War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  * * *

  Day 3 of my captivity.

  Get up, Hal. It’s shower time. Shower time seems irregularly spaced. I tried to expect it the first two days, but I’ve given up on that. It reminds me of when my dad used to wake me up for school in junior high. I was never ready. I’d turn the shower on, lie down in the tub, and get fifteen more minutes of sleep.

  Garret came in a little later, after the first round of tests for the day. He was reeking of cigarettes and I wanted one so bad. He stood above me while I sat at the computer, explaining the day’s test, and his breath washed over me with the smell of used-up nicotine.

  When Garret left, they brought in my meal: blueberry muffin, lemon chicken, peas, sweet potatoes, apple, small milk. WTF? I’m sure they’re keeping a record of what I choose to eat and how much I eat. I know they’re paying me, and they’re all really nice, mostly, but I feel angry. I want to screw up the experiment. I ate the blueberry muffin and the chicken, didn’t touch the rest. What do you make of that, Garret?

  * * *

  Day 4 of my captivity.

  The test is different today. The screen has a constant parade of random capital letters moving from right to left,

  K U S O C I G H Q I S K D E B H C [S] X P T L F K R F H G A S L Q I R P

  and I have to hit the space bar every time an S passes through the brackets in the center. This goes on for fifteen minutes. I want to just hit the space bar randomly, but I feel this stupid need to score well.

  At least the tests, which happen eight to ten times a day, feel like work. Work I can deal with. But after twenty-odd years of eating food, I’ve come to associate it with relaxation and enjoyment. So you can imagine how frustrating it is that the meals take on this same repetitive tasklike quality. After days of the same basic things switched around—bread, meat, veggie, starch—I’ve found myself combining the food in strange ways. Today’s meal: toast with jam, scoop of tuna salad, pickled beets, oatmeal, apple, small milk. I slid the beets over the lip of the tray trough and into the oatmeal. I spread the tuna on the jammed toast. That was quite good, actually—reminded me of a cranberry turkey sandwich. The beets in oatmeal were harder to swallow but interesting—the creaminess of the oatmeal and the sugar seemed to repel the flavor of the vinegary, salty beets. I took one bite of the apple. I didn’t touch the milk.

  When Shackleton’s ship was crushed by the pack ice, and they were stranded on the featureless white floes of the Antarctic, they ate meals of bannock and seal hoosh, whatever those are. They were each rationed a cube of sugar, a mug of powdered milk. Once, they ate dog pemmican, baked beans, canned cauliflower, and beets cooked together in an empty gasoline can.

  * * *

  Day 5 of my captivity.

  Wake. Shower. Test. Eat. I wrote about my day, Garret!

  * * *

  Day 6 of my captivity.

  Didn’t sleep well last sleep time. I had finally adjusted to the EEG cap prickling my scalp. But I started thinking about my brain waves being recorded, and then I thought, My brain waves must be different when I’m waking and when I’m sleeping, and do they change depending on what I’m thinking about and how hard I’m thinking? And if I’m thinking about my own brain waves, will that throw the electroencephalograph into some sort of recursive feedback loop until the machine explodes?

  The lights went back up sometime later. I took out Endurance and tried reading. I’ve been going through it slowly, rereading paragraphs, even whole chapters sometimes, lingering, savoring the experience of that world. It’s my only book in here and it feels like the last book in the universe. The waking-period light is sufficient for reading but not comfortably so. It’s never bright, never like sunlight or even like cafeteria lighting. More like restaurant lighting at dinnertime, soft yellow, never energizing or oppressive—like twilight—that hour of the day when you can’t tell if it’s just after dawn or just before sundown. As Lansing describes it, a hazy, deceiving half-light remained . . . But it was difficult to perceive distances. Even the ice underfoot grew strangely indistinct so that walking became hazardous.

