Authors: David Foster Wallace
It's the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul's throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes unalone, if the previous night's Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around in the kitchen, making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed he's supposed to eat with post-coital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to eat with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises. Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago, as an unhappy youngster.
As a nod to Orin's own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night's had started with a wide-angle shot of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy person — Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a teaching pro in the Carolinas — when the dream's screen tightens on him and abruptly dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there's the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface and air, and after some interval the dream's Orin struggles up from this kind of visual suffocation to find his mother's head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza's, the Moms's disconnected head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet's own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he's still staring at, into, and somehow through his mother's face. As if the Moms's head was some sort of overtight helmet Orin can't wrestle his way out of.
2
In the dream, it's understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the phylacteryish bind of his mother's disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night's Subject's note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head with both hands and tried to sort of stiff-arm her, though not in an ungentle or complaining way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The apparent amputation of the Moms's head from the rest of the Moms appears in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is no evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base of the round pretty head had been sealed, and also sort of rounded off, so that her head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, attached to his own head's face.
The Subject after Bain's sister but before the one just before this one, with the Ambush scent and the hearts over i's, the previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous alimony and penchants for sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges, and professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright — she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he'd mailed her child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he'd awakened from a night of horror-show dreams — woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and benighted of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner's chalk outline — he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow, wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom's south wall, something horrific called 'INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING MATRIX PRESENTS SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?' and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow, and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal's age, with copper stubble and a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll's eyes, stare into space stage-left while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the Inter-Lace imprimatur — InterLace could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary's thesis was turning out pretty clearly to be SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY, the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an extra-institutional functioning unit, but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort of meaning by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in the human body's brain . . . that, in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission Topography or 'P.E.T.' technology (since supplanted wholly by Invasive Digitals, Orin hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt over her cup, unaware that Orin's paralytically awake), they could scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton's dysfunctional brain emitted positrons in a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing Alber-tan's brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the rotating body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner — on the viewer, it's an enormous gray-metal machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and now have a look at this Fenton fellow's eyes as he starts to get the gist of what the voiceover's saying — and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject Fenton in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton's eyes bugging out in total foreseen horror as he's rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen loaf into the thing's open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view, and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with brutal speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right and then up, faster and faster, the machine's blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton's entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an image of Fenton's ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right corner, where InterLace's Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed, wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom and get yesterday's asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject's kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from Moment magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here's Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly high in the Enfield Tennis Academy's underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into an industrial exhaust fan. It's the sad little interval after afternoon matches and conditioning but before the Academy's communal supper. Hal is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what he's doing.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled; there's none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl's big load, and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy's tennis courts' Lung's Pump Room is underground and accessible only by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let's face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with. Pipes are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it's highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C.
Boone, Jim Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw, and remotely possibly Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high. It's also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant K. Freer always has suspicions of all kinds. And Hal's brother Mario knows a thing or two. But that's it, in terms of public knowledge. And but even though Pemulis and Struck and Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a sort of medicinal or touristic way) Slice and Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually gotten actively high only with Pemulis, on the rare occasions he's gotten high with anybody else, as in in person, which he avoids. He'd forgot: Ortho ('The Darkness') Slice, of Partridge KS, knows; and Hal's oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he's coming right out and saying, unless Hal's reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there.
Hal's mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the current E.T.A. Headmaster, both know Hal drinks alcohol sometimes, like on weekend nights with Troeltsch or maybe Axford down the hill at clubs on Commonwealth Ave.; The Unexamined Life has its notorious Blind Bouncer night every Friday where they card you on the Honor System. Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes — there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part — and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her gizzard out, the mother's. And Charles supports whatever personal decisions she makes in conscience about her children. And God knows she'd rather have Hal having a few glasses of beer every so often than absorbing God alone knows what sort of esoteric designer compounds with reptilian Michael Pemulis and trail-of-slime-leaving James Struck, both of whom give Avril a howling case of the maternal fantods. And ultimately, she's told Drs. Rusk and Tavis, she'd rather have Hal abide in the security of the knowledge that his mother trusts him, that she's trusting and supportive and doesn't judge or gizzard-tear or wring her fine hands over his having for instance a glass of Canadian ale with friends every now and again, and so works tremendously hard to hide her maternal dread of his possibly ever drinking like James himself or James's father, all so that Hal might enjoy the security of feeling that he can be up-front with her about issues like drinking and not feel he has to hide anything from her under any circumstances.