Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

message on the answering device to describe an emergency departure this evening instead of this afternoon, but he decided he felt that since the woman had definitely committed to coming, his leaving the message unchanged would be a gesture of fidelity to her commitment, and might somehow in some oblique way strengthen that commitment. The E.W.D. land barge was emptying dumpsters all up and down the street. He returned to his chair near the window. The disk drive and TP viewer were still on in his bedroom and he could see through the angle of the bedroom's doorway the lights from the high-definition screen blink and shift from one primary color to another in the dim room, and for a while he killed time casually by trying to imagine what entertaining scenes on the unwatched viewer the changing colors and intensities might signify. The chair faced the room instead of the window. Reading while waiting for marijuana was out of the question. He considered masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch he'd committed himself to didn't somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door's buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.

 
    1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD

 
    'All I know is my dad said to come here.’
    'Come right in. You'll see a chair to your immediate left.’
    'So I'm here.’
    'That's just fine. Seven-Up? Maybe some lemon soda?’
    'I guess not, thanks. I'm just here, is all, and I'm kind of wondering why my dad sent me down, you know. Your door there doesn't have anything on it, and I was just at the dentist last week, and so I'm wondering why I'm here, exactly, is all. That's why I'm not sitting down yet.’
    'You're how old, Hal, fourteen?’
    Til be eleven in June. Are you a dentist? Is this like a dental consult?’
    'You're here to converse.’
    'Converse?’
    'Yes. Pardon me while I key in this age-correction. Your father had listed you as fourteen, for some reason.’
    'Converse as in with you?’
    'You're here to converse with me, Hal, yes. I'm almost going to have to implore you to have a lemon soda. Your mouth is making those dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds.’
    'Dr. Zegarelli says that's one reason for all the caries, is that I have low salivary output.’
    'Those dry sticky salivaless sounds which can be death to a good conversation.’
    'But I rode my bike all the way up here against the wind just to converse with you? Is the conversation supposed to start with me asking why?’
    Til begin by asking if you know the meaning of implore, Hal.’
    'Probably I'll go ahead and take a Seven-Up, then, if you're going to implore.’
    Til ask you again whether you know implore, young sir.’
    'Young sir?’
    'You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir?’
    'Implore's a regular verb, transitive: to call upon, or for, in supplication; to