  But I found a way, Garret. I found a way to tell the time. You came in late in the waking period—shoulders slouched, eyelids a quarter closed, hair mussed, strong cologne covering a hint of booze—a hung­over dude if I’ve ever seen one. It must be late morning. Out in the real world. In Boston, where Mani is. Which means it must be late afternoon, I think, in Baghdad.

  * * *

  Day 7 of my captivity.

  Wasn’t hungry today, but found myself craving milk for the first time in my life. I took a bite of my dinner roll and washed it down with 2 percent. It was so cold I had to stop halfway through the carton. I wiped the milk off my mustache and realized how long it was, projecting out over my lip like an awning. I haven’t trimmed my beard in over a week. There are no mirrors in here. I finished the milk in one long series of gulps. The sliminess, stickiness of it in the back of the throat.

  They took the tray away and I saw Garret note something down on his clipboard. He left, and a minute or two later, his voice on the intercom announced that it was test time. But I couldn’t focus. Mani drinks milk. Not like her cereal milk, or dipping cookies or anything, but she’ll just pour herself a glass of milk. I never understood it before. But I do now. I think it reminds you that you’re human—the way it lingers in your esophagus, it makes you conscious of the whole process, the fact of your biology.

  * * *

  Day 8–9 of my captivity.

  I’ve been up for who knows how many hours. This is the part Garret warned me about—a double-length waking period. I can’t leave the bed. The lights are on. They stay on. The room is hazy and featureless and everything is white. Even I’m white. I was already vitamin D–deficient.

  They put the computer on a wheeled cart and brought it next to the bed. I sit here with the keyboard on my lap, waiting for the letter S, waiting for the flashing light. My scalp is wired and itching and wet. I make my way slowly through Endurance. One looks forward to meals, not for what one will get, but as definite breaks in the day. All around us we have day after day the same unbroken whiteness, unrelieved by anything at all. I picked the right fucking book. The same apple, the same milk, dinner roll, slice of ham, steamed carrots. I’ve had five meals already, which means, I think, that I might get to sleep soon.

  I need to sleep soon. I can’t take any more tests. My legs ache. Bedsores? I’ve begun counting again, like on day 1. A tally sheet of infinity. Every individual minute had to be noted, then lived through and finally checked off. There was not even a crisis to relieve the tortured monotony.

  • • •

  Have had my last meal—I think—and they’ve got to shut the lights off soon. I’m nearly done with Endurance. The lights are on. The EEG is reading my brain waves. Writing keeps me awake—sort of. It would be so easy—I’ve slept under brighter lights than this—to just doze off. Shackleton leaves twenty-two men stranded on Elephant Island and goes for help. He takes the small lifeboat, the James Caird, and after crossing seven hundred miles of the deadliest waters on the planet, he and five others arrive at South Georgia. But they arrive on the wrong side of the island. He hasn’t slept in days. But there’s nothing else to be done. He and two other men prepare to cross the uncrossable glacier that covers South Georgia, riddled with uncharted chasms and crevices. They’ve only got fifty feet of rope and a carpenter’s adze—the woodscrews from their boat extracted and driven through the soles of their tattered boots. And they make it to the top of a crest, but they’re exhausted, and night is falling, and if they camp up here they’ll freeze to death. And so they slide two thousand feet down and incredibly, they live. And they continue marching, with no time for rest and only small breaks for seal hoosh. And after several wrong turns and hours of wasted exertion, they’re very nearly across the island and they’ve been traveling for over two days without rest. And they are s
o close to salvation but so near utter ruin.

  Almost at once Worsley and Crean fell asleep, and Shackleton, too, caught himself nodding. Suddenly, he jerked his head upright. All the years of Antarctic experience told him that this was the danger sign—the fatal sleep that trails off into freezing death.

  * * *

  Day 10 of my captivity. Waking Period 10 of my captivity.

  I cannot describe how soundly I have slept. The dark is gone again and I’m back in the low light of not day . . . from now on, I’ll use the phrase “waking period.”

  Meals and tests. A shower. Blood sample. Saliva sample. Urine sample. After giving me the daily alertness questionnaire, Garret sat down to review his notes. I asked how long. He smiled and left.

