War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  17

  * * *

  When Corderoy received his essay back at the end of class, there was no grade on it. Professor Flannigan had written in the margin in red pen, Come along to my office at half-three so we can talk. Corderoy wasn’t sure what half-three meant. He erred on the side of being early and ended up parking himself on a plastic chair outside Professor Flannigan’s office at two-thirty. He sat there for the next hour, attempting to read Defoe’s Roxana, which he had to finish for his Friday class, The Rise of the Novel. But the book was boring, and people kept walking through the hallway, forcing him to retract his stretched-out legs, and he got through only four pages before he decided to close the book, stare into space, and ponder the curious bit of information he’d stumbled on that morning concerning Sylvie.

  Corderoy had scoured various social networking sites looking for Sylvies and anyone with bytheseashore as their handle. He’d found squat on Friendster, Live Journal, and Xanga, but after Googling “cystic fibrosis” and “Boston,” he’d stumbled onto the Web forums at www­.dailystrength.org, a community support site for people with chronic medical conditions. Just that morning, he’d read a comment by Charlie37 regarding a community member known as Selena.

  Six months ago, I, like many others, was hooked by the heartrending and chaotic narrative of Selena, a teenage girl with CF in desperate need of a double lung transplant. Her friend Brita had been providing weekly updates about her progress on the “Pray for Selena” blog (http://prayforselena.blogspot.com), which has now been taken down. For those of you just finding out about this, here’s a sample from Brita’s blog:

  It’s been a rough week for Selena. For four days now, she’s been intubated but it’s not looking good. Her PaCO2 is in the 90s, the highest it’s been, and Lord knows how she’s been able to handle it. Her O2 sat was down to 84, and her temp reached 103. She’s been fighting hard, but it seems like there’s only one way this could go.

  On Tuesday she has a meeting with the transplant committee to discuss the lengthy and complicated process of getting new lungs. Selena isn’t suited to this bureaucratic hassle, especially when she’s struggling so much, but it’s coming down to the line now. Let’s pray for her and give her the strength she needs to get through this.

  Over time, Selena’s condition worsened and hundreds were praying and posting supportive comments on the “Pray for Selena” blog. Then, in March, the news broke that Selena/Brita does not exist. Rather, she is a persona invented by Sandra Fernandez, and she used photos of one of Sandra’s friends as our “Selena.”

  Corderoy had found it odd that the “she” in that sentence referred to Selena, who did not exist, rather than to Sandra, who was supposedly behind the hoax. Charlie37 continued:

  What bothers me most is the thought that someone could manipulate the hearts and prayers of hundreds of people the way Selena has without feeling the slightest remorse. It may be, as some community members have suggested, that Selena suffers from Munchausen syndrome, a mental disorder in which a person feigns illness or trauma to garner sympathy or attention. In any case, Selena has been active on many forums using many aliases. She has been linked with the names Sylvanshine and Laurie B.

  Could that be Sylvie? The voice of those blog posts written by Brita was, on the whole, much more cogent and measured than Sylvie’s. It couldn’t be her. But to be safe, Corderoy had written to Charlie37, asking if he had seen the IM handle bytheseashore, or if there were any other things Sandra/Brita/Selena was known for. Charlie37 had yet to respond, and Corderoy had become consumed with anticipation. He tried to pick up Roxana again, but Professor Flannigan arrived at 3:35, walking with brisk, short strides, wearing an argyle sweater and a cheerful grin.

  “Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said as he unlocked his office door.

  “Just a few minutes,” Corderoy said. He took a seat next to Professor Flannigan’s desk. After rearranging some papers, unpacking his leather satchel, and adjusting his eyeglasses, the professor sat down in his office chair, leaned back, and said, “So, tell me about your essay.”

  Corderoy explained the sense of magnitude he’d experienced. He paraphrased the most important parts of the argument he’d made in the essay, that Joyce himself was the crafty Odyssean character, not Leopold Bloom, that the seemingly triumphal ending was best read in light of this deceptive tendency, that Joyce’s vision of the female consciousness was that its intensity trumped its focus.

  “Brilliant. I love it,” Professor Flannigan said.

