I was told that nothing in Infinite Jest is filler. But only on my way from page 911 to 934 have I seen this aspect of the book truly in action.
Dr. Wo, Gately's past, even the sentence-long section about Lyle levitating - they all get resolution while we watch Gately in his hospital bed.
That last one is the weirdest of all, though. If I'm right, while Lyle meditated he peeked in on Gately and licked his forehead. It's what Lyle does with those that come to him for advice. As far as I can tell, he takes it as a kind of reward. Or Lyle uses the sweat he licks from seekers' foreheads for some sort of psychic link or mind-meld with his subject.
In any case, when Lyle appears in wraith form along with J.O. Incandenza, Lyle's licking Gately's forehead is an act that holds a lot of promise. Although the book's main text is quickly running out of pages so I'm not sure if anything more will come of it. I'm also running out of endnotes.
So the big question for me right now is how can all of the book's 900+ pages of momentum be stopped in less than 50 pages? Some of the pages to come are no doubt as dense as a wordsmith's anvil, but even then 50 pages that dense wouldn't be enough to resolve everything that's been raised.
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