War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  He had yet to buy sheets, and the stitching on the bare mattress scratched his naked skin. He became fixated on the tack holes in the walls, periodically illuminated by the waves of light that bent across the room whenever a car drove by. He visually estimated the dimensions of whatever posters, pictures, or items had been there. This, perhaps, had been a butterfly case. That had been an ovoid mirror. There, a vertical sequence of three postcards or photographs. From a friend’s wedding? Dark images, drinks held aloft, faint, almost disconcerted smiles.

  * * *

  I. Tricia, in fact, had read just under half of The Road to Serfdom.

  11

  * * *

  Corderoy and Tricia got off the T at Washington Street. After crossing several rusted, industrial railroad tracks, they turned down an alley and arrived in front of a large red-brick building. A small crowd stood outside, smoking in the warmth of the evening, and the noise of dozens more emanated from a lit doorway behind them.

  It was the first Friday in September, and they were in SoWa, that part of Boston with the highest concentration of old factories converted into lofts and art studios. Corderoy’s classmate Marcus Lee had announced to the class that morning that he would be attending First Fridays and that there would be a lot of great exhibits and free wine, of course. Corderoy wasn’t thrilled about going to an art opening. But then Maria Sardi had said, “Count me een.”

  He shared two classes with Maria, and during that first week Maria had gone from the semi-cute girl with the too-thin nose to the cute girl who knew her Star Wars to the smart and assertive girl with the mesmerizing face, eyes large and dark like a cow’s, voice like an unripe blackberry. That evening, as Corderoy trimmed his beard and brushed his teeth, he began to look forward to the opening as if it were a play-off game of some undetermined sport, as if he were the star player and his sweetheart would be watching from the bleachers. The anxiety and thrill of possible triumph was something he’d likely gleaned from television—not having played any sports in high school—and that feeling seemed to transcend the particulars of the event. Bright lights, crowds, probably some grass. He didn’t bother imagining a ball of any sort.

  When Tricia saw him getting ready to go out, something he hadn’t done once yet, she asked where he was going. He told her, and she said, “Oh, my friend’s in that show,” and invited herself along. Initially, he was miffed at her sudden intrusion into his budding social life. But then he reflected that it could work to his advantage, having Tricia with him. Girls probably assumed all guys were untrustworthy schemers. But a guy with female friends, he was like a guy with a wedding ring: safe.

  On the way there, Tricia had told him about some installations she’d seen at the last First Fridays, and Corderoy told her about Montauk and the Encyclopaedists parties, but in reminiscing about how fun they had been, he realized that they belonged to a particular time and place, and the memory prodded a large bruise he’d forgotten in the chaos of settling in a new city.

  Inside the building, Corderoy slipped through the crush of people and made his way to the folding table where they were handing out wine in small plastic cups. He handed one to Tricia, and they pushed farther into the gallery. Marcus Lee spotted Corderoy and waved.

  Corderoy made introductions, and Marcus shook Tricia’s hand in a professional manner. He was dressed in loafers, khakis, a white ­button-up tucked in around his belly, but no tie.

  “Anyone else here yet?” Corderoy asked.

  “Ray and Chelsea are in here somewhere.”

  “Cool. Wasn’t Maria going to come?” Corderoy spoke distantly while poring over the crowd, his voice moving at the speed of his visual scan.

  “I think so,” Marcus said. “But I haven’t seen her.”

  “This is really great,” Tricia said.

  “It is?” Corderoy asked. She was staring at a video projected onto the nearest wall. It was of a rather comfortable-looking, unused couch that would have fit nicely on a showroom floor but was, instead, in a field. For a moment, Corderoy thought it was a still photo, but a light breeze occasionally bent a stalk of grass from its upright position. The video had been running for an hour and a half, according to the time stamp in the lower-right-hand corner.

  Was that supposed to be deep? Or make him question the idea of the art space or what belonged in it? Or the nature of time and the value of subtle minutiae? At the Encyclopaedists parties, the art was an elaborate joke, so he and Montauk had always spoken about it with the utmost pretention and seriousness. Which paid great social dividends. But here, the art wasn’t offered up as comedy.

  Corderoy emptied his cup and said, “You think our grandkids will regard this sort of thing as important and subversive?”

  Tricia smirked. “You should be careful,” she said under her breath. “The artist could be any one of these people.”

  “There are artists here?” Corderoy said.

  “Maybe the piece is making a political statement,” she said, “about the excesses of Western culture. We have near-infinite resources, and we use them to record a couch sitting in a field. We could be documenting the numerous atrocities happening across the globe, but we have a live feed of a couch. And that’s what we choose to watch.”

  “I don’t,” Corderoy said. “I’d rather watch Ultimate Fighting.”

  “I’m not saying it’s amazing,” Tricia said. “I mean, we think of the Renaissance as some awesome time, but really, only like five or six guys come to mind. If you were there, you’d be surrounded by wannabe Raphaels all day. So what do you do? Laugh at them, then go watch people beat each other up? Or try to enter the conversation, like Raphael would, and think, I see what you’re doing, but here’s what would make it better.”

