Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

central pool and tries to eat it there, in the heat, the coffee not steaming or cooling. He sits there in dumb animal pain. He has a mustache of sweat. A bright beach ball floats and bumps against one side of the pool. The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell. No one else out here. The complex is a ring with the pool and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the deck like fumes from fuel. There’s that mirage thing where the extreme heat makes the dry deck look wet with fuel. Orin can hear cartridge-viewers going from behind closed windows, that aerobics show every morning, and also someone playing an organ, and the older woman who won’t ever smile back at him in the apartment next to his doing operatic scales, muffled by drapes and sun-curtains and double panes. The Jacuzzi chugs and foams.
    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. Orin reads the note while he eats toast that’s mainly an excuse for the honey. He uses his smaller right arm to eat and drink. His oversized left arm and big left leg remain at rest at all times in the morning.
    A breeze sends the beach ball skating all the way across the blue pool to the other side, and Orin watches its noiseless glide. The white iron tables have no umbrellas, and you can tell where the sun is without looking; you can feel right where it is on your body and project from there. The ball moves tentatively back out toward the middle of the pool and then stays there, not even bobbing. The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex’s stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart’s hair, from days gone by.
    Orin returned with the team from the Chicago game two nights ago, redeye. He knows that he and the place-kicker are the only two starters who are not still in terrible pain, physically, from the beating.
    The day before they left – so like five days ago – Orin was out by himself in the Jacuzzi by the pool late in the day, caring for the leg, sitting in the radiant heat and bloody late-day light with the leg in the Jacuzzi, absently squeezing the tennis ball he still absently squeezes out of habit. Watching the Jacuzzi funnel and bubble and foam around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi. With a flat matter-of-fact plop. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Nothing overhung the Jacuzzi but sky. The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something in flight and died and fallen out of the empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by the leg. He brought his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose with a finger and looked at it. It was an undistinguished kind of bird. Not a predator. Like a wren, maybe. It seems like no way could it have been a good sign. The dead bird bobbed and barrel-rolled in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next, creating an illusion of continued flight. Orin had inherited none of the Moms’s phobias about disorder, hygiene. (Not crazy about bugs though – roaches.) But he’d just sat there squeezing the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in his head. By the next morning, waking up, curled and entombed, it seemed like it