War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  Corderoy, surrounded by collegiate transplants from other parts of the country, had rarely had the luxury of enjoying the blue-collar accent Boston was famous for—and he wondered if his unfamiliarity with it somehow magnified its effect to his ear. “I was in Seattle,” he said. “It was seven in the morning. I’d been up all night playing Counter-Strike. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t actually taking a shit.”

  “What’s Counter-Strike?”

  Counter-Strike was why Corderoy had almost dropped out of college. It was why he knew that an AK-47—though not as accurate as the M4A1 carbine—used a 7.62 millimeter bullet, higher caliber than the M4, which meant you could drop a target with two body shots. Of course, a headshot would drop the target in one, but for that, he preferred to whip out his .50 Desert Eagle. His mother had called him at seven a.m., thinking she’d be waking him up, and he’d picked up while playing, clamping the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

  “Sorry to wake you, Hal.”

  “It’s fine, Mom . . . what’s up.” He was the only player left on his team, and he’d just planted the explosives. They were playing a map called de_inferno that had the look and feel of a quaint Tuscan village. Why on earth terrorists would want to bomb a quaint Tuscan village was beyond him. There were three enemies closing in on his position, to kill him, defuse the bomb, or both.

  “Turn on your TV,” she said.

  “I don’t have TV, remember.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you download things. Well, look online, then. I’m sure it’s everywhere.”

  Fuck fuck fuck. He’d just strafed out from behind a large crate, firing a three-round burst from his AK, which had hit and killed one enemy. But he’d been hit by another, knocking him down to 12 health. He fled the piazza where he’d just planted the bomb. One more shot would take him out.

  “New York was attacked. By terrorists,” his mother said.

  “What? Mom, hold on.” He threw a flash bang into the piazza, then rushed in spraying with his AK. Most of his rounds missed, but the last few bullets lodged in the enemy’s torso, and he collapsed near the bomb. Corderoy crept noiselessly behind a crumbling brick wall, then sat, hiding, waiting for the one remaining player to come out into the open. Only twenty-seven seconds left till the bomb exploded and he won the round. He reloaded his rifle.

  “Hal. Listen, I know your friend Brian went to school in New York. The Twin Towers were hit by two airplanes.”

  “What?”

  “Terrorists hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers. In Manhattan.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ll check it out.”

  “And call Brian.”

  “Okay. Bye.” His mother hung up and he let the phone drop to the floor. The enemy crept out from behind a crate, and Corderoy unloaded with his AK, hitting but not killing him. He was out of rifle ammo, so he pulled out his pistol as the return fire impacted the wall next to him. His heart was racing, and he’d stopped breathing. The adrenaline surged through him, and his eyes widened. A small pause in the gunfire and he leapt out and fired one shot from his Desert Eagle. It sailed right through the enemy’s head. He took a deep breath and let his hands relax. Only then, basking in the glow of that power, the triumph of having killed his enemy before he could be killed, did he register what his mother had said. A terrorist attack. But he’d never been to New York. He didn’t even know what the Twin Towers were. And he wasn’t even friends with Brian anymore; he had no way of contacting him even if he wanted to. He shut down his computer and went to sleep.

  Sitting on the stoop now, he felt guilty for that moment, though he never had before. Everybody had to be doing something when it happened. He had been planting bombs and firing an AK-47. He’d rather have been taking a shit.

  “It’s a video game,” he said to the guy.

  “Never really got into that stuff,” the guy said. “Though I did a little programming back in the day.” He stood up and took a key ring from his pocket. “Hey, thanks for the Coke,” he said. “I gotta get inside and fix the water heater.” Watah heatah.

  “You’re the . . .”

  “The super, yeah. Name’s Jack.”

  “Hal.”

  “You’re locked out, aren’t ya, Hal?”

  Corderoy blushed, and Jack let him into the building.