  Corderoy’s heart, which had been holding a difficult pose, relaxed into its natural rhythm, and a wave of warm blood spread out to his extremities.

  “But I can’t accept it.”

  “You can’t?”

  “The essay prompt was very clear, Mr. Corderoy.”

  Corderoy did not especially like being called Mr. Corderoy, though he admired how Professor Flannigan had managed to mold the social dynamic of the class into this more formal shape, one in which his social ascendance was more obvious and more welcome, as a benevolent philosopher king.

  “Did you read the essay prompt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know it says you are to apply three of the schools of criticism we’ve discussed to a text and argue which one provides the most useful lens through which to read it. I did not assign this essay without cause. This is a peer-reviewed field, Mr. Corderoy. Do you imagine we are here purely for the pursuit of knowledge?”

  “Yes?” Corderoy ventured.

  “I hope you’ve thought about life after graduate school. I don’t mean to be cynical, but frankly, you are training to be an academic. This degree doesn’t lead anywhere else. If you want to survive in this career, you need to learn the language upon which the grand discussion is based. When you take your orals two years from now, your thesis advisers will expect you to be intimately familiar with post-structuralism, new historicism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. You’re quite creative, Mr. Corderoy. And the insightful and unexpected thinking you demonstrated in this essay will make you an excellent critic and a great professor someday, if you take the time now to approach the field on its own terms.”

  Corderoy had been nodding sheepishly through Professor Flannigan’s speech, and after asking for a chance to rewrite the essay, which the professor granted without hesitation, Corderoy ducked out of the office and walked home rather than taking the train. When he crossed the Charles River into Cambridge, it began to rain. Not a Boston rainstorm but a Seattle drizzle. It reminded him of home, and it complicated his growing distaste for the city of Boston. He walked slowly as his shoulders darkened, realizing that he had a spot of violence in his heart for the world of academia. As much as he’d been moved by Professor Flannigan’s speech that first day of class (the search for truth—what could be more important?), the whole enterprise felt like a game with no real stakes, which was fine as long as you could play loose and free, have some fun with it. But academics, he was learning, tended to take themselves quite seriously. He wasn’t sure if he could play this game or if he really wanted to be a professor someday. But what else would he be? What other skills did he have?

  • • •

  When he got home, he found a reply from Charlie37. He didn’t want to read it. He closed his laptop. He went back outside into the rain to buy beer and ramen. After eating, he distracted himself with Web comics and tech blogs. Halfway through his six-pack, he decided it was time to man up. He navigated back to the forum to read the comment.

  Haven’t seen that IM handle. Sorry.

  Corderoy breathed a sigh of relief.

  Just be on the lookout for anyone claiming to have late-stage CF, needing a transplant, asking for prayer. And Funfetti cupcakes. Selena’s favorite—and in my opinion, a sick joke.

  There were a few more sentences in the message, but Corderoy had to stop reading. This Selena was unmistakably Sylv
ie. This girl (Sylvie/Selena/Brita/Sandra?) had played him like a game of Candy Land. She could be anyone. A fat old dude. Some schizophrenic guy in a psych ward. She could even be Montauk, fucking with him—he imagined it now: Montauk lying in his bunk, reading flirtatious IM logs and laughing, showing them to all his Army friends. But that wasn’t right. That was a substitute Corderoy had created to fill a void. It would be too easy, too benevolent of the universe, the gulf between him and every other human reduced to a joke, a prank by his best friend. Sylvie, a postcard from Montauk that said, Hey, Dickface, I miss you. No, Sylvie wasn’t Montauk. She wasn’t anybody. She didn’t even exist.

  Corderoy lay back on the couch. He felt like he didn’t exist. The ceiling existed. He knew that. Otherwise, he’d be getting rained on right now. The couch existed. And the floor it was on, that existed, too. And his clothes existed, but they seemed to arch around a negative space. He breathed in and felt that the air existed, certainly, as it circulated in and filled out two lunglike shapes, but what did that mean? One could have an entire face—something he wasn’t sure he had right now—and still not exist.

