Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

In Joelle’s childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and eight separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn’t just about die with love for. It didn’t matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats’ arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties iridescent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex’s paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking quality referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even with his wallet’s back-pocket bulge, she’d never so much again as in that line felt so taken ca...