War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  “Shut up, Mickey.”

  Montauk left his mouth ajar, as if those stupid, stupid words might funnel back in like chimney swifts.

  “I don’t want your pity. You don’t owe me anything. Neither does Hal.”

  “I know.”

  “So you promise this has nothing to do with that?”

  “Promise,” Montauk said. He was lying.

  “Even so, we couldn’t tell Hal. You know that.”

  “I won’t tell him if you won’t.” As soon as he said the words, he knew he meant them, and it made him feel ashamed that he was planning to keep something so huge from his friend. His best friend? Perhaps not anymore.

  Mani stared at him long enough that Montauk became conscious of the DVD menu music playing in the background. He couldn’t hear his own breath, because he wasn’t breathing. Then she leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” Mani said. “I can’t.”

  Montauk swallowed his own head. “No,” he said. “You can. You have to. I mean, I want you to. Let me do this for you.” He felt an excitement fueled by the thought that it might very well be a terrible idea, an excitement made more urgent by the guilt of hiding it from Corderoy, guilt complicated by the fact that he’d done Corderoy’s dirty work of kicking Mani out in the first place. It was so confusing that somehow this blind leap felt like the only sensible option.

  Mani considered his face as if it were a room-sized Rothko. “I don’t have to,” she said. “I don’t.”

  Montauk closed his eyes for a moment. “No,” he said. “You don’t. You don’t have to.”

  Mani took a deep breath. What would it mean to say yes? Allowing herself to be supported, yet again, by a guy? Not just a guy but a soldier, sending money home. It was such a weirdly romantic gesture, especially since it seemed pretty clear they weren’t headed toward a sexual relationship. It would mean something for him, too, if she agreed. It would probably be the biggest decision either of them had made in their lives. Maybe it was the perfect fertilizer for a strong friendship. She didn’t have one of those right now. Not anyone close, really close. Hadn’t in a while. But that could change, so easily. “Why not?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Yeah. Consider me Mrs. Montauk.”

  Whoa. Shit. Really? That was it, then. They were engaged. “We’re engaged,” he said wondrously.

  “Shut up,” Mani said, and she punched him on the shoulder.

  Montauk couldn’t help smiling. He’d have to tell his mother. No, of course not. That would only sow confusion. And yet a part of him indulged in what felt like nostalgia, nostalgia for future events that would never happen: he and Mani picking out wedding invitations, scouting locations, sampling dinner wines, licking envelopes, writing vows.

  8

  * * *

  It was four days until deployment when Montauk and Mani entered the Seattle Municipal Courthouse. They were on time for their appointment, but the judge was running behind, so they sat in padded folding chairs outside his office on the tenth floor. Mani was wearing a short yellow summer dress, almost as offensively bright as the fluorescent lights. Montauk wore his Army green service uniform. A couple sat next to them filling out paperwork for a marriage license, just as Montauk had done three days ago. The guy was thin, had shaggy brown hair, and wore a tweed jacket and bow tie. His arm was around the girl, who looked Chinese and was dressed like she lived in Manhattan. They were cooing and smiling over their clipboard.

  “I’m glad we’re having the coq au vin,” Mani said, loud enough for them to hear.

  “What?” Montauk whispered.

  “It’ll go well with the black truffle ravioli,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, quite,” Montauk said. “Though I must say, our boldest menu choice is surely the lemon-caper sorbet.”

  Mani snickered but regained her composure. “I can’t wait to see the look on Clarissa Worthington’s face.”

  Montauk had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at that one.

  The elevator down the hall opened, and a couple in their eighties shuffled out. Mani watched them approach and lower their creaking bodies into chairs. She suddenly felt shitty for messing with the young couple, for trying to joke through what she and Mickey were about to do, rather than facing up to its seriousness.

  The judge opened his door and said, “Montauk?”

