War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  Tricia picked up the mostly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker and drained it. And as the last of the whiskey trickled into her mouth, the decision solidified. She would call Luc. Right now.

  His phone rang six times before he picked up. “Hallo?”

  “Hi . . . it’s me. Tricia.”

  “Ah, Tricia . . . it’s the middle of the night.”

  “It is?”

  “It is in London.”

  “Oh, I’m so stupid.”

  “No, no. It’s okay. Did Kerry win?”

  Tricia sighed. “No.”

  “I’m so sorry—” Luc began to say.

  “I’m just wondering about this winter,” Tricia said. “Going to Baghdad.”

  “Ah. Well. Nothing is finalized . . .”

  “It’s less than two months away. I need to start making arrangements.”

  “Tricia.”

  “Yes?”

  “I know how eager you are. I was just like you. And I think you have what it takes to do this kind of work. But . . .”

  There it was.

  “The grant came through, Tricia. But not as much as we’d hoped. It’s only enough to support one photographer and one writer. We can’t afford a survey team.”

  “Yes, of course, yes. I understand.”

  “We’ll get a coffee next I’m in Boston, okay? Tricia?”

  “Yeah. Good night. Sorry I woke you.”

  She hung up the phone, limped to her room, and collapsed onto her bed. She felt useless. And now the Kerry defeat, which she’d pushed aside with dreams of Baghdad, came back to sock her in the gut. She’d failed to win Meigs County, she’d failed to win Ohio, and she’d failed her country. Now, for the first time in Tricia Burnham’s life, she had not an ounce of confidence. She wept into her pillow as the crushing futility of a generation descended on her. It was worse than the morning of 9/11. This time, she wasn’t late to arrive, a willing but unneeded blood donor, a bystander watching the medics at work. This time, she’d been the medic, and the patient had died.

  14

  * * *

  Corderoy was nearing the end of Ulysses when class started. His OCD tendencies usually led him to pause at a chapter break or at least the end of a paragraph. But the sentences in the final chapter went on for pages, so he was forced to set the book down midsentence.

  He’d sat through the lecture only dimly aware of what they were discussing. Stanley Fish’s idea of interpretive communities. Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader. When Professor Flannigan made reference to Joyce, Corderoy’s mind rose out of the book on his lap and into the cloud of discussion above the table.

  “As Iser puts it,” Professor Flannigan said, “the implied reader ‘embodies those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect.’ Joyce famously said that the ideal reader of Finnegans Wake would have ideal forgetfulness and ideal insomnia, that he would read until the end of the book and go right back to page one and continue as if for the first time.”

  Corderoy soon drifted back to a sort of mental hand-wringing until class was over. Sandy, Ray, Maria, and even old Gary were going out for a pint. They invited Corderoy, but he declined, pushing himself further out of the nascent social group. As they left, he felt like the weird kid on the playground the other kids made fun of.

  “You seemed distracted today,” Professor Flannigan said.

  Corderoy held up Ulysses in his right hand, his index finger stuck between pages 761 and 762.

  Professor Flannigan smiled. “Ah. Carry on, then.”

  Corderoy was walking on River Street, several blocks from home, when he finished the book. He stopped on the sidewalk. He reread the final lines a second time: I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. The gray October sky provided a dull backdrop to the golden-red leaves of the maple trees. A chill breeze worked its way into his unbuttoned coat. But he felt so warm, or bright, or everything did. No. That wasn’t right. Everything, he included, felt big. His soul—he wasn’t accustomed to thinking in terms of souls, in fact, he consciously railed against that sort of thinking, but he did so now, with no qualms—his soul was magnitudinous, it was a powerful vector with no directional component. He wasn’t happy or cathartic. He was charged.

  When he walked up the stairs to his apartment, he found Tricia in the living room. She was petting Smokey and holding a book she wasn’t reading. She looked at him and said, “Hey.”

  He went into the kitchen for a beer, then sat on the couch opposite her. “What’s up,” he said. “You look glum.”

