War of the Encyclopaedists (23 page)

26

It was the morning of November 3rd, 2004, and Montauk had whipped himself up about the elections. He came from a family of down-the-line Democrats and a social group that hated George W. Bush with a foaming intensity that made Montauk uncomfortable, especially as he had many acquaintances, if not friends, who assumed he'd volunteered for Iraq and therefore his presence here was proof of unscrupulousness, stupidity, or both. This line of thinking made Montauk angry. Which was unfortunate, as he'd been following the election coverage as a way to keep from dwelling on Aladdin's death and the futility of the interviews he'd conducted. “You're never gonna figure this out,” Olaf had told him. “It's Iraq.”

On arriving back at the Convention Center, Montauk took off his kit and hung it on the back of the black desk that served as his living partition. He loaded nytimes.com and cnn.com and foxnews.com to check the election results. Pennsylvania had just been called for Kerry—it was midnight back there—but results weren't in for Florida, Ohio, or Nevada. After a few minutes of fruitless refreshing, Montauk gathered up Molly and his cleaning kit and went upstairs to the Coalition Press Information Center. The CPIC was the medium-sized lecture hall with the big projection screen where CPA spokespeople gave their press briefings; on occasion it hosted movie nights or broadcast sporting events. Montauk guessed correctly that they'd have the election news on, though no one else was in there at 0715 except one
woman who, as indicated by her press badge, worked for NPR. The big screen was tuned to MSNBC, where a commentator was blathering half-predictions between the actual results. The NPR lady glanced over briefly when Montauk spread out his grimy brown cloth and laid out Molly Millions in all her black, dusty glory. Molly hadn't yet fired a shot, so her bolt carrier was relatively clean, but everything exposed to the outside air wore a fine coat of dust, including the inside of the barrel. He swabbed it and held it up to the screen, and for an instant, John Kerry was framed by the bore, like in
the opening credits of a Bond movie. Except for the flecks of Baghdad dust in the rifling. He threaded another swatch of cloth into the bore snake's slot and pulled it through. At 0827, Florida was called for Bush. The NPR lady looked over. “Did you vote?”

The bore snake made a metallic
thwoop
noise as it popped out of the barrel.

“I did,” Montauk said. “I'm Bravo Company's voting officer, in fact.”

“So you help other soldiers vote?”

“I make sure that everyone who wants to vote gets registered and gets an absentee ballot and knows how to send it in.”

“Do most of them vote?”

“Most? Probably not. Maybe half. Probably less.”

“Who do you think they voted for?”

Montauk shrugged. “Probably Bush. I don't ask.”

• • •

He was back at his desk by 0850. He refreshed nytimes.com again and surveyed his surroundings. With his thoughts on civilian concerns, imagining his friends and their beer-fueled election parties, FOB Bushmaster felt alien. It was certainly unlike most of the other FOBs in the country and unlike most encampments in the history of warfare: a large office space with wall-to-wall carpeting, fluorescent lights, cubicles replaced with rows of identical bunk beds fitted with camouflage sheets and hung with rifles, helmets, and web gear. Sweat-stained body armor. Next to the bunks, automatic weapons on their bipods, ammunition belts hanging limply from ammo bags. Laptops everywhere. Energy drinks and bodybuilding supplements.

More than half of the company slept in a camouflage quilted poncho liner, nicknamed the “woobie” in the late sixties when troops tied them into the grommets of their issued ponchos and rolled themselves up against the night monsoons in the central lowlands of Vietnam. The air-conditioning was running full blast, as usual. Ant's woobie was draped over him like a sort of shawl or sorcerer's cape as the blue light from his laptop illuminated his face from below.

On the laptop's screen, Ant's
Sims
avatar lived out his mostly quotidian life. In some ways, it made sense that he had turned to the virtual domesticity of this “sandbox” game, so called because it lacked any defined goals; it was both the furthest thing from and inescapably similar to the sandbox of Iraq he was currently stuck in. The more Ant withdrew from his own life as a private from 2nd Platoon doing security at Checkpoint 11, the more he invested in developing this virtual person, giving him desires and sating those desires.