  13

  * * *

  Corderoy had already masturbated twice today—much needed head-clearing breaks between the three chapters of Ulysses he’d read—and now, too drained for a third go at it, he found himself browsing through girls on MySpace. The cold afternoon sun lit his room insufficiently, competing with the glow from his laptop screen.

  There was an unreality to the social world of MySpace—a profile was, by its nature, a continually curated representation of the self. In this world, no one ever had a bad-hair day. The cookies always came out perfect. Nothing tedious. Nothing sad that was not also funny. It was thin, it was token, and it was the perfect substitution for the meaningful social world he was avoiding. In Seattle, he’d felt like the one guy outside of Plato’s cave, seeing things for what they were rather than looking at shadows on the wall. And he’d had Montauk beside him to up his cool quotient. To go from that to friendless in Boston had been rough. And after his humiliation at First Fridays, after realizing how hard it would be to rebuild that kind of status, he had buried his head in schoolwork; he’d even gotten caught up in presidential politics, watching The Daily Show at night with Tricia—their only social time together. Last week, on his way home from class, he’d seen a guy about his age standing on the street corner, holding a clipboard, wearing a poncho, though it wasn’t raining all that hard. He looked ridiculous.

  “Registered to vote?” he’d asked.

  “How much do you get paid?” Corderoy had said.

  “I don’t get paid. I’m a volunteer.”

  “And what if I’m planning to vote for Bush?”

  “Hey, man. I’m not asking who you support. I’m just getting people registered.”

  Corderoy thought Bush was an idiot, and he was angry that American troops, including Montauk, were being sent to Baghdad, but he’d always distrusted large elections. He hadn’t voted in 2000, when Gore had lost. Why bother replacing one rich Christian white guy with another rich Christian white guy? But here was this volunteer, out on the street corner simply to promote the health of the democracy. He’d taken the form and filled it out.

  He began reading political blogs. He subscribed to Truthout’s mailing list. And when he wasn’t reading and writing short response papers for his classes, he was getting drawn into e-mail debates with his uncle about the Patriot Act, about the possible link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam. But as much as he distracted himself with these new passions, he was lonelier than he’d ever been. He was in no condition for an actual human relationship; what he needed was nineteen-year-old Sylvie.

  He scrolled through her gaudy pink profile. She had a short brunette bob and she held a classic MySpace pose, head angled up and to the right, eyes looking at the camera in her left hand, shooting for mysterious and seductive. She was beautiful, of course, but she also looked silly and immature, and it was that more than anything else that drew Corderoy to her. He read through her details.

  Status:Single

  Here for:Networking, Dating, Serious Relationships, Friends

  Orientation:Straight

  Hometown:Boston

  Body Type:5'1" / Slim / Slender

  Ethnicity: White / Caucasian

  Zodiac Sign:Scorpio

  Smoke / Drink:No / No

  Children:Undecided

  Education:Some College

  Occupation:Student

  Income:Less than $30,000

  Her top eight friends had names like Gadget, Shawn, and Firecracker. Her favorite movies: “Disney! TenthingsIhateaboutyou, anything with Edw
ard Norton! Indiana Jones omgNightmare before Christmas.” Music: Daddy Yankee, whatever that was. Under “About Me,” she’d written the following:

  Hi. I’m Sylvie. I like to meet new people and laugh and have fun. I like ghosthunting and playing Twister. And I love absolutely love funfetti cupcakes! If you make me funfetti, I’m you’res.

  Under “Who I’d Like to Meet,” she had written one word: “You.”

  Corderoy composed a flirtatious message asking what ghosthunting was and did she know any good places to go. For a second, he hovered over the Send button. He could hear the sounds of drunken carousing on the street outside, arms around shoulders, bumming cigarettes, pissing in alleys. Choosing not to message nineteen-year-old Sylvie because it was creepy (and would thereby make him a creep) would mean coming to terms with the state of his life: single, friendless, unshowered, wearing cum-stained underwear, and trolling for immature girls on MySpace. Sending the message involved none of these things. More important, a part of him realized that he had contempt for this girl purely from looking at her profile. She was emphatically not an Ivy League humanitarian. There was likely nothing he could learn from her. If anything, the opposite was true, which meant he couldn’t get hurt. As disturbing as it was, that contempt was arousing, the way power was arousing. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about. But one could always forestall troubling thoughts with hasty actions.

