Free Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Page B

delivery, left on the sideboard in the living room along with personal and professional faxes
     and mail the medical attaché declines to read until it’s been pre-scanned by his wife for relevant interest to himself. The
     sideboard is against the wall opposite the room’s electronic recliner under a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica.
     The padded cartridge-mailers with their distinctive rectangular bulge are mixed haphazardly in with the less entertaining
     mail. Searching for something to unwind with, the medical attaché tears the different padded mailers open along their designated
     perforations. There is an O.N.A.N.M.A. Specialty Service film on actinomycete-class antibiotics and irritable bowel syndrome.
     There is 1 April Y.D.A.U.’s CBC/PATHÉ North American News Summary 40-minute cartridge, available daily by a wife’s auto-subscription
     and either transmitted to TP by unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play ROM self-erasing disk. There
     is the Arabic-language video edition of April’s
Self
magazine for the attaché’s wife,
Nass
’s cover’s model chastely swathed and veiled. There is a plain brown and irritatingly untitled cartridge-case in a featureless
     white three-day standard U.S.A. First Class padded cartridge-mailer. The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area
     in Arizona U.S.A., and the return-address box has only the term ‘
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,
’ with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a return address or incorporated logo. Though by birth
     and residence a native of Québec, where the language of discourse is not English, the medical attaché knows quite well that
     the English word
anniversary
does not mean the same as
birthday
. And the medical attaché and his veiled wife were united in the eyes of God and Prophet not in April but in October, four
     years prior, in the Rub’al Khali. Adding to the padded mailer’s confusion is the fact that anything from Prince Q ———’s legation
     in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. would carry a diplomatic seal instead of routine O.N.A.N. postage. The medical attaché, in sum,
     feels tightly wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely
     a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting
     cartridge-case, and has only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration-
     and duration-codes are supposed to be embossed. The medical attaché is puzzled by the cryptic mailer and face and case and
     unlabelled entertainment, and preliminarily irritated by the amount of time he’s had to spend upright at the sideboard attending
     to mail, which is not his task. The sole reason he does not throw the unlabelled cartridge in the wastecan or put it aside
     for his wife to preview for relevance is because there are such woefully slim entertainment-pickings on his wife’s irritating
     Americanized tennis-league evening away from her place at home. The attaché will pop the cartridge in and scan just enough
     of its contents to determine whether it is irritating or of an irrelevant nature and not entertaining or engaging in any way.
     He will heat the prepared
halal
lamb and spicy
halal
garnish in the microwave oven until piping-hot, arrange it attractively on his tray, preview the first few moments of the
     puzzling and/or irritating or possibly mysteriously blank entertainment cartridge first, then unwind with the news summary,
     then perhaps have a quick unlibidinous look at
Nass
’s spring line of sexless black devout-women’s-wear, then will insert the recursive surf-and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved
     early Wednesday evening of it, hoping only that his wife will not return from her tennis league in her perspiration-dampened
     black ankle-length tennis ensemble and remove his dinner tray