  “I’m fine,” Tricia said. Earlier today, her classmate Jeff Alessi had asked her to go see Super Size Me at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and she’d turned him down. She didn’t feel like doing that. Or doing anything with Jeff. Or doing anything with anyone.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Just mad at myself,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “For liking this guy. It’s stupid.”

  “That human rights guy? Why’s that stupid?”

  “Because. I don’t know. It was a career thing. It should have been.”

  “So what, you’re upset that you have a crush—”

  “It’s not a crush.”

  “—that you’re attracted to this worldly, older guy who’s doing the shit you want to be doing. Seems pretty standard.”

  Tricia looked at Corderoy as if he were a dog that had slipped into English.

  “Though I did always assume that stuff wasn’t too high on your priority list.”

  Tricia scoffed. “I’m busy, sure, but.”

  But maybe Hal was right? She had never had a relationship that lasted longer than a few months. There were numerous reasons why, she told herself. Her standards were high. She’d consistently made decisions not conducive to sustaining relationships: she’d gone to Barnard, an all-women’s college, she’d studied abroad in Bolivia her junior year, she’d interned with the documentary team on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She’d had plenty of hookups and a few flings, but these had been the exception rather than the rule.

  “I mean, who doesn’t want that?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “No.”

  “You’re gonna make me say it?”

  Corderoy smirked and took a swig of High Life.

  “Looove,” Tricia said dramatically, as if that would neuter the word.

  But Corderoy nodded thoughtfully, and the word seemed to take on the mantle of a Zen koan. “How’s that book?” he asked.

  Tricia held up the book on her lap, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival. “It’s great,” she said. “The world would be an immeasurably better place if everyone read this book.”

  Hal was looking at her curiously, with a smile, and it made Tricia self-conscious of her word choice. Everyone. That would never happen, so why even say it. And why was Hal being so nice? So interested. They’d gone through the routine, and it hadn’t ended in sex—their social dynamic had been established—they tolerated each other. Was he making a move?

  “Wow. Okay. I’ll read it.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Sure I will. Why not?”

  “Just— Don’t read it on my account.”

  “Of course not,” he said. Was that what she thought, that he was trying to impress her? Why would she think that unless . . . unless she wanted him. He suddenly remembered that she was a sexual creature, like all humans, and as such, she had sexual desires. He wondered if she was as dirty, as deliciously dirty, as Molly Bloom. He wanted to know her, but not in the biblical sense—he wanted to see into her brain, he wanted to watch the gear teeth bite into each other with the strangely orchestrated precision of human consc
iousness. And from the relenting look on her face, it seemed like she was going to open the gates freely.

  Tricia sighed. “I think I intimidate guys my age. You know how many times I’ve been called a bitch? Just for saying something halfway intelligent?” She thought of herself as kind enough. Social nicety wasn’t at the top of her list of priorities. She could be abrasive, yes. But that didn’t stop her from thinking that it was somehow her fault if others perceived her as a bitch. Which was crazy. And she knew it. But it never occurred to her that men often misinterpreted her self-­sufficiency as a lack of interest. It was an unfortunate psychological consequence of her three greatest virtues: her desire to better the world, her willingness to take responsibility where others wouldn’t, and her ruthless self-discipline.

  “This guy didn’t call you a bitch, did he?”

  “No, no. He’s great. Passes all my criteria.”

  “Criteria?” Corderoy leaned forward.

  “Intelligence, morality. Being hot. But the biggest one is—I don’t know how else to say it—enlightenment. Understanding what the world is, what’s at stake, what’s important.”

  “So this enlightened guy. He know you like him?”

  Smokey had been purring contentedly in Tricia’s lap, but she stopped, as if sensing Tricia’s apprehension.

  Tricia’s voice caught in her throat. “I thought he did. But then he turned me down for this opportunity—I mean, I guess it was a funding thing—it’s all muddled up. That’s why I’m angry, that I let it get muddled.”

