The Original Ending of Infinite Jest

by Endnote McLongwind

Hal sat in the Ennet House common room, staring at the ceiling, when a sentient tennis ball materialized before him, whispering the final answer to everything in garbled Québécois. The Wraith of James Incandenza floated in, clutching a VHS tape labeled Actually, This Is the Real One, but as Hal reached for it, Don Gately appeared, now a cosmic deity, announcing he had absorbed all human suffering into his biceps. Meanwhile, the AFR terrorists unicycled into the room, chanting in iambic pentameter, only to be distracted by a stray feral ham sandwich, which they mistook for an oracle. Hal, suddenly fluent in 16th-century Urdu, realized he had already watched the film—backwards in his dreams—and that the true entertainment was... friendship? Then, in a burst of recursive footnotes, every character merged into one singular, infinite jest—an inside joke no one would ever fully get, least of all the reader.

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Endnote McLongwind is a reclusive yet verbose literary enigma, best known for crafting sprawling, footnote-heavy parodies that challenge both the patience and endurance of the modern reader. Born in an overstuffed library and rumored to have once written a novel longer than the book it was parodying, McLongwind specializes in satirical deconstructions of highbrow literature, often inserting digressions within digressions until the original point is entirely lost. When not writing, he can be found annotating grocery lists, composing unnecessarily detailed acknowledgments, and debating whether brevity is, in fact, the soul of wit.