War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  Corderoy had been so wrapped up with this discovery, so thrilled that his crazy data collection was turning out to be worth it, so relieved that it would, if he kept at it all night, yield an essay with some actual insight, that he hadn’t eaten since lunch. The hunger hit him abruptly, and he made a quick phone call.

  Thirty minutes later, Tricia knocked on his door. “You order a pizza?”

  He ran down, paid the Domino’s guy, and walked back up the stairs with his medium cheese, set it on the coffee table, and took out an oozing slice. He noticed Tricia eyeing the steaming pie. “Help yourself.”

  “You know Domino’s is owned by a right-wing, anti-abortion nut job.”I

  “Does that make it undelicious?” Corderoy said.

  “Lots of things are delicious.”

  “Yeah, but this is right here in front of you.” Corderoy took a big bite, cheese stretching off the pizza and dripping onto the cardboard below him.

  “Not that hungry,” Tricia said.

  “I gotta get back to writing,” Corderoy said. He took another slice with a napkin. “I’ll leave this out here, in case you change your mind.” He nodded toward the pizza. “Know your enemy?”

  Corderoy shut his door and Tricia was left in the living room, breathing in that unparalleled pizza smell. She tapped her foot, glanced at Hal’s door, then took a slice and retreated to her own room. Wasn’t she allowed one small slip from an otherwise cautious and moral set of consumer habits? It was warm, salty, and luxuriant in carbohydrates. She ate it quickly. When she’d finished, she lit a cigarette without holding it to her mouth—it took at least five seconds of direct flame to get the tip embering without drawing air through it—and after it was lit, she took a long and indifferent drag.

  * * *

  I. False. Though Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s and a staunch Catholic, donated tens of thousands of dollars to anti-abortion causes like Operation Rescue, he had sold the company to Bain Capital in 1998.

  16

  * * *

  After a shower, Corderoy did twenty push-ups, dressed, and went out to buy some Funfetti cupcake batter, a can of Funfetti frosting, a jar of sprinkles, and—he almost forgot—a cupcake tin. By three p.m., he’d carefully frosted each of the twelve cupcakes, meticulously sprinkled them to ensure an artful and even distribution, and sealed them in a rectangular Tupperware.

  He did more push-ups, showered again, shampooing his pubes this time, then put on his brand-new pair of boxers. He walked into the living room, smiling like an idiot. Tricia came out of her room and cocked her hip to one side, surveying him. “Got a date or something?”

  “How’d you know?” Corderoy said.

  “You’re grinning like an idiot. And you haven’t showered twice in the last week. Who is she?”

  “Just someone I met.”

  “I want the dirt later,” she said.

  “Shit,” Corderoy said. “Forgot to brush.”

  He closed himself in the bathroom and brushed his teeth longer than he’d ever brushed his teeth. After five minutes, he took a swirl of Tricia’s Listerine, which burned the hell out of his mouth, but that’s how you knew it was working. He walked out of the bathroom, tugging at his jeans—the boxers were riding up—and went to his bedroom to get his coat.

  What he saw did not augur well for the future of his romantic life. Tricia’s cat, Smokey, was standing on his bed, back arched, tail up, midloaf. Without thinking, Corderoy flung open Tricia’s door with the intention of telling her to clean the fucking cat shit off his bed and have his sheets washed, but what he saw in Tricia’s room made him turn in horror. He shut her door, picked up his Tupperware, and left the house with an image burned into his visual cortex: Tricia, grabbing for the bedsheet, something purple buzzing between her legs.

  He’d mapped out the quickest way to get to the Lotus Yoga and Dance Studio in Brighton, and it took him through the Ringer Playground. But he’d left too early, and it was only four-thirty when he entered the park. He didn’t want to wait around too long in the yoga studio, so he found a place on a low cement wall. The sky was overcast, and a slight breeze had picked up. He bent up the corner of his Tupperware and smelled the Funfetti cupcakes. They were almost sickeningly sweet.

