Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

The incongruity between Admissions’s hand- and face-color is almost wild. ‘—verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we’re comfortable with, as against a secondary-school transcript from the institution where both your mother and her brother are administrators—’ reading directly out of the sheaf inside his arms’ ellipse—‘that this past year, yes, has fallen off a bit, but by the word I mean “fallen off” to outstanding from three previous years of frankly incredible.’ ‘Off the charts.’ ‘Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it,’ says the Director of Composition, his expression impossible to interpret.

‘I’ll begin by asking if you know the meaning of implore, Hal.’ ‘Probably I’ll go ahead and take a Seven-Up, then, if you’re going to implore.’ ‘I’ll ask you again whether you know implore, young sir.’ ‘Young sir?’ ‘You’re wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn’t that rather an invitation to a young sir?’

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’ ‘That’s a good one!’

I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen

That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while.

That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.

That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.

That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character.

The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can’t miss.’

i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

‘There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us—these are just the hazards of being free.’

‘When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,’ John L. says; ‘I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that’s not livin, that’s a fuckin death-in-life.’

A fuckin livin death, I tell you it’s not being near alive, by the end I was undead, not alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was nothing compared to the idea of livin like that for another five or ten years and only then dyin,’ with audience heads nodding in rows like a wind-swept meadow; boy can they ever Identify.

But this is just the price. This is the price of the free pursuit. Not everybody learns it in childhood, how to balance his interests.’

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time.

Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I’m standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,’ my father said.

‘I hate it when some adult pats my head like I’m a schnauzer.’ ‘The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell you.’ ‘I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.’ ‘Kittenplan’s tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’ Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; she’s subtle and very good with small children. ‘… that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when he wants me to go into rooms. It’s like he influences me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to let him have it in the shin.’

At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the window with his hands laced over his chest, and Jim Troeltsch poked his head in and asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn’t say anything else until Troeltsch went away.

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.’

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

Kevin Bain’s just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home.

Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’

‘I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could—I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can.

He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

You can go into the shower area and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis’s own vocals sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he’s surrounded by shower-tile.