hoshizora

~*~LISTEN TO MEREDITH~*~

'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling—it was always ironic—he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. [The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed] I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.'

Joelle van Dyne, Infinite Jest, p. 940

Joelle'd felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady's grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time she felt sure in her guts' pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

I had meant to read a relatively serious interlude from The Republic of Thieves, in which Locke Lamora is invested in the rituals of a mystery cult on the night of his thirteenth birthday, but I decided to go with something a little more adventurous, an interlude called "The Boy Who Chased Red Dresses," in which Young Locke goes toe-to-toe with Young Sabetha in a battle of wits (Hint: He gets schooled).

"But Don you're still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you're no less worthy of connection and society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you can't help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how much you care about how you look. You're supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you're so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control."

"Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit."

"What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts, and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of the people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you're hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance."

"Use less words."

"And then meantime you didn't say a straight-on Yes or Now to Can I ask what's up behind [your veil], are you cross-eyed or have like a beard, or do you have like really bad skin under there even though your skin everyplace else that isn't hidden looks—"

"Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?"

"See, this is you keep trying to sidetrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say No. Try it. It's OK. Nothing bad'll happen. Just try it straight out."

"Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is drop-dead creamy perfect."

"Jesus, why am I even here? Why don't you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I'm going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn't you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?"

"Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I'm the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection."

"Now with the sarcasm."

"I am so beautiful I am deformed."

"Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I'm stupid for trying to get her to walk through her fear to give a straight-out No, which she isn't willing."

"I am deformed with beauty."