Teaser Tuesday: Still “Infinite Jest”

What, you didn’t think I was going to be finished with Infinite Jest before the next Teaser Tuesday, did you?

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and ‘S.T.P.’ Peterson have agreed, could well distract the Headmaster’s office from post-Eschaton reprisals against Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club’s Eschatonite faction doesn’t want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit—feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow—and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, foreseeably.

Infinite Jest

So in that Teaser Tuesday—which, okay, fine, is three sentences, not two, but the last one hardly counts—a group of young students at the Enfield Tennis Academy are on a mission in the Academy’s maintenance tunnels, cleaning up trash as part of a punishment for their earlier involvement in an injury-causing fiasco in what amounts to a game of Risk played on tennis courts (it’s complicated), and are coincidentally searching for, yes, invasive feral hamsters. Apparently such rodents, mutated by the toxic wasteland, known as the Concavity, that used to be much of the Northeast, are a pretty serious threat around Boston. Okay, so it’s not quite as dramatic as an immortal carnivorous evil supernatural shapeshifting clown, but still. Hamsters can inflict a pretty nasty bite if they want to. As can vorpal rabbits, which, I imagine, can also be found in the Concavity.

Meanwhile, work continues on The Apprentice, or whatever I’m going to call it, although I will cop to being a little, uh, distracted last week* and not getting a heck of a lot done on it. Maybe there’ll be a little more progress on it this week …

An opening curled into view as the platform arrived at a long straight corridor that pierced a number of the inner rings of the tower, very much like the one that Telfar had taken him along before offering his staff to the tower. Of course, one long straight corridor within the tower was very much like any other. It was one of the many maddening things about this place: One could never be sure where one was in it. This was, Aron had no doubt, entirely intentional.

The Apprentice

Hmm, who knows? Maybe by the time this book is actually finished, everyone will have forgotten about that other The Apprentice and I’ll be able to use my original title after all. One can hope!

^* “Last Week” being the week before this post was written, i.e., Election Week here in the U.S., and not the week before it appeared.