We've heard a lot about them. There's been an entire endnote dedicated to their quasi-initiation ritual. Marathe, one of their numbers, figures prominently on the book's increasingly frequent promontory scenes. But only when the narrative's attention turns from Gately's speeding off to Cambridge to a small odds and ends shop run by two Quebecois do we actually see the dreaded AFR (wheelchair assassins) in motion.
The last 20 pages of Infinite Jest have been pretty intensely about the plot. Marathe and Steeply have just talked about p-terminals, pleasure experiments, and the "happy patch;" and those two Quebecois shopkeepers have unknowingly brought in master tapes of James O. Incandenza's pleasure overloading movie that has been dubbed "the entertainment" (Infinite Jest III, I think, without referring to the books' filmographic endnote); and the AFR has come in with full force to get those masters back.
As with the rest of the book so far, nothing's moving visibly forward yet, but there's something coming.
Reading this book has been like slowly uncoiling a sleeping Ouroboros from its tail to its head. I feel like I've just passed the hind leg.
But, though nothing concrete event-wise has happened, the scenes between Marathe and Steeply continue to develop the underpinnings and relevance of "the entertainment" to the current political situation. Their scenes don't have much of anything happening in them, but they're nonetheless weaving the dream of what might be once "the entertainment" hits the mainstream.
To some readers, this inaction comes off as boring, but really, it works on a meta level as a parallel to the book as a whole. For what they're discussing on that outcropping is really what the plot of the book might turn out to be. The reason for their indefiniteness being that, because they're characters within the book, they cannot know for sure what will happen within it. But they forecast anyway, from their utter ridiculous Tucson-viewing vantage point.
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