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

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 hydro-chloride 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 perfume up into the air from a mister she
     held in her left hand as she lay beneath him making a wide variety of sounds and spraying perfume up into the air, so that
     he felt the cold mist of it settling on his back and shoulders and was chilled and repelled, his last piece of contact after
     he’d gone into hiding with the marijuana she’d gotten for him had been a card she’d mailed that was a pastiche photo of a
     door-mat of coarse green plastic grass with
WELCOME
on it and next to it a flattering publicity photo of the appropriation artist from her Back Bay gallery, and between them
     an unequal sign, which was an equal sign