  They nodded and entered his office. Law books lined both walls. A narrow window behind the desk looked out on the city. The view wasn’t all that spectacular. The judge verified their receipt of payment ($63.50 cash, paid at the window down the hall), then inspected their certificate to ensure that it was properly filled out.

  Montauk wore a silver ring on his right index finger, mostly out of habit; it was a gift from an ex-girlfriend. He twisted it about his finger, imagined it on his other hand. They had no rings, of course. But they were about to be married. He couldn’t help feeling that certain elements were absent, that a marriage wasn’t a marriage without rings, and rice, and, well, consummation.

  These absences didn’t bother Mani. But her heart was beating at an elevated rate, her eyes scanned the room in quick saccades, she sat unnaturally motionless. She felt the same rush that she’d felt years ago when shoplifting a Goo Goo Dolls CD from Sam Goody. She was about to get something for free. Government money. Something she didn’t deserve. Mani grabbed Montauk’s hand and squeezed it, hoping this would alleviate the awkwardness, but it only magnified it, and she quickly let go.

  “Looks good,” the judge said. “Where are your witnesses?”

  “I’m sorry?” Montauk said.

  “You need two witnesses.”

  “They’re . . . just outside,” Mani said. She glared at Montauk.

  He jumped up, said, “Back in a second,” then ducked out of the office.

  “Can I borrow a pen and paper?” Mani asked the judge.

  • • •

  Montauk surveyed the hallway. The old man had just entered the bathroom, and the young woman was on the phone. But Bowtie and Granny were just sitting there quietly. “Excuse me,” Montauk said.

  • • •

  Inside the judge’s office, Mani finished writing and handed the pen back just as Montauk opened the door.

  “Sorry for the delay,” he said.

  Granny held her hands in front of her and smiled softly. Bowtie was doing his best to mute his expression, though his eyes conveyed a certain smugness. Mani gave him a sheepish grin.

  “Can we proceed?” the judge asked.

  Mani and Montauk nodded.

  “Is it your plan to get married and be faithful to each other?”

  “Yes,” Mani said.

  Montauk hesitated. What did faithful actually mean in this context? It didn’t mean sexually, so . . . Mani and the judge were both staring at him. “Of course,” he said.

  “Do you have any vows you’d like to say?”

  “No,” Montauk said.

  Mani’s voice caught in her throat. It would be awkward with these two strangers in the room, especially Granny, but they were getting married! Something had to be said. “He does,” Mani said, and she handed him a folded piece of legal paper.

  Montauk’s eyes widened.

  “Read it,” Mani said.

  Montauk glanced back at Granny and Bowtie. “Okay,” he said. “ ‘I vow not to be an asshole. Or a coward. To answer all letters sent to me, to eat any and all desserts I can get, to—’ ” He coughed. “ ‘To jerk off at least twice a day, to come home safe, to be open if I hurt, to make it my life’s mission not to fuck over anyone, anywhere, no matter how much they deserve it.’ ”

  Granny wiped a tear from her cheek.

  Montauk looked Mani in the eye.

  “Finished?” the judge said, all business. “Okay. I pronounce you husband
and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

  They both hesitated. Despite the intimacy and honesty of the vows Montauk had just recited, this prompting for a public kiss made it inescapably obvious that they were committing fraud, that they’d harassed two strangers to witness a nominal marriage purely to squeeze a little money out of the Army. Fraud that could land them in deep shit if they got caught. It had happened before. Montauk had heard of one company commander who made it a point to call the mothers of all pre-­deployment last-minute brides. The judge was staring at them. Montauk imagined seeing this moment on security camera footage. In a courtroom. Exhibit A. Corderoy watching from the gallery. He leaned toward Mani, she leaned in, too, and they kissed. It was a brief kiss, a guilty kiss. Not at all like the other night on the couch. It was more like a hesitant taste of milk. Milk that might have gone sour.

