War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  • • •

  Montauk flung open the metal door and let his duffel bag thud on the floor: there was his wife, standing before him in all her pajamaed glory. They fell into each other and hugged long and close, but they parted with some minor awkwardness, neither wanting to be the first to release nor the one to hold on.

  Montauk wanted to say something grand about how great it felt to see her, but all he could manage was a long pause, punctuated with “Hi.”

  Mani laughed, lit a joint, took a drag, and said, “Welcome home.” She offered it to Montauk.

  “Can’t. Routine drug tests.”

  She took another few puffs, then stubbed out the joint and left it in an ashtray. “You can have liquor, though, right? Let me make you a drink.”

  “What can you make?”

  “Hot toddys. That’s about it.”

  “A hot toddy, then.”

  Mani clicked on an electric kettle, then poured whiskey into two mugs, added a cinnamon stick, a dash of lemon juice to each. While the kettle boiled, Montauk looked around her studio, examining a few scattered sketches, some small half-finished self-portraits. He noted that all the large canvases were draped with sheets.

  “Cheers,” Mani said after handing him his steaming mug.

  “Hooah,” Montauk said. The hot toddy was strong. Really strong. If his alcohol tolerance had weakened over the last few months of sobriety, Mani’s had increased. Either that or she was trying to get him drunk. “You feeling good about the work?” he asked.

  Mani shrugged. “It still feels . . . not fully formed.”

  Montauk nodded toward the covered canvases, but before he could ask about them, Mani said, “You’re alive. You’re still alive.”

  Montauk smiled.

  “Not that I thought—but—just tell me everything.”

  “There’s not that much to tell,” Montauk said.

  Mani tilted her head to the side like an unconvinced mother.

  And so Montauk told her everything, or nearly everything, with enough flavor to get the idea but without getting too specific. He didn’t want to lose control like he had on the phone. Mani was particularly intrigued by the little ruffian Monkey—she asked more questions about him than about the various car bombs or about Aladdin’s death. She sketched what she imagined his face to look like, based on Montauk’s descriptions, and as Montauk watched the shape of the skull take form on her sketchpad, he thought of the last time he’d seen Monkey and of the morbid request he’d put in. Mani didn’t need to know about that.

  “And how’s Boston been?” Montauk asked. “Have you hung out with . . .”

  Mani stopped sketching and reached for her joint.

  “. . . any high school friends?” Montauk said.

  She lit it, inhaled, and stared at him while the smoke filled her lungs, considering whether she should answer the question he’d obviously meant to ask. She exhaled, then told him about her time in Boston.

  And after a while, Montauk let his posture slip; he relaxed as the whiskey heated him from inside out. He began to see Mani, his wife, not as a sexual figure but more as a sister for whom he could wish only the greatest happiness and love. Whatever awkwardness had been nosing at the surface of their conversation sank into a deep black place.

  “So are you going to show me these paintings or what?”

  “You’ll see them, you’ll be the first. Trust me. I want you to see them. Just—not now.”

  “What are you worried about?” Montauk asked.

  “That . . .” That he would be offended? At her appropriation of the violence he’d lived with for the last few months? That he’d see through them? That they were false and he would know it and so would she? Mani sighed. “That you won’t like them,” she said.

  Montauk laughed. He stood and walked over to one of the large canvases. Mani made no motion to stop him. He whipped the sheet off the first painting and then stood back, taking it in—the bright primary, wobbly Humvee in mid-explosion. Mani tucked her legs up into her arms and stopped breathing as Montauk drew the sheet off the second painting.

  He let the slippery lines lead him around the painting’s plangent colors, pausing on the face of a small Iraqi boy, the stump of a dead soldier’s leg, and he did so with amusement and horror. He turned to her as if she’d just popped into the room.

  “These are good,” he said. “Really fucking good.”

  “Really? Really fucking?”

  “I mean it. These are something.”

  Mani had been holding her breath for fear that the air in the room had grown acrid, but when she exhaled and filled herself up again, it was sweet and so crisp that it belonged with a view after a long strenuous hike.

  “Not that I’m not worried about you,” Montauk said.

  Panic flashed back into her eyes.

  “I mean, you’ve set the bar so high, you’re going to need to work your ass off.”

  Mani laughed.

  “Are you going out tonight?” he asked. “It is New Year’s Eve.”

  “I don’t really dig on crowds.”

  “No parties or nothing? Don’t you have any friends in Boston?” He’d said it jokingly, but she glared at him.

  “We both know why you came back to Massachusetts. It’s not for your parents.”

  “Are you staying with him tonight?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Montauk said.

  “You kinda suck at planning ahead.”

  “Not planning is a luxury. I’m indulging.”

  “Stay here tonight.”

