War of the Encyclopaedists (12 page)

Corderoy commented on her photos (
that's hawt, you're so effing cute!,
et cetera) following what he now realized to be the standard courting rituals of the MySpace digerati, or as he liked to think of them, MySpacesters.

He spent the next few days flirting with
Sylvie
via instant messenger. He became intimately familiar with the musical stylings of Daddy Yankee (Reggaeton, Wiki had told him, with a “dembow riddim”), he had come clean about his long-hidden love for Disney music (he had all the words to the
Little Mermaid
soundtrack by heart), and he knew the intricacies and subtle variations in lingual pleasure (secondhand) of the many types of Pillsbury Funfetti cake products, including the holiday, Valentine, and Halloween batters, the brownie mix, and of course, the frostings.

But he had not succeeded in moving the relationship from text to speech, though he'd dropped several large hints, such as
it's hard to tell this story by chat
and
omg you have to hear my impression of Jack Skellington
. Nonetheless, a ghosthunting trip had been set for the coming Saturday, and
Sylvie
said she would message him on Friday with her phone number so they could plan where to go. This did not happen.
Sylvie
effected a total digital-communications blackout. Corderoy checked hourly, but she was never on IM, and the time elapsed since
her last MySpace log-in grew and grew like a time-lapse shot of a testicular goiter.

• • •

As the week dragged on, he found himself obsessively alternating between two thoughts: Where did
Sylvie
go, she is so hot; and Why the fuck am I wasting my time thinking about this
disgustingly conventional
child
.
It was a phrase he'd lifted from
Lolita
. He found the book in one of the stacks near his mattress.

Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obnoxious items in her list of beloved things.

Sylvie
was exasperating, clownish, and yes,
disgustingly conventional
. There was no better way to say it. The full recognition of this fact—that he had sought out someone whom he considered leagues below his maturity and intellect, someone he could manipulate and anticipate with ease, offering up just the right phrase to make her twitter or swoon, the recognition that she made his dick hard not in spite of her cloying idiocy but because of it—it made him feel ugly, monstrous. And as a direct consequence of thinking about
Sylvie
that way, he began comparing her to Mani, who was clearly of far greater value to humanity. (Two people are hanging from a cliff. You can only save one. The first person is wearing hot pants. The second has Euler's identity [e
іп
+1 = 0] tattooed on her wrist. Whom do you save? Whom do you fall in love with?)