War of the Encyclopaedists (8 page)

8

It was four days until deployment when Montauk and Mani entered the Seattle Municipal Courthouse. They were on time for their appointment, but the judge was running behind, so they sat in padded folding chairs outside his office on the tenth floor. Mani was wearing a short yellow summer dress, almost as offensively bright as the fluorescent lights. Montauk wore his Army green service uniform. A couple sat next to them filling out paperwork for a marriage license, just as Montauk had done three days ago. The guy was thin, had shaggy brown hair, and wore a tweed jacket and bow tie. His arm was around the girl, who looked Chinese and was dressed like she lived in Manhattan. They were cooing and smiling over their clipboard.

“I'm glad we're having the coq au vin,” Mani said, loud enough for them to hear.

“What?” Montauk whispered.

“It'll go well with the black truffle ravioli,” she said. “Don't you think?”

“Yes, quite,” Montauk said. “Though I must say, our boldest menu choice is surely the lemon-caper sorbet.”

Mani snickered but regained her composure. “I can't wait to see the look on Clarissa Worthington's face.”

Montauk had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at that one.

The elevator down the hall opened, and a couple in their eighties shuffled out. Mani watched them approach and lower their creaking bodies into chairs. She suddenly felt shitty for messing with the young
couple, for trying to joke through what she and Mickey were about to do, rather than facing up to its seriousness.

The judge opened his door and said, “Montauk?”

They nodded and entered his office. Law books lined both walls. A narrow window behind the desk looked out on the city. The view wasn't all that spectacular. The judge verified their receipt of payment ($63.50 cash, paid at the window down the hall), then inspected their certificate to ensure that it was properly filled out.

Montauk wore a silver ring on his right index finger, mostly out of habit; it was a gift from an ex-girlfriend. He twisted it about his finger, imagined it on his other hand. They had no rings, of course. But they were about to be married. He couldn't help feeling that certain elements were absent, that a marriage wasn't a marriage without rings, and rice, and, well, consummation.

These absences didn't bother Mani. But her heart was beating at an elevated rate, her eyes scanned the room in quick saccades, she sat unnaturally motionless. She felt the same rush that she'd felt years ago when shoplifting a Goo Goo Dolls CD from Sam Goody. She was about to get something for free. Government money. Something she didn't deserve. Mani grabbed Montauk's hand and squeezed it, hoping this would alleviate the awkwardness, but it only magnified it, and she quickly let go.

“Looks good,” the judge said. “Where are your witnesses?”

“I'm sorry?” Montauk said.

“You need two witnesses.”

“They're . . . just outside,” Mani said. She glared at Montauk.

He jumped up, said, “Back in a second,” then ducked out of the office.

“Can I borrow a pen and paper?” Mani asked the judge.

• • •

Montauk surveyed the hallway. The old man had just entered the bathroom, and the young woman was on the phone. But Bowtie and Granny were just sitting there quietly. “Excuse me,” Montauk said.

• • •

Inside the judge's office, Mani finished writing and handed the pen back just as Montauk opened the door.

“Sorry for the delay,” he said.

Granny held her hands in front of her and smiled softly. Bowtie was doing his best to mute his expression, though his eyes conveyed a certain smugness. Mani gave him a sheepish grin.

“Can we proceed?” the judge asked.

Mani and Montauk nodded.

“Is it your plan to get married and be faithful to each other?”

“Yes,” Mani said.

Montauk hesitated. What did
faithful
actually mean in this context? It didn't mean sexually, so . . . Mani and the judge were both staring at him. “Of course,” he said.

“Do you have any vows you'd like to say?”

“No,” Montauk said.

Mani's voice caught in her throat. It would be awkward with these two strangers in the room, especially Granny, but they were getting married! Something had to be said. “He does,” Mani said, and she handed him a folded piece of legal paper.

Montauk's eyes widened.

“Read it,” Mani said.

Montauk glanced back at Granny and Bowtie. “Okay,” he said. “ ‘I vow not to be an asshole. Or a coward. To answer all letters sent to me, to eat any and all desserts I can get, to—' ” He coughed. “ ‘To jerk off at least twice a day, to come home safe, to be open if I hurt, to make it my life's mission not to fuck over anyone, anywhere, no matter how much they deserve it.' ”

Granny wiped a tear from her cheek.

