Infinite Jest

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (November 10)

The E.T.A. headmaster’s office is blue, Hal notices as he sits and waits to meet with the faculty members regarding the violent conclusion to the game of Eschaton. The receptionist who works for Charles was once a helicopter pilot. After a terrible crash, however, she was left with a medical condition and now she can only move sideways. The students call her Lateral Alice Moore. Avril works as the Dean of Academic Affairs and the Dean of Females. In her latter capacity, she brings all of the under-13 female students into her doorless office. The meeting is part of E.T.A.’s monthly well-being check-up; someone—usually Dr. Rusk—asks the girls whether they are being sexually abused. The absence of Dr. Rusk from Avril’s meeting makes Hal suspicious. He is aware that Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk but has never learned why. Every time he asks, Michael gives him a different answer. Hal worries that the fallout from the violent Eschaton game is having repercussions across campus. Hal, who is technically not involved in the Eschaton incident, listens to his mother asking the girls about their well-being. None of the students seem to have been sexually abused, but they complain about mollycoddling by patronizing adults, such as having their hair “tousled or smoothed in any way” (514).

A key feature of sports academies is that punishments for rule breaking often involve athletic activity, taken to a punishing level. An endnote mentions that at least one government department has tried to classify such punishments as “child abuse” (1036). Many of the students expect these punishing training regimes as a result of the Eschaton fiasco. Though Hal lives and studies in an academy that was founded by and is still run by his extended family, he “devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time ever thinking about people in his family” (515-16). His Uncle Charles has followed a similar career path to James, Hal’s father and Charles’s brother-in-law. In Hal’s view, Charles is a “terribly shy” (517) and withdrawn person who spent his childhood on the fringes of social groups. Hal thinks about the other times he has been summoned to the headmaster’s office. He has rarely been punished for any rules infractions and is often asked by Hal to show other students around the facility. Charles is a short man and a gifted administrator. He has eyes on different levels and a similarly imbalanced mustache. Hal’s mother approaches the space outside Charles’s office and asks Hal how long he has been waiting. Avril is the opposite of her stepbrother Charles. She commands attention in any room. She stands outside Charles’s office with a lit cigarette in her hand, and they listen to Charles’s awkward meeting with a prospective young student. Avril gives her son an apple, keen to escape from the absurd conversation between the girls in her office. The gesture annoys Hal because he resents his mother’s polite insistence and knows that she will likely not eat anything other than this apple for the rest of the day. Eventually, Hal is admitted into Charles’s office. Dr. Rusk is waiting with Charles. Otis P. Lord, horribly injured during the Eschaton game, is also with them, flanked by medical staff.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Outcropping Northwest of Tucson, AZ, U.S.A., Still (Pre-Dawn and Dawn, May 1)

As usual, nothing is truly accomplished during the meetings between Steeply and Marathe. However, the two men secretly enjoy the meetings, as do their respective organizations. Marathe knows that his boss, Fortier, does not know how tempted Marathe has been to betray the Wheelchair Assassins to obtain vital medical treatments for his wife Gertraude. If Fortier suspected him, Fortier would kill Gertraude. The men continue to talk about the myth and draw analogies between the myth and the Entertainment. Marathe admits that he will need to leave soon.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Front Office, Ennet House D.A.R.H., Enfield, MA (450H., 11 November)

Joelle listens to a man tell a story about another man being shot. The man asks Joelle about the veil she wears at all times. She explains that the veil is a part of her membership of the “Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed” (U.H.I.D.) (533). She likens the organization to the rehabilitation groups of which she is now a member. The man—eventually revealed to be Don Gately—listens to Joelle talk about the U.H.I.D., though he asks her to “use less words” (535). When Don mentions that he played high school football, Joelle says that she was once a cheerleader. Returning to her veil, she accuses Don of hiding behind his own symbolic mask of being a member of staff whenever he does not want to talk about his own flaws. Don is irritated by this accusation and blames Joelle for approaching him. Joelle explains that she is deeply aware of her beauty and how it can destabilize people. She believes that she is so beautiful that she is now “deformed.” Don, unsure what she means, remains irritated. Joelle tells him to believe whatever he wants.

