Infinite Jest Read Online Free PDF Page 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 us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control. My head is cradled in a knelt Director’s lap, which
     is soft, my face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional paper towels he received from some hand out of the crowd overhead,
     staring with all the blankness I can summon into his jowls’ small pocks, worst at the blurred jaw-line, of scarring from long-ago
     acne. Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is