War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  • • •

  Mani was intelligent but surprisingly ignorant of things Corderoy considered common knowledge. She had never heard the phrase cross that bridge when we come to it. She couldn’t describe a catapult. She’d never heard of Nikola Tesla. She wasn’t religious, but she believed in a force. Corderoy was quick to hate spirituality, but this sounded so much like his childhood love of Star Wars that he couldn’t hate it. He used to cry, and still got teary-eyed, during Yoda’s speech before lifting the X-wing from the Dagobah swamp. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

  Mani’s parents had emigrated from Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution, when her mother was pregnant. It took them some time to regain their footing in America, but eventually they landed solidly in the upper-middle class. Her father was a doctor and her mother a professor at Boston College; they were strict in their desire to see Mani succeed, which meant: doctor, lawyer, possibly optometrist. But Mani wanted to paint. Her parents wouldn’t finance an education in art, so she’d dropped out of UMass Amherst and moved to California with her then-boyfriend. She’d lived with him—and off him—for the better part of a year, painting portraits of the junkies and homeless who roamed the streets of Santa Cruz. When they split, she moved out, becoming homeless herself, sleeping in parks and on the beach, until one day she traded a few watercolors for an old bicycle, sold off her belongings, and made her way up to Seattle over a period of several months, living off her charm, camping or crashing with strangers in San Francisco, Portland, Olympia, helping old hippie couples with their gardens, moving from co-ops to art lofts, reminding everyone she met how great it was to be alive, to share a cigarette or a bottle of wine with an unfamiliar but fascinating human.

  This is why Corderoy loved Mani: She could roll her own cigarettes with one hand. She could recite large passages from Hunter S. Thompson. She looked exotic, with her olive skin and black hair, but she spoke like any college-aged American girl. One night she took him out to the woods in Interlaken Park with flashlights and beers to huddle in the dark and tell stories. When she wanted something, she had a way of setting her face in an almost-smile, a mischievous deadpan that held years of squealing, squirming mirth just below the surface.

  When they’d met at the fourth Encyclopaedists event (“moss”), they’d spent the night on Montauk’s futon. They had sex, quietly, while Montauk’s friend Tim slept just feet away from them, and afterward Corderoy reminisced with her about the video games of his youth (Mega Man 2, Castlevania). Mani found this endearing. She sketched his face in pencil, out of proportion and somewhat grotesque, and he thought it perfect.

  Corderoy loved Mani because he couldn’t figure her out, and he had a deep need to solve things. She was a Rubik’s Cube with one too many sides. No matter how he manipulated her, twisting her colors this way and that, she would always present another face, not quite aligned.

  • • •

  The party was a success by all the standards a party is usually measured by. The cops arrived once and only once. Traces of puke wound up alongside the piss on the floor of the bathroom. By four a.m., the music was off and only a few people were left among the wreckage of empty beer bottles, red plastic cups, and stomped-on papier-mâché moon craters. Corderoy found Montauk in the kitchen, spread out on a folding table like an etherized patient. He nudged him awake. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Montauk said. “Just got tired.” He sat up.

  “You have a bed upstairs.”

  “Like you said, upstairs.”

  “So, Mani’s passed out in the band room,” Corderoy said. Montauk’s housemate Ian was in a bluegrass band, and they practiced in the basement, where Corderoy and Mani had just had sex. Afterward, Corderoy had drunkenly tossed the condom across the room, and he was hoping it hadn’t landed on any of Ian’s musical equipment.

  “What’s your deal, man? You two have been acting weird the entire night.” Montauk stood and picked up a bowl of Cheetos.

  “She’s homeless. Where’s she going to go?”

  “Shit. That’s right.” Montauk looked out the back window while he methodically chewed and swallowed a stale Cheeto. “Family?”

  “They’re in Massachusetts. They don’t even know where she is.”

  “You care about her?”

  “Of course. She’s great.”

  “But you’re not ready for her to move in with you.”

  “Into my parents’ house.”

  Montauk walked over to the sink and filled an old keg cup from the faucet. He gulped it down, water dribbling off his chin. When he finished, he said, “Screw it. Just leave. She’ll figure it out in the morning. And she’ll throw herself into something new. She’ll find some other dude to—”

  “That’s great. Thanks.”

  “I don’t know, man, then fucking marry her.”

  “What?”

  “I’m too drunk to be having this conversation. You’ve only known her two months.”

  There was a creaking sound from the steps to the basement, and they both turned and listened for a tense moment.

  “Look, you can love her and still leave,” Montauk said, a little quieter. “They’re not mutually exclusive. If there’s anything real there, it will still be there. If you change your mind.”

  “Yeah?” Corderoy said. At this late hour, and running on fear, he couldn’t see any holes in the idea. It was a test: could their connection transcend his sudden departure?

  “Yeah. Go. Just go. I’ll come up with something to tell her in the morning.”

  “It is the morning. Whatever. Thanks.” Corderoy went out the front door, stumbled down the steps, and got in his car.

