“When will she wake up?”
“Hard to say. She’s been out of surgery for a few hours, but she needs her rest.”
They thanked the nurse and started down the hallway, but before they reached the waiting room, Corderoy hailed the elevator.
“I guess we’re not waiting, then?” Montauk said.
Corderoy didn’t answer. The doors opened, they entered, and Corderoy hit the button for Parking.
“It was late, all right? She ran across the street without looking,” Montauk said. “It’s not your fault.”
“Who said it was?”
They fell silent. Montauk leaned against the back of the elevator, looked down at his feet. Corderoy stared at his blurry reflection in the brushed-metal doors. “How do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
“She could have been trying to get hit. She’s super unstable.”
“She wasn’t trying to get hit, she just didn’t see the car.”
“How do you know?”
“No one tries to get hit by a car. That’s stupid. Plus, she wasn’t even that upset.”
“You said she was crying.”
“I said she might have been crying.”
The elevator stopped one floor before Parking, and an old man stepped in.
“It’s not your fault, all right?” Montauk said again, quietly.
Corderoy glared at him.
“Let’s go to Linda’s and get some breakfast.”
“I hate Linda’s,” Corderoy said, not bothering to lower his voice. The old man raised an eyebrow.
“You hate everything,” Montauk said.
• • •
They sat at a table in the back, near the jukebox. A stuffed buffalo head hung above them on the wall. Linda’s was even more crowded than usual. A waitress with spiderwebs tattooed on her elbows dropped off their Bloody Marys. Corderoy tipped his back and finished half of it in one gulp. He signaled the waitress.
“I’ve been called up,” Montauk said.
“Who called you?” Corderoy dropped his hand. “Oh.”
“I found out yesterday morning.”
“What about grad school?”
“I’ll defer, I guess. I have to report to Fort Lewis at the end of August for train-up. I ship out in late September.”
Corderoy stared into his glass. Montauk had been in the National Guard since they’d met, but the full reality of that had never sunk in. He’d taken Montauk’s affiliation with the armed forces as nothing more than a social trump to all the graphic designers and band members and bartenders who populated the world of post-college twentysomethings on Capitol Hill. But there was a war. No, two. Montauk would ship out to Iraq or Afghanistan eventually. “I’m sorry, man,” Corderoy said.
“I don’t need you to be sorry. It’s important work. Someone’s gotta do it.”
“Does someone have to do it?” Corderoy polished off his drink, felt the Tabasco burn up his sinuses.
“Somebody’s thirsty,” the waitress said, approaching from behind Corderoy.
His cheeks reddened. “Just get us a couple shots of whiskey.”
They sat in silence until she returned with the shots and their omelets. Montauk leaned toward her. “Don’t mind him, he’s still drunk from last night.” She rolled her eyes and left.
“I think I am,” Corderoy said. “I could hardly stay in my lane on the way up here.”
“You did kill that bottle of tequila.” Montauk tried to smile.
“Fuck, fuck.”
“Dude.”
“I know. It’s not my fault. But it sure fucking feels like my fault.” Corderoy poked his omelet with his fork. “Did you vote for Bush?”
“No,” Montauk said through a mouthful of egg.
Corderoy rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know they still haven’t found any WMDs.”
“So.”
“So? So the whole justification was fake!”
Montauk took another bite and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I actually read the Blix report.I Whether or not we actually find a nuke factory, there are reasonable grounds to think Saddam already built one. He’s done his best to make everyone believe he—”
“Wait, that’s why you’re doing this, because of the fucking Blix report?”
“No, genius, I’m deploying because I got orders from the SecDef, along with everyone else in my unit. I’m just saying I’m okay with it. It’s something real. I mean, everything we do . . . the Encyclopaedists and all that . . . it’s bullshit.”
“It was your idea.”
“Yeah, I know. It was fun.”
“It was.”
“I’m tired of fun, of racking up hipster cool points with the next clever thing.”
Corderoy downed his shot. Montauk waited until Corderoy finished, then matched him. “You’re saying my life is bullshit,” Corderoy said.
“I’m saying I can’t do it anymore.” This was true in a practical sense. Montauk was shipping out and would not be able to host absurd parties from the Middle East. But that would only be a limitation on his freedom if he saw deployment as a daunting imposition of someone else’s will. What if he saw it instead as the perfect opportunity to reinvent himself, a classic rite of passage that most of his coddled generation was denied?
“You weren’t saying that yesterday,” Corderoy said.
“I’m saying it now.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“You barely touched your omelet.”
Corderoy called for the check. It was two o’clock when they stumbled out into the hot afternoon. The streets were still damp, and a light breeze had picked up. They both looked dazedly around at the passing cars and toward the water. Downtown sparkled like a chandelier.
“What do you got going today?” Corderoy asked.
“I don’t know, you?”
“We could keep drinking.”
“We could write letters to our grandmothers,” Montauk said.
Corderoy pulled out a pack of cigarettes and gave one to Montauk. It took a moment to light them up in the wind. They exhaled lungfuls of smoke. “I don’t even want this,” Corderoy said before taking another drag.
