War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  As such, Tricia had been drinking steadily through the month of December, going out to dance clubs, hitting on boys—and girls—and generally keeping herself distracted from her own futility. She was a little tipsy when she arrived home, having drunk her way through a rather boring party that she’d gone to out of a sense of social obligation. She found Hal and his friend sitting on the couch listening to classical music. She brought out her bottle of Johnnie and poured them all glasses.

  “I thought you only listened to music with rapping in it,” she said to Hal.

  “I pretend I’m cultured when he’s around,” Corderoy said.

  “Dvor˘ák’s New World Symphony,” Montauk said.

  Tricia lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Montauk.

  “No, thanks, I got the Grizz.” Montauk pulled out a can of Grizzly long-cut wintergreen chewing tobacco, slapped it against his finger, then took a dip.

  “Give me that,” Corderoy said.

  Montauk did. Then he watched as Corderoy attempted, ­awkwardly, to flick his wrist in imitation of Montauk’s own fluid tobacco-­packing snap. He looked just like Aladdin. Tricia watched the scene with interest. After a few seconds, Corderoy gave up, took a clumsy pinch, and shoved it into his mouth, getting a fair amount on his tongue. He spent the next minute trying to maneuver the tobacco into the pocket of his lip.

  “How was your New Year’s?” Montauk asked Tricia.

  “Kinda boring,” Tricia said. “Though New Year’s Eve was fun.” She began telling Montauk about a cute girl named Autumn whom she’d met at a house party the previous night.

  Montauk wondered if this was some kind of ploy. Corderoy hadn’t said anything about Tricia being bi. Perhaps she was testing Montauk. “You can’t be serious,” Montauk said. “Autumn? No one is named Autumn.”

  “Maybe she had hippie parents?” Tricia suggested.

  “What happened?”

  Corderoy looked down at his feet to steady himself. He was feeling nauseated.

  “You all right, man?” Montauk asked.

  Corderoy nodded. He looked up to see Tricia take a long, slow, and disgusting drag on her cigarette.

  “We’d been making out in the back of the house,” Tricia said, “but then that Snoop Dogg song came on.”

  “Which one?”

  “You know, that one where the guy is singing at the beginning.”

  “Nate Dogg,” Corderoy said, under his breath.

  “Ah,” Montauk said. “ ‘It Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None).’ ”

  “Right, so I wanted to go dance, and Autumn says, ‘That song is one of the most disgusting, sexist songs ever made.’ ”

  “That’s what makes it so great,” Montauk said.

  Tricia hit him on the shoulder playfully. “I mean, time and place, right? You wouldn’t be able to dance at all if you subjected every song to some musical version of the Bechdel test.”

  “But I thought,” Corderoy said, “you said the subtle sexism, it’s the most insidious, or whatever. About Star Wars.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “You leave your goat untethered so often. How am I not supposed to get that sucker when I see the chance?”

  Montauk laughed.

  Corderoy puked into his mouth. “Blee light black,” he said. He rushed to the bathroom, flung open the door, dropped to his knees, and dumped his mouthful of minty-brown vomit into the toilet.

  He spent the next five minutes on the floor, breathing heavily between the occasional heave. He could hear muted laughter coming from the living room. He wondered if they could hear his retching.

  Once he’d gotten it all up, he washed his face and gargled mouthwash. He stared at himself in the mirror. His nose was covered in blackheads. His eyes seemed to be open wider than usual—nicotine? Maybe he was just tired.

  “That’s so cool,” Montauk was saying as Corderoy returned.

  “It’s not cool,” Tricia said. “It’s tragic. And in our own country.”

  “I didn’t mean it was cool, but you know, it’s cool that you helped with that documentary.”

  “Everyone should live on an Indian reservation for at least a few months.”

  “What if you’re from Sudan?” Corderoy asked. “Should you live on the rez then?” He stood up, stretched his arms above his head, and made a face as if about to yawn, found that he didn’t have enough sleep in him to get past that critical point, and then faked it, opening his mouth wide and long. “I’m going to bed.”