  * * *

  That moment, in the early morning of July 3rd, 2004, was the beginning of a fantastic and formidable knot in the lives of Halifax Corderoy and Mickey Montauk. The first such knot was formed the summer before, when they met at random in Rome. Montauk was leaning against a tree in the Piazza San Giovanni, where Beck was about to perform at an outdoor music festival, when Corderoy approached, asking if he could bum a cigarette. Montauk slipped him a Fortuna Blue, and they began talking as crowds congealed near the stage at the other end of the square. By an absurd and, they would later say, fateful co­incidence, they were both from Seattle, and they had both just graduated from the University of Washington. Montauk had done ROTC and had switched majors three times, finally settling on Comparative History of Ideas. Corderoy had confined himself to the En­glish department. They had several mutual friends. A light rain began to fall, and the Italians retreated from the stage and started huddling beneath the trees at the edges of the piazza, ripping canvas banners off fences to use as cover. But Corderoy and Montauk were Seattleites: umbrellas were for ­pussies. They walked casually up to the very front of the stage to wait for the show to begin. As it turned out, Italian rain was not Seattle rain. The sprinkling became a deluge, and Corderoy and Montauk were soaked through in under a minute, soggy cigarettes still in their mouths, each laughing at the other.

  From then on, they traveled together. They got high in a cathedral; they wandered into a strange abandoned castle graffitied and occupied by anti-fascista punks; they flew in a hot-air balloon; they threw bottles at the Carabinieri; they slept on a rooftop in Capri and under a bridge in Florence; they drank cheap Chianti and poured a bottle of Barolo on Keats’s grave; they each fell half in love with the same Italian girl. In the span of a month, they had connected so deeply and so thoroughly, there was no doubt for either of them that they would be lifelong friends. It was a rarity, and they didn’t question it, though Montauk’s mother did. In e-mails home, he’d been talking about his new pal so much that she asked if he and Corderoy had a gay relationship. Nothing wrong if you do, she stressed. The two had a good laugh over that one.

  But no sooner had they returned to their post-college lives in Seattle than Montauk received orde
rs from the National Guard to report to the four-month Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he would get the tactical training given to all new infantry officers.

  Corderoy moved back in with his parents. Having quit his job as a part-time manager at GameStop, he found employment teaching SAT prep. Each night he came home, shut himself away in his parents’ basement, uncorked a liter-and-a-half bottle of cheap Chianti, and played EverQuest for hours. He had little desire to join his friends at the bar; he figured if he’d be drinking there, why not drink here, relaxed in his chair, slaying wyverns and collecting experience points.

  When Montauk returned after four months at Fort Benning, he no longer felt comfortable in his hammock of post-graduate malaise. He was now a platoon leader, and rumors of an Iraq deployment wended through his Guard unit. Civilian life suddenly felt like a much too short vacation, and Montauk intended to make the most of it. So it was that after dragging Corderoy out of his parents’ basement, Montauk hatched the idea to form an art collective. The first Friday that February, the Encyclopaedists were born.

  Corderoy managed, through his highly developed powers of willful ignorance, to think of Montauk deploying as an unlikely possibility. It didn’t help that Montauk had applied to grad schools along with Corderoy. They were both accepted: Corderoy at Boston University and Montauk at Harvard—a point of minor resentment for Corderoy. The plan was to room together in Boston, starting at the beginning of August. By the fourth Encyclopaedists event in May, when Corderoy first met Mani, the idea of Boston had grown in his mind to the extent that he sometimes thought he was living there already and merely visiting Seattle. But after tonight, it was painfully clear to him that he was not in Boston, that he was stuck in Seattle for another month, that he was alone, and that he had done something he could not undo.

  * * *

  It was five-thirty a.m. when Mani woke up alone and wandered into the living room, her unwound turban draped around her shoulders. She’d lost her fake beard sometime during the night, but she was still toting the plastic AK-47. Two guys dressed as Roswell aliens were leaning over the coffee table, snorting lines. They were Montauk’s housemates, but he had so many that she could never remember their names.

  “Have you seen Hal?” she asked.

  “Who’s Hal?”

  “Mickey’s friend. Looks like President Bush.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where’s Mickey?”

  “I think he went to sleep. Check his room?”

  Mani walked toward the stairs, but a wave of nausea hit her and she stumbled into the bathroom. The vomit burned her throat, and as she leaned over the toilet bowl, spitting her mouth clean, she wondered if it was just the alcohol. She’d missed her period last month and hadn’t told Hal; it was probably nothing. Before Steph had gone psycho and kicked her out, she’d given Mani a bottle of Prozac, and Mani had been taking it for almost four weeks. She didn’t feel any happier. But maybe she was late because of the Prozac. And if it wasn’t the Prozac, well, how could she even talk to Hal about that? Any of it. Mani stood and rinsed her face in the sink.

  • • •

  It was just after dawn, and gray light filled Montauk’s room. Someone was talking to him. He sat up in bed. Mani was standing in his doorway. Her eye shadow had smudged across her face. Her black hair was tangled and oily. “What?” Montauk said.

  “Hal. Where’s Hal?”

  “He left,” Montauk said.

  “Where’d he go?”