  The Ringer Playground was bleak, graffitied, and cold. Narrow and litter-filled streets led into the shady and unkempt grounds. Staring through the chain-link fence to the baseball diamond, he thought of that scene in Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor clutches at the fence and all the children are incinerated by a nuclear explosion. This was a perfect place to get murdered. It was Brighton.

  He wandered around, smelled the cupcakes again, and checked his phone. As it neared five, he figured there was no point in waiting in the cold, so he left the park and walked along Allston Street until he hit Brighton Avenue, carrying the Tupperware on his perched fingers like a serving tray with a silver dome concealing carefully broiled game hens or a human head. It started raining, softly at first, and then, as if a switch had been flipped in the sky, it fell like billions of coins on the streets of Brighton. Corderoy ducked under the awning of the Lotus Yoga and Dance Studio, his coat lifted off his back and held above his head. His Northwest pride was deeply ingrained, and he was proud never to have carried an umbrella. But what he was slowly realizing in his first few months in the East was that in Seattle, it only misted. In other parts of the world, it rained. This was the second Boston rainstorm in which he’d been caught unawares. Corderoy looked down at his jeans: they were soaked up past his knees.

  He entered the yoga studio and walked up to a short, fit girl behind a podium.

  “You look lost.” Her eyes had a comfortably vacant look.

  “I’m not lost, I don’t think,” Corderoy said. “I’m looking for Sylvie.”

  “The class gets out in a bit,” she said. “Have a seat.”

  Corderoy had never been in a yoga studio and he felt slightly uncomfortable with the ambient spirituality—the purple and yellow walls, the exotically confused Indian/Celtic music, and the overly even cadences of the hostess’s speech.

  As the yoga class let out, a stream of sweating women (and a few men) parted the beaded curtain to the studio, some walking outside, others entering a door to the locker room.

  One of the girls stopped as she walked past him. She was not Sylvie. “Someone’s birthday?” she asked.

  “No,” Corderoy said flatly.

  The girl rolled her eyes and left. Corderoy covered up the Tupperware with his coat.

  More people filtered in over the next twenty minutes, and during that time, Corderoy checked his phone exactly twenty times: no missed calls, no text messages. Maybe he’d misremembered. Maybe Sylvie’s class got out at six?

  “Do you have a bathroom?” he asked the hostess.

  She directed him, and when he came back several minutes later, the lobby had cleared out and the five-thirty class had begun. The girl at the podium was missing as well. He sat down but realized that Sylvie could have slipped in and joined the class when he’d been in the bathroom. He parted the beaded curtain and walked through to the studio room to see a dozen or so women and two or three men in strange positions, falling and rotating and swooning and stumbling over one another like drunks. Corderoy tilted his head sideways as he watched one girl place her hand squarely between another’s breasts, then pull back, bringing the other girl forward as if her arm were a chain tied to the girl’s sternum.

  A bearded man in a tight blue turtleneck was crawling on the floor, orangutan-like, in long, uneven arm-strides; another man, taller and skinnier, had his hands on Turtleneck’s shoulder blades, trailing him as if he couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to mount him or if his hands were glued there and he was trying to escape.

  “You here for Contact Improv? First class is free.”

  Corderoy turned to see a slight blond girl standing
in front of him. Her face was small, with a broad forehead and a pointed chin; her hair was pulled back in a ponytail; her eyes were the size of apricots and of a similar color. She was stunningly beautiful, and Corderoy felt the same disturbing attraction to her that he sometimes felt toward anime characters.

  “Contact Improv?”

  “Think of it as distributing your weight in an interesting way. It’s all about awareness through movement, weight transfer, counterbalance. C’mon, you’ll like it. I’m Tanya, by the way.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Here. Lean into my palm.”

  Tanya stood there with an easy smile, holding her palm out to Corderoy as if directing traffic, swaying back and forth almost imperceptibly. Corderoy scanned the room once more. Sylvie wasn’t there. Finally, after about fifteen seconds, he caved: he leaned into Tanya’s hand. She pulled back and circled, drawing Corderoy’s center of mass with her.

