his attempt to sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note as the dream’s foreign M.D.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.

was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor’s final soliloquy in Himself’s unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor. I was on the floor.

Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and then to a Medicaid L.T.I. 365 out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley.

I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’

‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’

‘Thus the Flood’s real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,’ the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson’s The Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s text. The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough—these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding s...

His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist aspect he associates in memory with childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. One dream consists only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps coming up his throat. He’s both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out, but never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there’s people in his room but he’s not one of them. He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting ...

O.E.D. I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario’s detailed reports of his memories.

I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval windows and screen porches. One of the street’s homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were humped up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always to be summer or spring. I could remember the Moms’s voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in as dusk drifted down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes’ doors in some sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway flanked with whitewashed stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms’s intricate garden in a backyard enclosed by a fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic with his finger. The Moms’s dog S. Johnson, not yet neutered, confined by psychosis in a sort of large fenced pen abutting the garage, running around and around the pen when thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, towering over and down, teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward. I remember S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link’s pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.’s orbit in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet...

LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN

The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one’s Moms begin to age makes you feel inside. Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.

I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. I couldn’t stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).