  * * *

  Waking Period 11 of my captivity.

  What an invaluable resource this book has been to me. I finished and started over yesterday and am now reading so fast I am almost halfway through it again. Day after day after day dragged by in a gray, monotonous haze. Each day became so much like the one before that any unusual occurrence, however small, generated enormous interest. I’ve taken to observing Garret, and the nurse, Barbara, and any other doctors who come into my room on rare occasions. When people ask, “Who watches the watchers?,” why do they always leave out the possibility that the watched can watch as well?

  There was a small but strange incident earlier. Barbara was drawing my blood after the second meal of the waking period. She’s in her mid-thirties, black hair in a bun, wears lots of makeup, smoker’s voice, has a big rack. Not really my type, but Mickey would certainly bang her. Garret came in just after she had stuck the syringe into the IV in my right arm. I was holding my book in front of me, but I was actually looking out of the corner of my eye at Garret.

  GARRET: (walking in) Hey, how goes it?

  NURSE BARBARA: (not turning away from my arm) All right.

  GARRET: (affecting a shit-eating grin) He’s not giving you any trouble, is he?

  NURSE BARBARA: (not turning away from my arm) No.

  GARRET: (shit-eating grin disappearing) Oh.

  I couldn’t believe it. Garret had been trying to flirt. And he’d failed his fucking nuts off. Nurse Barbara finished drawing my blood and left without so much as a word to Garret. Then Garret left, as if his walking into the room had been an innocent mistake. And I was alone. It felt like it should have been test time, or shower time, or mealtime, but it was nothing time. I lay in bed. I thought about picking up Endurance again. I thought about Mani at Swedish Hospital, unable to move, trapped in the gray monotony of her own unconscious mind. I look back at the person who left her there. He is so desperate for forgiveness. I wish I could give it to him.

  * * *

  W.P. 12 of my captivity.

  Had a small breakdown this waking period. I finished Endurance again early in the day and couldn’t bring myself to flip back to page one a third time. I didn’t feel like writing. There was nothing to pass the time but the fucking PVT and meals. Garret’s voice on the intercom: Test time, Hal. And the PVT had cycled back to the simple flashing light from the initial waking period. See light hit space bar. See light hit space bar. I began whapping my thumb down with a slight rotation of my wrist, like how you strike a snare drum, and the causation seemed to flip. Whap! Light, whap! Light. I began striking the keyboard harder and the space bar stuck—it didn’t pop back up. But the lights went on flashing in their inscrutable pattern—which didn’t make any sense, because if my whaps were causing the lights to flash, then how—unless it was like winding a crank engine on an old-timey car, and once you got it going, it just kept on. Even if that was true, they weren’t judging me by the efficiency of the motor, but by the rhythms that I turned the crank handle in, and the handle—the space bar—was broken!

  So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I freaked the fuck out. I stood up from the PVT, I pulled my hair, Garret’s voice on the intercom: What’s wrong, Hal? The test isn’t over. Hal? I went into the shower and turned the water on and stood there with my gown on until Garret came in and shut the water off.

  “I’ve got to get out of this room,” I said. “I can’t do it anymore. Let me out. Garret, please, let me out.” He handed me a towel and stood there while I dried my head. I kept my face against the terry cloth for a good thirty seconds, and when I looked up, Garret was sitting down on top of the toilet lid. He looked up at me at said, “Don’t do this, Hal. Please. We’ve had two other participants quit early.” He was earnest and exhausted. “Please,” he said. “Please just stick it out, Hal. I need this.”

  I wanted to ask him why he needed it—if he had to write a paper or something, or if he’d get in trouble with whoever was funding the study, but instead I asked him how many days were left and he said he couldn’t tell me but that it wasn’t much longer. He left and I lay down on my bed on top of the sheets.