  As Tricia lowered her gaze and stared at Smokey, Corderoy’s sense of magnitude that Molly Bloom’s monologue had lent him, his sense of bigness, his realm of mental apprehension that had been slowly expanding, it passed some invisible threshold and he saw Tricia. Tricia with her face off. She told herself she wanted an enlightened guy, but enlightened guys weren’t manly, and manly men were so rarely enlightened. As much as she domineered most social situations, when it came to romance, Tricia Burnham fit the stereotype: she wanted a man to sweep her away. Worse was the paradoxical situation she had placed herself in: she wanted to be conquered by a pacifist. But before his expanding soul could wrap itself around that thought, she said, “What about you, Hal? Any girls you’re after?” And his expanded soul became a rigid shell, creaking like a submarine under pressure.

  “I.” He was too embarrassed to mention Sylvie.

  “You had a girlfriend back in Seattle, right?”

  Bolts were breaking and crossbeams buckling. A hull breach was imminent.

  “Hal?”

  The USS Halifax Corderoy imploded.

  As Tricia dredged through the wreckage of the submarine, she extracted a name, Mani, and a hasty apology to the effect that there was an essay, the writing of which could no longer be postponed, and the wreckage slid off the sloping seafloor to the abyss of its room.

  15

  * * *

  Of course, the essay could be postponed. And Corderoy was given the perfect excuse the instant the dot next to Sylvie’s IM handle (bytheseashore) flicked from gray to green in his contact list and a message popped onto his screen.

  bytheseashore: sorry i disappeared

  bytheseashore: i missed you

  bytheseashore: but i was in the hospital

  rogue7: Are you OK? What happened?

  Nothing that hadn’t happened before, apparently. Sylvie had cystic fibrosis. Last week she’d coughed up blood and was rushed to the emergency room. They’d done X-rays and CAT scans of her lungs, and she was now on an additional antibiotic, ciprofloxacin, in addition to the four she took on a regular basis, even in periods of relative health, vancomycin, meropenem, tobramycin, and piperacillin.

  Corderoy immediately Wikied “cystic fibrosis” to learn that it was an inherited disease that affected the entire body, with lung infections being the most serious complication. The minimized chat window was flashing, and before clicking back to her, Corderoy finished reading the first paragraph of the Wiki article: “Most individuals with cystic fibrosis die young—many in their 20s and 30s—from lung failure.” Holy shit.

  bytheseashore: i like u hal

  rogue7: I like you, too. Are you feeling better?

  bytheseashore: a little

  bytheseashore: now that im talki

  bytheseashore: ng to u again

  rogue7: Why just a little?

  bytheseashore: u make me feel so special

  rogue7: Thanks.

  bytheseashore: but still just a little

  bytheseashore: i have a check up

  bytheseashore: tomorrow

  bytheseashore: for my crohn’s

  rogue7: What?

  Sylvie also had Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disease causing inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. Two horrible diseases. What were the odds? But of course, that was probably why Cystic Sylvie, as he would later think of her, had to depend on MySpace for her social life.

  This revelation didn’t scare Corderoy off; paradoxically, it knocked him into a spiral of infatuation, a fact which may seem incommensurate with reality, but when the threads of circumstance that led to it are traced back sufficiently far, its inevitability is apparent. The most constant circumstance responsible was his immersion in the suffocating academic pretensions of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Sylvie’s whimsey was like oxygen. The most distant circumstance, though also the most profound: the image of Mani in traction, in a hospital room on July 3rd, unconscious, moments from abandonment by her de facto boyfriend, soon to awake in a city suddenly cold and alien, absent of a single friend. The most trivial, and the most evil, and the most suppressed of these circumstances was the Get Out of Relationship Free card, similar to the one he’d used when leaving Seattle, that came with Sylvie’s terminal diagnosis.

