Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it,

(2

These, seventeen-year-old Michael Pemulis’s nighttime customers, now become also, four times yearly, his daytime customers.

Clean urine is ten adjusted dollars a cc.

and the only G/M scan it couldn’t pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something;

‘Urine!’ ‘Clinically sterile urine!’ ‘Piping hot!’ ‘Urine you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’

Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill’s other side in the old VA Hospital complex,

Who-Can-Find,-Boil,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-In-A-Three-Hour-Period-Without-Any-Kind-Of-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You’re-Up-To,

Mario’s really come to look forward to, since he’s found he has a real sort of mystical intuitive knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary layers of packed dumpsters,

in E.T.A.’s proud red and gray school colors,

also sells small-time drugs of distinguished potency at reasonable retail prices to a large pie-slice of the total junior-tournament-circuit market.

Pemulis, who claims he sees every third word upside-down, actually just has a born tech-science wienie’s congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems.

Pemulis’s real enduring gift is for math and hard science,

Hal Incandenza is now being encouraged to identify himself as a late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at tennis who is on the verge of making every authority-figure in his world and beyond very proud indeed.

Hal is, at seventeen, as of 10/Y.D.A.U., judged ex cathedra the fourth-best tennis player under age eighteen in the United States of America,

and the sixth-best on the continent,

Mario will be the only one of the Incandenza children not wildly successful as a professional athlete.

‘Please commit a crime,’ and Michael Pemulis will reply ‘Gracious me and mine, a crime you say?’

showing no artful respect or care,

I’m predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great.

day you first beat me I may well weep. It’ll be out of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father’s terrible joy.

will do what it’s made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who’s made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body.

Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak.

My thumb’s wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you’re ready for a drink of this. No? Nein?

Son… son, you’ll have to put that what is that that Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition down, son. Looks heavy anyway. A tendon-strainer.

And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t, just don’t, it’s revolting,

six-six-plus like your grandfather may he rot in hell’s rubber vacuum

He plays golf. Your grandfather. Your grandpappy. Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt?

A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod.

There was a man with a healthy respect for spiders.

He was no fool, the bastard. A golfer.

Good godfrey Incandenza

You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former

limit and wave a hankie at it,

Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great.

We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you.

Furniture of the world.

just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking,

held under the arms by two bodies big as yours and dragged off a public court with two extra lines.

how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ,

To accept the fact that the Game

is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory.

The other big difference between Units #1 and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave the building deeply changed,

while #1’s wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #1 looking even more stressed and historically aggrieved than when they went in.

(and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot)

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.

and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House counselors’ cars right below in the little roadlet,

and now took absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents,

with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates