Le Jeu du Prochain Train — the train-jumping Root Cult

texture · UNDATED (B.S. era; Root Cult "at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration")

• When: UNDATED — the cult "originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration" among miners' sons of the Papineau region; predates the A.F.R. as its substrate
• What: In the desolate asbestos/nickel/zinc-mining Papineau region of extreme southwestern Québec, the male offspring of miners played "Le Jeu du Prochain Train" (the Cult of the Next Train): six boys line up at a rail crossing after sunset and try to be the last to leap athwart the tracks before an oncoming train, the finest players closing their eyes to trust only their own will and intuition about "the last viable instant in which to leap." Not to jump at all — "perdre son coeur," also "Faire un Bernard Wayne" after the one boy who ever froze (and later drowned) — is unthinkable disgrace. The game's legless survivors and its directorate went on to found the A.F.R.; the doctrine of choosing what one will die for (Marathe's whole ethics) and the wheelchairs themselves both descend from this jeu; the cult's rites are "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" (n304). See Marathe's timeline (event 2) (Marathe's own maiming and his brothers' deaths in the jeu). The essay recording all this is a plagiarized term paper (n304, cribbed by E.T.A.'s J. Struck from "G. T. Day, M.S.")— a source hedged as printed.