Infinite Jest

Marathe visits Ennet House, pretending to be an “addict” as he searches for Joelle. He is in his wheelchair and wearing a veil. The crowded, sweaty room makes him feel nauseous. He listens to the conversations of two nearby women as everyone else in the room chain-smokes cigarettes. The women have both been members of cults. Marathe remembers his own experiences in the cult-like group, La Cult du Prochain Train (the cult of the next train). In a long endnote, an E.T.A. student named James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. researches the Wheelchair Assassins and learns about their tactics for forcing traffic accidents on American highways. Struck also learns about La Cult du Prochain Train, a group founded around a game. In the game, the sons of Quebecois miners laid down on train tracks ahead of oncoming trains. The last person to leave the tracks before the train arrived was the winner. Anyone who stayed too long on the track lost their legs under the train. Many of the legless members of La Cult du Prochain Train joined the Wheelchair Assassins. The only person who never jumped off the track was Bernard Wayne, the father of E.T.A. prodigy John Wayne; the Wayne name is now “a figure of ridicule and disgust” (1060).