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The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine but really it looks to Pemulis from his slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM’s monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class, Way more powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.-ingestible DMT (or Ololiuqui or datura’s scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. ‘Jackie-O.’), or Ebene or psilocybin or Cylert[56]; DMZ resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid, but significantly different from LSD-25 in that its effects are less visual and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally-cerebral and almost ontological, with some sort of manipulated-phenylkylamine-like speediness whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically (and euphorically, is where the muscimole-affective resemblance shows its head) altered.[57] The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ’s discovery was the tail-end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. Leary’s invitation to become ‘Writer in Resonance’ at Leary’s Utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook NY on what is now Canadian soil. A substance even just the accidental-synthesis of which sent the Sandoz chemist into early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching, the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese opium, which forget it.

DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’ which Mario Incandenza and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to almost religiously.

The day-shift Ennet House kid at the booth who raises the portcullis to let him onto the grounds had a couple times in October approached Pemulis about a potential transaction. Pemulis has a rigid policy about not transacting with E.T.A. employees who come up the hill from the halfway house, since he knows some of them are at the place on Court Order, and knows for a fact they pull unscheduled Urines all over the place down there, and types like the Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulis’s talents let him get away from in terms of like social milieu and mixing and transacting; and his basic attitude with these low-rent employees is one of unfoolish discretion and like why tempt fate.

The East Courts are empty and ball-strewn when Pemulis pulls in; most of them are still at lunch. Pemulis, Troeltsch, and Schacht’s triple-room is in subdorm B in the back north part of the second floor of West House and so superjacent to the Dining Hall, from which through the floor Pemulis can hear voices and silverware and can smell exactly what they’re having. The first thing he does is boot up the phone console and try Inc and Mario’s room over in Comm.-Ad., where Hal is sitting in wíndowlight with the Riverside Hamlet he told Mario he’d read and help with a conceptual film-type project based on part of, his uncushioned captain’s chair partly under an old print of a detail from the minor and soft-core Alexandrian mosaic Consummation of the Levirates, eating an AminoPal® energy-bar and waiting very casually, the phone with its antenna already out lying ready on the arm of the chair and two folio-size Baron’s SAT-prep guides and a spine-shot copy of the B.S. 1937 Tilden on Spin and his keys on their neck-chain lying on the Lindistarne carpet by his shoe, waiting in a very casual posture. Hal deliberately waits till the audio console’s third ring, like a girl at home on Saturday night.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘The turd emergeth.’ Pemulis’s clear and digitally condensed voice on the line. ‘Repeat. The turd emergeth.’

‘Please commit a crime,’ is Hal Incandenza’s immediate reply.

‘Gracious me,’ Pemulis says into the phone tucked under his jaw, carefully de-Velcroing the lining of his Mr. Howell hat.

TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN 11.5-MINUTE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT

CARTRIDGE DIRECTED, RECORDED, EDITED, AND —

ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM — WRITTEN BY MARIO

INCANDENZA, IN RECEIPT OF NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL

HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT’S

ANNUAL ‘NEW EYES, NEW VOICES’ YOUNG FILMMAKERS’

CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007

MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD-

EASY-TO-INSTALL UPGRADE FOR INFERNATRON/INTERLACE TP

SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (SIC), ALMOST

EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA

PASSED FROM THIS LIFE

Here is how to put on a big red tent of a shirt that has ETA across the chest in gray.

Please ease carefully into your supporter and adjust the elastic straps so the straps do not bite into your butt and make bulged ridges in your butt that everyone can see once you’ve sweated through your shorts.

Here is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a log.

Here is how to win, later.

This is a yellow iron-mesh Ball-Hopper full of dirty green dead old balls. Take them to the East Courts while the dawn is still chalky and no one’s around except the mourning doves that infest the pines at sunrise, and the air is so sopped you can see your summer breath. Hit serves to no one. Make a mess of balls along the base of the opposite fence as the sun hauls itself up over the Harbor and a thin sweat breaks and the serves start to boom. Stop thinking and let it flow and go boom, boom. The shiver of the ball against the opposite fence. Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself sits and advises with his flask. Older men’s legs are white and hairless from decades in pants. Here is the set of keys a stride’s length before you in the court as you serve dead balls to no one. After each serve you must almost fall forward into the court and in one smooth motion bend and scoop up the keys with your left hand. This is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve. You still, years after the man’s death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.

This is how to hold the stick.

Learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It’s a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.