  18

  * * *

  When he’d woken up on the couch three days ago, Tricia and Smokey had already left for New York, and there was a plastic package of new bedsheets sitting on the kitchen table. It was still sitting there, next to a note that read:

  Hal—

  Really sorry about your sheets. Here’s some new ones. I’ll be in Westchester with my family until Monday. Call me if you want to come down to NY to join us for Thanksgiving.

  —Tricia

  He’d read the note, but he didn’t have the energy to open the sheets and put them on his bed. As hard as he tried, he was unable to read that invitation as anything other than a calculated nonvite, an offer designed to be declined, one that would nonetheless give Tricia social credit for her unfailing hospitality.

  So he’d passed the days until Thanksgiving, alone in the apartment, skipping class, watching South Park episodes, and masturbating. He was broke, and his parents could only afford to fly him back to Seattle once, for Christmas.

  It was six p.m. when his mother called, wishing him a happy Thanksgiving. She asked if he was going somewhere, and he lied and said he’d be having Thanksgiving with his roommate’s family. “Well, we miss you,” she said, and he heard his father in the background, saying, “Ask him if he got my e-mail.”

  “Your father wants to know—”

  “Yeah, Mom. I got it. Tell him I’ll read it now.”

  When he hung up, he collapsed on the couch with his laptop and Wiki-binged for the better part of an hour, navigating link by link from “Sexuality of Adolf Hitler” to “Zombie Apocalypse.” Finally, he pulled up his father’s e-mail from last week. It was long, and it looked boring; his father, apparently, had been getting deep into family genealogy research.

  Pretty fascinating story about where we Corderoys come from. I wish I’d talked to my grandparents more when I was your age. I had to figure all this out the hard way. Thought you might be interested, given the time of year. You should know about this stuff before it’s too late.

  Corderoy skimmed a long paragraph about his great-great-great-grandfather, some dude named Elroy who’d fought for the Confederates, got captured in 1861, and tunneled out of jail a few years later. His son, Meriwether, fled St. Louis after a botched robbery and rustled cattle through Kansas and New Mexico, nearly got hanged a few times, then made his fortune in Dawson City during the Yukon gold rush. He “fell heavy into drink,” in his father’s words, bought a saloon, took an Aleut wife in Anchorage, beat his son, William, and died of cirrhosis in 1917. Not the most noble forebearers. Why didn’t his dad find this shit depressing?

  Your great-grandfather William was a book lover, just like you. He even memorized Shakespeare, the bloody parts, your grandpa says.

  William lost his job during the Depression and “took to the bottle.” He would come home with a pint of whiskey in his back pocket, stone drunk, and his children would take off his boots, throw him in bed, then pour his drink down the drain.

  That’s why your grandpa doesn’t drink. His three brothers all had problems with alcohol. Be careful—it runs in the family. And you know all about your Great-Aunt Jane’s time in the sanitarium. They still did electric-shock treatment back then.

  His father went on about how Grandpa Frank had gotten to where he was today. Corderoy already knew the story in bits and pieces. After Pearl Harbor, he’d worked at Boeing as an electrician on the B-29 bomber to avoid the draft. He met Corderoy’s grandma at the Highline Diner. She was a waitress, and she got him a job at the White Center Weekly, a dinky local paper that her father ran. Corderoy was about to skip the rest of the e-mail, but then his own name jumped out at him.

  I probably told you about your namesake years ago, but I doubt you remember. It was Grandpa Frank’s business partner, Charles Halifax. He was a drinker, a smoker, and a rake, believe me—they had trouble keeping the office staffed with secretaries. One day, I think it was in 1964, your grandpa and Charles took me and your Uncle Ted climbing on Mt. Rainier. Just a day hike to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet or so, you needed ski poles for the Muir snowfield. And about ¾ of the way up, this boulder the size of a basketball came tumbling down at us and it would have bounded right into my head if Charles Halifax hadn’t stuck out his leg. That rock shattered his shinbone to pieces. We had to wait for Search and Rescue.

