Infinite Jest (215 page)

Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: ‘The variable
of the game isn’t so much a matter of the train, but the player’s courage and will.’

‘The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart
the expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench, gravel and scarred iron,
amid the ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge
push of terrible air from the transport’s cow catcher or express train’s rounded nose,
to go sprawling in the gravel past the tracks’ other side and roll to see wheels and
flanges, couplings and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles,
feeling the whistle’s steam condense to drizzle all around——these few seconds are
known, familiar as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.’ Struck’s now
progressed to grinding the whole heel of his hand into his eyesocket, producing a
kind of ectoplasmic pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines
have flanges and cowcatchers and whistles that steamed?

In a disastrous lapse, Struck copies
hurl himself athwart,
a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text.

‘… that the true variable which renders
le Jeu du Prochain Train
a contest and not merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness to risk
all of any or all of the five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait?
When will they choose? Their lives and limb worth how much Queen-headed coin this
night? More radical by far than the American youth automobile game of “Chicken” to
which its principle is frequently compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively
gauge, in addition to your own will’s resolve, and no motion or action to distract
you from the tension of waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other
five quail and save themselves, leap to beat the train…,’ and then the sentence just
ends, without even a close to the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for
this sort of thing, knows the analogy to Chicken’ll ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise.

‘
Le Jeu
’s historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, concentrating
their entire attention on determining the last viable instant in which to leap, regarding
the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, mettle,
and intuition about the last viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few,
le Jeu
’s finest——many of whom will go on to
directeur
future
jeux
(if not, often, to membership in
Les Assassins
or its stelliform offshoots)——these nerveless and self-contained virtuosi never see
their opponents’ flinches or tics or the darkenings at corduroys’ crotches, none of
the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan for——for the game’s finest
players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, trusting the railroad ties’
vibration and the whistle’s pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, and whatever numinous
influences lie just beyond fate.’ Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering
this
Wild Conceits
guy’s lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with
the other—forehand, backhand, forehand.

‘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 à niveau de voie 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 organizing cultist with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the
thumb and fore-finger of both hands to seal the combatants’ nostrils. Thus, the battle
of the Endless Kiss had been joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly
inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent,
who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back
and forth, the same air being traded back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide
ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, until the organizer holding their nostrils
closed officially declared one combatant or the other to be “
evanoui,
” or, “swooned,” either fallen to the ground or out on his or her feet. The theoretics
of the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, grinding
down tactics of traditional Quebecois
Séparatisteurs
such as
Les Fils de Montcalm
and the
Fronte de la Libération du Québec,
as opposed to the viciousness and brinksmanship of “
Le Prochain Train”
’s Root Cult’s disabled heirs. The figurative object of the “
Baisser
” competition appears——according to Phelps and Phelps——to involve using what one is
given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting
it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the Phelps somewhat
cavalierly employ to illuminate the
Montcalmistes
’ relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
’ whole “
raison de la guerre outrance
.” ’
^b

^a.
Pimple cream.

^b.
‘Reason for all-out war,’ which Struck inserts without bothering even to check for
the definition Day’d been too befogged to give, which is in and of itself almost suicidal,
given that Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck’s got, or rather
hasn’t.

305.
(she thought then)

306.
Some of her and Jim’s best arguments had been over the connotations of ‘Everybody’s
a critic,’ which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of
ironic double-edge.

307.
Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee.
It’s unclear which if either’s memory is accurate, though it’s noteworthy that this
is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, the other
being the ‘Swiss hand-model’ on whose nude flank he’s been furiously tracing infinity
signs all during the
Moment
Subject’s absence.

308.
= point of view.

309.
In the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center on Boylston/Rte. 9, which the E.T.A. A-squad
staggers past several times a week, on runs—a chain, but a very top-shelf and fine
one, and the Brookline Legal puts on a particularly fine marine spread, and the boniface
seemed to know Dr. Incandenza and called him by name, and brought him a double bonded
without being asked.

310.
Jargon: Film/Cartridge Studies.

311.
Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy.

312.
Boston AA jargon.
Y.E.T.
is ‘You’re Eligible Too,’ a denial-buster for those who compare others’ ghastly consequences
to their own so far, the point being to get you to see the street-guy with socks for
gloves drinking Listerine at 0700h. as just slightly farther down the same road you’re
on, when you Come In. Or something close to that.