  Corderoy withdrew into his wine cup.

  Marcus smiled thoughtfully at Tricia while nodding, then raised a finger and said, “One could argue that the installation is about the nature of modern desire. We’ve been programmed to demand constant entertainment, and so a scene like this, subtle and bucolic, is experienced as boredom.” He spoke like a museum docent reciting a well-practiced speech. “It’s about how modernity changes the size of our appetite for spectacle and the length of our attention span. That’s the image of a field in a slight breeze.”

  Corderoy scanned for Maria again and saw a group of people taking turns reaching inside a wooden box.

  “It’s almost as if the couch is a representation of contemporary American culture,” Marcus continued. “The subtlety of the installation is not dynamic enough for us, even though it’s far more dynamic and alive then we are, in our couchlike passivity. Or, more specifically, the couch represents the modality with which we experience—”

  “No. No jargon,” Corderoy interrupted. “No modalities. This couch is American culture? No way. Where’s the imprint of our fat asses? The cigarette burns. Where’s the empty Doritos bag?”

  “That’s a good point, Hal,” Marcus said. “You know, Foucault wrote about what he called ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ in our culture.” He made quotation marks with his fingers without smirking or moving his eyebrows even slightly.

  “Anybody want more wine?” Corderoy interrupted again. Tricia’s cup was still half-full.

  “I don’t drink,” Marcus said.

  “Well, I’ll be back.” Corderoy shouldered through the crowd to get another plastic cup of merlot. He didn’t like crowds; he often developed high-anxiety palm sweat when crammed into a strange room with unfamiliar people. When he was sober, that is. Thus, he set about adjusting his mood, telling the lady behind the wine table that he was getting an extra cup for his friend, an excuse that she didn’t need or care for, but which Corderoy felt compelled to provide anyway. He turned around and nearly bumped into Maria. She cocked her head to the side and smiled at him, then glanced down at his two cups of wine.

  “Hey!” Corderoy said, handing her a
cup. “Saw you come in.” Smooth.

  “Thanks,” Maria said. Her fingers brushed his as she took it.

  “Everyone’s back this way,” Corderoy said, anxious to have Maria see him with Tricia. They worked through the crowd to the video installation, but Tricia and Marcus were gone. Corderoy spotted them across the room and was about to lead Maria there, but she was fixated on the couch. “I think I like this,” she said.

  “We were just talking about this piece and how it represents modern desire, for Americans, in our couchlike passivity, you know?” God, why was he saying that? He took a big gulp of wine.

  • • •

  They found Marcus standing in front of a large wooden thronelike chair. Tricia was nearby, talking to a tall guy in leather pants and a partially unbuttoned shirt.

  Maria circled the piece, Corderoy at her side. The back of the chair, which was about six feet tall, was actually a bookshelf, stuffed with books and sealed over with a sheet of Plexiglas. The armrests of the chair folded open to reveal more hidden books. A few people had removed these and were examining them.

  “Finally found something you like?” Tricia called to him.

  Corderoy smiled at her, then turned back to Maria and tapped her on the shoulder. “Uh.” He swallowed. “Come meet my friend.”

  They approached Tricia and Leather Pants.

  “It’s kind of cool,” Corderoy said after introducing Maria and Tricia. Easy enough. Now just say smart things. “But it’s kind of inconsistent. Like, why are the books in the armrests accessible but the ones in the back are sealed under Plexiglas?” He stared at the chair for a moment. When neither Tricia nor Leather Pants responded, he said, “I find that . . . problematic.”

  “Hal, this is Dacey,” Tricia said. “That’s his piece.”

  “Oh. So . . . why the Plexiglas?”

  “Why do you think?” Dacey asked.

  Corderoy stuttered.

  “The bookshelf is where you expect to access books,” Maria said. “But here it’s sealed. The books you can access are hidden away. Maybe that says something about the knowledge we display and the knowledge we hoard and their relative values.”

  “That’s great,” said Dacey. “I should hire you to write my grant proposals.” He gave her a friendly punch on the shoulder. Maria blushed.

  This wasn’t going well. “Why did you pick those books?” Corderoy asked. “I saw Don Quixote back there, and that Churchill biography.”

  “I chose them for the color on the spine,” Dacey said.

  “What? That’s like sacrilege.”

  “You’re still thinking about these objects as books,” he said. “Here they perform as representations of books. Or, rather, representations of the idea of books. Like your girlfriend said, the ones behind glass are what you display for others. The content doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, I’m not, we’re not,” Maria said, glancing between Dacey and Corderoy.

  “My bad,” Dacey said. “I’m curious what you think of this piece by my friend Mark.” And just like that, he put his arm around her shoulder and guided her away. Corderoy stood there, aghast. Tricia gave him a pitying look, then turned to follow them.

