Infinite Jest Read Online Free Page A

first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist,
     walking with a roll to his shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as
     he slides into the chair still warm from C.T.’s bottom, crossing his legs in a way
     that inclines him well into my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics
     and capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the
     remains of a breath-mint turned sour.
    ‘… a bright, solid, but very shy boy, we know about your being very shy, Kirk White’s
     told us what your athletically built if rather stand-offish younger instructor told
     him,’ the Director says softly, cupping what I feel to be a hand over my sportcoat’s
     biceps (surely not), ‘who simply needs to swallow hard and trust and tell his side
     of the story to these gentlemen who bear no maliciousness none at all but are doing
     our jobs and trying to look out for everyone’s interests at the same time.’
    I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory
     posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in
     the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone. I have
     been coached for this like a Don before a RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence.
     The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let
     everything bounce off you; do nothing. I’d tell you all you want and more, if the
     sounds I made could be what you hear.
    Athletics with his head out from under his wing: ‘—to avoid admission procedures that
     could be seen as primarily athletics-oriented. It could be a mess, son.’
    ‘Bill means the appearance, not necessarily the real true facts of the matter, which
     you alone can fill in,’ says the Director of Composition.
    ‘—the appearance of the high athletic ranking, the subnormal scores, the over-academic
     essays, the incredible grades vortexing out of what could be seen as a nepotistic
     situation.’
    The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal
     dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever:
    ‘Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn’t be accused
     of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University
     of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn
     he won’t speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application.’
    The Brewster’s-Angle light of the tabletop appears as a rose flush behind my closed
     lids. I cannot make myself understood. ‘I am not just a jock,’ I say slowly. Distinctly.
     ‘My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was
     to get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are
de moi
.’ My eyes are closed; the room is silent. ‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’
     I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’
    It’s funny what you don’t recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I
     barely remember—my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home’s backyard
     with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out
     of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden’s area was a rough rectangle laid
     out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the
     Moms’s path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven
     thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms
     rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold on,
     her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle
     of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some
     sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was