Mark André ’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update

The note from last night’s Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle of darker violet dead-center where the subject’s perfume-spritzer had hit it. The only interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single circle — o’s, d’s, p’s, the #s 6 and 8 — is darkened in, while the i’s are dotted not with circles but with tiny little Valentine hearts, which are not darkened in.

Does this mean they think I’m gifted?’
SPFFFT. ‘Here you are. Drink up.’
‘Thanks. SHULGSHULGSPAHHH . . . Whew. Ah.’
‘You were thirsty.’
‘So then if I sit down you’ll fill me in.’

The insect on the shelf was back. It didn’t seem to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn’t do anything in there either. He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar.

‘The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’

Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.

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.

Sharp curved palmshadows move slightly over the pine table’s shine, the one head’s shadow a black moon.

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.

He broods on it abstractly sometimes, when high: this No-One-Must-Know thing. It's not fear per se, fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.

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.