Mark André ’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update

Then, wholly friend- and connectionless, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw From Heroin. Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The words echoed in his neuralgiac and wigless head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing-in-deserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird.

She had this effect on older men, somehow.

Recall how mediocrity is contextual..

Again I’ll say it — I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest.

For the first week here in July he’d held the books upside-down in the corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Mecical Dictionary he’d hauled down and smoke and read until Annie Parrot the Asst. Manager had to tell him not to bring it down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley’s mind. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just sat there and read.

The gallery is barely even applauding Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a certain point it becomes like Romans applauding lions.

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; . . .

Schacht looks over at Pemulis’s guy, a grunter with a moody profile and the storky look of recent puberty.

The infra-lit courts are warm and soft; the heaters bolted into both walls above the tarp’s upper hem are the deep warm red of little square suns.

They emerge through flaps in the tarp with hands upraised in slight apology to their opponents, walk out onto the warmer courts, the slow green eraserish footing of indoor composite. Their ears dilate into all the sounds in the larger space. Gasps and thwaps and pocks and sneakers’ squeaks. Pemulis’s court is almost down in female territory.