Montauk looked Mani in the eye.

“Finished?” the judge said, all business. “Okay. I pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

They both hesitated. Despite the intimacy and honesty of the vows Montauk had just recited, this prompting for a public kiss made it inescapably obvious that they were committing fraud, that they'd harassed two strangers to witness a nominal marriage purely to squeeze a little money out of the Army. Fraud that could land them in deep shit if they got caught. It had happened before. Montauk had heard of one company commander who made it a point to call the mothers of all pre-­deployment last-minute brides. The judge was staring at them. Montauk
imagined seeing this moment on security camera footage. In a courtroom. Exhibit A. Corderoy watching from the gallery. He leaned toward Mani, she leaned in, too, and they kissed. It was a brief kiss, a guilty kiss. Not at all like the other night on the couch. It was more like a hesitant taste of milk. Milk that might have gone sour.

They passed the next few days in a cloud of formality. But on the night before Montauk's departure, Mani crept into his room around four a.m. “Can I stay up here?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Montauk mumbled. She'd never asked before, and the couch downstairs was perfectly comfortable. He didn't press her. She climbed into his bed.

After a few minutes of silence, she said, “I've been thinking about your advice. About getting out of Seattle.” Mickey had asked his housemates, and they were fine with her staying at the Encyclopad even after he left for Baghdad, but Mani knew she would feel awkward, lonely.

“You should,” Montauk said. “Rent a studio somewhere, buy art supplies. Change your environment.”

“I think I might go back to Newton.”

“With your parents? You bit my head off when I suggested that.”

“I don't know. I haven't seen them in a while. Maybe it's a good place to start over.”

Montauk lay there, more awake, thinking about how close Newton was to Boston, to Hal. Another minute passed, and he'd nearly resolved not to bring it up. Then he whispered, “This doesn't have anything to do with . . .”

Mani didn't respond. She had either fallen asleep or didn't want to answer that question. For the best, probably.

But Montauk couldn't fall back to sleep. It was now the time of day he would soon come to know as Begin Morning Nautical Twilight. The turret on the third floor of his house looked out through the leafy branches of a nineteenth-century maple toward the gray of Lake Washington. Mani faced away from him, half covered by a sheet, breathing deep and slow, the tattoos on her lower back—two cursive
f
s, as on a cello—peeking out between her boxers and the bottom of her tank top.

Montauk had not lain awake at early dawn like this since the mid-1980s. Like most children and old people, he would often wake up earlier than the rest of the world. During those years before he quit the piano, he would lie still in the mornings, hearing Suzuki piano sonatas playing in his mind as the gray diamond of window light slowly traveled his bedroom wall. Those dawns were the best part of his whole day. Not because his childhood was unhappy, but because at dawn, the world was surreal. Lying completely still, he would sometimes get the sensation that his hands were enormous—the size of his bed or as big as the room. He tried not to look down at his sheets, so as to preserve the illusion. He felt the ghost of that feeling now, mitigated by adult knowledge, the certainty that his hands were, in fact, quite normal.

He inhaled and his thoughts were enveloped by Mani's scent, like submerging his head in warm bathwater. Smelling her body beside him made him wonder how she tasted, which made him wonder if she waxed. He thought for an instant about asking Corderoy. But he didn't really want to know; he'd made the conscious decision, for the first time in his life, to not sleep with a girl, his wife, for a reason other than that she was ugly.

Mani rolled over toward him. With his eyes closed, he felt her head move on the pillow and thought she might be awake, but he didn't move or open his eyes. Eventually, he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was six. He had a plane to catch in three hours that would take him to D.C. and then to Kuwait. From there they'd convoy to Baghdad down highways studded with IEDs. This was his last day as a civilian. After packing his duffel bag with the few items he was permitted, he kissed Mani on the forehead. Though she stirred, her eyes remained closed. She knew, of course, that he was leaving this morning, but this nonverbal good-bye was somehow better, softer. Downstairs, Montauk checked his e-mail, then navigated to Wikipedia and looked up “The Encyclopaedists.” Their article had been updated on September 3rd with a new section: “Ice.” Montauk read it and smiled. He still had a little time, so he started a section of his own: “Used goods.” He hammered out the last sentence as his cab honked out front. He looked toward the stairwell and wondered if Mani had woken at the sound. He said good-bye to the Encyclopad as he closed the front door softly. An hour later, he reached his gate of departure.

