War of the Encyclopaedists (17 page)

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 hovered 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.

Back home, he lay down on the couch and turned on the TV.
The Last Samurai
was playing on USA. He'd heard it was only okay.

He had trouble focusing on the movie, partly because he was quite drunk and partly because he couldn't help imagining Thanksgiving in Seattle. His mother, Susan, was an incorrigible prompter of party games: charades, Pictionary, Scattergories, or Celebrity, in which each person wrote down someone famous and stuck the paper to someone else's forehead, then you went around the circle, trying to guess who you were. Corderoy hated this game most of all—perhaps it was
something about the uncertainty of identity, the madness it implied in having to ask, “Am I dead?” or worse, “Am I fictional?” It was eleven in Boston, which meant it was eight in Seattle, and his mother was probably just now rounding people up for an interlude of games before dessert.

Tom Cruise was annoying, which was to be expected, but Ken Watanabe played a badass samurai named Katsumoto. Near the end of the movie, when the emperor's army had mowed down Watanabe's rebels with their American-bought howitzers, only Cruise and Watanabe were left alive on a blood-drenched field. Watanabe was too weak to commit seppuku, Japanese ritual suicide, so he asked Cruise to do it for him. Would that even count? It would be more like assisted suicide. Or consensual murder. It didn't seem honorable so much as pathetic. Cowardly. But the thing that really got Corderoy was that the reverse seemed cowardly, too. To simply go on living until nature or genetics or circumstance or God snuffed you out. He tried to recall Hamlet's
To be, or not to be
soliloquy:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the something something

The law, patient merit something,

. . . .

With a bare bodkin . . .

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death—

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns—puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

He realized that, as an atheist, he did not fear
the undiscovered country
. In his equation, there were no other ills he knew not of. There were only the present ills. And the option of ending them at his discretion. Besides, life had to end eventually. And thousands of years ago, twenty-three was middle-aged. Would he be missed? Certainly. His
parents and his brother, and Montauk, and a few others would miss him. Mani, in a way, maybe. Perhaps his mother, a devout Catholic, would be debilitated by the same conundrum that Hamlet faced. But Corderoy's will felt significantly unpuzzled.