Endnote 304 (from page 732)

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

You were sent here from page 732 — when you're done, head back to pages 729–736.

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

You've just been sent to endnote 304 from p. 732 — from Marathe, veiled in the Ennet House waiting room, remembering his "four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train." The note runs pp. 1055–62 and is a scene in its own right: 2030h the same evening, E.T.A.'s Jim Struck slumped at his console, laundering a History of Canadian Unpleasantness term paper out of a journal essay he judges too obscure to get caught ripping off. Long stretches of the essay are quoted verbatim, so you're reading two texts at once — the scholarly history Marathe's memory pointed at, and the comedy of a boy "sanitizing" prose whose overheatedness is part of the joke.

Terms, in order of appearance

(C2H5CO)2O2 (p. 1055) — sub-footnote a, in its entirety: "Pimple cream."
Sudetenlandization (p. 1056) — real analogy: the Sudetenland, Hitler's 1938 pretext for carving up Czechoslovakia.
cui bono (p. 1057) — Latin: "who benefits?"
le Jeu du Prochain Train (p. 1058) — French: the Game of the Next Train.
Papineau (p. 1058) — real mining region of southwest Québec.
directeurs de jeu (p. 1059) — French: game masters.
athwart (p. 1060) — across, crosswise; the word Struck fatally copies verbatim.
perdre son coeur (p. 1060) — French: to lose one's heart, i.e. one's nerve.
Baiser Sans Fin (p. 1061) — French: Endless Kiss; the northern companion cult.
évanoui (p. 1061) — French: fainted, out cold.

After you read: three things

1. Check the byline. The essay is by one "G. T. Day, M.S.," of Bayside Community College, Medford — a red-wine-soaked prose stylist who, the note observes, gets audibly drunker as the article proceeds. You've been living with a Geoffrey Day of exactly that vintage — junior college, red wine, aggrieved Academese — down the hill at Ennet House. The note never says they're the same man; you get to. Meanwhile Hal's embedded aside offers the scene's other diagnosis: plagiarists like Struck are "navigationally insecure," needing "a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them" (p. 1060).

2. This is where the wheelchairs come from. Le Jeu du Prochain Train, pp. 1058–60: six miners' sons on the tie-juts at a dark rural crossing, the winner the last to leap across before the train — which is never the opponent, but "le jeu's boundary, arena, and reason." The virtuosi wait with their eyes closed. The maimed survivors become the wheelchair-bound directeurs, and the directeurs became the A.F.R.: the leglessness you've been seeing all book is not affliction but election. The callout's phrase — Marathe's "four-limbed childhood" — is this game's before.

3. The platform, stated flat at last. P. 1057 gives the A.F.R.'s actual demands — not secession first, but the return of the Reconfigured territory to the U.S., the fans and launchers stopped, the annulars gone — and the cult-scholarship thesis behind them: fealty to principles "activally opposed to the cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cui bono, or entertainment" (pp. 1057–58). That is the academic rendering of the argument Marathe has been making on the mountainside since pp. 105–09, and it inverts nearly everything else in the book.

Written only from this endnote and pages before its callout on p. 732. Safe to read before you start.