Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both. Mario’s ears are extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He’s shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW-sponsored ‘Quality-Control-Orientated’ Austrian Akademie to account for his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn’t stir, not even when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears.

This has to be somehow significant. Schtitt is the ultimate gamesman, ecstatic in his Spartan devotion to a singular pastime. His philosophical mind is depicted as very sharp in all his previous scenes, so the fact he's sleeping amid this chaotic crescendoing opera says... something? Significant too is the confusion of language - Mario can't tell if these Germans are happy or unhappy, a confusion mirrored all through the book and especially overt in the pages to come. Also, another reference to "a high D" - the note plucked on a string in one of Himself's films.