War of the Encyclopaedists (2 page)

He had yet to tell Corderoy. They had planned to room together in Boston, and now Montauk was essentially being ordered to bail on his best friend. It wasn't the right time to bring it up. He found Corderoy and Mani drinking red box wine from a gravy boat and a teacup, looking at the first items on display: the old
Anglo-American Cyclopedia
and a
Black's Law Dictionary,
both laid open on music stands to “conspiracy.” “More people than last time,” Montauk said.

Corderoy toasted him with his gravy boat. “Mission accomplished,” he said in a Texan drawl.

Montauk smiled. He found Mani's slutty bin Laden costume disconcerting. But it fit the party, which was full of the kind of people who would laugh at it. Mani was still a bit of a black box to him. She seemed to be reeling in his buddy like a hooked trout. On more than a few occasions he had reminded Corderoy that she was basically a freeloader; by her own admission, she'd trekked from Massachusetts to California on her ex-boyfriend's generosity—meaning credulity. Corderoy was certainly credulous, but when Mani was around, he was also happy, and who could argue with that?

“Gotta make the rounds,” Montauk said, and he dipped into the crowd.

“You okay?” Mani asked Corderoy.

Corderoy turned to her. “You've barely touched your wine.”

“I always drink slow.”

“Cheers to that,” he said, and he took a drink, holding the gravy boat to his lips for a long time, trying to get her to match him. She did.

“So . . . you're homeless again,” Corderoy said.

“We've got bigger problems,” Mani said. “I think they're after us.”

“Who's
they
?”

“You know,
them
.”

• • •

They drank. They smoked. They danced in slow motion on the lunar soundstage. They trampled a crop circle in the neighbors' grass. Corderoy and Mani told the story of the burglary again and again, with differing degrees of hyperbole. But the issue of where Mani would sleep that night went unmentioned. And Corderoy had to keep his keg cup
filled and frothy to hide his preoccupation. Did he actually love this girl enough to invite her to move in with him? Into the basement of his parents' house, no less? His parents wouldn't bat an eye—their hospitality was nearly a form of psychosis, and it had been a great boon to Corderoy in the past. Now it meant that the onus of this decision was on him. And Mani, unaware of his parents' attitude, would likely interpret an invitation as a serious move, which would leapfrog their relationship over the months of courtship it normally took to reach a place of domestic intimacy. And so he filled his cup, he lit a cigarette, he made out with Mani on the porch, he avoided Montauk because he needed Montauk's help, he clung to Mani because he feared he would leave her, because he imagined her down in Santa Cruz bumming around with potheads and surfers, playing guitar on the beach. He imagined her back in Newton, Massachusetts, living under the strictures of her immigrant parents. He imagined her warm breasts pressed against the side of his torso, her leg angled across his waist, sleeping through the night until tomorrow morning and forever.

• • •

Mani was intelligent but surprisingly ignorant of things Corderoy considered common knowledge. She had never heard the phrase
cross that bridge when we come to it.
She couldn't describe a catapult. She'd never heard of Nikola Tesla. She wasn't religious, but she believed in a
force
. Corderoy was quick to hate spirituality, but this sounded so much like his childhood love of
Star Wars
that he couldn't hate it. He used to cry, and still got teary-eyed, during Yoda's speech before lifting the X-wing from the Dagobah swamp.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter
.

Mani's parents had emigrated from Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution, when her mother was pregnant. It took them some time to regain their footing in America, but eventually they landed solidly in the upper-middle class. Her father was a doctor and her mother a professor at Boston College; they were strict in their desire to see Mani succeed, which meant: doctor, lawyer, possibly optometrist. But Mani wanted to paint. Her parents wouldn't finance an education in art, so she'd dropped out of UMass Amherst and moved to California with her then-boyfriend. She'd lived with him—and off him—for the
better part of a year, painting portraits of the junkies and homeless who roamed the streets of Santa Cruz. When they split, she moved out, becoming homeless herself, sleeping in parks and on the beach, until one day she traded a few watercolors for an old bicycle, sold off her belongings, and made her way up to Seattle over a period of several months, living off her charm, camping or crashing with strangers in San Francisco, Portland, Olympia, helping old hippie couples with their gardens, moving from co-ops to art lofts, reminding everyone she met how great it was to be alive, to share a cigarette or a bottle of wine with an unfamiliar but fascinating human.