  Montauk shrugged.

  “When’s he coming back?” A note of uncertainty had entered her voice.

  “He . . . didn’t say.”

  “Mickey. Why would he leave without telling me? What’s going on?”

  “He was getting a little freaked out. That it was moving too fast or something.”

  “So he just left? He’s just gone?” Her voice was rising.

  “Yeah.” Montauk looked out the window.

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “It’s not really my business.”

  “You.” Mani threw her hands up, pointing the toy gun skyward. Montauk pictured those Hezbollah tapes of some bearded guy in camo firing an AK, down with Israel, Allahu Akhbar. Mani lowered her hands and sighed.

  “Sorry,” Montauk said.

  “Fuck you,” she said, and she left the room, slamming his bedroom door. He heard her running down the stairs, then the front door opening and closing. He pictured her unwound turban trailing behind her in the dim light as he closed his blinds and lay back on his bed. Was she crying? She didn’t seem the type.

  2

  * * *

  Montauk found the Roswell aliens, his housemates Nick and Ian, still up and playing through the final level of Halo.

  He picked up a plastic bag from the floor. It had been ripped at the seams and was moist. “Did you kill that entire eightball?” He looked out the large bay window toward the street, where a leaf-strewn puddle was rippling in the light rain. It was just after noon.

  “Sorry, dude. Already licked the bag. You should’ve come down sooner.”

  Montauk went to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee—soy milk, sugar—then went outside and sat in the wicker chair that hung from the portico. Sunlight filtered through the clouds. It felt good to be outside in pajama pants and a T-shirt with a cup of coffee. The wet soil was steaming and smelled of sweetness and fresh decay. To the left of the door, he spotted the toy AK-47. It had been smashed. Next to it was a broken cellular phone. He brought them inside.

  “Hey, Ian.” He held them forward in confusion.

  “Hold on.” Ian was fixated on the TV screen. A plasma grenade landed near him and exploded with a flash of purple light. As the level reloaded, he swiveled his bloodshot gaze toward Montauk. “That’s that girl’s shit. The one who got hit by the car.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hear it? Ambulance and everything. They took her to the hospital, man. She looked fucked up.”

  “Jesus.” Montauk sat down and drank his coffee slowly, conscious of its heat warming his tongue, his throat, pooling in his stomach. He felt an insistent dread; but rather than face it, he scanned the bookshelf across the room. His gaze came to rest on a tattered copy of The Odyssey. He could have been thinking about Mani. Or about his aging parents and their imminent retirement, the increasing healthcare costs they would need help to meet. But why think about that when he could be thinking about Odysseus, how careless he was to allow his men to slaughter the oxen of the Sun God. How he was doomed never to return home, his ship destroyed, his men drowned. And really, was it all that bad an offense? It was absurdly easy to offend a god back then. The irony was that in choosing to avoid the difficult thought chains, Montauk inevitably fell into their metaphorical counterparts, which left him depressed and not knowing why. He finished his coffee and dialed Corderoy.

  • • •

  Corderoy parked his dad’s Suburban in front of the Encyclopad. It was drizzling again. Montauk came down and got in, holding the AK and Mani’s cell phone. Corderoy glanced at the toy gun. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  They sat in silence. Corderoy kept his hands on the wheel, even though they were still parked. “So?”

  Montauk ran his fingers through his hair. “I thought you might want to check up on her. She’s at Swedish.”

  Corderoy rubbed his eyes with his palms. “Should I call her?”

  Montauk waved the broken phone in the air and offered it to Corderoy.

  “Put it in the glove box or something.” Corderoy looked away. “How do you even know she’s at Swedish?”

  “It’s the closest hospital.”

  “Should I go?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t see her if you don’t want to.”

  “Did you talk to her after I left?”

&nb
sp; “Yeah, she came up to my room.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said you were gone. She got upset and ran downstairs. She might have been crying.”

  “She was crying?”

  “What did you think would happen? Wasn’t that the point? So you wouldn’t have to see her cry?”

  Corderoy put the car in gear.

  • • •

  Mani was in traction.

  Montauk set the AK and cell phone on the plastic chair next to the gurney, then assessed the situation. Her legs were elevated by cables attached to steel rungs that encased the bed frame. Her right arm was in a splint. She was dressed in a hospital gown that looked like it was made out of floral-print paper towels. There was a small bandage on the right side of her head. She was asleep or drugged unconscious. In all likelihood, it was not a critical situation. She seemed to have made it through surgery, and the possibility of head trauma seemed low. “It’s not so bad,” Montauk said.

  Corderoy stood in silent panic with one arm crossed over his chest and the other holding his chin, feeling as if he were heading for a cliff in a car with no brakes and no one in the driver’s seat.

  A nurse came into the room. “Hi there. Are you friends or family?”

  Corderoy looked up. “Ah . . . no.”

  The nurse balked. “No?”

  “No, we’re actually friends of a friend,” Montauk said. “We were supposed to meet her here.”

  “Why don’t you have a seat in the waiting room.”

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Montauk asked.

  “She has an impacted femoral fracture. They put three pins in her hip.”