War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  “That’s incredible. Are you excited?”

  “They’re not good enough yet.”

  “They never will be.”

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “You have high standards is all.”

  “Hal,” Mani said, reaching out to touch his arm.

  But the waitress returned with their orders, and Mani drew back to make room for the plates.

  The waitress left, and Corderoy snatched up his Reuben to take a huge bite. “Hot sauce,” he said. “How have I lived without hot sauce?” He half stood, holding the dripping sandwich.

  “Sit down, dork,” Mani said.

  As she walked away, Corderoy followed her ass, the way his eyes sometimes latched on to a railroad tie from the train window.

  He was still holding his sandwich when Mani returned. He opened it up and she dashed some Tabasco on it. Corderoy bit in. He chewed and chewed and just kept on chewing that first bite—the meat was fatty and moist and delicious. He barely said a word as he devoured the rest of the sandwich. Mani had eaten only half her burger.

  “Did they feed you in there?” she asked.

  “Hospital food,” Corderoy said. “But hey, can’t complain. They paid me two grand. That’s enough to put first and last month’s on an apartment.” He had been waiting to say those exact words and was now carefully observing Mani’s reaction.

  “It is,” Mani said.

  Something tiny snuffed out in Corderoy’s chest. After a moment, he said, “Where should I look?”

  Mani finished off her Tom Collins, then stared enigmatically at him. “Don’t look,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Right now, I mean. Close your eyes.”

  Corderoy did so, and the pub became a soundscape of clinking silverware and chaotic chatter, laughter, indie music.

  “Open your hand,” Mani said.

  Corderoy felt the object. It was cold, jagged. It was metal. “Can I look?”

  “You can’t tell what it is?”

  “It’s a key,” Corderoy said.

  Mani said nothing.

  Corderoy opened his eyes and found hers, still and attentive.

  “I missed you,” she said. “But that’s not a good enough reason.”

  “Is there one?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “So.” He looked down at the key and rubbed it between his fingers like an old coin.

  “That key is for tonight.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Maybe I change the locks tomorrow.”

  A weakness rippled through Corderoy’s being but quickly passed.

  “And maybe I don’t,” she said. “That’s the best I can offer you.”

  “I fucking love you,” he said.

  • • •

  It was dark when they left Grendel’s Den. Mani lit up a joint in the alley, and when Corderoy took a hit, his mind bloomed like a bud opening after weeks of night. They made out against the wall for a moment, then stumbled back to what had been Mani’s home, what was, for tonight at least, their home.

  Corderoy slung his body into what had been Mani’s bed—tonight, their bed—and exhaustion clocked him in the head. Mani crawled in beside him and fitted her body against his. His face was numb with oncoming sleep, and his last thought felt like the last thought he would have before his soul—if he had a soul—slipped from the husk of his harrowed body. It was a thought aware of itself as a weed-and-booze quintessence: all of Boston, and his months of floating through grad school, of giving away his blood, his urine, his semen, his sleep—it was a voyage in a lifeboat in the Weddell Sea, dodging floes and slowly dying of thirst, and now, after a winter on the treacherous ice, he’d found solid, unsinkable land, right where he’d left it, land at the end of the known world, a rocky inhospitable island leagues from civilization, but land, immovable, magnificent land. Corderoy melted into a dead and dreamless unconsciousness and slept as he had never slept before.

  Mani lay awake for a moment, staring at his child’s face. In the two weeks since her visit to the clinic, she had come to think about her life in a new way. You make decisions; some are reversible and some are not; and they have consequences that are both bad and good. Nothing is pure. Nothing easy. When she settled into sleep, she did so uncertain of what her world would be like upon waking, her mind circling the suspicion that there was a deep relationship between uncertainty and beauty.

