Mark André ’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update

It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but
sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

It's the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul's throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes unalone, if the previous night's Subject is still there, . . .

. . . entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading whatever you think of.

'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.'

Hal?'

l l

'...Hey Hal?'

'Yes Mario?'

'Are you asleep?'

'Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.'

'That's what I thought.'

'Happy to reassure you.'

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought teacher as 'flaxen 1 ; a body which the fickle angel of puberty — had visited, kissed, and already left, back in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious.

Reginald Love his Wardine. Wardine be like to die of scared. She say no to Reginald beg. She say, if she go to Reginald momma, then Reginald momma go to Wardine momma, then Wardine momma think Wardine be lie down with Reginald. Wardine say her momma say Wardine let a man lie down before she sixteen and she beat Wardine to death. Reginald say he aint no way going to let that happen to Wardine.

I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles . . .

The dope scared him. It made him afraid. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else. It had long since stopped being a release or relief or fun.