  “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  • • •

  This time he climbed into her bed, overpowered by the smell of her, wondering if that was what she’d felt that last night in Seattle, aware of his scent in a way he never could be. They did not touch, but they were close enough to feel the heat transfer between them. How unlike his cot in the Iraqi Convention Center. As he stared up at the dark ceiling, he said, “I’m gonna go see him tomorrow.”

  Mani didn’t respond. But he knew she was awake. “I could tell him to call you,” he said. “But I think you should contact him.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.

  “I’m not. Just a suggestion.”

  “Well, it’s been suggested. And don’t you dare tell him I’m in Boston.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  They shared a minute of silence, hearing only their mutual breathing, the small sounds of blankets moving against skin.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  “Really fucking good?”

  There was no radio noise from down the hall. Outside the loft windows, wind, just wind. Montauk waited for the chattering sound of small arms fire. Nothing. “Really fucking,” he said. He had never felt so safe.

  33

  * * *

  At 15:36 Eastern Standard Time on New Year’s Day, Second Lieutenant Mickey Montauk walked up to the olive-green duplex at 52 Fairmont Street and, as if drawing back to throw a javelin, balled his fist and pounded on the door. The January sun was bright over the snowed-in city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A hand holding a lit cigarette protruded from a paneled bay window on the second floor. The hand withdrew, and a few moments later, Tricia Burnham opened the door. She was wearing knee-high boots, a black skirt, and a white button-up blouse with frilly shoulders. Her hair was held in a bun with a chopstick. Her lips were bright red and her cheeks were powdered. One eye was deeply shadowed a midnight blue, the other was bare. She held an eye shadow palette in one hand and her cigarette in the other. “Can I help you?”

  Behold: a young woman. American, civilian, not off-limits to Montauk (as far as he knew). Seeing Mani in her pajamas had put him in a place of comfort. But here, seeing this girl in the act of beautification, the world of female disp
lay and male posturing came rushing back to him. He inhaled like a parolee stepping out of the pen on a fine autumn day. “Sorry to trouble you. My name’s Mickey. I’m looking for Halifax Corderoy. Does he live here?”

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  Montauk followed Tricia up the stairs, his head level with the shifting hemispheres of her ass. He was wearing a large black backpack, and in his left hand he carried an eighteen-pack of Miller High Life: the Champagne of Beers. Tricia slipped back into her room to finish her eyes. Her nerdy housemate had friends after all.

  Corderoy, having woken from a nap several minutes ago, was lying on his bed with his laptop open, looking at the recent changes to the Encyclopaedists article.

  There was a pounding at his door. “Hey, asshole, open up.”

  Corderoy opened his bedroom door to see Montauk wearing a coprophagous grin. “Holy what! What’re you doing here?”

  “I’m on leave. Back to Baghdad tomorrow.”

  “Well, where the hell you been?”

  “Visiting my parents, fuckhead.”

  “Right. How are they? I hope my affair with your mom hasn’t been causing any marital problems.”

  Montauk’s grin slipped a notch. “They’re fine. Though my dad’s getting suspicious. Apparently, after your visits, he keeps asking what smells like fag.”

  Corderoy laughed. “Hey, chill on the faggot stuff, my roommate is super . . .”

  “See you boys later,” Tricia yelled from the stairwell.

  The front door shut and Montauk looked back to see the living room empty. “She’s a lesbo? Too bad. She’s fucking hot, man.”

  “No, not gay. PC. And she’s not hot.”

  “Oh, please, dude.”

  “Her face is too sharp. She smells like cancer. And I hate the way she dresses.”

  “You must not have spent the last few months in Iraq.”

  “Don’t you fucking sleep with her. I mean it. The very thought . . .” Which was what, exactly? That Montauk and Tricia might have fun together? Why did it bother him to imagine her happy?

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Also, don’t tell her you’re in the Army.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be, I don’t know, awkward.”

  “What if she asks?”

  “Tell her you’re a blimp pilot?”

  “You idiot. Good to see you. Beer o’clock yet?” Montauk held up the eighteen-pack.

  Corderoy’s no-alcohol policy had shattered on Christmas Eve, and he wasn’t exactly happy about it. He wanted to live in moderation, to be able to have a few beers and call it quits. “It is now,” he said.

  They cracked a couple and sat down on the couch.

  “You look homeless, dude,” Montauk said. “When’s the last time you got a haircut?”

  “Seattle.” His reddish-blond beard had grown out considerably.

  “So. Tell me about Boston.”

  “Not much to tell. Been kind of depressed.”

  “Gotten laid?”

  “Nah.”

  “C’mon, man. It’s your job to be fucking chicks while I’m out defending democracy. You must have got some action. A date, at least?”

  Corderoy thought about bringing up Sylvie. It was the kind of story that would be funny to others if he could laugh along with them, but pathetic if he couldn’t. He pictured himself telling the story, willing himself to laugh, and Montauk seeing right through it and awkwardly changing the subject. “Fuck Boston,” he said. “Tell me about Iraq.”

