Infinite Jest Read Online Free Page B

really unpleasant-looking
     in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the
     cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn’t make it out until
     our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what
     I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold—Orin posits
     from some dark corner of the Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace
     and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green,
     glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange,
     red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and
     some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. ‘I ate this,’ was what
     I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty
     work, and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering;
     and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything
     spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out—as in how many used
     heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports,
     backseats, tournament lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing
     with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand
     reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning
     to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with same.
     He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still Rototrembling,
     hung in the air before mine.
    ‘I ate this,’ I said.
    ‘Pardon me?’
    O. says he can only remember (
sic
) saying something caustic as he limboed a crick out of his back. He says he must
     have felt a terrible impending anxiety. The Moms refused ever even to go into the
     damp basement. I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size
     and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ’s with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously,
     like the report of some kind of audit.
    O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his
     first memory, the Moms’s path around the yard is a broad circle of hysteria:
    ‘
God!
’ she calls out.
    ‘Help! My son ate this!’ she yells in Orin’s second and more fleshed-out recollection,
     yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers,
     running around and around the garden’s rectangle while O. gaped at his first real
     sight of adult hysteria. Suburban neighbors’ heads appeared in windows and over the
     fences, looking. O. remembers me tripping over the garden’s laid-out twine, getting
     up dirty, crying, trying to follow.
    ‘God! Help! My son ate this! Help!’ she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just
     inside the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical
     trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her turns,
     inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying ‘My son ate this! Help!’
     and lapping me twice before the memory recedes.
    ‘My application’s not bought,’ I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the
     red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘I am not just a boy who plays tennis.
     I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.
    ‘I
read,
’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I
     haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get
     in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and
     mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
    ‘But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions.
     Some of them are interesting. I could,