War of the Encyclopaedists (39 page)

• • •

Corderoy sat in the waiting room, tapping his foot, angling his neck to look through the small vertical slit of a window in the door to the
back area, as if that would allow him to see Mani. His phone rang. Unknown number.

“Hello,” he said quietly.

“Hi, this is Melissa calling from California Cryobank. I'm calling for Halifax Corderoy.”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Corderoy, I regret to inform you that your donor application has been declined, as your sample does not meet our needs at present. We thank you for your interest in California Cryobank.”

“What do you mean,
does not meet your needs
?”

“We do not disclose that information. I apologize.”

“Does that . . .” Shit. Did he have a low sperm count? Poor motility? That couldn't be it, or he wouldn't be in Planned Parenthood right now.

“Mr. Corderoy?”

“Hi, sorry. Do I have an STD? I mean, if I did, you'd tell me, right?”

“Yes.”

“I have an STD? What is it?”

“Yes, I would tell you, Mr. Corderoy. You do not.”

“Great.”

“Have a nice day.”

“Thanks.”

So he wasn't HIV-positive or syphilitic. He was just deficient for completely natural reasons. Good to know.

• • •

When Mani walked back into the waiting room, she looked nauseated and defeated. Corderoy assumed she had gone through with it. It had been almost forty-five minutes. But
Did you?
didn't seem like a good question to ask right then. He grabbed Mani's bag, held the door for her, and they walked out into the cold.

Mani spent the next few days in bed with a heat pad, both because of the cramps and because of a general spiritual malaise. They hadn't talked about her experience in the clinic, and they were operating under the
tacit agreement that everything was fine, that Mani was completely capable, both physically and emotionally, of helping herself. Corderoy took care of her as if she were an aging matriarch, which meant he excused the helpful things he did as mere acts of convenience; Mani could have gotten her own cup of tea, but if Corderoy was just about to make some for himself anyway, well, it was no trouble to pour a second cup.

Getting
it
taken care of hadn't solved anything. Corderoy didn't want to leave, and Mani didn't want him to, either, but he thought she did, and she feared he wanted to. It was probably best to air the place out, anyway. So Corderoy started looking for solutions. The most immediate one was liquor. He brought home a handle of Jim Beam. Then he turned to Craigslist. He spent two drunken days looking for jobs, trying not to let it bother him when Mani declined a pour, when she asked how many drinks he'd had that day. He didn't find a job, but he did find a solution: two thousand dollars for a two-week inpatient sleep study at Mass General Hospital.

He would live in a small windowless room for two weeks, doctors and scientists observing his routines, and when he emerged, well—it would be later, and hopefully he and Mani would have a real talk about everything that needed talking about. He showed her the advertisement.

“It says here you won't be able to consume any substances. No caffeine, no nicotine, no alcohol.”

“I think I could use a detox anyway,” Corderoy said.

“Maybe that would be best.”

“So I should do it?”

“I didn't say that.”

If he couldn't start making his own decisions, he'd drink himself to death. “I think I'll do it,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Will you miss me?” he said.

She had to start protecting herself. “I don't know,” she said.

“Let's find out.”

SLEEP

SUBJECTIVE STUDY RECORD, PARTICIPANT H. CORDEROY

Day 1 of my captivity.

I counted out a minute, then five, then ten, and then an hour, letting my body get a sense of that time, trying to incorporate the span of a day into the rhythms of my viscera. But there are no windows. The lights are kept dim and steady. White walls. A white bathroom. A white metal door, the hospital kind with the handle lower than you expect. There is no TV, no bookshelf. There is a small desk with a computer, but it only turns on when they activate it from somewhere outside the room. And then it is locked into the testing program. A camera watches me from the upper-right corner. My clothes are in storage. There is no clock.