  bytheseashore: still want to go ghosthunting

  bytheseashore: its totaly on

  bytheseashore: this friday

  bytheseashore: if not we can bake funfetti

  bytheseashore: cupcakes or something because

  bytheseashore: thats always wonderful

  bytheseashore: maybe we can cuddle at the house

  bytheseashore: this palce i know

  bytheseashore: but wear boxer shorts

  bytheseashore: briefs are icky

  bytheseashore: gotta go by cutie hal

  She was practically throwing herself at him. And for a moment, he was tempted to disbelieve the illusion. But luck, both good and bad, was all about relative perception. In the grand scheme of things, he reminded himself, the universe was indifferent to our fortunes. When looking through a small enough window, it sometimes seemed designed to thwart you. But through that same window, it could also seem to be rewarding your very existence.

  Dear Hal,

  Have some pussy. Don’t question it.

  Your friend,

  The Universe

  Corderoy threw on a pair of pants and left the house like he had a plane to catch.

  He didn’t own a single pair of boxer shorts. Why would he want his junk flopping around? Briefs angled it upward, so when an unexpected boner occurred, it was the shaft that created a slight bulge in the jeans. But in boxers—and he’d experienced this at the mall once when he ran into Jessica Wilson, the hottest ninth-grader in school, whose jeans were as tight around her ass as industrial shrink wrap on a pair of maracas—in boxers, it was hanging free, angled down, and when it got excited, it was not the shaft but the head that appeared under the denim near the upper thigh. The maneuver required to rectify this was extremely conspicuous. And what was the downside of briefs? There was the supposed drop in sperm count from having your testes snug and cotton-cupped all day long, but was that even a detriment? He didn’t plan on impregnating anyone anytime soon. Perhaps not ever. No, it was definitely a positive—briefs came with a built-in prop
hylactic.

  And yet here he was, on his way to the store to purchase a pair of boxer shorts for the possibility of cuddling (sex?) with a nineteen-year-old girl whom he’d never met—not in person—and who apparently had cystic fibrosis. And Crohn’s disease. He would have to be gentle.

  * * *

  They had arranged to meet the following Friday—the same day his essay was due—at the Lotus Yoga studio in Brighton. She would be getting out of her class at five, all limber and sweaty. It was nearly a week away. And the anticipation fueled him in every aspect of his life. He went running, he cleaned up his room, and he dove back into Ulysses, rereading chapters, researching past critical commentary by Derrida and others, sketching out essay ideas of his own.

  It was Thursday evening when he opened up a blank document on his laptop and began to write. In the last week, he had slowly regained that sense of expansiveness he’d felt at the end of the novel. But it was changed now; he didn’t so much feel it as know it, and the fact that it wasn’t joy, or anger, or release, or self-deception, that it was somehow none of these and all of these, the fact that it was a force without a direction became glaringly obvious. He hit upon the topic for his essay: he would go through the final chapter, Molly Bloom’s famous stream-of-consciousness monologue, and he would track all the sign-valued language—all the yeses, nos, everys, alls, didn’ts, and nots—he would quantify the tone to see how positive the language actually was. He would take his data and make a graph.

  He began laboriously scanning the pages and looking for yeses and nos, circling them, counting them, but when he’d made it through only five pages in an hour, he turned to the Internet. A quick Google search turned up a text-file version of Ulysses. He identified a list of words and auto-searched for them in the document. By midnight, he’d finished the data collection; a quick analysis confirmed his suspicion and validated the strange directionless sense of magnitude the final chapter had given him. Though the book ended with a string of yeses, and though the total yeses outnumbered the total nos in Molly Bloom’s monologue, the total negatives, including nots, didn’ts, and so forth, skewed the tone highly toward the negative. Joyce had given Molly Bloom an accumulative moment, a big moment, but it wasn’t a positive moment; it was much more complex than that. Molly Bloom’s connection with her husband—the subject of much of her thoughts in the final pages—was deep and important, but far from simple or purely loving. That final yes, if anything, was an acceptance of the complexity of love, that it always contained strands and flecks of its opposite.