The story thus far, as it applies:
Our hero, Hal Incandenza, who is a junior at the Enfield Tennis Academy [E.T.A.] (high school) has been smoking a potent form of marijuana for at least a year or so. (This particular form of dope is called "Bob Hope" leading to the cynical rejoinder "abandon all Hope" for those who decide to quit using it.) Hal has been directed to what he thinks is a Narcotics Anonymous meeting after realizing he wants to quit. (Quitting, by the way, has caused Hal to salivate nearly uncontrollably.) He has driven to the outer edges of Boston to the Quabbin Recovery Systems [Q.R.S.] building listed in the Metro-Boston Recovery Options [M.B.R.O.] booklet.
Setting note: This is set in the near future (first decade of the 2000's) where America, Canada and Mexico have become The Organization of North American Nations [O.N.A.N.], and the years are "sold" to companies, rather than the years being "2001, 2002" and so on. This is set in the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment.
(w/r/t means "with regard to")
We join the story with:
A good two-thirds of the lot's parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding with a shuddering fart. It's dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on 27 past all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live in exurban Natick. It's either way colder out here or else a front's been coming in while Hal drove. The lot's piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.
Q.R.S.'s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass. There's no obvious bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of institutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague medical/dental smell. Its carpet's a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There's a circular high-countered nurse's station or reception desk, but nobody's there.
The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.
The 32A that follows Q.R.S. in the girl's little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He'd have to spit even if he didn't have chew in; the Kodiak's almost like a cover or excuse.
There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby's heat is intense and close but kind of porous; it's in a sort of uneasy struggle with tile radiant chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that's shadowless and seems to rise from the room's objects themselves. It's the same lighting and lion-colored carpeting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, flush in their flames. There's also the smell of stale coffee. The wall's color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn't quite cover the sweet medical stink or the bland sour smell of institutional food.
Hal hasn't heard one human sound since he came in. The place's silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso's "Seated Harlequin," and nothing else that wasn't just institutional bullshit, visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it's like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that's chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The glass's one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. He's missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90° turns it's clear the hallway's run is a perfect square around the cube's ground level. He's seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass rather gooily into a potted rubber tree's dirt. Q.R.S.'s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn't purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.
Room 32A's wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who've come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn't knock.
He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he's straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.
And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A.- flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.
But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn't near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle- class males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room's own colors, walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing -- a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy associations for Hal -- and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.
The only guy in the meeting to acknowledge Hal's entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal's winter coat and NASA glass as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man's chair is positioned under a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and the man holds; a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he's got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star. The morbidly round blond man's pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high-ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.
Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like a bear.
The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says "I'd like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss."
They're all at subtly different angles to Hal, who's slumped low over by the wall in the second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck- craning that, sure enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting there clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests -- and identical teddy bears, plump and brown and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal's saliva hitting the bottom of the empty glass rather more loudly than he might have wished.
The back of the crying guy's neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear and rocks on his hams.
Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk's dreaded Inner Child, Hal'd be willing to bet that here it's some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like "limbic component of the CNS" or "the part of our cortex that's not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly" or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.
The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear's head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says "The energies I'm feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin's Inner Infant." Nobody else says anything, and the leader doesn't seem to need anybody to say anything. He looks down at the cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage. The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet- red but shiny with embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar and hair's hem, sobs even harder at the affirmation of love and support. The round leader's high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk's, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child.
After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods at nothing and says "Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and share how much we're caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.."
Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up:
"I love you, Kevin."
"I'm not judging you, Kevin."
"Know just how you and the I.I. feel."
"I'm feeling really close to you."
"I'm feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin."
"You're crying for two, guy."
"Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin."
"I'm not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella." It's at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous ("NA") Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn't one bit like he's imagined an even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance-deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they've ever been engaged with anything more: substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.
Hal's grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it begins to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and-spacecraft emblem on his NASA glass.
"Kevin?" the leader says over the music. "Kevin?" The sobbing man's hand lies over his face like: a spider, and he doesn't even start to look up until the leader has said several times very blandly and kindly "Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the," rest of the group?"
Kevin's red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.
The leader's made the cage again on his poor bear's squashed head. "Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?" he says. "Can you name it?"
Kevin's voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. "I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv," he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater's shoulders tremble. "I'm feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars ... bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him." Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap's bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin's nose just mm. over the throttled bear's head. "And nobody's coming!" he sobs. "Nobody's coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane-mobile and teething ring."
Everybody's nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone's bear stares blankly ahead.
The leader's nod is slow and meditative. "And can you share your needs with the group right now", Kevin?"
"Please share, Kevin," says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he's a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs.
The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
"The work we're here to do," the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed pensively to the side of his big face, "is to work on our dysfunctional passivity and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant's needs to be magically met. The energy I feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inner Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I'm feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for Kevin right now."
Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears' bellies pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from Kevin's nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who'd asked Keyin please to share is now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva.
"We're asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything in the world," the leader's saying to Kevin.
"To be loved and held!" Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear's head. The bear's expression is seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but right from the start they'd never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.
At this Hal's slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He's all of a sudden realized that this guy who's seated at such an angle that Hal's been able to see only the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin's old E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain's older brother, Keyin Bain, of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home and the novelty wore off.335 The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a wild time336 had been putting extra marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn't have known a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for possible exits. The only door was the one he'd come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There are no windows at all.