  Corderoy shot a leg forward and righted himself, stepping back from her palm. “Okay. Well, that was fun.”

  “You know Newton and the apple, right? Sorry, I forgot your name.”

  “I never told you. But it’s Hal. Yeah, I know Newton and the apple, though I’m pretty sure that story’s apocryphal.”

  “Newton overlooked the question of how it feels to be the apple. We can transcend the law of gravity with the swinging, circulating attraction of the centrifugal force.”

  Even the hippies in Boston had an academic patois.

  “Try to be attuned to how gravity acts on your body, how your momentum carries you. Slip your shoes off. And roll up those wet pant legs.”

  Corderoy did, then Tanya took him by the hand and led him into the slow circus of undulating leotards. “Do you know the five rhythms?” she asked. “Flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. Just think about flowing. Put your hand on my shoulder.”

  He obeyed, and she began swaying and dipping, and Corderoy stumbled to follow her, then he leaned back and she drew forward as if attached by a length of elastic; her hand found his, and their fingers whispered back and forth, palms never quite aligning, fluttering, then she jerked forward—staccato—stumbled into him, causing him to stumble back until they collapsed into a muddle of too many limbs and faces, and Corderoy found himself torso to torso with the tall, skinny man who had been wobbling atop Turtleneck. Embarrassment flashed through his nervous system but vanished as soon as he recognized it. Following Skinny’s lead, he felt his joints tighten while his body became more fluid and he gave way to the inebriation of momentum and gravity. They interlocked their arms, bent, pivoted, and countered like robots with limited end-range movement—then Skinny went stiff as a beam and fell backward on Corderoy, his head landing in the crook of Corderoy’s shoulder, and as they stepped backward in a circle, Corderoy realized that this skinny, mulletted hippie had given him his entire weight, had entrusted a stranger with the job of directing his momentum and with keeping gravity from smashing his only and irreplaceable body into the earth.

  • • •

  When the class ended, Corderoy asked Tanya and Skinny, whose name was Gregg, if they wanted to get a drink. They agreed, and the three of them went down to Harpers Ferry. It was typical of the rock venues and bars found in the Allston-Brighton area: dark, divey, manned by rude, tubby bouncers, and overpriced, given its aesthetic. They sat at a small table, and before Tanya or Gregg had a chance to speak, Cor­deroy announced he was buying the first round. He went up to the bar and ordered three beers and three shots. When he returned, Tanya and Gregg were examining his Tupperware.

  “Are these Funfetti?” Tanya asked.

  Corderoy nodded and said, “Help yourself.”

  “My God, I haven’t had these since I was a kid,” she said. She and Gregg each took a cupcake, and Gregg took a beer. “Not much of a whiskey drinker,” he said, pushing his shot toward Corderoy. “You have it.”

  “It’s you and me, then, Tanya,” Corderoy said, holding up his shot.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tanya said. “I tried to tell you earlier, but I can’t. I’m allergic to alcohol,” and she slid her beer and her shot over to Corderoy. What the fuck.

  “Shit,” Corderoy said. “Sorry. I’ll get you a Coke or something.”

  “I’m okay for now, thanks. Cheers?” she said, holding up her cupcake.

  Corderoy laughed. Sure, whatever. “Cheers,” and he knocked his shot glass against her cupcake and Gregg’s beer.

  Corderoy had been hoping to extend the intimacy he’d felt with these two new friends, but by the time he’d finished his beer and shot, they’d exhausted their conversational topics of mutual interest—whatever connection they’d had was a bodily one, and he didn’t know how to keep it alive outside the yoga studio. He downed Gregg’s shot and started working on Tanya’s beer.

  “How long have you two been friends?” Corderoy asked.

  “Oh, we’re married,” Gregg said.

  “Oh. Congratulations,” Corderoy said. He tossed back the last shot.

  “It was a while ago,” Tanya said, patting Gregg’s leg under the table. “So, Hal, I’m guessing you didn’t bring these cupcakes for us. What’s her name? When do we get to meet her?”

