Free Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Page A

also attends and keeps free of detritus from the tray just below. The medical
     attaché sits and watches and eats and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until
     the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has
     passed into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically
     to recline to full horizontal, and luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly
     from long slots in the appliance’s sides; and, unless his wife is inconsiderate and
     clumsy with the recliner’s remote hand-held controls, the medical attaché is permitted
     to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night’s sleep, still
     right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume
     surf and light rain on broad green leaves.
    Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife’s
     Arab Women’s Advanced League tennis night with the other legation wives and companions
     at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is not around
     wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Töblerone
     hits Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves,
     and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment’s inability to control his appetites
     for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attaché to remain in personal attendance
     all evening on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors
     and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves,
     rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but
     not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q———. So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U.,
     when the medical attaché is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an
     ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive
     pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-volume
     fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned
     by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical
     attaché on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the
     yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved
     early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attaché does get home, at like
     1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the living room lights undimmed,
     dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and—worst—of course
     no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet
     where the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the
     Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. And even if he weren’t far
     too exhausted and tightly wound to venture back into the damp urban night to pick
     up entertainment cartridges, the medical attaché realizes that his wife has, as always
     on Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic-immunity license plates, without
     which your thinking alien wouldn’t even dream of trying to park publicly at night
     in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.
    The medical attaché’s unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living
     room’s lavish TP receives also the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription
     Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from the
     service are so technologically and cryptographically complex that the attaché has
     always left the whole business to his wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons
     and abbreviations almost at random, the attaché is able to summon up only live U.S.A.
     professional sports—which he has always found brutish and repellent—Texaco Oil Company–sponsored