War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  Mani’s hairline began itching with perspiration. “I . . . took the day off, Mom. Amanda must be new. I had to run down to drop off applications. For school.” Why was she lying?

  “Tomorrow, then? I’m free after my morning lecture.”

  “Sorry, I won’t get much of a break tomorrow—new work being installed.” So what, so she had lied to her parents about getting a job, but she was painting, and it was finally paying off. Her work, featured in a gallery. Why couldn’t she tell her mother? She would be proud. All sins would be forgiven.

  “Are you okay, dear?”

  “Yes. I’m fine. I’ll call you soon, okay?”

  When she got home that afternoon, she crawled into bed and plummeted into sleep. Then slept all through the night and into the next day. She got up to make a drink, to roll a joint. She flipped through a book of John Singer Sargent’s portraiture—searching for an aesthetic distant from her current work—then went back to sleep.

  She woke up at some indeterminate hour, the light outside that gray half-light of early morning or early evening in winter, and she knew she had to call Hal. She had yet to process the turbulent emotions surrounding his disappearance last summer, her ensuing accident; she had bookmarked that indefinitely, when things got complicated with Mickey. But now that Hal was back in the foreground of her thoughts, that unresolved cluster of resentment and curiosity and anger and lingering love, it had become a block that she urgently needed to dissolve. She didn’t know what she would say to Hal. But she knew how to figure it out. She had to paint him.

  She stretched a canvas and began sketching the outline of a figure seated on a metal folding chair, legs crossed. She put a book in his hand, open and held aloft as if to suggest the figure cared deeply that whoever might be looking should know what a great book he was reading. She spent hours getting the posture right, then worked in a few details: the Converse, the skinny jeans, the plaid shirt. She worked through the night. Around dawn, she finished a rough version of his face. It was Hal, but she’d made him more clean-shaven than she’d ever seen him, his chin polished and reflective, and she’d given him long, wavy hair, though she couldn’t say why. The cover of the book remained blank for the time being. She stood back to take in her work. Hal had a smug aloofness about him. But it was still missing something. Two somethings. She painted on a trim and ironic mustache and repainted his crotch with an open fly.

  Compared to the Seussian war paintings, this seemed pointedly antiquated. Mani was a great admirer of Sargent, and in this piece she’d taken after him, just as he had taken after Velázquez and Van Dyck. But where Sargent had operated within the Grand Manner of portraiture to depict Edwardian luxury, she had put Hal on a folding chair. She’d mixed a hint of blue into everything, making his skin pale and lighting the scene with a sterile fluorescent quality, as if he were sitting in a church-basement A.A. meeting. Though she hadn’t touched the background, she knew it would have to be an amorphous gray swirling, like the backdrops for school portraits. It was a picture of someone who desperately wanted to be seen looking maximally indifferent to the opinions of others. It was a portrait commissioned to look accidental.

  Of course, Hal hadn’t commissioned anything. And Mani wasn’t about to imagine him with any sort of power in this situation. But the painting needed power. It needed Mickey. Over the next three days, she tried a dozen ways to work him into the background of the painting, and each became more violent than the last. Mickey changed as well, in both clothing and facial hair. What had started as a clean-cut Mickey hovering authoritatively behind Hal, wearing his DCUs with crossed arms, eventually became an enraged Mickey screaming through a ragged beard, wearing Civil War Union blues, his rifle drawn back, bayonet affixed and ready to plunge into the unwitting skull of Halifax Corderoy.

  Poor Hal. Somehow pity had crept into the painting, pity for the villain.

  * * *

  It was snowing outside in thick, cumbersome flakes. Corderoy stared out the window, content to be alone, doing nothing. But the universe wouldn’t allow that to continue for long. He heard the front door open and the sound of heels clicking up the stairs.

  Since Mickey’s visit, Corderoy’s relationship with Tricia had petrified. They hardly talked at all, the necessary communication—Any mail? It’s your turn to buy garbage bags—happening through passive-aggressive notes. Corderoy had passed his classes, barely, but hadn’t registered for second semester, which began in two days. The Jennings Fellowship for Promising Scholars, which his parents believed he was the proud recipient of, was a fiction. He didn’t have much of a plan aside from playing video games and trying not to drink before six p.m.

  “Guess what?” Tricia said, walking into the kitchen.

  Corderoy turned reluctantly from the window. Tricia was wearing a slim black dress, and her hair was mussed. She looked like she’d been partying all through the previous night. Corderoy did not want to guess. He hated it when people asked him to guess what. Tricia smelled like booze. Her smile was pleasant enough, but Corderoy nonetheless had to fight the urge to recoil, as if her face were the crooked arm of a leper extending toward him.

  “All right,” he said. “What?”

  “You remember that guy Luc Dubois? The photographer?”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s going to Baghdad as an unembedded journalist to document human rights violations.”

  “And . . .”

  “Well, he was going to go with this guy Will he knew from Truthout, who had lots of journalism experience—which is important.”

  “But . . .”

