302. Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Christe Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants. Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution. This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe’s love of his wife’s health of prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays — Fortier had overseen both jeux du prochain train a at which Marathe’s elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this. (back to text)
303. Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop’s brothers active and alert. For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost. (back to text)
304.
Q.v. @ 2030h. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered in (C2H5CO)2O2 a , elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing converter plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one’s photo, keyboard hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen’s upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over what’s starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Poutrincourt’s History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes as ‘things.’ Original hopes for at least originality of topic have long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he’s now trying to find some new resource in the piles that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.
‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R. s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized “Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’
A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Québec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism, history, and cult, which you’d think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, essays, and papers, in everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up I-93 in Medford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named guy whose Wild Conceits wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times to even make sense of it, gauges he’s pretty safe in ripping off, since no way Poutrincourt’d have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this insufferable:
‘… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.’ In a twist on the usual plagiarism-situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the prose in this Wild Conceits guy’s thing, or at least bringing the verbs and modifiers down out of the like total ozone, which the Academese here on the whole sounds to Struck like the kind of foam-flecked megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then the odd Preludin to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes and red wine. Plus let’s not even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt has a fetishy thing about transitions.
‘The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt. Would that the infamous Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were, as well.’ Struck can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big red triple-underlined QUOI? under a transition this tortured and freewheeling. Struck pictures the Wild Conceits guy totally strafed as he goes, weaving over his foam-flecked desktop, almost. ‘For the infamous Quebecker Separatist A.F.R. cell’s claims to irreduceably active status include the following. The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans, to have disrupted pipelines between processing points in the eastern Reconfiguration’s annular fusion grid, have been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste Displacement’s launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured intracontinental border, and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell’s own sobriquet in the vox populi —— “Wheelchair Assassins” —— from the active practice of assassinating prominent Canadian officials who support or even tolerate what they —— the A.F.R. s, in infrequent public communiqués —— regard as both Quebec and Canada in toto’s “Sudetenlandization” by the —— as the A.F.R. characterize it —— same American-dominated Organization of North American Nations which forced ecologically distorted and possibly mutagenic territory into their —— the nation of Canada, and most specifically and intensively the province of Quebec —— aegis in the newly subsidized Year of the Whopper…’— Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the overdevelopment of his body’s right side, is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy’s clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely — ‘… the Wheelchair Assassins at these all too publicly familiar assassinations materializing, quote “as if from nowhere” unquote, masters of stealth, striking terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels, striking swiftly and without warning, assassinating prominent Canadians and then dissolving back into the dark night’ — as opposed to a light night? Struck forces sudden air through his full nose, producing a low and horn-like derisive sound — ‘striking always at night, a type of performative signature, to strike at night only, leaving behind only sinuous networks of thin, double tracks in snow, dew, leaves, or earth, as performative signatures, such that a double sinuous S shaped line across the traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism is the A.F.R. cell’s standard, its escutcheon or “symbol,” if you will, in their infrequent and always hostile communiqués to the administrations of Canada and O.N.A.N. Such that, quote, “To hear the squeak,” unquote, is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant, terrif
ying, and violent death. And for the media, as well. As in, quote, “Before many thousands of shocked subscribers, newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide, guarded by no fewer than a dozen units of the Domestic Detail’s elite mounted Cuirassiers, nevertheless heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously disseminated address at the lakeside resort of Pointe Claré.” 4
Struck, clutching his head with one hand, is trying to find euphemismic in the TP’s Lex-Base.
‘… Affiliations, sometimes purported, between the Root Cult core of Les Assassins on one hand and the more extreme and violently subversive of Quebec’s Séparatisteur organizations —— the Fronte de la Libération de la Quebec, the Fils de Montcalm, the ultra right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc Quebecois —— tend, however, to be contradicted by both stated agendas —— the conventional Separatist phalances demanding only the independent secession of provincial Quebec and the elimination of Anglo-American cognates from public discourse, while the A.F.R. s’ stated aims being nothing less total than the total return of all Reconfigured territories to American administration, the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste displacement and ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the removal of all fission/waste/fusion annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the secession of Canada in toto from the Organization of North American Nations —— and by the fact that all too many prominent figures in the recent sociohistory of the Separatist movement —— for e.g., Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Sr. and Jr. Bouchards —— have, in the last 24 months —— particularly, in the violent and bloody autumn of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar —— “heard the squeak.” ’
Struck’s little TP’s internal Lex files confirm vishnu, at least. Plus there’s a kind of almost savage edge to the article’s incoherence that Struck’s getting almost to like, a little: he keeps imagining the little hyphen of wrinkle Poutrincourt gets between her eyebrows when she doesn’t follow something and can’t quite tell if it’s your English’s fault or her English’s fault. ‘Prior to Y.P.W.c.’s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible sociohistorical data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources whose scholarly veracity was of an integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable.’ Struck here pictures Thierry Poutrincourt, who tends to get that little annoyed-confusion wrinkle sometimes even with the lucidest of term papers, lowering her tall head and charging into a wall. One sinus feels noticeably bigger than the other sinus, and there’s something not quite right with his neck from sitting hunched all this time, and he’d kill relatives for a quick DuBois.