  He hit the booze pretty hard after that injury though. A few months before you were born, he drove himself off a bridge and died. I wanted to name you after him. Your mother wasn’t thrilled with the idea. She wanted to name you after her grandfather Albert. He was a dairy farmer outside of Madison, Wisconsin. He asphyxiated himself with exhaust fumes from his pickup truck. That’s another story. But I never forgot how Charles Halifax saved my life.

  With such a robust legacy of alcoholism and suicide, his namesake a shining example of both, it was remarkable that Corderoy had managed to make it to his early twenties before seriously flirting with either one.

  The closest he’d ever come to suicide was after Tara, his college girlfriend, had dumped him the month before he went abroad, where he’d met Montauk in Rome. He’d moved out of their studio and into the living room of his friend Aaron’s basement apartment on the other side of the U District. Aaron’s girl had just split as well, and they’d fed on each other’s misery, smoking a pack of cigarettes each day and killing a bottle of Jack nearly every night. Corderoy had stopped eating regularly, losing close to fifteen pounds.

  Tara had been Corderoy’s best friend and lover for a year and a half—their intimacy had been intense, their future together inevitable. When she’d cheated on him, just before the end, he’d been unable to fathom the reasons for her betrayal, but he’d been willing to forgive. Tara didn’t want forgiveness; she wanted a wedge to drive them apart. It would take him years to realize that he wasn’t the perfect boyfriend precisely because of his unqualified devotion to her. Tara had been immature and cruel, but she’d been perceptive: Corderoy didn’t need her so much as he needed to love someone, anyone. Blind to this himself, the unexplainable dissolution of their perfect union had grave implications for his future happiness: anything good could sour at an instant. Why go on living a life like that?

  He’d thought at the time that if he’d had a gun, he might have done it. He’d later reproached himself for thinking he’d been anywhere near as depressed as some people, as his friend Dave, who had slit his wrists, twice.

  Corderoy wasn’t nearly as emotionally perturbed now as he’d been in the month after Tara had left. The revelation of Sylvie’s nonexistence meant he had failed at even the most superficial connection. He wasn’t feeling crushed; he was feeling small and weightless, like a packing peanut. He thought of the time Montauk had helped him to the bathroom at the end of the third Encyclopaedists party. Corderoy had ho
vered over the toilet, dry-heaving, Montauk saying, You got this, you got this, until he said, Move over, and puked in the toilet himself. It was the moment Corderoy knew that their friendship had evolved from superficial absurdity to something of substance. It was a good moment. But it belonged to the past. It belonged to a life that wasn’t over yet but could be soon. Why not?

  All at once he was famished. There was no food in the house, so he put on some shoes and walked out into the cold November evening, wearing the same clothes he’d slept in for the last three days. It was below freezing outside, and everything was closed. He couldn’t buy groceries. He wandered down the desolate streets, where the only other humans were speeding by in cars or walking briskly, no doubt late for Thanksgiving dinners. He headed toward Central Square, thinking about how much he loved his mother’s turkey, her pumpkin pie. Normally, he would have scolded himself for such sentimental thoughts, but tonight, alone on Thanksgiving, three thousand miles from his family, Corderoy couldn’t help indulging his melancholy. And as if the universe were indulging along with him, the only open restaurant in five miles was Nori Sushi.

  He took a table in the rear, keeping his coat on for warmth, and ordered a dragon roll and a large flask of hot sake. There were only two other people in the restaurant, a fat guy with even worse hygiene than Corderoy, and an old Japanese couple. When his sake arrived, he poured a cup and knocked it back, feeling its heat and its alcohol warm his esophagus. He poured another cup immediately, and before his sushi arrived, he had finished the carafe. It was so perfectly antithetical to his usual Thanksgiving alcohol experience—his father decanting an expensive bottle of Bordeaux, swirling the glass. The waitress set down his dragon roll and another flask, and Corderoy meticulously stirred wasabi into a dish of soy sauce, dissolving large amounts of the green paste until he’d created a sinus-busting goo. It was stronger than he was accustomed to making it, but he wanted to highlight the disparity between his present experience and that of most of America, busy stuffing themselves with sweet yams and savory gravy over garlic mashed potatoes. When he finished, he paid his tab and walked outside with his coat unbuttoned, warmed all over from the sake and wasabi.