Infinite Jest (214 page)

‘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, terrifying, 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 gestalt.’ 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-adolescent 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.’