Free Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

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.’

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
    Though only one-half ethnic Arab and a Canadian by birth and residence, the medical
     attaché 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 attaché 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 attaché’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 attaché’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 attaché 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
     attaché’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 sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attaché partakes
     of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid. When he
     arrives home after evening prayers, he wants to look upon a spicy and 100%
shari’a-halal
dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly on its attachable tray, he
     wants his bib ironed and laid out by the tray at the ready, and he wants the living
     room’s teleputer booted and warmed up and the evening’s entertainment cartridges already
     selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer’s
     drive. He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled,
     ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing,
     adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head
     so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below
     his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from
     whatever entertainment is up and playing. He has a narrow imperial-style beard which
     his wife