Wallace:David:Infinite Jest:809:head brace? (Orlowsky)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

wallace-l 30 June 1996:

I still haven't quite finished IJ, so I can't comment on the head brace, but on page 809, the first page of the section describing Gately's hospital stay, there are two references to a boy sitting up in the next bed who either has a box on his head or a box-like head. Sounds like Mario to me, but does the chronology make any sense?

the same day:

I don't have the book with me, but I believe that the person with the box on his head is the kid who was running the nearly fatal game of ESCHATON and ended up with the video monitor on his head.

and another:

I think that would be Otis Lord who got his head stuck in the Yushityu (You-shit-you) monitor during the Eschaton meta-solution battle.

and on 1 July:

When I was reading that section around p. 809, I was assuming that the "blurred figure" that "seemed to have a box on its head" was that kid that ended up with the monitor on his head in the Eschaton debacle. I don't remember his name. I'm not sure if it works out chronologically; but I remember the removal surgery had to be postponed for some time, and Hal certainly would have visited.

again that day:

When Gately first wakes up in the hospital, he is sharing the room with the kid with the video monitor on his head from the Eschaton disaster. However, he checks out of the room and and it is prepared for someone else. If Hal visited Gately's first roomate, it is unlikely that he would have had any meaningful conversation with Gately, who couldn't speak and was falling in and out of conciousness.

However, the second roomate, who has not yet checked in by novel's end, might well be Ortho Stice, who has lost his forehead on a frozen window. Hal might later visit him and see Gately when he has recovered some.

and another:

Remeber also that Marathe's wife had a similar apparatus. And the passage on 559, where Lenz tells Green about the "normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, . . . " This is "The Infant." For what it's worth, it could have been just about anybody; prepping the room for any one of a number of characters for whom head/skull deformities were reality (physically or metaphorically).

and another:

I'm pretty sure the bed next to Gately's is being prepared for Hal. The rig, described on pp. 966 & 968, refers "back" to the "strap-secured head of my stretcher" Hal describes on page 16, when he was in the hospital in 11/YDAU "lying there restrained and immobile."

On 11/20/YDAU, Pemulis "Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed" finds the hiding place for the DMZ has been apparently broken into (p.917). It isn't disclosed there whether he finds it there or not. Pemulis may have found it untouched, but he is "nowhere to be seen since early this A.M., at which time Anton Doucette said he'd seen Pemulis quote 'lurking' out by the West House dumpsters looking quote 'anxiously depressed.' (p.964) "Anxiously depressed" would seem to me to indicate he didn't find it. Perhaps Hal himself took it. After all, as he says, "Call it something I ate." (p.10)

We last see Hal, on 11/20/YDAU getting his ankle taped just before the match with the Wheelchair Assassins. "His face today had assumed various expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going on." (p.966)

Hal, it appears, ended up in the hospital in 11/YDAU, and apparently missed a semester of school, thus graduating in 12/YoG.