  BOOM

  51

  * * *

  Montauk awoke, covered in sweat. He hit the illuminator button on his Casio: 3:12 a.m. He’d been dreaming about the skull, the skull that Monkey had brought him. A skull in a paper bag. He slid out of his cot, opened his footlocker, and lifted out a pile of shirts and socks. There it was, barely visible in the dim light from the exit signs and the small glowing dots from sleeping electronics. A smell of damp earth. A smell he’d grown fond of over the past week, taking intermittent peeks at his prize, picturing it sitting on the mantel of the fireplace in the house he would have one day, making enigmatic comments about its origin to a dinner guest over a glass of brandy.

  He’d obsessively researched Army regulation on penalties for possession of prohibited items, in this case, war trophies. Human remains, whether enemy or civilian, were certainly contraband. Who knew what they would do to him if they found out. There’d probably be a 15-6 investigation. He could get an other-than-honorable or possibly even jail time. Mostly he worried what his platoon would think.

  He’d read about soldiers in World War II taking the ears, teeth, and even full skulls of Japanese dead in the Pacific theater. It was contraband then, too, but regulations must have been a lot more lax. From what he’d seen here, even snapping a photo of yourself with a hajji corpse would, at the very least, expose you to the salival spray of Greywolf Six.

  Montauk had thought of a dozen different methods to smuggle the skull back. There were thousands of packages and crates that left the country every day. He could ensconce it in dirty clothes in his duffel. He could build a false bottom in one of the electronics crates to be shipped back to Fort Lewis at the end of the deployment. He could buy a soccer ball and carefully slice it open.

  But as he looked at the skull for the tenth time this week, at what was now surely three-fifteen a.m., the smell made him retch. Montauk shoved the skull in his backpack, laced up his boots, and left.

  Outside, he passed a soldier from 1st Platoon who was standing guard. “Everything all right, sir?” he asked after taking a drag from his cigarette.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Montauk said. He walked on, then turned abruptly and asked the soldier for a smoke.

  The nicotine washed through his blood and brought a sense of calm to him as he stood on the bridge and leaned out over the Tigris. He was far enough from the BOB crew that no one would notice if he did it quickly. He fished out the skull. He moved to his left a little to avoid the mud pit around the pilings where Aladdin had gotten stuck. But he couldn’t just drop it at an instant. He found himself staring at it wistfully. He or she might have been one of Saddam’s victims—where could a kid like Monkey get a skull except from some mass grave? Mysteries piled on mysteries, but the mystery of death itself was surely at the top of the SecDef’s known unknowns. Depending on the answer to that mystery, even murder could be a blessing. Some half-­remembered and malformed version of Hamlet’s “poor Yorick” speech fluttered through Montauk’s head, then he kissed the skull on its bony forehead and gave it a reverent toss into the water below.

  * * *

  Sodium Joh was hunched over in the backseat of the Millennium Falcon, trying to get his dick into the mouth of an empty plastic water bottle.

  “What the . . . Are you jacking off back there?” demanded Ant from the driver’s seat.

  “I’m taking a leak, dude. Piss bottle,” yelled Joh. Thomas sat on the
other side of the backseat, encased like a sweating sausage in his battle rattle. Sergeant Fields’s feet dangled between them as he reclined in the sling attached to the gunner’s turret.

  “Oh, dude, I gotta piss, too,” Ant said. “Hey, sir, could you find a bottle for me? I gotta piss.”

  “I’ll hold the wheel. I’m not holding your dick, though,” Montauk said.

  Ant was chewing gum in a way that would have been loud if you could hear it over the roar of the Millennium Falcon moving over the highway. They had to keep a maximum speed of forty mph due to the extremely slow fuel trucks they were escorting, which was nerve-racking, as the trucks were fat and slow targets in one of the main IED alleys in central Iraq.