  * * *

  They passed the next few days in a cloud of formality. But on the night before Montauk’s departure, Mani crept into his room around four a.m. “Can I stay up here?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Montauk mumbled. She’d never asked before, and the couch downstairs was perfectly comfortable. He didn’t press her. She climbed into his bed.

  After a few minutes of silence, she said, “I’ve been thinking about your advice. About getting out of Seattle.” Mickey had asked his housemates, and they were fine with her staying at the Encyclopad even after he left for Baghdad, but Mani knew she would feel awkward, lonely.

  “You should,” Montauk said. “Rent a studio somewhere, buy art supplies. Change your environment.”

  “I think I might go back to Newton.”

  “With your parents? You bit my head off when I suggested that.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen them in a while. Maybe it’s a good place to start over.”

  Montauk lay there, more awake, thinking about how close Newton was to Boston, to Hal. Another minute passed, and he’d nearly resolved not to bring it up. Then he whispered, “This doesn’t have anything to do with . . .”

  Mani didn’t respond. She had either fallen asleep or didn’t want to answer that question. For the best, probably.

  But Montauk couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was now the time of day he would soon come to know as Begin Morning Nautical Twilight. The turret on the third floor of his house looked out through the leafy branches of a nineteenth-century maple toward the gray of Lake Washington. Mani faced away from him, half covered by a sheet, breathing deep and slow, the tattoos on her lower back—two cursive fs, as on a cello—peeking out between her boxers and the bottom of her tank top.

  Montauk had not lain awake at early dawn like this since the mid-1980s. Like most children and old people, he would often wake up earlier than the rest of the world. During those years before he quit the piano, he would lie still in the mornings, hearing Suzuki piano sonatas playing in his mind as the gray diamond of window light slowly traveled his bedroom wall. Those dawns were the best part of his whole day. Not because his childhood was unhappy, but because at dawn, the world was surreal. Lying completely still, he would sometimes get the sensation that his hands were enormous—the size of his bed or as big as the room. He tried not to look down at his sheets, so as to preserve the illusion. He felt the ghost of that feeling now, mitigated by adult knowledge, the certainty that his hands were, in fact, quite normal.

  He inhaled and his thoughts were enveloped by Mani’s scent, like submerging his head in warm bathwater. Smelling her body beside him made him wonder how she tasted, which made him wonder if she waxed. He thought for an instant about asking Corderoy. But he didn’t really want to know; he’d made the conscious decision, for the first time in his life, to not sleep with a girl, his wife, for a reason other than that she was ugly.

  Mani rolled over toward him. With his eyes closed, he felt her head move on the pillow and thought she might be awake, but he didn’t move or open his eyes. Eventually, he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, it was six. He had a plane to catch in three hours that would take him to D.C. and then to Kuwait. From there they’d convoy to Baghdad down highways studded with IEDs. This was his last day as a civilian. After packing his duffel bag with the few items he was permitted, he kissed Mani on the forehead. Though she stirred, her eyes remained closed. She knew, of course, that he was leaving this morning, but this nonverbal good-bye was somehow better, softer. Downstairs, Montauk checked his e-mail, then navigated to Wikipedia and looked up “The Encyclopaedists.” Their article had been updated on September 3rd with a new section: “Ice.” Montauk read it and smiled. He still had a little time, so he started a section of his own: “Used goods.” He hammered out the last sentence as his cab honked out front. He looked toward the stairwell and wondered if Mani had woken at the sound. He said good-bye to the Encyclopad as he closed the front door softly. An hour later, he reached his gate of departure.