‘Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of Quebec are essentially cultists, locating both their political raison d’etre and their philosophical dasein within the North American sociohistorical interval of intensive special interest diffraction that preceded —— nay, one might daresay stood in integral causal relation with respect to —— the nearly simultaneous inaugurations of O.N.A.N.ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar O.N.A.N. calendar. Like most Canadian cult extensions, however, the Wheelchair Assassins and their cultic derivations have proven substantially more fanatical, less benign, less reasonable, and substantially more malignant —— in sum, more difficult for responsible authorities to anticipate, control, interdict, or reason with than even the most passionate U.S. kabals. This scholarly essay concurs in many essential respects with the thesis that Canadian and other non American Root Cults, in contrast to all but what Phelps and Phelps argue are isolated pockets of antihistorical American stelliformism, persist so queerly in directing their reverent fealty toward principles, quote, “often not only isomorphic with but activally opposed to the cultists’ own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment as to be all but outside the ken of both the sophisticated predictive models of psychosocial science and the rudimentary comprehension of human reason.” 5 ’
This all takes serious labor for Struck to decoct the gist out of and then recast in rather less uptown and more basic studential prose. Twice in the hall outside his and Shaw’s and Pemberton’s room, Rader and Wagenknecht and some other 16’s-sounding males go down the hall, all of them together going ‘Er, ah, ee, oo, ah, er, ah, ee…,’ and so on. ‘It is an accepted fact that Les Assassins’ Root Cult, in a fashion typical of those whose objects are divorced from the rational advancement of individual interest, takes, for its rites and personality, rituals intimately bound up with “Les jeux pour-memes, ” formal competitive games whose end is less any sort of “prize” than it is a manner of basic identity: i.e., that is, “game” as metaphysical environment and psychohistorical locus and geatalt.’ Struck’s own historical dad, during Jim’s own childhood in Rancho Mirage, was an inveterate red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker, who used to make late-night phone calls to people he didn’t know very well and make statements he later had to retract at great length, until finally one autumn night the Dad had staggered out and attempted a one-and-a-half tuck into the Struck family’s backyard pool that he hadn’t recalled had been drained, resulting in a neck brace for life that ended his career as a low-80s golfer, resulting in incredible bitterness and family trauma, before little J.A.L.S. Jr. was shipped off to the Rolling Hills Academy.
‘It is, for example, largely conceded that Les Assassins’ confinement to their epithetic wheelchairs can be traced to rural southwestern pre-Experialist Quebec’s infamous “Le Jeu du Prochain Train,” and that the A.F.R.’s Root Cult itself was comprised largely or perhaps even entirely of veteran devotees and practitioners of this savage, nihilistic, and mettle testing jeu pour-meme.
‘“La Culte du Prochain Train,” often translated as “The Cult of the Next Train,” is known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest Quebec. The chilling game’s competition and its upspringing cult soon spread throughout the network of non-ionized and pre-Interdependent railroad lines which carried raw minerals south to Ottawa and the United States’ Great Lake Ports.’ Over Struck’s little desk hangs a model airplane made entirely from different parts of beer cans. While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror-across-highway terrorism thing of early O.N.A.N., and Schacht’s paper’s focus was the violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, Struck had picked the A.F.R.-and-Russian-Roulettish-train-jumping-cult-thing connection, and was sticking to it with the same tenacity that kept him on the 18’s A-squad despite a serve that deLint described as resembling a debutante’s curtsy. The plane’s got flattened cans for wings, smunched-flat cans for wheels, part of a tallboy for fuselage and snout.
‘As with many games, Le Jeu du Prochain Train was itself substantially simpler than the organization of the competition.’ A cool smile from Struck. ‘It was played after sunset at specified sites, specifically les passages à niveau de voie ferrée that marked every rural Quebecker road’s intersection with a railroad track. In the Year of the Whopper, there were over two thousand (2,000) such intersections in the Papineau region alone, though not all saw heavy enough flow to accommodate the complexities of true competition.
‘Six boys, miners’ sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen, Quebecois French speaking boys, line up on six railroad ties’ juts just outside the track. Two hundred sixteen (216) boys —— never either more nor less —— are involved in a night’s opening rounds, organized into sixes, each group of six taking its turn with a different train, standing on consecutive juts just outside one track, waiting, doubtless tense, awaiting the procession of a fearsome bride, indeed. The night’s heavily travelled crossing’s schedule of trains is known to Le Jeu du Prochain Train’s episcopate of les directeurs de jeu —— older, post-adolesce
nt boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or —— for the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor —— on crude rolling boards. No timepieces are permitted the players, who are under the absolute discretion of the game’s directeurs, whose decisions are final and often brutally enforced. They all are silent, listening for the sound of the engine’s whistle, a sound which is sad and cruel at the same time, as the sound approaches and begins to subtly undergo Doppler Effects. They tense palely muscled legs beneath hand me down corduroys as the next train’s one white eye rounds the track’s curve and bears down on the game’s waiting boys.’
Struck keeps bogging down in these parts where it seems like the guy just totally abandons a scholarly tone, and even probably starts making up or hallucinating details which there’s no way Jim Struck could represent himself as having been there to see, and he’s blue-delete-looping all over the place, plus grinding his eye and picking at his forehead, his two more or less constant responses to creative stress.
‘Le Jeu du Prochain Train itself is simplicity in motion. The object: Be the last of your round’s six to jump from one side of the tracks to the other —— that is, across the tracks —— before the train passes. Your only real opponents are your six’s other five. Never is the train itself regarded as an opponent. The speeding, screaming train is regarded rather as le jeu’s boundary, arena, and reason. Its size, its speed down the extremely gradual north-to-south grade of what was then southwestern Quebec, and the precise mechanical specifications of each scheduled train —— these are known to the directeurs, they comprise the constants in a game the variables of which are the respective wills of the six ranged along the track, and their estimates of one another’s will to risk all to win.’
Infinite Jest Page 164