Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Page B

head against the gray light of the window. Hal got to the console on the second ring and had the transparent phone’s antenna out by the third.
    His way of answering the phone sounded like ‘Mmmyellow.’
    ‘I want to tell you,’ the voice on the phone said. ‘My head is filled with things to say.’
    Hal held three pairs of E.T.A. sweatpants in the hand that didn’t hold the phone. He saw his older brother succumb to gravity and fall back limp against the pillows. Mario often sat up and fell back still asleep.
    ‘I don’t mind,’ Hal said softly. ‘I could wait forever.’
    ‘That’s what you think,’ the voice said. The connection was cut. It had been Orin.
    ‘Hey Hal?’
    The light in the room was a creepy gray, a kind of nonlight. Hal could hear Brandt laughing at something Kenkle had said, off down the hall, and the clank of their janitorial buckets. The person on the phone had been O.
    ‘Hey Hal?’ Mario was awake. It took four pillows to support Mario’s oversized skull. His voice came from the tangled bedding. ‘Is it still dark out, or is it me?’
    ‘Go back to sleep. It isn’t even six.’ Hal put the good leg into the sweatpants first.
    ‘Who was it?’
    Shoving three coverless Dunlop widebodies into the gear bag and zipping the bag partway up so the handles had room to stick out. Carrying all three bags back over to the console to deactivate the ringer on the phone. He said, ‘No one you know, I don’t think.’

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YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
    Though only one-half ethnic Arab and a Canadian by birth and residence, the medical attache is nevertheless once again under Saudi diplomatic immunity, this time as special ear-nose-throat consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q–, the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment, here on northeastern U.S.A. soil with his legation to cut another mammoth deal with InterLace TelEntertainment. The medical attache turns thirty-seven tomorrow, Thursday, 2 April in the North American lunar Y.D.A.U. The legation finds the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say nothing of the arresting image of the idolatrous West’s most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper, a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals.
    The attache’s medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub’ al Khali, it is his first trip back to U.S.A. soil since completing his residency eight years ago. His duties here involve migrating with the Prince and his retinue between InterLace’s two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. and Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A., respectively, offering expert E.N.T. assistance to the personal physician of Prince Q–. The medical attache’s particular expertise is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora. Prince Q– (as would anyone who refuses to eat pretty much anything but Töblerone) suffers chronically from Candida albicans, with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis and thrush, the yeasty sores and sinal impactions of which require almost daily drainage in the cold and damp of early-spring Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attache is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.
    Saudi consulting fees, in particular, are somewhere just past obscene, but the medical attache’s duties on this trip are personally draining and sort of nauseous, and when he arrives back at the sumptuous apartments he had his wife sublet in districts far from the legation’s normal Back Bay and Scottsdale digs, at the day’s end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way. A more than averagely devout follower of the North American