  “Sylvie,” Corderoy said. “And probably never, seeing as how . . .” He took a few big swigs of Tanya’s beer. Fuck it. Why not? “She’s gonna die soon. Cystic fibrosis.”

  “That’s awful,” Tanya said.

  “If only all relationships were like that,” Corderoy said. “With a pre-set termination. No awkward breakups.”

  Tanya and Gregg shared the nervous look of a couple cornered by a mentally ill person on a city bus.

  Now would be the time to apologize, reverse course. But that would be boring. After the rush of unearned physical intimacy in the yoga studio, he needed intensity, drama, and if the only way to get that was by being an asshole, well . . . “She’s nineteen,” Corderoy said. “Met her on the Internet. Cystic fibrosis. And Crohn’s disease. You gotta admit. Pretty funny.”

  Tanya blinked her big anime eyes in disbelief, then stood and put her coat on. “Come on, Gregg.”

  They left. Just as well. It was hard to drink alone with other people. Corderoy checked his phone: no missed calls, no messages. He ordered another shot, downed it. Some people at the next table over leaned in and inquired about the cupcakes, and he offered them up, then ordered another shot. By nine, he had only two Funfetti cupcakes left, and he hadn’t so much as dipped his own finger in the frosting. He hid the Tupperware under his coat again, ordered one last shot, knocked it back, then stumbled outside. He sat down on the wet curb and checked his phone: no missed calls, no text messages. He opened up the Tupperware and bit into one of the Funfetti cupcakes. It was delicious. He took one more bite, then shoved the entire thing in his mouth; before he’d finished chewing, he did the same with the second, prying the paper cup off the back as he crammed it in. He swallowed, bit by bit at the back of his throat, until he was able to chew, and then he chewed and chewed until his mouth was empty.

  Standing up was not a good idea. He doubled over puking, splashing his lower legs and shoes. He had only eight dollars, so he hailed a cab, got in, and told the driver to take him seven dollars toward Central Square. They stopped at the bridge, and Corderoy walked home in the moonlight. The cat shit was still on his bed.

  * * *

  He was famished and hungover when he awoke the next morning on the couch. He needed grease. He fried up some bacon and ate it with his fingers.

  Tricia came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk, then stood near the counter drinking it. It sickened Corderoy to see the opaque film clinging to the glass after she tipped it back. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

  Then, without thinking how awkwardness would swoop down upon them, Corderoy said, “Sorry I walked in on you yesterday.”

  Tric
ia said nothing.

  Corderoy overcompensated. “You know, the good ol’ sock-on-the-doorknob trick actually works. And it’s refreshing to be that comfortable about it. My buddies back in Seattle used to say, ‘I’m gonna go masturbate the penis now. You wanna order a pizza in a bit?’ It was like, this is a thing I need to do, like taking a shit. Natural.”

  “Right. I’m not really comfortable with that system.”

  “What system do you suggest, then?”

  “How about not barging into other people’s rooms?”

  “Of course. Sorry. I was just upset. Because of Smokey.”

  “What?”

  “Shitting on my bed.”

  “No . . .”

  Corderoy nodded.

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you new sheets. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  Corderoy bit his lip.

  “Right,” Tricia said. “Sock on the doorknob.”

  • • •

  After eating, Corderoy felt better, less hungover. He sat down on the couch with his laptop and checked his instant messenger. Sylvie’s icon was inactive. He logged in to MySpace and checked her profile. It was one hundred percent gone. Deleted. Her picture next to her comments on his page had been replaced with a question mark. Orphaned sentences, no longer attached to a person. There was a sense of wonder at the feeling, like finding graffiti under the ash of Pompeii, and also a sense of devastating betrayal, as if letters from an ex-lover had lost their XOXO, Mani or Love, M and been replaced with XOXO, Error 404, Person not found. Sylvie hadn’t left. She wasn’t somewhere else. She had disappeared. From everywhere.