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

twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and
     snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack
     folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed
     back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent.
     He decided he’d have her toss him what she’d promised to bring, and then would from
     a distance toss back to her the $1250 U.S. in large bills and tell her not to let
     the door hit her on the butt on the way out. He’d say
ass
instead of
butt
. He’d be so rude and unpleasant to her that the memory of his lack of basic decency
     and of her tight offended face would be a further disincentive ever, in the future,
     to risk calling her and repeating the course of action he had now committed himself
     to.
    He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. He
     remembered clearly the last woman he’d involved in his trying just one more vacation
     with dope and drawn blinds. The last woman had been something called an appropriation
     artist, which seemed to mean that she copied and embellished other art and then sold
     it through a prestigious Marlborough Street gallery. She had an artistic manifesto
     that involved radical feminist themes. He’d let her give him one of her smaller paintings,
     which covered half the wall over his bed and was of a famous film actress whose name
     he always had a hard time recalling and a less famous film actor, the two of them
     entwined in a scene from a well-known old film, a romantic scene, an embrace, copied
     from a film history textbook and much enlarged and made stilted, and with obscenities
     scrawled all over it in bright red letters. The last woman had been sexy but not pretty,
     as the woman he now didn’t want to see but was waiting anxiously for was pretty in
     a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. The appropriation
     artist had been led to believe that he was a former speed addict, intravenous addiction
     to methamphetamine hydrochloride 1 is what he remembered telling that one, he had even described the awful taste of
     hydrochloride in the addict’s mouth immediately after injection, he had researched
     the subject carefully. She had been further led to believe that marijuana kept him
     from using the drug with which he really had a problem, and so that if he seemed anxious
     to get some once she’d offered to get him some it was only because he was heroically
     holding out against much darker deeper more addictive urges and he needed her to help
     him. He couldn’t quite remember when or how she’d been given all these impressions.
     He had not sat down and outright bold-faced lied to her, it had been more of an impression
     he’d conveyed and nurtured and allowed to gather its own life and force. The insect
     was now entirely visible. It was on the shelf that held his digital equalizer. The
     insect might never actually have retreated all the way back into the hole in the shelf’s
     girder. What looked like its reemergence might just have been a change in his attention
     or the two windows’ light or the visual context of his surroundings. The girder protruded
     from the wall and was a triangle of dull steel with holes for shelves to fit into.
     The metal shelves that held his audio equipment were painted a dark industrial green
     and were originally made for holding canned goods. They were designed to be extra
     kitchen shelves. The insect sat inside its dark shiny case with an immobility that
     seemed like the gathering of a force, it sat like the hull of a vehicle from which
     the engine had been for the moment removed. It was dark and had a shiny case and antennae
     that protruded but did not move. He had to use the bathroom. His last piece of contact
     from the appropriation artist, with whom he had had intercourse, and who during intercourse
     had sprayed some sort of