  Corderoy went back to the wine table, got two more cups, and downed one as he worked back through the crowd. There they were, Tricia, Dacey, and Maria, looking at the wooden box with the hole in it, Dacey leaning over Maria as she felt around inside. Corderoy stopped short. He couldn’t join them. Instead, he sat down on Dacey’s throne. The panel under his ass shifted. He stood and opened it. There were books in there, too. He pulled one out at random, closed the seat, sat back down, and crossed his legs. It was The Stranger, the Vintage paperback with the big sun on the cover and all those Arab faces, translated by Stuart Gilbert. He’d read this translation in high school and had fallen in love with it, but had never been able to find it since.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that, Hal.”

  It was Marcus Lee. Corderoy read out loud the last sentence of Part I of The Stranger—his favorite sentence, the one that always tipped him off to an inferior translation: “ ‘And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.’ ”

  “Hal.”

  “What? Sitting here?”

  “It’s an installation. You can’t just sit on it.”

  Dacey approached, shaking his head as if looking at a bad dog.

  “Oh, is this seat taken?” Corderoy asked.

  “C’mon, man,” Dacey said. Maria was standing a few paces behind with Tricia.

  “All right, bad joke,” Corderoy said. He stood up, but in so doing, he knocked over his cup of wine. It spilled on the seat and began to seep into the compartment where the books were stored.

  “Aww, shit,” Dacey said, wiping the wine off with his palm. Cor­deroy stood there, not knowing what to do or say.

  Marcus Lee pulled some napkins from his shoulder bag.

  When Dacey had soaked up most of the wine, he put the sopping mess of napkins in Corderoy’s hands and said, “Do me a favor. There’s a garbage can. Near the exit.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Corderoy said. “I was just leaving anyway.”

  Marcus shrugged and looked at his feet. “See you in class?”

  “Yeah.” Corderoy glanced at Maria, who was biting her lip, then at Tricia, who was covering her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh. He turned and walked toward the exit, giving the wad of napkins a forceful toss into the garbage can before entering the black, industrial night, passing through the crowd of smokers out front.

  He was drunk enough that he had to watch his step as he crossed the old railroad tracks, but in focusing on his feet, he failed to notice the chain-link fence on the other side of the tracks, the fence that would have been hard to see anyway, given the lack of streetlights. It was into this fence that Corderoy walked face-first, indenting his forehead and causing him to stumble backward over the train tracks. He fell squarely on his tailbone, causing an instant flash of pain. He rolled onto his side and lay still, trying not to wonder if anyone standing out front had seen him.

  When he got home, his tailbone was still aching. He grabbed the bottle of Johnnie Walker from Tricia’s room and took a swig, then went into the kitchen and emptied the ice trays into a Ziploc. Back in his room, he sat on that cold uncomfortable lump. He hated icing bruises and bumps, but the pain in his coccyx was worse than the pain of prolonged contact with ice. He took out his phone and scrolled through his address book. He wanted to call someone, someone back home. Not his parents, not any of his friends from work. He wanted to call Montauk. But Montauk had left for Iraq already. He could leave a voicemail. He hit Send, but before the call connected, he hung up.

  He groped around in the dark for his laptop. He navigated to the “Encyclopaedists” article on Wikipedia. He stared at it dumbly for a minute, feeling the white glow of his screen bathe his wine-warmed face like a campfire, then he clicked edit.

  12

  * * *

  Tricia had always felt she was destined to do great things, but what those things were had stayed hidden in a warm humanitarian cloud of possibility. And that vagueness had been rankling her since the anti-war protest last March—a die-in on Boylston Street along Boston Common. They’d smoked and laughed and tried to outdo one another in their death poses, tongues hanging out of their mouths, eyes rolled back. There were tens of thousands of people. Tricia could smell weed smoke in the air around her. Later in the day, her friend Erica parked herself in front of the entrance to a government building. And though Tricia had been too timid to join her, she’d applauded Erica’s commitment. Her willingness to stand out from the crowd of protesters and risk arrest. Which was exactly what happened. Tricia’s heart leapt as the policeman slipped zip ties around Erica’s wrists, but as he escorted her away, Erica looked back over her shoulder and gave Tricia a sly grin. Tricia looked aro
und at the people, the chanting, the signs, and something seemed off. She’d seen the footage of protests from the civil rights era. Nobody was smiling at Birmingham. In the days after, she heard Erica retell the story half a dozen times with exuberance, as if it had been the opening night of her first Broadway play. Tricia couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. With every retelling, it came more and more into focus: their brand of protest was mere theater, self-indulgence. Tricia had no interest in being a performer. She wanted to be something more than that, but without any clear idea of how she would help the world, she was no different from all the other campus activists. That all changed the day she met Luc Dubois at the reception for a Chris Hedges reading; her future began crystallizing as fast as she could imagine it. A life with real risk, real stakes.

  She sat down on the edge of the booth facing the entrance so that she could watch for him. Jenny Yi slid into the seat across from her, next to Jeff Alessi.

  “So what exactly does this guy do for Truthout?” Jenny asked.

  “He’s a photographer,” Tricia said. “Mother Jones and Democracy Now! just ran some of his photos. I’m sure he’ll explain when he gets here.” She was proud that she’d had the guts to ask Luc to join her and her classmates at the bar—she had actually offered to buy him a drink.