Infinite Jest Read Online Free PDF Page A

if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk
     about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated.
     I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is
     just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.
     I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a cretus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’
    I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’
    I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging,
     eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below
     me.
    ‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.
    ‘I’m fine,’ I tell them, standing. From the yellow Dean’s expression, there’s a brutal
     wind blowing from my direction. Academics’ face has gone instantly old. Eight eyes
     have become blank discs that stare at whatever they see.
    ‘Good God,’ whispers Athletics.
    ‘Please don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I can explain.’ I soothe the air with a casual hand.
    Both my arms are pinioned from behind by the Director of Comp., who wrestles me roughly
     down, on me with all his weight. I taste floor.
    ‘What’s
wrong?
’
    I say ‘
Nothing
is wrong.’
    ‘It’s all
right!
I’m
here!
’ the Director is calling into my ear.
    ‘Get help!’ cries a Dean.
    My forehead is pressed into parquet I never knew could be so cold. I am arrested.
     I try to be perceived as limp and pliable. My face is mashed flat; Comp.’s weight
     makes it hard to breathe.
    ‘Try to listen,’ I say very slowly, muffled by the floor.
    ‘What in God’s name are those…,’ one Dean cries shrilly, ‘… those
sounds?
’
    There are clicks of a phone console’s buttons, shoes’ heels moving, pivoting, a sheaf
     of flimsy pages falling.
    ‘
God!
’
    ‘
Help!
’
    The door’s base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of halogen hall-light, white
     sneakers and a scuffed Nunn Bush. ‘Let him
up!
’ That’s deLint.
    ‘There is nothing wrong,’ I say slowly to the floor. ‘I’m in here.’
    I’m raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken toward what he must see as calm
     by a purple-faced Director: ‘Get a
grip,
son!’
    DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘
Stop
it!’
    ‘I am not what you see and hear.’
    Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds
     her palm against her mouth, looking.
    ‘I’m not,’ I say.
    You have to love old-fashioned men’s rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in
     the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble;
     these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing;
     mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless
     trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose mosaic
     pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.
    The disorder I’ve caused revolves all around. I’ve been half-dragged, still pinioned,
     through a loose mob of Administrative people by the Comp. Director—who appears to
     have thought variously that I am having a seizure (prying open my mouth to check for
     a throat clear of tongue), that I am somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left
     me whooping), that I am psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed
     to transfer that control to him)—while about us roil deLint, trying to restrain the
     Director’s restraint of me, the varsity tennis coach restraining deLint, my mother’s
     half-brother speaking in rapid combinations of polysyllables to the trio of Deans,
     who variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle digits in C.T.’s face, and
     make
pases
with sheafs of now-pretty-clearly-superfluous application forms.
    I am rolled over supine on the geometric tile. I am concentrating docilely on the
     question why U.S. restrooms always appear to