  She accepted his friend request and responded almost immediately. YOU NEVER WENT GHOSTHUNTING! you have to go, its the funnest. its when you go out to a place thats suppose to be haunted with like flashlights and camaras and stuff. you can also stay the night in sleeping bags but sometimes it gets cold and you have to cuddle together to stay warm

  Corderoy wrote back, You’ll have to show me sometime. Do you go often?

  i’m going next week! maybe you can come, but we have to talk more before i decide if i like you! ;)

  Wow. Was it really that easy? It was the Internet, after all—it could accommodate all kinds of people.

  • • •

  Later that night, Corderoy discovered that he had new comments on his photos. On a photo of him riding a ferry to Capri, Sylvie had written, cracka in a wife-beater. how stereotypical. but its hot. On a photo of him at a restaurant in Vegas, angled from below, thats the most impressive glare ive EVER seen coming off a forehead. On his most embarrassing photo, a picture of him with his shirt off, wearing a red bandanna knotted in front à la 2Pac, flashing a West Coast sign, Sylvie had written, and 150 lbs of pure destruction baby. supersexygorgeous, ma dear. It was an embarrassing photo because it was misrepresentative—upon seeing him, she would certainly notice that he’d developed a little pudge around his scrawny torso.

  Corderoy commented on her photos (that’s hawt, you’re so effing cute!, et cetera) following what he now realized to be the standard courting rituals of the MySpace digerati, or as he liked to think of them, MySpacesters.

  He spent the next few days flirting with Sylvie via instant messenger. He became intimately familiar with the musical stylings of Daddy Yankee (Reggaeton, Wiki had told him, with a “dembow riddim”), he had come clean about his long-hidden love for Disney music (he had all the words to the Little Mermaid soundtrack by heart), and he knew the intricacies and subtle variations in lingual pleasure (secondhand) of the many types of Pillsbury Funfetti cake products, including the holiday, Valentine, and Halloween batters, the brownie mix, and of course, the frostings.

  But he had not succeeded in moving the relationship from text to speech, though he’d dropped several large hints, such as it’s hard to tell this story by chat and omg you have to hear my impression of Jack Skellington. Nonetheless, a ghosthunting trip had been set for the coming Saturday, and Sylvie said she would message him on Friday with her phone number so they could plan where to go. This did not happen. Sylvie effected a total digital-communications blackout. Corderoy checked hourly, but she was never on IM, and the time elapsed since her last MySpace log-in grew and grew like a time-lapse shot of a testicular goiter.

  • • •

  As the week dragged on, he found himself obsessively alternating between two thoughts: Where did Sylvie go, she is so hot; and Why the fuck am I wasting my time thinking about this disgustingly conventional child. It was a phrase he’d lifted from Lolita. He found the book in one of the stacks near his mattress.

  Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obnoxious items in her list of beloved things.

  Sylvie was exasperating, clownish, and yes, disgustingly conventional. There was no better way to say it. The full recognition of this fact—that he had sought out someone whom he considered leagues below his maturity and intellect, someone he could manipulate and anticipate with ease, offering up just the right phrase to make her twitter or swoon, the recognition that she made his dick hard not in spite of her cloying idiocy but because of it—it made him feel ugly, monstrous. And as a direct consequence of thinking about Sylvie that way, he began comparing her to Mani, who was clearly of far greater value to humanity. (Two people are hanging from a cliff. You can only save one. The first person is wearing hot pants. The second has Euler’s identity [eіп +1 = 0] tattooed on her wrist. Whom do you save? Whom do you fall in love with?)