BOSTON

9

The seeds of Corderoy's existential crisis were planted during his first class, when his professor asked him to prove he wasn't wasting his time. Corderoy had felt a quiet thrill, climbing the stairs to the third floor of the Gothic stone building and entering a room lined with bookshelves. But when he sat down at the long conference table, he'd felt intimidated. An older guy at the end of the table was most of the way through a volume of Proust. In Seattle, Corderoy would have considered that a pretentious pose, but here, maybe that was like reading
Us Weekly
? He had tried to look introspective while listening to the girls a few chairs away talking about where they'd attended undergrad.
In New Haven . . . And you? . . . Cool, my best friend went to Brown.
He'd surveyed the other arriving students. They couldn't all have gone to Ivy League schools, could they? But Boston was a bigger pond than Seattle, and as host to several elite colleges, it had a disproportionate share of transplanted big fish. He'd caught the eye of the semi-cute girl across the table and given her an aloof smile. She'd ignored it and returned to her book, prompting Corderoy to affect his best casual thug lean—an attempt to convey that, yeah, he was just as smart as everyone here, probably smarter, but it wadn't no thang.

When the professor had entered with his brown leather satchel and his Dr. Wily hair, he had said in an Irish accent, “This is Literary Criticism One, and I am Professor Flannigan,” before initiating a round of introductions. The closer it had come to Corderoy's turn, the less he'd
paid attention and the more he'd begun to plan out what he would say. The goal was to sound nonchalantly clever and smart—to be just witty enough that people thought that was how you always were. Corderoy had said, “Well, I like reading books. And playing video games. But there's no degree for playing video games.” No one had thought it funny, and he'd slunk back in his chair as the spotlight moved on.

As Professor Flannigan rifled through a stack of wrinkled and stained legal pad pages, he'd said, “The purpose of this course is to examine the critical theories and modes of interpretation that . . .” And then he had stopped talking for what seemed at least a minute. He'd been so clearly comfortable with the silence, moseying about in his brain, selecting the right word, it was almost a rebuke. “. . . that pay intellectual dividends,” he'd continued, “when applied to various texts. The greatest insight of post-structuralism, and of post-modernism in general, is that language is not a stable, closed system. Literature, therefore, is irreducibly plural. We reject the notion of a transcendental signified that would guarantee the illusive center of meaning, an impossible point of reference completely external to all human thought. Now, this isn't a hermeneutic license to say that all reading is misreading, but rather, an exhortation to be ruthlessly self-conscious of the reductive impulse.

“This may seem obvious to some of you, as it should, for you've matured in a fragmented and pluralistic world. If it does, then I have a more difficult question for you. Why isn't this class, this activity, a waste of time?”

An unspeakable question. You didn't start doubting God's existence while gearing up for the Crusades. You didn't consider whether the stripper giving you a lap dance was performing her sexual attraction. And you didn't ask whether literary criticism was a waste of time the day after you paid your tuition. Corderoy found himself staring at the cleavage of the girl on the far left. Sandy? She was a little chubby and had an overly large jaw, which made him feel conflicted about his ogling. When a girl was pleasant to look at as a whole person, you could call her beautiful and it was refined to admire beauty. But if you had to ignore her face to enjoy her breasts, you were effectively sectioning her into isolated chunks and staring at only the good bits. There was
no way to convince yourself that it was noble. The subconscious pull to glance at Sandy's cleavage made him feel powerless, in the grip of an addiction he was born with.

“Mr. . . .”

Corderoy looked up. “Hal. Corderoy.”

“Why isn't this a waste of time, Mr. Corderoy?”

Corderoy faltered, then quickly retreated into cynicism. “It is a waste of time,” he said.

The professor smiled. “Ah, well then, tell us. Why
is
our enterprise a waste of time?”