  “You feeling okay?” Montauk said. “Dip hit you pretty hard, huh?”

  “I’m fine. What time you gotta wake up?”

  “My plane leaves at eight-fifteen, so I guess be there by seven, leave here by six?”

  “Sounds good. See you shortly.” Corderoy gave him a stony look that said, Don’t, don’t you do it, then shut himself in his room and went to sleep.

  • • •

  “What do you do, really?” Tricia asked.

  “I told you,” Montauk said. “I fly blimps.”

  “You do not!” She hit him on the shoulder again. “For who?”

  “UAI. United Airships Incorporated. You think Goodyear owns their own blimps? They contract out to us, and we slap on their logo.”

  “But aren’t you a little young to be a blimp pilot?”

  “An aeronaut. And no, actually, most of us are young. The more experienced you get, the more likely you are to work ground control. Pays more.”

  “Shut up.” Tricia was grinning despite herself, and Montauk could see exactly where this was leading.

  “I didn’t create the industry,” he said.

  “How long’s the training? You go to school for it?”

  “Blimpsmanship is still on the apprentice system. I was going to go to grad school for literature. Got into Harvard, even, but UAI promoted me to Senior Aeronaut. Couldn’t turn that down.”

  “You got into Harvard?”

  “Yeah. Ask Hal. He’s still a bit sore about that.” Montauk smiled, leaned forward, and kissed Tricia. Within a minute, she was straddling him on the couch, pressing her mouth on his so fiercely that Montauk could feel her teeth and jaw and the entire weight of her head bearing down on him.

  Somehow, through his joking deceit, Tricia saw Mickey Montauk as an honest and thoughtful person, someone willing to consider anything, and in that, she envied him—it seemed a hallmark of wisdom, of experience—and it made her wet.

  Tricia pulled Montauk into her room, her mouth on his neck as they both stripped off articles of clothing. Montauk went down on her for several minutes, until Tricia lifted his head and said, “Do you have a condom?”

  “Hold on,” Montauk said, and he ran out into the living room in his boxers. He knocked on Corderoy’s door and said in a loudish whisper, “Hey, man, I need a jimmy hat.”

  Corderoy’s muffled voice said, “What?”

  “I need a condom. Do you have any?”

  “I’ll give you one in the morning,” Corderoy said.

  “No, idiot! I need it now.” Montauk tried the door. It was locked.

  “I’m sleeping,” the voice came back, then something unintelligible.

  Montauk sighed and went back into Tricia’s room. “Sorry,” he said.

  Tricia was lying naked under her comforter. “We probably shouldn’t, then,” she said.

  “Okay,” Montauk said, climbing into bed with her.

  That resolution lasted all of ten minutes. They moved through several positions until Tricia was on top. The lights were off. Montauk’s left hand was clenched on her right hip, where a small mole moved back and forth under his palm. His right kept awkwardly groping for her breast, but with the bouncing and the darkness, this was difficult, and he gave up after a short time and settled on slapping her ass. She wasn’t loud, but she was vigor
ous.

  She leaned down and placed her open mouth on his, taking in his tongue as the bouncing settled into a slow circular grinding. They breathed into each other. Then Montauk dug his nails into her back and brought them down toward her ass in a slow, deep scratch—and as if he were pulling a drawstring, she arched upright again, placed her hands on his chest, and began slamming her hips into him with more force. Montauk could feel his cock swelling and hardening beyond his control.

  His chest was suddenly wet. And then his face. Tricia must have been sweating hard. And then he felt drips land near his mouth and on his neck.

  “Oh my God,” Tricia said, jerking to a halt. “My nose is bleeding.”