* * *
Mani woke in her hospital bed and looked down at her suspended legs. Though her senses were dulled, she could feel the pain in her hip asserting itself; soon it would be the only thing she was conscious of. There was a buzzer for the nurse around somewhere, wasn’t there? As she pressed it, she saw the toy rifle and her cell phone sitting on the plastic chair. Had Hal come by?
Mani clenched her jaw, which was about the only part of her she could clench without pain. Hal had left her passed out at a party. The coward. And he’d come here and left again. Twice left in the same day. Who would do that? But how long had she been out? Maybe he’d waited for hours, sitting in that chair inventing silly backstories in his head for all the hospital staff. He wasn’t curious about other people’s lives so much as he enjoyed letting his imagination run ahead of him, and she loved him for it. She pictured the nurse telling her that a lanky boy with apricot-blond hair had been here all morning, that he’d just left, but she couldn’t imagine herself believing it. Mani winced as the pain blitzed from her hip up through her torso. She hit the buzzer again, tears running down her cheek. Of course he’d left. Who wouldn’t?II
The nurse arrived and said, “Ah, Ms. Saheli, you’re awake.” He was stout like Mickey, but softer, not as muscled. She didn’t like him.
“It hurts,” she said.
“You’re on a morphine drip,” the nurse said. “When this light is green, you can press the button to administer another dose.” He indicated a small black control pad connected to the IV line. “But it only works once every ten minutes. Here.” He pushed the button for Mani. “That should feel be
tter.”
A warmth traveled up Mani’s arm and flooded her chest, diffused down into her hips. The pain became merely the suggestion of pain.
“I have a few questions for you,” the nurse said.
Mani knew where this was going. She’d ignored the question when they rushed her through triage.
“We need to see about your insurance. If you don’t have any, we’ll call a social worker in to help you figure things out.”
“I don’t have a card,” she said, which was true enough.
“Are you on your parents’ plan? If you give us their contact info, we can get the paperwork started.”
She was on her parents’ plan, but her mother would see this accident as a punishment for all the ways Mani had screwed up. Even those she didn’t know about. Like last night. Mani could have said, I’ll find a place, don’t worry about it, I know some people. She hadn’t. And her not doing so had given Hal the opportunity to be an asshole and a coward. And now he was gone. How could she possibly explain that to her mother? “I’m not on their plan,” she said.
The nurse sighed. “I’ll see about that social worker.”
• • •
When he left, Mani submerged herself further into the morphine, as if it were a warm bath that was rapidly cooling. The control pad connected to her IV lay on the bed next to her. She picked it up. The light was still red. It had to be nearly ten minutes. She counted out a minute. Another. A third. She lost count as the morphine faded and the pain began to overwhelm her, somehow searing and glacial at once.
Then she remembered. She’d missed her period. She should tell them. The light turned green. She could press the button now. But she didn’t. She closed her eyes and everything was white. She could press the button. Could she? Her hip pierced her head like it wasn’t a part of her but a sharp instrument wielded against her. Maybe it was okay; maybe there was a different kind of pain medication that was safe. That wouldn’t endanger the— She couldn’t even think the word. She hit the call button and waited. And waited.
What seemed like hours later, a middle-aged man walked in and introduced himself as Dr. Santos. The fluorescent lights behind his head flared and Mani looked away, fixing her eyes on her tractioned legs.
“Ms. Saheli,” the doctor said, leaning down. “What can I do for you?”
“I think I might—I missed my period,” Mani said. “What if I shouldn’t be taking morphine?”
“Don’t worry. As a precaution before surgery, we do routine pregnancy tests.”
“I’m not . . .”
“You tested negative.”
Mani looked at him blankly.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said.
She burst into a fit of sobbing.
The doctor picked up the control pad and hit the button, administering another dose of morphine into her IV. The pain in her body ebbed. The doctor said something, then something else. Mani felt devastated and she didn’t know why.
* * *
Corderoy and Montauk had passed out in the Encyclopad living room while watching Seinfeld reruns. It was five o’clock when Montauk woke up. Corderoy was sitting at the computer at the far end of the room, next to the bookshelves, which were alternately filled with much-thumbed editions of Livy, Virgil, and Herodotus, which Montauk had kept from school, and books chosen for purely ironic reasons by his housemates, such as the British Guide to Etiquette, Scandalous Saints, and Nitrogen Economy in Tropical Soils.
“Come here,” Corderoy said. “Read this.”
Montauk got up and wiped a bit of drool from his lip. Corderoy was reading a Wikipedia article, “The 2003 invasion of Iraq.” He had highlighted a few sentences under the heading “Events leading to the invasion.” They read:
On the day of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reported to have written in his notes, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” Shortly thereafter, the George W. Bush administration announced a War on Terrorism, accompanied by the doctrine of preemptive military action dubbed the Bush doctrine.
“This is so poorly written,” Montauk said. “Like everything on Wikipedia. Give me that.” He took the mouse. “Ugh. It’s all sticky.”
“Someone spilled beer on it last night.”
Montauk skimmed the rest of the article. “It mentions all these war crimes,” he said, “but nothing’s attributed. Feels like it was written by pissed-off liberal college students who know fuck-all about what’s really going on.”
