Struck plagiarizes the A.F.R. train-cult essay — "The game’s object is to jump…"
‘The game’s object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment. […] 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.’
Context
Where the wheelchairs actually come from: the game's carnage menu, "fully limbed" named as the stake, the ceremonial mining shovels — dismemberment liturgized down to the funerary hardware, administered by the already-dismembered — and the commonest outcome, legs lost at the crossing or later under the orthopedic saws. The origin scene for the entire A.F.R. system: every squeaking fauteuil in the novel was earned here, on purpose, as the price of jumping last. ("[C]ontuded" preserved as the text has it.)