JOI's suicide by microwave: the mechanics, the anhedonia-theory denied, the gift-bottle, the mirrored maternal suicide; found by thirteen-year-old Hal; no note

pivotal · 1 April YTSDB (Trial-Size Dove Bar); age 54

• When: "He stopped living on April First" (YTSDB), at the Headmaster's House kitchen; two-to-three days before C.T. moved in upstairs (event 18); "the last three years of his life" a "full-blown demented alcoholic" (n234)
• What: JOI killed himself "by putting his head in a microwave oven" (045) — "the rotisserie microwave over next to the fridge, on the freezer side" (064). As reconstructed: he "used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he'd gotten his head in he'd carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil"; the internal-pressure buildup was "almost instantaneous" and "equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT" (his head "popped like an uncut spud"; ~ten seconds). "Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old," found him — coming to HmH after losing to Freer to do laundry, his involuntary first reaction being "that something smelled delicious"; he fetched Schtitt. A "large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey... with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck" sat on the counter — against Joelle's claim (relayed by Orin) that JOI had gone sober that January as her condition for being filmed (event 16); whether he was truly sober is left open. "And he left no note or living-will-type video or communiqué of any kind" (064). The present scenes add three things: (1) an explicit narratorial denial of the campus anhedonia theory — younger E.T.A.s attribute the microwave suicide to middle-aged anhedonia, "but... In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all," and Hal "has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave" (scene 135), motive on the record as unknown; (2) the gift-bottle possibly placed "by the spouse's widow-to-be," "enraged" JOI gave up spirits for Madame Psychosis and not "for her" (scene 159, a fresh, unproven Avril-pointed theory); (3) the mirrored suicide — Madame Psychosis's own mother "killed herself... with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before" JOI "also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly" (scene 159, "Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections" left to the reader). Orin flattens the "insane" question into the record: "he was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the microwave," "you'd have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way" (n234). [DEATH-MOTIVE CRUX: the death is central and the motive is affirmatively left open — anhedonia denied, sobriety and spousal-rage and the reach-for-Hal each floated, none confirmed.]