Le Jeu du Prochain Train, the brothers' deaths, and the loss of his legs

pivotal · UNDATED (Marathe's youth/early twenties, B.S. era)

• When: UNDATED (adolescence into early twenties, B.S. era); the train cult "originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration" (n304)
• What: Marathe came up through "Le Jeu du Prochain Train" (the Cult of the Next Train), the savage southwestern-Québec game in which miners' sons leap across the tracks in front of an oncoming train, last-to-jump wins; its legless survivors and directorate founded Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. Both of Marathe's older brothers "kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age," and Marathe "had been part of the audience for the death of the better one." His A.F.R. superior Fortier was "the former boyhood friend of Rémy Marathe's late older brothers" (n039) — the cell-leader he now betrays is a tie back to the dead brothers themselves. Marathe himself lost his legs to a U.S.A. train (he calls it, dryly, his "victory over the train that had taken his legs"). He is left-handed, with the enormous upper arms of all A.F.R.s and a very low resting pulse ("no legs to require blood from the heart"). [n304 is the train-cult essay credited to "G. T. Day, M.S." — the book quietly implies it is plagiarized term-paper work by the Ennet House resident Geoffrey Day.]