  I was wrong about Garret the whole time. He’s not an asshole. He’s just socially awkward. If he looked like your average dungeon master, it would be obvious that his social skills were lacking, but since he’s handsome—curly hair, scraggly beard, a strong jawline—and dresses well, he seems like an elitist dick. But his reserve isn’t reserving anything! He’s even more socially inept than I am. This realization is oddly comforting, and hopefully it will get me through another battery of PVTs and blood and urine samples and interchangeable meals. It’s got to be over soon. Please let it be over soon.

  ___

  W.P. 13 of my captivity.

  Another body in the river today. Ho-hum. Meals and tests. How can they expect us to walk through the rubble of this city like ballerinas when we’re so bagged down with ammo and armor, which we couldn’t even remove if we wanted to. At my easel today, my mind is a riot of color and shape. Substances course through my body. THC. Alcohol. Naproxen. Images bloom on the canvas: Hal in a white room. White sheets, white walls, everything stark. His thoughts taking shape above his wired skull: Mickey, ice floes, explosions, and most prominently, me, the woman stuck in the back of his brain, painting his likeness, half-awake and dreaming.

  * * *

  W.P. 14 of my captivity.

  I awoke to the slow plucking of wires from my scalp, as I awake every waking period—but it wasn’t Nurse Barbara. It was Mani leaning over me, nipping out even through her thick lab coat, carefully removing the engorged ticks and eating them like a monkey. And Mickey came in with his clipboard and said, “Sorry I’m late—you know how it is leaving your mom’s house.” And he was huge—his arms were as big as my thighs—and he was bald, dog tags the size of playing cards hung down to his sternum. And once the EEG was off, Mani sat cross-legged on the bed and began knitting the wires into a little blanket and Mickey sat me down at the PVT and said, “Test time, Hal.” And I worked that PVT like I was pumping the holds of the Endurance, all night, working with closed eyes, like dead men attached to some evil contrivance which would not let them rest, and I asked Mickey how I was doing and he said it was all subjective anyway, and Mani was gone, buried in a pile of blanket, pulsing with my brain waves. I could smell it in the air, the world was ending, one second at a time.

  50

  * * *

  A wave of nicotine washed over Corderoy’s brain. His body was still adjusting to the ball-freezing air of Boston in early March, his eyes still relearning daylight. Mani had rolled him a cigarette. They stamped out their butts on the cobbled walkway of Winthrop Street and ducked into the basement hideaway that was Grendel’s Den. Corderoy grabbed a table in the corner and proceeded to wobble it intentionally while Mani took her seat. None of the furniture in the hospital had any wobble to it; how he had missed these imperfections.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Corderoy transferred the task of nervous movement to his knee. “Yeah. I like the light in here.” There were low incandescents, a little daylight through street-level windows. The waitr
ess came and left with their drink orders.

  Corderoy stood abruptly and said, “I think I’m gonna hurl.”

  He ran to the bathroom, hunched over a toilet, and began dry-heaving.

  A minute passed.

  His nausea ebbed.

  He washed his face.

  He felt fine, didn’t he? He did.

  “Nicotine hit me hard,” he said, sitting back down across from Mani.

  “What was it like it in there?”

  “It was. There were a lot of things it was. But mostly it was lonely.”

  The waitress returned and set a Tom Collins in front of Mani. In front of Corderoy: a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, and a pint of Guinness. Mani ordered a burger, Corderoy a Reuben. As the waitress left, Corderoy lifted the coffee to his lips and carefully sipped, then slurped, then slugged the whole cup back like a shot. He savored the milk a bit longer, letting the slime linger on his tongue, and when it was drained, he settled into his Guinness, letting the foam froth over his mustache. His facial muscles began twitching from the caffeine.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Mani said.

  Corderoy smiled and gulped down the cold black of his Guinness. “How are you?” he said. “What have you been up to?”

  Mani stared at him as if he were an art object, a favorite sculpture she hadn’t seen in years. “I finished the last two paintings in the Seuss series,” she said. “I have to drop them off at the gallery next Friday.”