Infinite Jest Read Online Free PDF Page B

only marginally
mammalian
in there, sir.’
    ‘Like hell. Have a look. How’s the excitable little guy doing down there, Aubrey,
     does it look to you?’
    ‘You, sir, are quite possibly ill. This affair is not concluded.’
    ‘What
ambulance?
Don’t you guys
listen?
I’m telling you there’s—’
    ‘Hal? Hal?’
    ‘Dope him up, seek to act as his mouthpiece, muzzling, and now he lies there catatonic,
     staring.’
    The crackle of deLint’s knees. ‘Hal?’
    ‘—inflate this publicly in any distorted way. The Academy has distinguished alumni,
     litigators at counsel. Hal here is provably competent. Credentials out the bazoo,
     Bill. The boy reads like a vacuum.
Digests
things.’
    I simply lie there, listening, smelling the paper towel, watching an espadrille pivot.
    ‘There’s more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.’
    And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?
    Not for nothing did Orin say that people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors
     from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side
     of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri
     sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims. The traffic is nothing like Boston.
     The stretcher is the special type, with restraining straps at the extremities. The
     same Aubrey deLint I’d dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet knelt gurneyside to squeeze
     my restrained hand and say ‘Just hang in there, Buckaroo,’ before moving back into
     the administrative fray at the ambulance’s doors. It is a special ambulance, dispatched
     from I’d rather not dwell on where, with not only paramedics but some kind of psychiatric
     M.D. on board. The medics lift gently and are handy with straps. The M.D., his back
     up against the ambulance’s side, has both hands up in dispassionate mediation between
     the Deans and C.T., who keeps stabbing skyward with his cellular’s antenna as if it
     were a sabre, outraged that I’m being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency
     Room against my will and interests. The issue whether the damaged even have interested
     wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead
     to hear slices the sky from south to north. The M.D. has both hands up and is patting
     the air to signify dispassion. He has a big blue jaw. At the only other emergency
     room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher
     was wheeled in and then parked beside the waiting-room chairs. These chairs were molded
     orange plastic; three of them down the row were occupied by different people all of
     whom were holding empty prescription bottles and perspiring freely. This would have
     been bad enough, but in the end chair, right up next to the strap-secured head of
     my stretcher, was a T-shirted woman with barnwood skin and a trucker’s cap and a bad
     starboard list who began to tell me, lying there restrained and immobile, about how
     she had seemingly overnight suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right
     breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic Québecois accent
     and described the ‘titty’s’ presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty
     minutes before I was rolled away. The jet’s movement and trail seem incisionish, as
     if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade.
     I once saw the word
KNIFE
finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an infantophile.
     I am forced to roll my closed eyes either up or to the side to keep the red cave from
     bursting into flames from the sunlight. The street’s passing traffic is constant and
     seems to go ‘Hush, hush, hush.’ The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even slightly,
     gives you the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you. ‘Why
not?
Why
not?
Why not
not,
then, if the