He had set up his
Sims
avatar in a two-bedroom, two-bath rambler, the best he could afford with a service job's income. The avatar stood by the window, eyeballing the neighbor lady as she got out of her minivan and walked to the front door of her house.

When she closed the door behind her, Ant's
Sims
avatar pulled himself away from the window and initiated a set of calisthenics. He was a relentless self-improver, with Benjamin Franklin–level discipline, who would work himself into wealth and physical hardness. Private Ant's Sim would run through that neighbor lady like Drano, that was the plan. Ant tracked the screen with the vapid intensity of a toddler watching a
Baby Einstein
video. He wore a set of earbuds in deference to those sleeping around him.

Gentle snoring noises came from Thomas's partitioned-off hooch. He slept on his side in a modified fetal position, his hands pressed together prayerlike under his ear. The orange tip of an earplug was visible next to the elastic band of his JetBlue sleep mask.

Not everyone was asleep. The clanking of weight plates and Urritia-­like exertion sounds came from the makeshift weight room set up outside the far edge of the bay. And laughter escaped from the office doors of the platoon room, where a dozen soldiers were watching
Team America: World Police
. Most of the troops were in some stage
of the Desert Camouflage Uniform, although a substantial minority wore interesting mash-ups of civilian and military dress. Lo was sporting his usual ensemble of UC Berkeley basketball shorts, brown issue T-shirt, and black PT watch cap.

Sodium Joh walked down the bay with a stack of mail, tossing letters, magazines, and package slips on bunks. “Sir.”

“Thanks.”

The letter slid into Montauk's hands. It was from Mani Saheli. He sniffed it for perfume, like he used to do in Officer Basic with letters from his ex-girlfriend. It smelled like a mail pallet. You pretty much had to be in the Army to get letters these days. Montauk tossed it beside his laptop. It was getting close. They would be calling it any time now. Unless there was a recount, a possibility
The
New York Times
couldn't help but obsess about. Montauk refreshed the home page again, then checked
The Washington Post
and
Drudge Report
. Though everyone wanted to be the first to call it, no one wanted to be wrong. Montauk jammed a plug of Kodiak into his lip.

With his earbuds in, Ant didn't feel Olaf's presence behind him until the platoon sergeant's large hand had parked itself beside the laptop. Ant remained motionless in his hunched-over position. Olaf was more or less leaning on him.

“Ant, you lazy fuck,” Olaf whispered, “you've got your Sim doing push-ups?”

Ant removed an earbud but didn't look up.

Montauk refreshed nytimes.com again and again. Pie charts and exit polling about national security and moral values. He spat into an empty Mr. Brown. The Kodiak wasn't just making him salivate; he felt his bowels loosen and the hot pressure of a large Class II download position itself in the straightaway. He instinctively looked around for some sort of book or magazine, then remembered the letter and tossed it into his cargo pocket. The bay was its usual somnolent self, except for the grunting from Private Antonin Ant. Olaf had shut Ant's laptop and was treating Ant like his own Sim, putting him through progressive stages of discomfort and muscle exhaustion in a quiet, almost respectful tone of voice, so as not to disturb the sleeping troops. Ant was on to slow-count push-ups as Montauk walked by.

The bathroom was in the middle of the bay and more or less first world, except for the foreign push-button flush system, the one-ply on the dispenser, and the constant thick reek. A live-in company of well-fed grunts was not the intended user group for this three-stall corporate restroom. Montauk spread his cheeks across the seat and reached for the letter.

Dear Mickey,

Rain is falling all over Boston right now. I'm in my new studio in Allston. After a week with my parents, I couldn't take it anymore. It's an old factory building. Nice ceiling-high windows. Lots of light. But the rain is so heavy I can barely see the cars on the other side of the street.

I bought rolls of canvas and tons of acrylic paint and brushes. And I've been dipping my brush in paint and swiping it around. It doesn't feel right to call it “painting” because it all sucks. I feel like a poseur. But at least I'm doing it.

It's a bit lonely here—I could look up some old high school friends, but it's too depressing to even think about that. I just know how awful it will be giving a rehearsed five-minute recap of the last few years, explaining about everything, about my hip. It's doing well, by the way, thanks to your tender ministrations. It's still kind of stiff, but pretty much when I've got jeans on, I can't tell the difference.