Hal's chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men's-issues-Men's-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle's stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick's grip poke out between his legs and yelling "Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!"
Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear's head and saying it didn't look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music's cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it's in the middle of.
Sure enough, the round man, whose hand's left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.'s wounded wish anyway, to say "Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me," out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumb-prints on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet's cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it's not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.
Kevin Bain keeps repeating "Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me" in a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv's own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner's cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicat stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room's mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies some- body nearby has some athlete's-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it's mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestration Hal'd seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt's beard is one of those small rectangular ones that's easy to keep clear of the cup's rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain's hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room's heat and the Infant's emotions.
All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain's Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn't automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-flee. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn't exactly sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn't consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.
The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if ill feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to meet his needs.
"No," Kevin says very quietly. "No, it doesn't, Harv."
The leader is idly arranging his bear's splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear's either waving or surrendering. "Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?"
The back of Kevin Bain's head doesn't move. Hal's whole digestive tract spasms at the prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate Infant--hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn't just fake a hideous; coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.
Harv's now waggling tile bear's arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain's bear if it would maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal's spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the fact that he's driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear's speaking Latin when he looks up from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear this way and that, scanning the room -- as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized -- and finally manipulating the bear's arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear's pointing right in Hal's direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half- faked, running decision-trees on various ruses for flight.
Just like his younger brother Marion Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll. And he has the same capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marion Bain look to Hal, both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except Kevin Bain's little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping, and he's balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow's peak like nobody's business, and doesn't seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear's blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who's holding a spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear's open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue's red corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and hops the chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move from his back-row orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin Bain wriggles cross-legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the hand-signal into a motion like he's smoothing his hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music's settled back into its original nodding narcosis.
"Kevin," Harv says, "since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner- Infant needs, and since you've selected Jim as the member of the group you need something from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and hold you and love you, since your parents aren't ever coming. Not ever, Kevin."
Kevin Bain makes; a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face.
"Go for it, Kev," somebody over near the Bly poster calls out.
"We affirm and support you," says the guy by the filing cabinet.
Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he'd rather be right now. He's not even up to Addis Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who's put aside his yogurt but not the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal's envisioned himself tumbling over American Falls at the Concavity's southwest rim in a rusty old noxious-waste displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching his yogurt-tongued bear, his expression some- where between mild and blank.
Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before. Bain's tears are actually exiting his eyes and projecting outward several cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression is the scrunched spread one of a small child's total woe, his neck-cords standing out and face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher's mitt. A bright cape of mucus hangs from his upper lip, and his lower lip seems to be having some kind of epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum's expression on an adult face sort of compelling. At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it appears. Hal imagines watching Bain weep on a white beach through binoculars from the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room.
"He's not coming!" Kevin Bain finally keens to the leader.
Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in puzzlement and asks rhetorically what might be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn't automatically coming when called.
Kevin Bain's just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures fi3r getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At some point a timpani has gotten involved in the CD's music, and a rather saucy cornet, and the music's finally started moving a little, toward what's either a climax or the end of the disk.
By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner Infant wasn't getting its needs met, that sitting there passively asking for nurture to get up and come to him wasn't getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his Inner Infant to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant's needs. Somebody shouted out "Honor that Infant!" Somebody else called "Meet those needs!" Hal is mentally strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial silence and a normal salivary flow.
Pretty soon the men's supportive exhortations have distilled into every- body in the room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting "Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!" in the same male-crowd-exhortative meter as "Hold That Line!" or "Block That Kick!"
Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he's supposed to do to get his Infant's needs met if the person he's chosen to meet those needs won't come.
The leader has folded his hands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling, cross-legged, holding his tongue. His bear sits atop the protrusion of belly with its little blunt legs straight out, the way you'll see a bear sitting on a shelf. It seems to Hal that the O2 in 32A is now getting used up at a ferocious clip. Not at all like the cool, sheep-scented breezes of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting "Meet Those Needs!"
"What you're saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold me," Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes with his knuckles.
The leader smiles blandly.
"Instead of you're saying passively trying to get Jim to come to me," says Kevin Bain, whose tears have largely stopped, and whose sweat has taken on the clammy shine of true fear-sweat.
Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. "It would take real courage and love and commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk and go actively over to somebody that might give you what your Infant needs," he says quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of "I Don't Know (How to Love Him)" from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people's players and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly tight, Hal recalls.
The trimeter of the men's chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume "Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs" as Kevin Bain slowly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises from his orange chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him, this Jim. Bain begins to move slowly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming walking against a tornadic gale. Hal's picturing himself doing a lazy backstroke in the Azores, spouting glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytological plume. He's leaning almost out of his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain's line of transit, studying the brown suspension in the bottom of his glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a regressive Kevin Bain is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can remember offering since he'd stopped wearing pajamas with feet in them.
"Kevin?" Harv calls softly from the front of the room. "Is it you moving actively toward Jim, or should it be the Infant inside you, the one with the needs?"
"Needs, Needs, Needs," the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their manicured fists in the air.
Bain's looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively.
"Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?" Harv says.
"Go for it, Kevin!" a full-bearded man calls out.
"Let the Infant out!"
"Let your Infant do the walking, Kev."
So Hal's most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother's doubles partner's older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain's knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.
335. Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.
336. (according to his sudoriferous and angora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)
© Copyright David Foster Wallace
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