M. Marathe
He is Marathe’s father. He has a pacemaker that is visible beneath his cardigans, and he dies from the videophonic pulse of a telephone company call advertising the videophony.
Rémy Marathe’s Mother
She is Marathe’s mother, and she cries when Marathe’s father (See Above) dies.
Gertraude Marathe
She is Marathe’s 46-year-old wife. She is born without a skull due to her mother’s smoking whilst pregnant, and she carries around an external heart (the Jarvik Exterior Artificial Heart) in her purse (which is eventually stolen by Poor Tony Krause, and all of which is published in Moment magazine by Hugh/Helen Steeply). This puts her in a coma in which she’s been for fourteen months. Marathe and her meet through an act of selflessness—Marathe decides to stop wallowing in his own pain and simultaneously decides to save Gertraude from being killed by a truck. In this moment, he decides to focus all of his energy on her and her well-being, thus the quadruple-agent thing (See Rémy Marathe). Falling in love with Gertraude saves him from killing himself.
He is the A.F.R.’s U.S.A.’s unit’s leader, and is Marathe’s superior. He does not know about Marathe’s quadruple agent status, and believes that Marathe is simply a triple agent pretending to betray the A.F.R. for the sake of his wife (See Above) and is not actually betraying them (unless, of course, Hugh/Helen Steeply has informed him of this quadruple-crossing, of which Marathe can neither confirm nor deny). Fortier is the man who oversees “The Game of the Next Train” (See Rémy Marathe), during which Marathe’s brothers (See Below) are killed. Once it becomes clear that Canada will have to secede from America if the A.F.R. controls the dispersion of the Entertainment, Marathe suspects that Fortier is going to force him to watch the Entertainment because Fortier thinks that Marathe is going to exact revenge for the death of his brothers (all of which is mere speculation). Fortier also believes that Guillaume DuPlessis‘s athletic relative once gave a copy of the original Entertainment to DuPlessis, a relative to whom Steeply has been clinging and whom is suspected to be Orin Incandenza. Fortier has prosthetic legs that he chooses not to wear because he enjoys the condescension he receives whilst in public—the ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ to ‘equal access’.
Rémy Marathe’s Two Older Brothers
They are the older brothers of Marathe, both of which are killed during “The Game of the Next Train” (See Rémy Marathe).
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