Infinite Jest Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘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 news-flash 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 best reasoning you can contrive is why not?’ C.T.’s voice, receding with outrage. Only the gallant stabs of
     his antenna are now visible, just inside my sight’s right frame. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where
     I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated;
     so it will be inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart. I think