  The obvious solution was to retcon the whole thing. Retcon, short for retroactive continuity, was a tactic Corderoy had great familiarity with. Long-running comic books—often written by dozens of writers over the years—would sometimes manipulate history in order to make future story lines possible. Or, say, halfway through a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, the assembled nerds might rewind after getting killed by skeletons—we put on our armor before opening that door. Soap operas used this technique with abandon, inserting characters into the past, bringing the dead back to life.

  It would be no easy feat to rewrite the history of his contact with Sylvie, to remember her as whimsical instead of puerile, as witty, not superficial. Her absence would allow him to forget her flaws, but only if he could keep himself distracted. He needed to focus on things outside of his personal life. Fortunately, a distraction had just entered his peripheral vision: there was a criminal to oust from the White House. So when Tricia invited him to canvass with her in Ohio the weekend before the election, he found himself readily agreeing. After years on college campuses, he’d finally succumbed to an incipient form of political idealism. All it took was a shameful attraction to run from. Suddenly he cared. Maybe, just maybe, they could change the world.

  * * *

  John Kerry lost. And oddly, it was not Tricia who was staring at the post-election coverage on MSNBC, shocked in disbelief, glugging another tumbler of whiskey, Tricia who had cast her vote early that morning and then volunteered the rest of the day at a polling location in an Allston high school to provide oversight against voter fraud.

  It was Corderoy who stared at the TV in disbelief. Corderoy who had voted for the first time that day, experiencing an unexpected sense of civic pride. Corderoy who had felt, as he pulled the lever (though the parallels to a slot machine were hard to avoid), that he was a part of something larger, that he mattered, if only a little. It was Corderoy who kept shaking his head in exasperated confusion, Corderoy who had dreamed of sending Bush packing and welcoming Montauk home.

  Tricia had seen the exit polls coming in Bush, and though she, too, had begun numbing herself with whiskey in preparation for Kerry’s concession speech, she had quietly stepped out the back door of her mind when it finally happened, leaving the cloistered world of the American political show and entering the wings of the grand stage of the world, where real risks had real consequences. Last week she’d sent her résumé to Luc, along with an essay she’d written about her time on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, expressing formal interest in accompanying him and William to Baghdad as part of t
heir survey team. He’d written her back that same day, saying that he was “greatly impressed” by her experience, her enthusiasm, and the quality of her writing. But there were several interested parties, he said, and he needed a little more time to sort through his options. And then six days of unbearable silence in which she’d checked her e-mail compulsively, fighting off the urge to call him and ask. Somehow, with Kerry’s loss, her potential future with Luc in Baghdad became more of a certainty in her mind.

  Tricia emerged from her room, after checking her e-mail yet again, and stared at her group of friends. Jenny Yi had been on the verge of tears when Florida was called for Bush, and she’d burst out crying when Ohio had gone red; though she’d quickly retreated to the bathroom to wash her face, it hadn’t done much good. She still looked glum. Tricia’s friend Heather, whom she’d met on the campaign, was doing her best to present an indomitable spirit. “Tomorrow,” she was telling them. “We get right back to it tomorrow, keep the momentum.” Heather’s enthusiasm, Jenny’s gloominess, they both seemed silly to Tricia. It was Corderoy she felt sorry for. He’d gotten so excited in a week’s time. And now he looked like he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  The party began to disperse and Jenny, Heather, and the others gave each other long parting embraces. When they had trickled out the door, Tricia sat down on the couch next to Corderoy. “Not the end of the world,” she said.

  “I know. But still. Sucks.”

  “It’s the whole system. Even if we didn’t vote, Massachusetts would have gone blue.”

  “That supposed to make me feel better?”

  It didn’t change the fact that his best friend was still in Iraq. He’d never told Tricia that. He thought about doing so now, but he didn’t have the energy for the conversation that would follow. Corderoy rubbed his eyelids. Thinking about Montauk inevitably meant thinking about Mani, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Where the hell was Sylvie when he needed her. “I have to go read,” he said, and he retreated to his room.