This is why Corderoy loved Mani: She could roll her own cigarettes with one hand. She could recite large passages from Hunter S. Thompson. She looked exotic, with her olive skin and black hair, but she spoke like any college-aged American girl. One night she took him out to the woods in Interlaken Park with flashlights and beers to huddle in the dark and tell stories. When she wanted something, she had a way of setting her face in an almost-smile, a mischievous deadpan that held years of squealing, squirming mirth just below the surface.

When they'd met at the fourth Encyclopaedists event (“moss”), they'd spent the night on Montauk's futon. They had sex, quietly, while Montauk's friend Tim slept just feet away from them, and afterward Corderoy reminisced with her about the video games of his youth (
Mega Man 2, Castlevania
). Mani found this endearing. She sketched his face in pencil, out of proportion and somewhat grotesque, and he thought it perfect.

Corderoy loved Mani because he couldn't figure her out, and he had a deep need to solve things. She was a Rubik's Cube with one too many sides. No matter how he manipulated her, twisting her colors this way and that, she would always present another face, not quite aligned.

• • •

The party was a success by all the standards a party is usually measured by. The cops arrived once and only once. Traces of puke wound up alongside the piss on the floor of the bathroom. By four a.m., the music was off and only a few people were left among the wreckage of empty beer bottles, red plastic cups, and stomped-on papier-mâché
moon craters. Corderoy found Montauk in the kitchen, spread out on a folding table like an etherized patient. He nudged him awake. “You okay?”

“I'm fine,” Montauk said. “Just got tired.” He sat up.

“You have a bed upstairs.”

“Like you said, upstairs.”

“So, Mani's passed out in the band room,” Corderoy said. Montauk's housemate Ian was in a bluegrass band, and they practiced in the basement, where Corderoy and Mani had just had sex. Afterward, Corderoy had drunkenly tossed the condom across the room, and he was hoping it hadn't landed on any of Ian's musical equipment.

“What's your deal, man? You two have been acting weird the entire night.” Montauk stood and picked up a bowl of Cheetos.

“She's homeless. Where's she going to go?”

“Shit. That's right.” Montauk looked out the back window while he methodically chewed and swallowed a stale Cheeto. “Family?”

“They're in Massachusetts. They don't even know where she is.”

“You care about her?”

“Of course. She's great.”

“But you're not ready for her to move in with you.”

“Into my parents' house.”

Montauk walked over to the sink and filled an old keg cup from the faucet. He gulped it down, water dribbling off his chin. When he finished, he said, “Screw it. Just leave. She'll figure it out in the morning. And she'll throw herself into something new. She'll find some other dude to—”

“That's great. Thanks.”

“I don't know, man, then fucking marry her.”

“What?”

“I'm too drunk to be having this conversation. You've only known her two months.”

There was a creaking sound from the steps to the basement, and they both turned and listened for a tense moment.

“Look, you can love her and still leave,” Montauk said, a little quieter. “They're not mutually exclusive. If there's anything
real
there, it will still be there. If you change your mind.”

“Yeah?” Corderoy said. At this late hour, and running on fear, he couldn't see any holes in the idea. It was a test: could their connection transcend his sudden departure?

“Yeah. Go. Just go. I'll come up with something to tell her in the morning.”

“It is the morning. Whatever. Thanks.” Corderoy went out the front door, stumbled down the steps, and got in his car.

