Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4’s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect.

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for cata-tonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients sub-contracted to a Commonwealth outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs.

and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.

Gatley's addiction to drugs can be associated with his mother's addiction and incapacity to take care of her son.

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, is Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of Commonwealth Ave.

Unit #7 is on the west side of the street’s end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad shape, boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof’s middle as if shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity.

Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and without sanctioned path.

Don Gately’s been told that the school’s maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill’s hilltop before the Academy’s burly cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending all sorts of damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine’s Unit #7, something over which you can sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated, years back; and but Gately doesn’t know that E.T.A.’s balding of the hill is why #7 can still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full rent, every month, on what it almost buried.

6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that. That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude.

hurt.That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever.

That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

Don Gately’s developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character.

He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis’s room, with Pemulis’s roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they’re alone, Pemulis and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis’s yachting cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ.

‘Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.’

The accounts I’ve been reading have been incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let’s just say things got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team scattered, reassigned. Vague but I’ve got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.’

‘The literature’s mute on the titration. Do you take one tablet?’ He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys’ faces leaning in above. ‘Is like half a tab a regulation hit?’

‘Two or even three tablets, maybe?’ Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.

Hal's urge to use as much substance as he can my be said to emerge from the external pressures he has to face at the academy.

‘Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med- library?’ Hal’s his mother Avril’s child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc.

over the course of the next day or so the matter’s hashed out and it’s decided that while there’s no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it’s really Pemulis and Axford and Hal’s right — duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade practice — to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeterminedly safe amounts before unleashing it on Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians.

7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho’s neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse,

Joel wears a veil because she thinks she is so beautiful it could kill the people who look at her.

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director’s lap can call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high that she’s going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth.

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

She’s had her last fling with film cartridges. Jim had used her several times. Jim at the end had filmed her at prodigious and multi-lensed length, and refused to share what he’d made of it, and died w/o a note. 79 Her mental name for the man had been ‘Infinite Jim.’ The display cartridge shoves home with a click.

Joelle used to work with James Incandenza. She worked as an actress with him but James never showed her what he made of her shots.

For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to — only four years seven months six days past — to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did. Scrub sinks until they were mint-white. Dust the ceilings without using any kind of ladder. Vacuum like a fiend and put in a fresh vacuum-bag after each room. Imitate the wife and mother they both declined to shoot. Use Incandenza’s toothbrush on tiles’ grout.

As she remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart’s friend, the world’s best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots where Boston cabs by all that’s right just aren’t,

He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great love of taxis. And they loved him back.

And so Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame P., surrendered, suicidal, eschews tumbrel or hack, her solid clogs sounding formal on the smooth cement down Boylston’s sidewalk past fine stores’ revolving doors southeast toward serious brownstone-terrain, open coat swirling over poncho and hanging rain breaking into stutters and drips.

Here it is suggested that Joelle is Madame Psychosis.

W. Churchill — when the lady, no person’s doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated — made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed.

Here we know that Joelle wears a veil because she is hideously deformed. Once she was pretty but after the "acid incident" she has been deformed. We do not yet know what this incident is and how or when it occured.

she has no idea that Joelle’s been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B., has no idea what she and Jim Incandenza were even about for twenty-one months, whether they were lovers or what, whether Orin left because they were lovers or what, 80 or that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter’s father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he’d claimed to have had it locked away.

"the Entertainment" is mentioned here

A good many of James O. Incandenza’s films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light.

Orin dislikes Mario

Joelle was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved for twenty-one.

Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent?

He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven?

Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?

My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out.

THE END? amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle’s mother’s family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here.

Perhaps she is planning to kill herself?

The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.

Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a slip as The Sad Stork.

No one out there knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much.

Allusion toward Joelle trying to end her life.

The idea that she’ll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal.

The word "never" confirms that she is attempting to take her life.

‘Hey Hallie? I think I’m being followed.’

Oring being followed by people for the catridge

‘The weird part is I think I’m being followed by… by handicapped people.’

‘Hallie, this physically imposing Moment girl’s asking all these soft-profilesque family-background questions.’ ‘She wants to know about Himself?’ ‘Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It’s gradually emerging it’s going to be some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody’s talents and accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko’s careers.’