  BOSTON

  9

  * * *

  The seeds of Corderoy’s existential crisis were planted during his first class, when his professor asked him to prove he wasn’t wasting his time. Corderoy had felt a quiet thrill, climbing the stairs to the third floor of the Gothic stone building and entering a room lined with bookshelves. But when he sat down at the long conference table, he’d felt intimidated. An older guy at the end of the table was most of the way through a volume of Proust. In Seattle, Corderoy would have considered that a pretentious pose, but here, maybe that was like reading Us Weekly? He had tried to look introspective while listening to the girls a few chairs away talking about where they’d attended undergrad. In New Haven . . . And you? . . . Cool, my best friend went to Brown. He’d surveyed the other arriving students. They couldn’t all have gone to Ivy League schools, could they? But Boston was a bigger pond than Seattle, and as host to several elite colleges, it had a disproportionate share of transplanted big fish. He’d caught the eye of the semi-cute girl across the table and given her an aloof smile. She’d ignored it and returned to her book, prompting Corderoy to affect his best casual thug lean—an attempt to convey that, yeah, he was just as smart as everyone here, probably smarter, but it wadn’t no thang.

  When the professor had entered with his brown leather satchel and his Dr. Wily hair, he had said in an Irish accent, “This is Literary Criticism One, and I am Professor Flannigan,” before initiating a round of introductions. The closer it had come to Corderoy’s turn, the less he’d paid attention and the more he’d begun to plan out what he would say. The goal was to sound nonchalantly clever and smart—to be just witty enough that people thought that was how you always were. Corderoy had said, “Well, I like reading books. And playing video games. But there’s no degree for playing video games.” No one had thought it funny, and he’d slunk back in his chair as the spotlight moved on.

  As Professor Flannigan rifled through a stack of wrinkled and stained legal pad pages, he’d said, “The purpose of this course is to examine the critical theories and modes of interpretation that . . .” And then he had stopped talking for what seemed at least a minute. He’d been so clearly comfortable with the silence, moseying about in his brain, selecting the right word, it was almost a rebuke. “. . . that pay intellectual dividends,” he’d continued, “when applied to various texts. The greatest insight of post-structuralism, and of post-modernism in general, is that language is not a stable, closed system. Literature, therefore, is irreducibly plural. We reject the notion of a transcendental signified that would guarantee the illusive center of meaning, an impossible point of reference completely external to all human thought. Now, this isn’t a hermeneutic license to say that all reading is misreading, but rather, an exhortation to be ruthlessly self-conscious of the reductive impulse.

  “This may seem obvious to some of you, as it should, for you’ve matured in a fragmented and pluralistic world. If it does, then I have a more difficult question for you. Why isn’t this class, this activity, a waste of time?”

 
An unspeakable question. You didn’t start doubting God’s existence while gearing up for the Crusades. You didn’t consider whether the stripper giving you a lap dance was performing her sexual attraction. And you didn’t ask whether literary criticism was a waste of time the day after you paid your tuition. Corderoy found himself staring at the cleavage of the girl on the far left. Sandy? She was a little chubby and had an overly large jaw, which made him feel conflicted about his ogling. When a girl was pleasant to look at as a whole person, you could call her beautiful and it was refined to admire beauty. But if you had to ignore her face to enjoy her breasts, you were effectively sectioning her into isolated chunks and staring at only the good bits. There was no way to convince yourself that it was noble. The subconscious pull to glance at Sandy’s cleavage made him feel powerless, in the grip of an addiction he was born with.

  “Mr. . . .”

  Corderoy looked up. “Hal. Corderoy.”

  “Why isn’t this a waste of time, Mr. Corderoy?”

  Corderoy faltered, then quickly retreated into cynicism. “It is a waste of time,” he said.

  The professor smiled. “Ah, well then, tell us. Why is our enterprise a waste of time?”

  “Because . . . we produce nothing consumed by the world outside of academia, and the opportunity cost of applying our intellects to something that’s basically useless, aside from whatever personal satisfaction we get from it, when we could be building rockets or curing cancer. I mean, we can’t all be physicists, but at least we could be building tables or filming amateur pornography or something that would actually get used by other humans!”

  Professor Flannigan laughed. “Good points, all. But if it’s a waste of time, why don’t universities simply eliminate liberal arts programs?”

  Corderoy scratched his chin, but the contemplative gesture belied a growing inner panic. Indeed, why not?