“Because . . . we produce nothing consumed by the world outside of academia, and the opportunity cost of applying our intellects to something that's basically useless, aside from whatever personal satisfaction we get from it, when we could be building rockets or curing cancer. I mean, we can't all be physicists, but at least we could be building tables or filming amateur pornography or something that would actually get used by other humans!”

Professor Flannigan laughed. “Good points, all. But if it's a waste of time, why don't universities simply eliminate liberal arts programs?”

Corderoy scratched his chin, but the contemplative gesture belied a growing inner panic. Indeed, why not?

“From a Darwinian perspective,” said Professor Flannigan, turning to the class, “professors will possess those traits that ensure the highest likelihood of survival, tenure for the professor and department funding for the species. As such, we English professors have, over time, ensured our own usefulness by creating texts so dense with inclusive language that only a member of the elect can decipher them. The university bureaucrat may wonder whether studying Derrida or Hegel truly does enhance a student's intellectual understanding of the world, and to whom does he turn for an expert opinion?”

“That's how the clergy survived for centuries,” said the old guy at the end of the table. “They kept Mass in Latin, acting as translators for God.”

“Exactly, Mr. Fulmer,” Professor Flannigan said. “In this sense, then, professors don't have jobs because there are difficult books requiring explication; rather, difficult books exist so that professors
can have jobs! That's assuming our enterprise is inherently useless, as Mr. Corderoy suggested. I submit that it is not.”

But how could it not be? Montauk was preparing for war—maybe a war based on bad ideas, but regardless, what Montauk was doing had real risks, real consequences—and here Corderoy was, talking about fucking books.

“When we apply various theories to a particular text,” Professor Flannigan said, “we learn something about the text and about the theory we are looking through, adding depth and intricacy to the body of our collective knowledge. Let's have an example, yes? Ms. . . .” He looked toward a girl who had a Swede's complexion and a Boston accent.

“Chelsea Harrow,” she said. The Yale girl.

“Give us a text, Ms. Arrow.”

“
Ulysses
?”

“Has anyone not read
Ulysses
?”

Corderoy had not read
Ulysses,
but he remained silent. A fat guy and the semi-cute brunette both raised their hands.

“Let's see if we can find something we're all familiar with,” Professor Flannigan said. “Any cultural item whatsoever.”

Corderoy racked his brain.
Huck Finn,
maybe?
Of Mice and Men
? The brunette asked if it had to be a book, then mumbled some suggestion. Her nose was too narrow.

“Remind me of your name again, dear,” Professor Flannigan said.

“Maria Sardi.”

“Thank you, Ms. Sardi. Has anyone not seen the
Star Wars
films?” He pronounced it
filims,
with an extra vowel.

Wait, what?

No hands were raised. “Perfect.” Professor Flannigan stood and began pacing in front of the blackboard. “We'll begin with New Criticism, which argued that a literary text ought to be regarded as autonomous, that the intentions of the author and the historical circumstances in which the work appeared are extraneous.”

Corderoy felt violated.
Star Wars
didn't belong here. It wasn't meant to be taken apart by the cold intellectual grip of academics. He thought back to the last time he'd watched
The Empire Strikes Back
. With Mani. She had stared at him lovingly as an uncontrollable child's grin had
overtaken his face.
Star Wars
was the one place in his life where he was totally sincere, without a shield of irony.

“Thus,” Professor Flannigan went on, “when Han Solo says that the
Millennium Falcon
made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, a unit of distance, not time, New Criticism would say that the ignorance of George Lucas is irrelevant. The work stands alone. The Kessel Run, perhaps, can be accomplished in varying distances, the more difficult or dangerous routes being shorter.”

Corderoy had been staring at the dust motes in the sunlight, but now he gave his full attention to the professor, who was scribbling on the blackboard as he said, “Archetypal Criticism, based on the work of Jung and Campbell, sees literature as instantiating patterns and mythic formulae present in the collective unconscious. Any fool can see that
Star Wars
fits Campbell's hero-quest framework: boy leaves home, boy finds mystic guide, boy rejects destiny, finds magic sword, loses mystic guide, accepts destiny, travels to underworld, meets father, transcends father, kills father, redeems father, et cetera.”