That moment, in the early morning of July 3rd, 2004, was the beginning of a fantastic and formidable knot in the lives of Halifax Corderoy and Mickey Montauk. The first such knot was formed the summer before, when they met at random in Rome. Montauk was leaning against a tree in the Piazza San Giovanni, where Beck was about to perform at an outdoor music festival, when Corderoy approached, asking if he could bum a cigarette. Montauk slipped him a Fortuna Blue, and they began talking as crowds congealed near the stage at the other end of the square. By an absurd and, they would later say, fateful co­incidence, they were both from Seattle, and they had both just graduated from the University of Washington. Montauk had done ROTC and had switched majors three times, finally settling on Comparative History of Ideas. Corderoy had confined himself to the En­glish department. They had several mutual friends. A light rain began to fall, and the Italians retreated from the stage and started huddling beneath the trees at the edges of the piazza, ripping canvas banners off fences to use as cover. But Corderoy and Montauk were Seattleites: umbrellas were for ­pussies. They walked casually up to the very front of the stage to wait for the show to begin. As it turned out, Italian rain was not Seattle rain. The sprinkling became a deluge, and Corderoy and Montauk were soaked through in under a minute, soggy cigarettes still in their mouths, each laughing at the other.

From then on, they traveled together. They got high in a cathedral; they wandered into a strange abandoned castle graffitied and occupied by anti-fascista punks; they flew in a hot-air balloon; they threw bottles at the Carabinieri; they slept on a rooftop in Capri and under a bridge in Florence; they drank cheap Chianti and poured a bottle
of Barolo on Keats's grave; they each fell half in love with the same Italian girl. In the span of a month, they had connected so deeply and so thoroughly, there was no doubt for either of them that they would be lifelong friends. It was a rarity, and they didn't question it, though Montauk's mother did. In e-mails home, he'd been talking about his new pal so much that she asked if he and Corderoy had a gay relationship. Nothing wrong if you do, she stressed. The two had a good laugh over that one.

But no sooner had they returned to their post-college lives in Seattle than Montauk received orders from the National Guard to report to the four-month Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he would get the tactical training given to all new infantry officers.

Corderoy moved back in with his parents. Having quit his job as a part-time manager at GameStop, he found employment teaching SAT prep. Each night he came home, shut himself away in his parents' basement, uncorked a liter-and-a-half bottle of cheap Chianti, and played
EverQuest
for hours. He had little desire to join his friends at the bar; he figured if he'd be drinking there, why not drink here, relaxed in his chair, slaying wyverns and collecting experience points.

When Montauk returned after four months at Fort Benning, he no longer felt comfortable in his hammock of post-graduate malaise. He was now a platoon leader, and rumors of an Iraq deployment wended through his Guard unit. Civilian life suddenly felt like a much too short vacation, and Montauk intended to make the most of it. So it was that after dragging Corderoy out of his parents' basement, Montauk hatched the idea to form an art collective. The first Friday that February, the Encyclopaedists were born.

Corderoy managed, through his highly developed powers of willful ignorance, to think of Montauk deploying as an unlikely possibility. It didn't help that Montauk had applied to grad schools along with Corderoy. They were both accepted: Corderoy at Boston University and Montauk at Harvard—a point of minor resentment for Corderoy. The plan was to room together in Boston, starting at the beginning of August. By the fourth Encyclopaedists event in May, when Corderoy first met Mani, the idea of Boston had grown in his mind to the extent
that he sometimes thought he was living there already and merely visiting Seattle. But after tonight, it was painfully clear to him that he was not in Boston, that he was stuck in Seattle for another month, that he was alone, and that he had done something he could not undo.

It was five-thirty a.m. when Mani woke up alone and wandered into the living room, her unwound turban draped around her shoulders. She'd lost her fake beard sometime during the night, but she was still toting the plastic AK-47. Two guys dressed as Roswell aliens were leaning over the coffee table, snorting lines. They were Montauk's housemates, but he had so many that she could never remember their names.

“Have you seen Hal?” she asked.

“Who's Hal?”

“Mickey's friend. Looks like President Bush.”

“Sorry.”

“Where's Mickey?”

“I think he went to sleep. Check his room?”

Mani walked toward the stairs, but a wave of nausea hit her and she stumbled into the bathroom. The vomit burned her throat, and as she leaned over the toilet bowl, spitting her mouth clean, she wondered if it was just the alcohol. She'd missed her period last month and hadn't told Hal; it was probably nothing. Before Steph had gone psycho and kicked her out, she'd given Mani a bottle of Prozac, and Mani had been taking it for almost four weeks. She didn't feel any happier. But maybe she was late because of the Prozac. And if it wasn't the Prozac, well, how could she even talk to Hal about that? Any of it. Mani stood and rinsed her face in the sink.