A man named Randy Lenz returns to Ennet House. Randy is still in the first few months of his recovery but rumors around the rehab center suggest he “has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues” (538) that are common in addiction recovery. He always walks to his meetings rather than drive his car or hitch a ride. His solitary behavior flags him as suspicious to the Ennet House staff, who watch him carefully and submit him to frequent urine tests. However, he always seems to be clean. The staff do not know that Randy has started catching stray cats and rats from the street during his walks. The first animal he killed was a rat; he stamped on it in an alley and found it solved “internal-type issues” (541). He graduated to killing cats and has since refined his approach. In addition, he is also secretly taking “organic cocaine” (543) without the staff’s knowledge. He poisons, burns, and beats cats to death every night, then begins using a knife to stab dogs. He considers killing a homeless person but does not. One evening, a patient named Bruce Green asks to accompany Randy on the walk home. Randy agrees but then Bruce begins to walk with him every night. This annoys Randy, even though he likes Bruce, as he has no opportunity to act on his murderous impulses. One day while walking home, Randy manages to snatch a bird without Bruce noticing. Even after he pushes it through the garbage disposal, he continues to feel “largely impotent and unresolved” (548).

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Early November)

Rodney Tine is the Chief of the Office of Unspecified Services. The government is testing the Entertainment—codenamed “samizdat“ (549)—on prisoners to try and determine the source of its power. Tine is concerned about possible “Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment’s dissemination” (549).

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Late P.M., Monday, November 9)

Dr. Rusk provides psychological coaching to Ortho Stice, an E.T.A. student. She criticizes Stice because he has control issues, though Stice rejects her diagnosis. Meanwhile, Michael Pemulis eavesdrops from the hallway. He does not like Dr. Rusk. Even though the hour is late, the lights remain on in the area of the office that houses Avril and Charles’s offices. Entering Avril’s doorless office, Michael is surprised to find Avril alone with the academy’s best player, John Wayne. Further to his surprise, John is wearing “a football helmet and light shoulder pads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else” (552), and Avril is dressed as a cheerleader. Michael mentions to Avril that he had hoped to talk to her about something. He compliments John’s helmet while John dresses himself.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Wednesday, November 11)

Bruce Green still accompanies Randy Lenz on their walks from the counseling sessions back to Ennet House. Randy has come to realize that he actually likes Bruce; the realization, however, makes him even more anxious as he has not been able to satisfactorily harm an animal with Bruce present. The overwhelming anxiety has driven him even deeper into his secretive substance use, and he has been getting high regularly, telling himself that he needs to do so if he is ever going to be sober. Having taken cocaine for “medicinal support” (554), however, he cannot stop talking animatedly to Bruce about discreet and private moments from his past. As well as stories about his father and crocodiles, he tells Bruce about how he once talked to a child at a party who was born in the heavily polluted Great Concavity and who, as a result, was affected in their physical development; Randy was obsessed with the child’s “boneless face” (559).

At E.T.A., Hal lays on his bed in his room. After a series of visitors, John Wayne appears in the doorway. They look at each other wordlessly for a short while and then John withdraws without saying anything.

Randy cannot stop grinding his teeth. He chews gum in a desperate attempt to hide his drug-induced condition while he talks incessantly to Bruce. Before coming to rehab, Randy was a drug dealer. He tells Bruce stories about selling cocaine. He also tells Bruce that he considered becoming a model but was afraid of the gay culture that he believed was associated with the male modeling industry. Randy uses the story to probe at Bruce. He is beginning to suspect that Bruce is a closeted gay man. As they walk, Randy notices that Bruce repeats Don Gately’s phrases.

Selected Snippets From the Individual-Resident-Informal-Interface Moments of D.W. Gately […]

The chapter is comprised of a series of conversations between Don Gately and the patients at Ennet House. The patients complain about minor issues and more serious matters. Their complaints involve plumbing, sexual harassment, philosophical bullying, and other issues.

