The term-paper night: plagiarizing the Wheelchair-Assassins essay

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU, 2030h

• When: 11 November YDAU, 2030h, Room 308 Subdorm B — the paper due the next day
• What: Struck's solo set-piece. Forehead slathered in pimple cream, feeling punk under a storm-front headache, he grinds through unabsorbable research for his post-Midterm term paper for Poutrincourt's History of Canadian Unpleasantness course (mentally filed, like all his classes, as a "thing"), having picked the Wheelchair Assassins and their Root-Cult origin in Le Jeu du Prochain Train. He semi-plagiarizes an incoherent, Quaalude-and-red-wine-addled Wild Conceits essay by one G. T. Day of Bayside C.C., laboriously sanitizing its purple Academese into earnest pubescent-sounding sentences — while committing self-incriminating lapses, copying "hurl himself athwart" and unfootnoted hallucinatory details he could never have witnessed. Down the hall, Jennie Bash reports the "moaning coming from Struck and Shaw's room." The passage doubles as the novel's diagnosis of him (event 3): more work camouflaging theft than honesty would cost, because he cannot trust unmapped ground.