The testimony on Himself and Joelle; the word on the Volvo window

pivotal · Nov YDAU (recounting up to the days before JOI's suicide)

• When: November YDAU (the letter); the recounted matter runs to "the days prior to Dr. Incandenza’s felo de se" (1 Apr YTSDB per the archive's JOI anchor)
• What: On the family's catastrophe Bain is careful about what he actually knows. Answer (3c): "I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza’s suicide" — he knows JOI "erased his own cartography in a grisly way," was told JOI was abusing ethyl alcohol daily in his last year while working on "a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was driving Dr. Inc insane." Answer (3e), double-hedged with "supposedly": the Orin-Joelle separation's supposed cause was JOI using Joelle "in his work more and more extensively," finally asking her to perform in the radical new entertainment; "They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen," with Orin "not a reliable source" on their relationship. Then his one independent fact, sourced not to Orin but to "an innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our punter in an intimate and unguarded way": that in the days before the felo de se a "word" appeared on a fogged window of Avril's pale yellow Volvo — "and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it." The word itself is never given. CRUX NOTE: every clause here is Bain relaying Orin (or the relative relaying Orin) at one or two removes; the window incident feeds the live Avril-liaison and JOI-death questions and is recorded with Bain's hedges, resolving nothing — including whether the relaying relative is the "innocent younger sister" of his own letter (see Dating notes).