  Montauk had fallen into that passenger’s state of mind where, once you hit a certain speed, you perceive yourself as motionless, the world scrolling past you. And with the soft assurance of the pensive child he was when riding home on the yellow bus after a long day at school, he began to daydream. He daydreamed mostly of Tricia Burnham. He thought of her in Boston, which was probably cool and crisp right now. He thought of her reclining in a large, soft bed with puffy white sheets. Sipping tea and intelligently discussing the arts at a dinner party with her college friends. He’d been too harsh with her. She’d made a mistake, a big mistake, but what the fuck was he doing gathering his own intel through civilian sources anyway. He’d been an outright asshole, unwilling to admit his own fault in the Gorma shitstorm. It was calming to recognize that character flaw. He felt cleansed, as if admitting a sin. Knowing was half the battle.

  “Hey, Joh,” Fields said, leaning down from the turret. “Hand me that bottle. I need to piss, too.”

  “It’s full, Sergeant,” Joh said.

  “Thomas,” Fields said, “finish your bottle and hand it to me.”

  “You kidding?” Thomas said. “Your crotch is right in our faces. Gunner’s gotta hold it.”

  “Drink your fucking water or pour it on your stupid face or whatever and hand it to me.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, Sergeant.” Thomas drained his water bottle, then handed it to Fields. “One more thing, Sergeant,” he said. “How long exactly should we look at your dick?”

  There was a slight pause, then Ant burst out laughing. Then Joh, then Fields as well.

  At just that moment, a bomb dug under the highway exploded directly beneath the Millennium Falcon. Montauk’s view of the central Iraqi landscape skewed as the Falcon transformed into its namesake and the roll axis was introduced to its passengers. The altitude and roll became more pronounced as it picked up speed, and the landscape cut across Montauk’s field of vision. His tympanic membranes ruptured from the overpressurized blast wave, and his brain, reacting belatedly to the new direction, sitting as it was in a liquid-filled chamber, misfired as it pushed up against the bottom of his skull. He did not feel the metal biting into him as his brain slipped a gear and the image of Tricia Burnham that had been framed in his imagination became a memory; a memory of her with conditioned hair in a cool New England morning, looking at him and smiling, her chin propped up in her hand, a gift from Tricia, a portrait of how she wanted him to remember her, a sepia tone in a tasteful pewter frame to be placed next to a computer in an office cubicle and gazed at every so often during decades of a unique but not especially noteworthy twenty-first-century middle-class American life.

  FOOLS

  52

  * * *

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Montauk. Is that you?”

  Mani went blank.

  In the hallway outside her loft, the soldier stood impossibly erect in his green dress uniform, bedazzled with an assortment of abstruse patches, insignia, and pins that glinted in the afternoon light.

  “What is this about?” she asked. Had they somehow discovered their marriage was . . .

  “Your husband, ma’am. We apologize for the delay in bringing you this news. We had trouble locating your contact information.”

  How could she be so stupid. Of course it wasn’t that. Her internal monologue trembled past her lips. “No, no no. He’s not. He’s not.”

  “No, he’s not,” the soldier said. “He’s been wounded in action.”

  “Oh my God.” Mani took a few quick deep breaths. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was admitted with a compound fracture to his femur and cerebral edema due to . . .” The soldier’s eyes broke Mani’s gaze and looked past her into the room. “Traumatic brain injury.”

  Mani turned and saw Corderoy standing there, shirtless, in his boxer shorts, looking like he’d just been startled out of a postcoital nap, which he had. They both had. Oh God. “Mickey . . . ?” Corderoy said.

  The soldier looked back at Mani, a new sadness in his face. He sighed. Mani ran her hand through her mussed hair, knowing it didn’t matter, that there was nothing she could do to look more put together, dressed as she was in a torn pair of leggings and one of Hal’s T-shirts.

  “What happened?” Corderoy said.

  The soldier continued to address Mani. “His Humvee hit an IED while on a convoy into Diyala Province.”

  “What does that mean, cerebral, whatever you called it?”

  He glanced at Corderoy again. “I’m not a doctor, ma’am. They’ll have more information for you at Walter Reed.” He handed her an envelope.