  Montauk licked his lower lip and tasted iron. Tricia reached over and flicked on her desk lamp. There were bright red spatters of blood on Montauk’s chest, his neck, Tricia’s bedsheets, and, though Montauk couldn’t see them, his face. Tricia had a line running down from her nose and off her chin. A few drops had dribbled across her pale and perky breasts. She looked mortified. But then Montauk started laughing. He could feel his penis, which had gone soft, get slightly hard again inside her, and they laughed and laughed until their abs hurt.

  Tricia climbed off, plugged her nose with tissues, grabbed a towel from the back of her door, then straddled Montauk and gently wiped the blood off his chest and face.

  • • •

  It was 6:40 a.m. when Corderoy stumbled to the bathroom to empty his bladder; Montauk was half-naked on the couch. Corderoy nudged him awake. “Hey. Isn’t it—shouldn’t you . . .”

  Montauk’s eyes flashed open. “Oh, shit. What time is it!”

  “It’s . . .”

  Montauk looked at his watch. “Fuck.” Then at his bare legs. “My pants.”

  “What about your pants?”

  “They’re in Tricia’s room.”

  “Shut up. No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Goddammit. Go get them.” Corderoy got dressed as Montauk crept into Tricia’s room.

  He came out a moment later buttoning his jeans. They threw Montauk’s shit into his backpack and ran down to Central Square to catch the T. As the train pulled into the tunnel, they caught their breath and Corderoy turned to Montauk and said, “All right. Tell me.”

  “What?”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I just kissed her. We made out for a while on the couch, and then she took me into her room.”

  “You idiot.”

  “Sorry about waking you up.”

  “What?”

  “I knocked on your door at two.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I said, ‘Hey, man, I need a condom.’ And you said, ‘I’m sleeping. I’ll give you one in the morning.’ ”

  “Hah. So . . .”

  “So we decided not to.”

  “Oh?” Corderoy raised his eyebrows with affected surprise.

  “But then after making out for a while more, I got her too wet, I guess.”

  “Aww. No, don’t tell me that.”

  “She was a fucking tiger, man.”

  “Whatever.”

  “The weird thing was,” Montauk said, “well, she got a nose bleed. It got all over me.”

  Corderoy looked at him, shocked. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yeah. Except it wasn’t, really.” He could see that he was only feeding Corderoy’s loathing of Tricia, a girl who, in Montauk’s eyes, was completely undeserving of such contempt. “It was intimate,” he said.

  “You know what bothers me the most is just knowing that she felt pleasure and comfort, that she was happy even for a minute.” Corderoy clenched his fist in mock rage.

  “Dude, you’re becoming a supervillain or something. Like you don’t just have a twisted perspective, you actively want evil to win, knowing it’s evil.”

  “You’re saying it’s evil of me to loathe the thought of someone else being happy in any respect?”

  “I’m sure there are exceptions, but yeah, that’s the general idea.”

  When they arrived at Logan Airport, they discovered that the line to get through security was ridiculously long.

  “Fuck, I’m gonna miss my plane. I can’t miss my plane.”

  “You won’t,” Corderoy said. He left and found one of the airport security people, then explained that his friend, his active-duty friend, was in a rush. The lady escorted Montauk to the front of the security line. There wasn’t really time for a proper bro-hug good-bye. Montauk saluted to Corderoy just before walking through the metal detector. Corderoy smiled and flipped him off.

  As he walked out of the airport, he wondered if he really was evil. He’d never done anything too immoral. There was the night of the last Encyclopaedists party, of course, but that moment had been blocked from mental search queries. He’d never cheated on a girlfriend, but maybe the opportunity had simply never presented itself. It was entirely possible that he’d lived a moral life thus far out of nothing other than circumstance.