Orin takes a new “Subject” to a hotel room to have sex. He met this woman, a hand model from Switzerland, while taking Helen Steeply to the airport. An endnote provides excerpts from his discussions with Helen. After initially refusing to talk about family matters, he talks about his father’s fleeting sanity in the later years of his life, his lack of trust of his mother, and his former doubles partner from E.T.A., whom he believes has obsessive compulsive disorder, just like his mother who is high functioning but undiagnosed. He also believes that his mother much prefers Mario to her other sons as she sees him as a “secular martyr” (1040). At this point in the interview, Orin becomes defensive. He worries that his brothers will read Helen’s article. He repeats the story about the time Hal ate a clump of mold. Avoiding further questioning, he suggests that Helen contact someone named Bain for more information about his parents. Returning to the narrative, Orin looks back on how he met the Swiss hand model. Like many of the Subjects, she is married with children. Orin overlooked this fact and convinced himself that her appearance was a fortunate way to distract himself from saying goodbye to Helen.

Orin leaves the Swiss hand model in the hotel. As he walks out of the building, he is convinced that he glimpsed a man in a wheelchair. They seem to have returned to his life after the departure of Helen Steeply. He worries that he is being followed all over again. Then he realizes that the Swiss woman’s accent was very similar to one of the stalkers.

Randy continues to talk incessantly while chewing gum. While Bruce stays quiet, Randy expands on his gossipy and largely incorrect theories about the other Ennet House residents. His own stories are private and tragic, including details about his overweight mother’s embarrassing incident on a bus. She was awarded a “morbidly obese settlement” (576) that allowed her to retire. She spent four months watching television and eating herself to death. Bruce is able to empathize as his parents both died when he was young, though he has repressed the emotions so he does not talk about it often. His father was once a fitness instructor until, on one fateful day, he realizes that his legs were no longer the same size. His career was ruined, so he went to work for a company that made practical jokes. Bruce used one of the jokes—a surprise fake snake in a can—on his mother and caused her to have a heart attack. After her death, Bruce’s father suffered a breakdown. He turned to crime and began filling his company’s joke cigars with real life explosives. After people were killed, Bruce’s father was sentenced to death. Bruce becomes so trapped in his memories of his parents that he becomes separated from Randy. He wanders around, following the sound of Hawaiian music in the distance. Bruce thinks about visiting a Hawaiian-themed college party with his then-girlfriend, Mildred Bonk. He got incredibly drunk at the party and soiled himself. Across the street, Bruce sees Randy bending down strangely in front of a dog. Randy becomes suddenly angry and kills the dog before Bruce can say anything. A crowd forms around Randy, holding a bloody knife, and the dead dog. Among the crowd are people in wheelchairs. Randy tries to run away.

Mario thinks ahead to his imminent 19th birthday. He is again suffering from acute insomnia, in no small part because his favorite radio show is off the air. From a very young age, he has been diagnosed with Familial Dysautonomia. The symptoms of the conditions include the inability to feel pain, something that has provoked jealousy in his brother. Mario still frets about the sudden and unexplained absence of his favorite radio host, Madame Psychosis. He fell in love with her show because listening to it was like “listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M.” (592). He is also concerned about Hal; the two brothers seem to have grown apart in recent years. Occasionally, Mario walks past the rehabilitation facility at Ennet House. He listens to the bits and pieces of conversation. As he passes Ennet House, he is shocked to hear what sounds like Madame Psychosis’s show.

Sex does not please Orin. He is only capable of ensuring that his sexual partners are satisfied, without ever being satisfied himself. Nevertheless, he takes pleasure from being able to give “the impression of care and intimacy” (597). During his time with the Swiss model, a knock at the hotel room door makes the woman worried that her husband has caught them in the affair. Orin opens the door to find a man in a wheelchair who claims to be carrying out a survey. Orin answers his strange and scattershot questions, assuming that the man is a shy fan who wants an autograph. When the questions become personal, Orin continues to answer them. He talks about nostalgia for the past. He discusses television commercials and aspects of broadcast television that no longer exist, but that he misses. The interrogation eventually ends.