Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 1039

‘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 Lejeu du Prochain Train’s episcopate of les directeurs dejeu---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’$ 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.’

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.’