  “But Will’s wife got pregnant! He had to back out. And Luc called me yesterday, and I’m going! I’m going to Baghdad. I mean, it’s too bad that Will can’t go.” Which Tricia truly believed, if only because she hated the fact that a fluke like this, and not her talent, was landing her this opportunity. “But Luc needs me,” she said. “I’ll be in Baghdad by the end of January! I’ll be writing articles for Truthout and Counterpunch.”

  “That’s crazy. How can you be qualified for that?”

  “Hal, no one’s qualified to be there!” She was too excited to take his comment as an insult. “They’re all making it up as they go. Anyone can buy a plane ticket to Baghdad. The hard part is choosing to go there when it’s so dangerous.”

  “Wait, what about the apartment?” Corderoy asked.

  “I’m giving it up. I know it’s short notice, sorry. We have to be out by the end of January.” Tricia tried to cringe, but her glee just made it look comical.

  “What? Where am I going to go?”

  “You’ll find a place. I’ll ask around for you. But isn’t it exciting!”

  Corderoy’s check-engine light came on. He glared at Tricia. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s great. Maybe you’ll see Mickey there.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “He’s not a blimp pilot,” Corderoy said with a mischievous smile. “He’s a lieutenant. In the Army.”

  “That’s not funny,” Tricia said.

  “I know. He’s probably committing some human rights violations right now.”

  “Shut up.”

  “If you get horny, just look for the guy standing over a pile of corpses like Galactus.”

  “Asshole,” she said, and stalked into her room.

  “You don’t even know who Galactus is,” Corderoy muttered. He wasn’t sure why he was being an asshole. He was still angry with Montauk for sleeping with Tricia, and he was angry that Tricia might see Montauk in Iraq, and he was angry that she was happy and that everything seemed to be working out for her. He was an asshole because why not? If he failed at everything else in life, there was always that one thing he was great at: being an asshole.

  35

  * * *

  In attempting to figure out what bo
ok her fictive Hal was reading in the portrait, Mani had turned to The Thousand and One Nights. Her mother had read her the stories as a child, and over the years they had become, for Mani, a sort of whimsical encyclopedia of the imagination.

  The tales within the book were framed with the story of a king, who, fearful of marital betrayal, murders his virgin wife each night, then takes a new wife the following day. When the kingdom runs out of virgins, the vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, volunteers herself. Each night she tells the king a tale, stopping short at a cliffhanger, prolonging her life a further night. When she tells the king the tale of The Thousand and One Nights itself, the king has lost, for he can never escape the loop. It is an infinite prison. Such a metaphysical solution made perfect sense for someone like Hal. Of course he’d be reading a book about himself.

  Mani carefully replicated the painting in miniature on the cover of Hal’s book, then did so again within that replica, and again, the image becoming abstract dabs of color as it receded within itself, drawing the viewer’s eye into the black hole of the book—but somehow also casting the viewer out beyond the frame, for the painting itself was the cover of an enormous book that the viewer would never be able to read. No, only that smug-looking hipster in the painting could read it, the corner of his mouth curled up—in amusement at the book or merely as a pose, even Mani couldn’t tell. It was dizzying, in her head and in her heart, and that was how she knew she’d done good work. She texted Hal.

  * * *

  The text had been an address. And a time: eight p.m. It did not say come see me or let’s talk. It did not attempt to explain or palliate the six months of rough silence that had festered between them. It didn’t cast blame and it did not invite apology. It presented itself as a fact, as part of the natural order of things. And so Corderoy, who was otherwise too cowardly to reestablish contact, too guilty to reply, obeyed, for what else could he do? The universe happened, and this meeting at Mani’s studio was a thing that happened within it.

  As he walked up the stairs, he pictured Mani not in a wheelchair or covered with bandages but spry and vigorous. He paused in the hallway. The door to her loft was cracked. Years later, he would remember this as the moment he turned and walked away.

  No. He would remember this as the moment he knocked.

  He knocked timidly as he pushed the door open. Mani was standing at the window with a cigarette, wearing sweatpants, her hair oily and pulled back in a ponytail.

  She turned and smiled and it killed him. He felt something emanating from that smile and it was not love. It was power. A form of power that was not rigid or controlling, that was not concerned with dominion. It was power that derived from an essential goodness. The smile he offered back said, Please don’t hurt me, I know I deserve it.

  “I have something to tell you,” Mani said, putting out her cigarette. “But first I need to show you something.”

  Corderoy walked farther into the room. “You look good,” he said. “How long have you been here?”

  “We can talk about that stuff later,” Mani said. “This is important.” She walked up to a large canvas in the middle of the room and pulled the sheet off it.

  Corderoy took in the painting. A hipster about to get his head ventilated by a Civil War soldier. And the soldier, he looked a lot like Montauk. But who was the hipster kid? Corderoy tilted his head to the side. “That’s not . . . is that?” he said without looking away from the painting. It was. It was him. It was so obviously him.

  Mani observed Corderoy’s face, how it moved from confusion to recognition and then into an even deeper confusion. “What do you think?” she asked.

