War of the Encyclopaedists (3 page)

• • •

It was just after dawn, and gray light filled Montauk's room. Someone was talking to him. He sat up in bed. Mani was standing in his doorway. Her eye shadow had smudged across her face. Her black hair was tangled and oily. “What?” Montauk said.

“Hal. Where's Hal?”

“He left,” Montauk said.

“Where'd he go?”

Montauk shrugged.

“When's he coming back?” A note of uncertainty had entered her voice.

“He . . . didn't say.”

“Mickey. Why would he leave without telling me? What's going on?”

“He was getting a little freaked out. That it was moving too fast or something.”

“So he just left? He's just gone?” Her voice was rising.

“Yeah.” Montauk looked out the window.

“Is that all you can say?”

“It's not really my business.”

“You.” Mani threw her hands up, pointing the toy gun skyward. Montauk pictured those Hezbollah tapes of some bearded guy in camo firing an AK, down with Israel,
Allahu Akhbar
. Mani lowered her hands and sighed.

“Sorry,” Montauk said.

“Fuck you,” she said, and she left the room, slamming his bedroom door. He heard her running down the stairs, then the front door opening and closing. He pictured her unwound turban trailing behind her in the dim light as he closed his blinds and lay back on his bed. Was she crying? She didn't seem the type.

2

Montauk found the Roswell aliens, his housemates Nick and Ian, still up and playing through the final level of
Halo
.

He picked up a plastic bag from the floor. It had been ripped at the seams and was moist. “Did you kill that entire eightball?” He looked out the large bay window toward the street, where a leaf-strewn puddle was rippling in the light rain. It was just after noon.

“Sorry, dude. Already licked the bag. You should've come down sooner.”

Montauk went to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee—soy milk, sugar—then went outside and sat in the wicker chair that hung from the portico. Sunlight filtered through the clouds. It felt good to be outside in pajama pants and a T-shirt with a cup of coffee. The wet soil was steaming and smelled of sweetness and fresh decay. To the left of the door, he spotted the toy AK-47. It had been smashed. Next to it was a broken cellular phone. He brought them inside.

“Hey, Ian.” He held them forward in confusion.

“Hold on.” Ian was fixated on the TV screen. A plasma grenade landed near him and exploded with a flash of purple light. As the level reloaded, he swiveled his bloodshot gaze toward Montauk. “That's that girl's shit. The one who got hit by the car.”

“What?”

“You didn't hear it? Ambulance and everything. They took her to the hospital, man. She looked fucked up.”

“Jesus.” Montauk sat down and drank his coffee slowly, conscious of its heat warming his tongue, his throat, pooling in his stomach. He felt an insistent dread; but rather than face it, he scanned the bookshelf across the room. His gaze came to rest on a tattered copy of
The Odyssey
. He could have been thinking about Mani. Or about his aging parents and their imminent retirement, the increasing healthcare costs they would need help to meet. But why think about that when he could be thinking about Odysseus, how careless he was to allow his men to slaughter the oxen of the Sun God. How he was doomed never to return home, his ship destroyed, his men drowned. And really, was it all that bad an offense? It was absurdly easy to offend a god back then. The irony was that in choosing to avoid the difficult thought chains, Montauk inevitably fell into their metaphorical counterparts, which left him depressed and not knowing why. He finished his coffee and dialed Corderoy.

• • •

Corderoy parked his dad's Suburban in front of the Encyclopad. It was drizzling again. Montauk came down and got in, holding the AK and Mani's cell phone. Corderoy glanced at the toy gun. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

They sat in silence. Corderoy kept his hands on the wheel, even though they were still parked. “So?”

Montauk ran his fingers through his hair. “I thought you might want to check up on her. She's at Swedish.”

Corderoy rubbed his eyes with his palms. “Should I call her?”

Montauk waved the broken phone in the air and offered it to Corderoy.

“Put it in the glove box or something.” Corderoy looked away. “How do you even know she's at Swedish?”

“It's the closest hospital.”

“Should I go?”

“I don't know. Don't see her if you don't want to.”

“Did you talk to her after I left?”

“Yeah, she came up to my room.”

“What'd you say?”

“I said you were gone. She got upset and ran downstairs. She might have been crying.”

“She was crying?”

“What did you think would happen? Wasn't that the point? So you wouldn't have to see her cry?”

Corderoy put the car in gear.

• • •

Mani was in traction.

Montauk set the AK and cell phone on the plastic chair next to the gurney, then assessed the situation. Her legs were elevated by cables attached to steel rungs that encased the bed frame. Her right arm was in a splint. She was dressed in a hospital gown that looked like it was made out of floral-print paper towels. There was a small bandage on the right side of her head. She was asleep or drugged unconscious. In all likelihood, it was not a critical situation. She seemed to have made it through surgery, and the possibility of head trauma seemed low. “It's not so bad,” Montauk said.

Corderoy stood in silent panic with one arm crossed over his chest and the other holding his chin, feeling as if he were heading for a cliff in a car with no brakes and no one in the driver's seat.

A nurse came into the room. “Hi there. Are you friends or family?”

Corderoy looked up. “Ah . . . no.”

The nurse balked. “No?”

“No, we're actually friends of a friend,” Montauk said. “We were supposed to meet her here.”

“Why don't you have a seat in the waiting room.”

“Can you tell us what happened?” Montauk asked.

“She has an impacted femoral fracture. They put three pins in her hip.”

“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 better.”

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.