Infinite jest - David Wallace

[292] Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during their nine-month stay,3 to say nothing of attachments to Staffers.

a. This is a corollary of Boston AA’s suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for this, Boston AAs with time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn’t pan out (which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even more hole-pain than before and now don’t have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include ‘Addicts Don’t Have Relationships, They Take Hostages’ (sic) and ‘An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.’ And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy’s often the issue that separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There.

[293] Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in.

[294] It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way.

[295] Boston Housing Authority.

[296] Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce ‘A + B Blood,’ an F/X staple of low-budget splatter-films.

[297] The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl — to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive.

[298] It’s also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment.

[299] © the Commonwealth of MA’s Lottery Authority.

[300] Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Cafe® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis’s passion of breakfast cafe au lait.

[301] Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v. cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production companies v. videotape-rental chains, Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace’s golden goose’s copyrights by specifying that all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run,a and you need licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers out of the bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle to clear if you’ve got financial resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master).

a. N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m.

[302] Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Chrìste Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants. Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution. This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe’s love of his wife’s health of prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays — Fortier had overseen both jeux du procbain train* at which Marathe’s elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this.

a. Q.v. Note 304 sub.

[303] Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop’s brothers active and alert. For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost.

[304] Q.v. @ 2O3Oh. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered in (C2H5CO)2O2a, elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing converter plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one’s photo, keyboard hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen’s upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over what’s starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Pout-rincourt’s History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes as ‘things.’ Original hopes for at least originality of topic have long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he’s now trying to find some new resource in the piles that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.

‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized “Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’

A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Quebec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism, history, and cult, which you’d think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, essays, and papers, in everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up 1-93 in Med-ford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named guy whose Wild Conceits wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times to even make sense of it, gauges he’s pretty safe in ripping off, since no way Poutrincourt’d have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this insufferable:

‘… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.’ In a twist on the usual plagiarism-situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the prose in this Wild Conceits guy’s thing, or at least bringing the verbs and modifiers down out of the like total ozone, which the Academese here on the wrhole sounds to Struck like the kind of foam-flecked megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then the odd Preludin to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes and red wine. Plus let’s not even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt has a fetishy thing about transitions.

‘The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt. Would that the infamous Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were, as well.’ Struck can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big red triple-underlined QUOI? under a transition this tortured and freewheeling. Struck pictures the Wild Conceits guy totally strafed as he goes, weaving over his foam-flecked desktop, almost. Tor the infamous Quebecker Separatist A.F.R. cell’s claims to irreduce-ably active status include the following. The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans, to have disrupted pipelines between processing points in the eastern Reconfiguration’s annular fusion grid, have been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste Displacement’s launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured intracontinental border, and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell’s own sobriquet in the vox populi---

“Wheelchair Assassins”---from the active practice of assassinating prominent Canadian officials who support or even tolerate what they---the A.F.R.s, in infrequent public communiques---regard as both Quebec and Canada in íoío’s “Sudetenlandization”

by the---as the A.F.R. characterize it---same American-dominated Organization of North American Nations which forced ecologically distorted and possibly mutagenic territory into their---the nation of Canada, and most specifically and intensively the province of Quebec---aegis in the newly subsidized Year of the Whopper …’ — Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the overdevelopment of his body’s right side, is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy’s clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely — ‘… the Wheelchair Assassins at these all too publicly familiar assassinations materializing, quote “as if from nowhere” unquote, masters of stealth, striking terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels, striking swiftly and without warning, assassinating prominent Canadians and then dissolving back into the dark night’ — as opposed to a light night? Struck forces sudden air through his full nose, producing a low and horn-like derisive sound — ‘striking always at night, a type of performative signature, to strike at night only, leaving behind only sinuous networks of thin, double tracks in snow, dew, leaves, or earth, as performative signatures, such that a double sinuous 5 shaped line across the traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism is the A.F.R. cell’s standard, its escutcheon or “symbol,” if you will, in their infrequent and always hostile communiques to the administrations of Canada and O.N.A.N. Such that, quote, “To hear the squeak,” unquote, is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant, terrifying, and violent death. And for the media, as well. As in, quote, “Before many thousands of shocked subscribers, newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide, guarded by no fewer than a dozen units of the Domestic Detail’s elite mounted Cuirassiers, nevertheless heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously disseminated address at the lakeside resort of Pointe Clare.”*

Struck, clutching his head with one hand, is trying to find euphemismic in the TP’s Lex-Base.

‘… Affiliations, sometimes purported, between the Root Cult core of Les Assassins on one hand and the more extreme and violently subversive of Quebec’s Séparatisteur

organizations---the Fronte de la Liberation de la Quebec, the Fils de Montcalm, the ultra right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc Quebecois---tend, however, to be contradicted by both stated agendas---the conventional Separatist phalances demanding only the independent secession of provincial Quebec and the elimination of Anglo-American cognates from public discourse, while the A.RR.s’ stated aims being nothing less total than the total return of all Reconfigured territories to American administration, the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste displacement and ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the removal of all fission/ waste/fusion annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the secession of Canada in toto

from the Organization of North American Nations---and by the fact that all too many

prominent figures in the recent sociohistory of the Separatist movement---for e.g., Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Sr. and Jr. Bouchards---have, in the last 24 months---particularly, in the violent and bloody autumn of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar---”heard the squeak.” ‘

Struck’s little TP’s internal Lex files confirm vishnu, at least. Plus there’s a kind of almost savage edge to the article’s incoherence that Struck’s getting almost to like, a little: he keeps imagining the little hyphen of wrinkle Poutrincourt gets between her eyebrows when she doesn’t follow something and can’t quite tell if it’s your English’s fault or her English’s fault. ‘Prior to Y.P.W.c.’s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible sociohistorical data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources whose scholarly veracity was of an integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable.’ Struck here pictures Thierry Poutrincourt, who tends to get that little annoyed-confusion wrinkle sometimes even with the lucidest of term papers, lowering her tall head and charging into a wall. One sinus feels noticeably bigger than the other sinus, and there’s something not quite right with his neck from sitting hunched all this time, and he’d kill relatives for a quick DuBois.