  For the second time in as many days, Montauk related his life thus far in Baghdad: the havoc of car bombs, bodies in the Tigris, waking up to the sound of mortars, shooting up a car as it rushed toward the checkpoint and killing the family inside. Or imagining that happening anyway—a hundred horrific possibilities every single day. The tone had gotten serious, and Corderoy said, “Sounds rough, man.”

  “It’s not so bad. We got plenty of time to watch movies, read, and fuck around. Some of the guys in my platoon are pretty cool. Actually, you won’t believe this, but one of my guys, Private Ant, was at the fourth Encyclopaedists party.”

  “That seems so long ago.”

  Montauk pictured the small journal Mani had sewn together, its collaged cover with the snipped-out image of a bicycle carefully overlaying an old lithograph of the Trojan horse, Greek hoplites rappelling, each with a double-edged xiphos and round hoplon shield. The ­journal was in his duffel bag, only a few feet away, underneath an end table. “You want another beer?” Montauk asked.

  When he returned from the kitchen, he found Corderoy loading up his Xbox.

  “I’m not really feeling Xbox games,” Montauk said.

  “Nah, son. I like to start off the New Year with an old-school Nintendo game.”

  Montauk looked at him quizzically.

  “It’s modded,” Corderoy said. “I bought a chip and soldered it onto the Xbox motherboard. Now it can run emulators and shit. I downloaded every Nintendo game.”

  “Do you have Kid Icarus?”

  “I have every game.”

  “Like, every game ever?”

  “Yes, every game ever. Including the Japanese ones. But Kid Icarus . . . I don’t know. He’s not exactly an uplifting mythological figure. Let’s play Blaster Master.” Corderoy loaded the game, and after he pressed Start, a perfectly ominous four-toned MIDI progression played over a black screen. “Watch the intro,” he said.

  The backstory of the game unfolded in a short sequence of still frames: a boy’s pet frog escaping, bounding toward a radioactive crate; the frog growing by a factor of ten, diving down a hole in the earth; the boy leaping after it, finding a futuristic tank at the bottom of a cavern; fanfare and a revving engine and the boy driving the tank into a vast under-the-crust world to reclaim his pet frog.

  “Simple,” Corderoy said. “Ours is but to do or die.” He maneuvered the tank, jumping over chasms from platform to platform and firing missiles at slow-moving mutant enemies.

  “I can see why you like this,” Montauk said.

  “It really does cheer me up to play through the first half of this game. Then it gets too hard.”

  “Isn’t that your problem with life in general?”

  “Shut up.”

  “New Year’s, you know. Fresh start. Maybe you should make a resolution.”

  “Resolutions are just predictions of what you’re going to fail at.”

  “Maybe you should make a resolution to fail, then,” Montauk said.

  “Very clever.”

  As Corderoy approached the first-level boss, the music taking on an adrenal intensity, his cell rang.

  Montauk picked the phone up from the table. “It says unknown,” he said.

  “Answer it.”

  Montauk said, “Hello,” then after some mumbling on the other side, he cupped his hand over the phone and said, “It’s some professor from BU. Flannigan or something. Says you owe him a paper, that you still haven’t registered for classes for next semester, and that you haven’t been responding to e-mails.”

  “That’s nice,” Corderoy said. “Take a message.”

  • • •

  As the day wore on, Montauk tried probing into Corderoy’s grad school woes, but Corderoy steadfastly refused to discuss—because he refused to think about—the fact that he still had several papers to turn in if he wanted credit for his first semester, that he had no money to pay for tuition next semester, that he’d lied to his parents about receiving a fellowship from the English department to cover his expenses. They polished off the rack of High Life just as Tricia returned.

  Since the Kerry loss, she’d become annoyed with Jenny Yi, Jeff Alessi, and all her other friends who were so quick to say, “It’s only four more years. America will hate the Republicans even more by then. This cou
ld be a good thing.” It most definitely was not a good thing. And this made the cloying optimism of her social group all the more unbearable. She became frustrated with school as well, with writing papers and having class discussions. It had all begun to seem like superfluous preparation, research for a project that would never commence, work whose sole purpose was to create the illusion of accomplishment without setting foot outside and confronting the real problems of the world. To make matters worse, several of her professors at the Kennedy School were angling for positions in the White House, repeatedly missing office hours because of trips to Washington.

  Over Thanksgiving, her mother had tried to console her about the election, but Tricia wasn’t just upset about Kerry. The idea of Baghdad had bloomed in her mind over weeks and shriveled in the course of a night. Her mother would never understand. Her world was one of local politics and petitions and fund-raisers, and she would have been horrified at the prospect of her precious daughter traveling to a war zone.