How are you doing, wartime husband? Are you keeping America safe for us innocents back home? I worry about you sometimes. It's weird having you come up in my thoughts. Like, I'll be walking around and see a newspaper, or someone will say something about Iraq, which is pretty much all the time now since everyone's talking about the election constantly, which is really annoying, or I'll be lying in bed and you'll pop into my thoughts for no reason, and I'll be like, “My husband's off at war,” which is the weirdest thing ever because no one else I know is married or knows anyone in Iraq, and it's all so strange. But also romantic. I totally feel like some 40's girl from Wisconsin or something, hoping my husband will come back in one piece so I can have his babies. I'm not saying I think about it that way, but I do feel like I can all of a sudden empathize with those
girls. What would blow that girl's mind is that we've kissed exactly once (I'd probably need to go back a few hundred years for knowing nods on that one). But also that it's this weirdly fake war. No one around here even thinks about it except to think how stupid it is, and how much they're embarrassed by it, and how much they hate Bush, of course.

Definitely, no one's worried about how battles are going, or whatever. Are there any? I guess there aren't, right? I don't even know how to talk about it. I think a lot of people want things to get even worse so we can leave and everyone will realize what a jackass Bush is. Which sentiment I certainly do not share, Mickey—I just want you to stay safe so you can come home and dump me with all your fingers and toes attached. Just kidding, I don't mind at all and I really appreciate how you've helped me. Because of you, I can spend time in my studio making shit, I mean art. Someday, soon, I'll make art. I'll have something to impress you with when you get back. Anyway, my hand is starting to hurt—you're giving my fingers a workout. Joke.

xoxo

mani

P.S. Sorry I was so awkward that time on the couch!

Montauk could feel his chest giving way to his heart as if it were a watermelon breaking through the bottom of a wet paper grocery bag. It made him angry, to be suddenly moved. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he mumbled, then self-consciously looked around, as if his platoon had been reading over his shoulder and making revolting jerk-off gestures. Just a few months ago, he'd been biking around Capitol Hill with a beer helmet on, trying to figure out which Encyclopad party theme would net the most babes with the least work. Now he was an officer in an occupation, reading letters from his wife back home. He wondered with dread whether the choices that had gotten him here had been subconscious attempts at the sort of hipster irony he'd claimed to be done with that time at Linda's, with Corderoy. The day after Mani's accident.

Montauk sighed and looked back at Mani's Millennial War-Bride
letter. He couldn't decide whether he admired her or pitied her. She would probably hate him if she could peek inside his head at all the violent thoughts, the sourceless anger that made him even angrier with its sourcelessness.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he muttered, trying to put her out of his mind.

It was 0915. Past one a.m. back in the States. The results had to be in. Montauk stuffed the letter in his pocket. He stood up and flushed and was about to zip when he saw the small ragged stack of porno mags on the top of the throne in mute defiance of General Order Number One: the blanket prohibition of booze, sex, and porn in the entire Central Command area of operations. He flipped open a
Penthouse
issue to a photo essay of a waxed brunette riding a jacked Mexican guy. He imagined it was his own hands on her ass cheeks, the girl morphing into different girls he'd been with or wanted to. Then he pictured his own blushing bride, Mani Saheli, her hair down, shiny, black, and long like advertisement hair. He hadn't turned away from Mani that night on the couch out of noble concern, whatever he may have told himself at the time. He'd turned away from her for the same reason every other loser guy turns away from a beautiful girl—he was terrified of rejection, of admitting his painfully acute desire to a girl who, probably, like all girls he wanted to bang (which numbered in the tens of millions, worldwide, he'd worked out with Corderoy), didn't want to bang him back. And though he'd been able to sense a little heat coming from her, the higher chance of success with Mani had been offset by the greater price of failure. She'd seemed coquettish, even a bit nuts, when she was with Corderoy. She'd calmed down in that month since Corderoy left for Boston, and here in the bathroom stall, Montauk felt that perhaps she'd changed, or perhaps he'd been wrong about her all along.