Corderoy could feel his pulse increasing.

“How about from a psychoanalytic perspective?”

Sandy Bigjaw suggested that the Dark Side was pure id. She misquoted the Emperor's speech to Luke: “ ‘Give in to your fear, take your weapon, strike me down.' ”

“Brilliant,” Professor Flannigan said. “And the Jedi are the superego, constantly self-monitoring, making the sound moral judgments for the good of the Republic. A Jedi would rather die than give in to temptation. How about Marxist theory?”

A student with neatly parted hair and black Gucci eyeglasses cleared his throat. “We could analyze the struggle between the proletariat Rebels and the bourgeois Empire as a form of dialectical materialism,” he said.

Professor Flannigan scrawled
dialectical materialism
on the blackboard. Corderoy suddenly felt small and excited, like a child at an amusement park, not tall enough for any of the rides. Here they were, in grad school, talking about
Star Wars
! And it wasn't terrible at all. It was like seeing it again for the first time, but through his adult's eyes. Though everyone else seemed to have a leg up on the proper lingo.

“Post-colonialism,” Professor Flannigan said, “might examine the Jedi as an ethnic group in Diaspora. Yoda and Obi-Wan and the few remaining Jedi having fled the galactic center for the remote planets of Dagobah and Tatooine. How about existentialism?”

Maria Sardi said, “Han Solo.”

“Go on,” Professor Flannigan said.

Corderoy stared at Maria Sardi, prepared to judge the living shit out of her for whatever minor interpretive flaw she might apply to this sacred fictional personage.

“At least in the beginning,” she said with the ghost of an Italian accent—
een the begeening—
“Han Solo could be seen as an atheist existentialist. He's a mercenary by trade, and for him the world has no inherent truth or meaning. The Empire is no worse than the Republic.”

Maria Sardi: officially cute.

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons,” Corderoy said to her.

“Excellent,” Professor Flannigan said. “And from the phenomenological point of view, the Force can be seen as an expression of yearning for a world not reducible to the phenomena of conscious experience. A desire to be certain of more than merely our perceptions. Obi-Wan tells Luke to put down the blast shield on his visor, to not let his eyes deceive him, to trust his feelings.”

A round-faced Korean student chimed in. “I was thinking about Noam Chomsky's propaganda model of mass media. That all sources of information are biased. Maybe that can explain certain inconsistencies. Like, why are the storm troopers, highly trained shock troops, incapable of hitting the heroes with a blaster shot?”

“Brilliant, Mr. Lee. The movies themselves are a form of Rebel propaganda, with a Rebel bias. Is anyone familiar with semiotics?”

“The study of signs,” said the old guy, “and how they signify.”

“Exactly. We could look at the significance of light saber colors (blue/green versus red), the shapes of starships (the Empire's are angular, the Rebellion's rounded), and the various ritualistic phrases (
May the Force be with you
or
What is thy bidding, my master
)
.
And on a macro level, the binary opposition that gives each element meaning, for there would be no Dark Side without the Light.

“The structuralists might say that upon breaking
Star Wars
down
to its mythemes, the component parts of the larger mythos, we see that the actions of Luke, the orphaned hero, are significant only in the larger mythical structure, which contains the frail king and hidden father (Vader) and the prophecy (bringing balance to the Force), which itself is a kind of structure that binds everything together. And post-structuralism and deconstruction are what allow us to inhabit all these interpretations simultaneously.

“That was fun, yes? I hope so, for your sake, because that's what we'll be doing this semester. Is it a waste of time? We could be carpenters or pornographers, after all.” He nodded toward Corderoy. “And chances are you're not going to be Aristotle. But I offer you this to ponder: the search for human meaning—what could be more important?—must happen through intellectual investigation that is not tethered to empirical knowledge or scientific progress. Where would we be if we didn't have a million people searching for the truth?”

Professor Flannigan handed out the syllabus and said, “That's it for today. And one last thing. Some of you were silent during our discussion. I hope you'll learn to participate. If you weren't familiar with
Star Wars,
you should have spoken up. I'm looking at you, Mr. Corderoy.”