  34

  * * *

  After Mickey’s encouragement, Mani felt less like she was appropriating the imagery of war and more like she was entering a conversation about war; she quickly finished two of the three new paintings she’d begun: the flipped-over Bradley and the BMW crashing through a checkpoint. She’d discarded the third. She now had four completed paintings, and in the last week, she had started two final ones. These two proved the most difficult yet, for they were focused on people rather than vehicles. The first was of a woman dressed in a black abaya, cradling an infant with a single cartoonish curlicue of hair and an expression of blissful idiocy. The woman stood in a line of Iraqis waiting to be processed through a checkpoint into the Green Zone. A boxy soldier was patting down a spindly man in front of her whose head was out of the frame. And the woman herself: her midsection burgeoned as if she were horrendously pregnant—flames slipped through fissures in her garment, out her sleeves, indicating her imminent explosion. In the corner, inset in a circle, a close-up of her fist clenched around a detonation plunger. The earlier paintings had been all aftermath and explosion. This was detonation. It was not a painting of violence proper but of the birth of violence.

  The second painting was of a boy no older than ten with his back to the frame, walking through concrete corridors lined with Gordian spools of razor wire. In the distance, up in a tower bent like a palm tree, a bored soldier manned a fantastical overbarreled machine gun. Below him, near the iron pedestrian gate of the checkpoint, two soldiers rested their hands lazily on the bright orange M4s slung around their necks. And the boy: fuzzy green hair, loose-fitting blue shirt, his hands behind his back holding a grenade the size of a pineapple. It was not even the birth of violence, it was violence in utero, which made it all the more horrifying.

  At the rate Mani was going, scraping paint off and redoing the grenade, fixing the woman’s face, it would take her another month to finish these two paintings. But she would finish them, and they would be a part of the world.

  It was the 4th of January, and after a long day of painting, she made herself a drink and sat near her space heater, giving her back, her shoulders, her arms, but mostly her mind a rest. And then her phone rang with an unknown number. And she was terrified that it was Hal. That Mickey had told him to call her. Though she hadn’t spoken to Hal since last July, he had been an intermittent but persistent presence in her head. He mattered, for some annoying reason. Perhaps it was because he had betrayed her in a way that lacked finality or resolution. She felt an illogical and visceral fear that he was calling to take credit for inspiring her work, as if it wouldn’t have been possible without his emotional immaturity and general shittiness. Worse was the possibility that he was calling to apologize, which seemed like something she should want but also something that might somehow sap her creative drive.

  It was not Hal. I
t was Nikolai Andropov from the Lewis Gallery in SoWa. He loved the slides she’d submitted and was offering to display her work in the gallery. She absorbed the details numbly: she would have room for all six paintings, and the opening would be in late April. Her work would remain up for a month—anything she sold would be split between her and the gallery fifty-fifty.

  After she accepted and hung up the phone, she walked over to the windowsill. She lit a half-smoked joint from earlier, and as she inhaled, she realized that her period had begun. But instead of going to the bathroom to get a tampon, she lay down on her bed, a twin mattress in the corner, half covered in sketches and books. She finished the joint, letting her underwear stain. She felt like crying, and tried to briefly, but her eyes were dry, almost to the point of irritation. She felt like dancing, but she was exhausted. She didn’t know what she felt—she only dimly understood some urgent need to be understood.

  • • •

  The next day Mani tried to throw herself back into the work. But it wasn’t happening. She kept looking at her phone, cleaning, preparing meals she didn’t eat. Two things had happened: Mickey’s visit and his prompting had brought Hal squarely into the center of her consciousness, and Nikolai Andropov’s phone call had more than doubled the significant pressure she already placed on herself to make each line perfect, to make each moment of the painting own itself and inform the time-scape of all six. She was no longer working for herself.

  She left the house and wandered through the aisles at the Blick art store near Fenway. She was running low on violet pastel and cadmium yellow, and why not buy a book of Caravaggio prints? If Mickey was sending her money, she might as well spend it. She was examining a palette knife when her cell rang. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello, dear. I was shopping down on Newbury and thought I’d see if you wanted to go out to lunch.”

  Mani dropped the knife on the floor. She’d told her parents that she’d gotten a job sitting at the Alpha Gallery on Newbury. And now her mother was there!

  “I asked at the desk, but the girl, Amanda, she’d never heard of you.”