Q, Q (Q[Q]), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q, Q.

So I finished rereading Infinite Jest* and am left with some questions.  What follows, necessarily, is "spoiler"-heavy, so read no further if you want to read this novel and don't want a damned thing exposed in advance.  [Funny that we get so mad if a review gives away a major plot point—more a movie review than a book review, note—but we don't "bat an eye" when a scholarly essay discusses the end of a book in great detail.  Or, no, wait, that's not funny or surprising at all.]

Here are the questions—all are invited to weigh in, particularly those who have actually read the book:

1. So did John Wayne "dose" Hal with the DMZ?
2. And John Wayne is one of the Canadian agents at E.T.A., right?
3. In which case did he fake the whole incident that got Pemulis basically expelled?  At least it wasn't actually an innocent allergy-related mixup, right?
4. Because of course in the first chapter or whatever you want to call it, he's "standing watch in a mask," are I think the words, while Gately and Hal dig up Himself's head.
5. Speaking of which, his head?  His head supposedly blew the fuck up in the microwave.  It's already sort of half-suggested that there was some kind of foul play involved, if only because of the complexity of the suicide and the bottle so conveniently on the scene, but twice, at least twice in the book, we hear about Gately and Hal going and digging up Himself's head, which his head ought not really to be dig-uppable, diggable-up, so then what's the deal with that?
6. And—hello—ghosts?  It's like a Nabokov novel: you can read the whole thing through and almost be in denial about it, but we've got some actual ghostly interference, here, yeah?
7. In which case what did Himself (and Lyle!) want with Gately, after all?
8. Oh, and is this just some crazy idea I got in my head, or was somebody (maybe even Rod the God himself, who's supposed to be under the sexual thrall of that Luria woman and therefore reportedly practically a Canadian agent) going to replace the "Just Say No"–style kid's commercial about Infinite Jest with actually Infinite Jest and broadcast the shit across the entire nation?
9. It was Orin who mailed the cartridge to the medical attaché in the beginning, I'm pretty sure of that (given that he worries briefly that a knock on the door might have something to do with a medical attaché, and we learn later after Hal's lost it that what seems to be that same dude had an affair with the Moms).  So then well does he know all about it?  And are the Incandenzas immune?
10. By the way, if Himself did kill lowercase-h himself, was it because of the movie?  And but does that mean he was immune?  Because he must have watched it to edit it, and no one we see elsewhere in the novel who's seen it could watch it and then get up to do anything at all, much less set up an ingenious self-microwaving scenario.

That's all I can think of for now.  More may come.

* Rereading not because I liked it so much (although I did like it, and I am a rereader of books I like) but rather because I was 18 when I liked it so much, and I guess over the years I'd given more and more of that doubt-benefit to the backlashers—who insisted (often, I think, without having read the damned thing) that the damned thing was basically nothing but a big pretentious scam designed to make people feel smart for reading a big book with big words in it, and that only a show-off would ever claim even to have read the thing, much less to have enjoyed it—and less and less to the taste of an 18-year-old dazzled by a subgenre of literary fiction that he'd never even imagined was around (not to mention the exciting coincidence at Shakespeare & Co.); but, as it turns out (as I've come halfway back around to feeling it did in the case of the early Mothers LPs), the taste of an 18-year-old, or at least this late-20th-century 18-year-old, does not deserve such disrespect; and, although I'm inclined now to think (as, again, in the case of the early Mothers LPs) that my criteria were maybe a little off and that I got a little more excited about the pyrotechnics, so to speak, and less about what I'd now call probably the real content—well, 18-year-old Short Round, I believe I owe you some kind of thing resembling an apology.

     To the time machine!