  “This isn’t what you think,” Mani said. “It’s—”

  “It’s none of my business, ma’am. Is there anything else I can do for you in this time of need?” The words were so polite, and so dead, so rehearsed.

  “I guess not,” Mani said.

  As the soldier left, Mani closed the door and fell back against it. She surveyed her loft, her home, the Montauk family home. Dirty dishes near the wash sink, open tubes of paint on the windowsill, beer bottles overflowing with cigarette butts. And a man who was decidedly not her husband standing in the middle of the room, half-naked, staring back at her.

  “We have to go to D.C.,” he said.

  Mani heard the words but not their meaning. She walked over to the unmade bed as if she were going to collapse into it and drown in the comforter, but she merely stood there, looking down at her feet. There was a torn condom wrapper on the floor. She turned around and swiped it toward the middle of the room with her foot. “Clean this shit up,” she said.

  “What the fuck,” Corderoy said. “He’s my best friend.”

  * * *

  The exterior of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with its rooftop cupola and its colonnaded portico, looked more like a mansion in the English countryside than a trauma center. Corderoy and Mani passed a circular fountain big enough to swim in. On the landscaped East Lawn, ranks of soldiers did sit-ups while others knelt beside them with clipboards. Your everyday fitness test, except many of the soldiers were double amputees.

  “What if he’s . . . different?” Corderoy asked.

  “Don’t say that?” Mani said. “Whatever he’s gone through—”

  Corderoy grabbed Mani’s hand as they ascended the steps. They passed soldiers on crutches, in wheelchairs, and soldiers who looked perfectly healthy. Were they staff? Were they visitors? Or had they been wounded in some invisible way? Corderoy felt a gnawing anxiety in his gut that every normal-looking person they passed was either mentally crippled or missing his genitalia.

  “I haven’t stayed in touch like you have,” he said. “I’m not his best friend anymore.”

  “Stop it,” Mani said.

  But that statement had a mental momentum that carried him forward. He and Montauk had an intense connection, they’d become friends overnight, but it lacked the stability of a childhood friendship. Maybe it had already withered, maybe it had snapped the night of the last Encyclopaedists party. How would he know? What would he even say to Montauk? “Our rela
tionship,” he said, “it was never really characterized by emotional disclosure.”

  “Who are you?” Mani said.

  “What?”

  “Did you consider that maybe you’ve changed, too?”

  They reached Montauk’s room, but before Mani could open the door, Corderoy reached forward to ward her off. “I have to,” he said. “I have to ask.”

  Mani turned toward him expectantly.

  Corderoy hesitated. “Did you two hook up?”

  “No,” Mani said flatly. “Can we go in now?”

  Corderoy sighed. “Not at all?”

  Mani’s shoulders slumped as if she couldn’t muster the energy for anything but the unadorned truth. “We kissed,” she said. “And honestly, I would have. But Mickey’s a good guy. He’s a good friend to you.” As she said the words, though they felt true, they also felt hollow. She had been proud, those months ago, that her relationship with Mickey had not become sexual. Perhaps, on the threshold of witnessing Montauk’s injuries, she needed to see him in a heroic light. Or perhaps, as messed up as it was, she wanted to see how this new Corderoy would react to that sting. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, you’re right. He’s a good friend. Much better—”

  “Let’s go in already.”

  Montauk was asleep when they walked into his room. His left leg was in a cast, and his ear was covered with a gauze bandage that left a piece of sutured flesh visible. “Ohhhh, Mickey,” Mani said. She walked to him while Corderoy stood back, surveying the room. There were cards, books, flowers on the side table. Montauk’s parents had obviously visited. Venetian blinds on the windows, one of them twisted the wrong way. Something ugly breathed inside Corderoy, an oppressive guilt centered on the unconscious body of his friend. But then Montauk stirred. He blinked a few times, inhabiting the silence, taking in the presence of his friends. Corderoy pushed the feeling away. “It’s good to see your face,” he said.