“C’mon,” Corderoy said.
Montauk sighed and continued scrolling down the page. “There, look at how it always uses the word regime instead of government. This is why you can’t trust Wikipedia.” He walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “You want a beer?”
Corderoy leaned back, and his metal folding chair creaked. He looked down at it. He’d been sitting in this same chair last night, with Mani on his lap.
“Hey,” Montauk yelled. “You want a beer or not?”
“Yeah,” Corderoy said. He stood up, swapped the folding chair for a wooden one nearby, and sat back down at the computer. “But the bias, it’s got to be only with contentious subjects, like the invasion of Iraq. Right? There’s no way the article for ‘banana’ is biased.”
“Look it up.”
Corderoy pulled up the entry as Montauk returned with beers. “Seems pretty neutral,” Corderoy said.
“I bet we can fix that.”
“Eh?”
“Click edit.”
“Ahh.” Corderoy did so and began editing the first sentence, smiling and nodding to himself as he typed. He clicked Save, reloaded the page, then read the new first sentence aloud: “ ‘Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fucking delicious but regrettably phallus-shaped fruit they produce.’ ”
Beer vaulted up through Montauk’s nose as he burst out laughing. “Shit, man,” he said. “Anybody can do anything on this. That’s why Wikipedia’s bullshit.”
“No, that’s why it’s awesome. We could have a page. About us.”
“Yeah?” Montauk took a swig of his PBR.
“Why not? We can write it. Add whatever subsections we want, stuff like . . . ‘Mickey’s shitty deployment.’ ”
“Or ‘Hal’s video game addiction and its effect on his ignorance of geopolitical events.’ ”
Corderoy laughed. “But it doesn’t have to be so obviously about us. Like we could make a section titled: ‘The taste of the mouth the morning after a hangover’ . . .” He finished the rest of that sentence in his head: “while standing in the hospital room of a person whom you don’t intend to ever see again but might love anyway because you are a fuckup.”
“Hmm.” Montauk wrinkled his brow. “But anyone could edit our article and make it say stupid shit.”
“It’s not like we’re bananas,” Corderoy said.
“What?”
“We’re not as well known. As bananas. Who would even know our article existed, and if they did, why would they edit it?”
“But aren’t there rules about being notable or something?”
“We meet the notability standards. We’ve been written up in a legit publication.” Corderoy began creating a new Wikipedia article. He titled it “The Encyclopaedists,” then sourced the new article with an external link to The Stranger’s profile on the “The Encyclopaedists of Capitol Hill.” He began typing the overview:
Scholars generally agree that the Encyclopaedia is Truth, insofar as Truth exists, which it doesn’t. Nevertheless, existence, which teeters on the precipice of subjective experience, is anchored by encyclopaedic reference. The Encyclopaedia, therefore, justifies itself with a recursive entry. And it should not be surprising that this article’s subject is responsi
ble for its origination. Fuckballs. Post-colonial cadaver sex. See, we can write anything, since no one else cares to define us for us.
“Let me do it,” Montauk said. He leaned over and pushed Corderoy’s hands out of the way. Before he knew what he was typing, Mani’s name appeared.
The exact origins of this article are a matter of some debate, the most popular (and most contentious) theory aligning its inception with Mani’s hospitalization on the early morning of July 3rd, 2004—one year, three months, fourteen days, ten hours, and twenty-six minutes after the beginning of the Iraq War,
Corderoy took the keyboard back.
in which Mickey Montauk would learn to shut the fuck up . . .
He thought a moment, then added:
while Halifax Corderoy deconstructed in the bricked and hobbling streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They read through it again in silence.
“Huh,” Montauk said. “I feel weird.”
“Like we didn’t really exist until just now?”
They put on music—Ice Cube, Wu-Tang—and drank another two beers. On some level, they were aware that through booze and conversation, they were holding down the lid of a black trunk, about the size of a woman, which could not be locked, and which they would eventually have to leave unguarded.
* * *
I. Montauk, in fact, had read just under half of the Blix report.
II. A nicer person? That thought wasn’t currently available to her in the extremity of her pain, which throbbed to an insistent beat of “stupid, I’m so stupid.”
3
* * *
Over the next two months, Corderoy took extra tutoring shifts and drank a bottle of wine each night. He shrank and shrank until he barely existed—and Mani disappeared with him. When he wasn’t making lesson plans or grading essays, he was scouring Craigslist for a room to sublet in Boston. This kept him from imagining Mani’s hypothetical futures. She healed miraculously, say, and fell in love with her doctor—they moved to Aruba, where he became the personal physician of Queen Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard van Oranje-Nassau, and Mani taught diving lessons. Alternatively, the ceiling in her hospital room collapsed while she was still rigged up in traction, fracturing her spine and paralyzing her. In this future, she was later found underneath an overpass in her wheelchair, OD’ed on heroin. Each day he thought about visiting her in the hospital. Each day he rejected the idea. Tomorrow’s hangover was punishment for failing to stamp that thought into nothingness.
War of the Encyclopaedists Page 3