‘The cult’s game’s principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted themselves.
‘The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed.
‘But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To “perdre son coeur” and not jump at all is outside le Jeu’s limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train’s extensive oral history, has a miner’s son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round’s train passed. This player later drowned. “Perdre son coeur” when it is mentioned at all, is known also as “Faire un Bernard Wayne,” in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner’s son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.’ Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size bulb flickering anywhere over his head.
‘The game’s object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment.
‘Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport’s cow catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a burlap sack. A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu’s older and frequently dismembered directeurs.
‘As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs---either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.’ The paradox here for Struck as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn’t even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild Conceits Bayside C.C. guy seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot of it up, like e.g. the contuded-meat bits, etc. What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether it’s dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn’t developed much of any sort of take.
‘It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and victor, and advances, each winner literally “surviving” into the game’s next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six rounds of six Canadian boys each: the, quote, “Les Trente-Six” for the evening. the initial rounds’ boys---those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to leap---are permitted to stay at the le passage a niveau de vote ferree, assembled to become the semi finals’ silent audience. The entire Le Jeu du Prochain Train is customarily conducted in silence.’ In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of lapses, Struck rehabilitates the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there’s obviously no way he could pretend to have been there.
‘The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent gallery as the six nerveless winners---the finalists, this night’s “attendants longtemps ses tours”---some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long delayed leaps and hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized “Le Train de la Foudre” from Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed nose at the final moment, each trying to be the last to leap and live. It is not rare for several of the le Jeu’s finalists to be struck.’ Struck tries to decide whether it’d be unrealistic or unself-consciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb — would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?
‘… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era’s simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train’s savage tournaments and the present’s limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec’s La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle’s second Inaugural.
‘As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced around a periodic, tournament style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom one half were female.6 Thus, the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one female Quebecker.’ Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his room’s wearisome phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there someplace later in the sentence? Struck envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly strafed by this time, the guy’s eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one eye with a hand just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter how gifted, Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand and backhand slaps all the while. ‘Of each pair, one half, designated by lot, filled his or her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or hers. Their mouths were then fitted together and quickly sealed by an