  There he was, reading a book whose cover depicted the death he was about to experience at the hands of his best friend, and yet he looked so self-satisfied, so smug. As if he could keep death at bay through infinite recursion. The painting had contempt for its central figure. And yet such care had been taken to perfect the lilt in the brow, the sheen of oil on the forehead under the fluorescent light. In contrast, the image of Montauk leaping from behind was almost blurry with rage. A rage that seemed neutered by the frozen moment of the painting. “I . . . don’t know,” Corderoy said. He finally turned to look at Mani. “I’m stupid,” he said. “I’m so, so stupid and sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry yet,” she said. She took a breath. “After you left, when I got out of the hospital, I didn’t have anywhere to go. So, I moved in with Mickey for a while.”

  Corderoy blinked.

  “I told him not to tell you. I thought it would be weird.”

  “It is weird,” he said. He willed his face to relax. “But. I get it.”

  “Also, we kinda, sorta. Got married.”

  Corderoy steadied himself on the edge of a chair.

  “Just at the courthouse. It was Mickey’s idea. To give me health insurance and a thousand bucks a month from the Army. That’s how I paid for physical therapy, and this place.”

  Corderoy looked back to the painting. He tried to bury his consciousness inside of it. “I. I.” I don’t deserve this? I have no reason to be angry?

  “Cards on the table,” Mani said. “I had to.”

  Corderoy stared at her feet. He couldn’t say another word. He turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

  • • •

  It was dark and chilly on the street, and Corderoy strode with purpose toward anywhere. He wanted to bang on parking meters and signposts as he walked, to kick garbage cans, but he didn’t. He held his breath. Montauk had taken Mani in and helped her with her medical bills, asking nothing in return, and that made Corderoy, in comparison, even more of a jerk. He closed his eyes and walked blindly. Montauk had given him an escape route when he needed it, and Montauk had stuck around to clean up the resulting mess. He stumbled, he ran into someone. He kept walking. No, he had no right to be angry. But he was. And realizing he was wrong to feel angry made it worse. The flames were nearing his gas tank, and knowing it wouldn’t blow on its own, he saw himself rigging it for detonation.

  He heard the sound of water, a washing, a spraying. He stopped abruptly. He breathed in. He opened his eyes. He was standing in front of the Allston Car Wash. A sedan had just pulled in and was being slapped around by the massive felt arms and rollers. He walked in behind it. An attendant saw him but was too late to stop him from entering.

  The jets of water soaked him through in a second, and the large slapping brushes nearly knocked him over. Soap got in his mouth, and he started choking before another brush, stiffer and more painful, came from his right and sent him to the floor. The conveyor belt was moving him forward along with the car, but he could hardly breathe. The constant attack of the water and the soaped-up brushes didn’t give him time or space to inhale. As he reached for the car’s rear bumper to pull himself up, he realized that this was what the car always went through, though you couldn’t possibly know from inside. He felt as if he were outside his own body, shocked at what the exterior must put up with on a daily basis, the rigors of gravity and light and water, and outside of his life, as if the thing that was really him were so tiny and small and protected that it couldn’t possibly be exposed to the traumas that defined his life.

  He plunged through one last curtain of water and was hit by gusts of heated air that invaded his crevices. He struggled to stand under the force of the fans.

  The manager of the car wash was waiting for him as he emerged. “What are you fucking nuts? I oughta call the police.”

  “Can I have a towel?” Corderoy asked.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  • • •

  He walked into the first bar he could find, leaving sodden footprints behind him. He ordered a glass of whiskey, paid with sopping cash, downed it, then ordered another. Twenty minutes later, he stumbled out, drier, warmer, and drunk. When he got home, he checked his pockets. His phone was a wet, functionless b
rick. His keys were missing. He banged on the door until Tricia let him in. He said nothing to her. Inside his cave, he opened his laptop and navigated to the Encyclopaedists article. He created a new subsection: “Betrayal.”

  36

  * * *

  That night Corderoy dreamed of the painting, saw it move forward and backward in time, Montauk’s bayonet piercing his skull and protruding from his eye socket. Then it sliding out and Montauk receding into the background. When he awoke the next morning, a strange calm had come over him. His fever had broken. He did not reflect on what he’d added to the Wiki article the previous night or whether he still believed it. It belonged to its moment in time as he belonged to this moment. And this moment felt good, but more important, it felt momentous—like the end of Ulysses—it was carrying him somewhere, and he was content to give himself to its design.

  And so he arrived at Mani’s apartment without warning and pushed the buzzer. Up until the moment itself, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say, and it surprised him as much as it did her when he walked in and said, “I love it. I love the painting. It’s weird and it’s true and I absolutely love it.”

  Mani was speechless. She sat down on her bed and began rolling a joint. She held it up when she was done, and Corderoy sat down next to her. She lit it and they smoked it and they said nothing until it was finished. Then Mani said, “I didn’t need you to like it. It’s not for you.”

  Corderoy stiffened.

  “You know how sometimes you have to say something out loud to see if you believe it?” Mani asked.

  “Do you believe it?”

  “This is me extracting myself. I’m trying to see who I am—not in relation to these other things.”

  “Things? You mean me and Mickey.”

  “Not you, but what I feel about you and Mickey. I had to take all of that out of my head and put it in the painting.” She paused and looked up as if examining whether she believed that last statement. “I’m glad you like it,” she said.