I entered the room at eight a.m. and have eaten two meals since then. Good, as far as hospital food goes. After each, they had me fill a cup with urine, and after the second, they drew blood. The first meal consisted of a dinner roll, slice of ham, steamed broccoli, hash browns, apple, small milk. The second meal: biscuit, sausage, steamed carrots, mashed potatoes, apple, small milk. I don't like milk, so I didn't drink it the first time. I told them not to bring it again, but they did anyway. I tried to save the apple for later; they said I had to eat it now. I'm beginning to suspect they design each meal to contain the same basic ingredients but in varied forms, and that these ingredients are specifically chosen so the meals cannot be identified as breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Hard to complain, though. I've lived on ramen and beer for weeks at a time.

I'm reminded of the beginning of Robinson Crusoe's journal. I must have read that book a dozen times when I was a kid. Something like,
September, 1659. I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked in a dreadful storm, came on shore on this dismal island, the rest of the ship's company drowned. In despair of any relief, I saw noth
ing but death before me.
Only Crusoe's journal was voluntary—I write because they tell me to write. Though I did volunteer for the study, so I guess that means I've shipwrecked myself. Which is kind of what Defoe did in choosing to inhabit that character. Right? Maybe I'm talking out my ass.

Day 2 of my captivity
.

Garret's voice on the intercom.
Test time, Hal.
So I get out of bed and sit down at the computer. Today's test is the same as yesterday's. They call it the PVT—the psychomotor vigilance task. Basically, the screen is black and every few seconds a small white light flashes in the middle, about the size of an icon. And I have to press the space bar right when it happens. It is so fucking boring. I guess they're trying to quantify my sleepiness by reaction time or something. Garret calls me to the computer for a ten-to-fifteen-minute session once every hour or two. You're probably going to read this, aren't you, Garret?

Garret is kind of a dick—he's about my age, grad student at MIT, studying computational psychology, which I guess means he's on his way to some combination of computer programmer and neuroscientist. Garret was the guy I first talked to on the phone. He said they'd be looking at genes linked with circadian rhythms to see if they're different for early birds and night owls. And to make sure there are no other factors, I had to abstain from all foreign substances. No caffeine, no nicotine, no prescription drugs, no over-the-counter, no “street drugs,” no vitamins. No alcohol. One day and I already feel off balance, chemically vacant.

Last night—already that doesn't sound right—just before the first sleep time, Garret came in with one of the nurses, and they said it would be lights-out in five minutes—they ordain when to sleep, when to wake, when to shower, when to eat—and so they had to connect me to the EEG. They put on the electrode cap and began poking through it with wooden sticks, scraping the dead skin cells from my scalp and pulling my hair out of the way. Then they squeezed in this weird gel. It's like having nineteen ticks attached to your scalp, slowly engorg
ing themselves. And they expect me to sleep this way. I wasn't tired. I wanted to keep reading
Endurance.
They allowed me a single book and that's what I brought, figuring it would be appropriate when isolated in a white room. But they wouldn't let me read. It was lights-out. I lay there with those wires coming out of my head until my body figured out how to shut itself off without the help of booze.

Day 3 of my captivity.

Get up, Hal
.
It's shower time
. Shower time seems irregularly spaced. I tried to expect it the first two days, but I've given up on that. It reminds me of when my dad used to wake me up for school in junior high. I was never ready. I'd turn the shower on, lie down in the tub, and get fifteen more minutes of sleep.

Garret came in a little later, after the first round of tests for the day. He was reeking of cigarettes and I wanted one so bad. He stood above me while I sat at the computer, explaining the day's test, and his breath washed over me with the smell of used-up nicotine.

When Garret left, they brought in my meal: blueberry muffin, lemon chicken, peas, sweet potatoes, apple, small milk. WTF? I'm sure they're keeping a record of what I choose to eat and how much I eat. I know they're paying me, and they're all really nice, mostly, but I feel angry. I want to screw up the experiment. I ate the blueberry muffin and the chicken, didn't touch the rest. What do you make of that, Garret?

Day 4 of my captivity.

The test is different today. The screen has a constant parade of random capital letters moving from right to left,

K U S O C I G H Q I S K D E B H C
[
S
]
X P T L F K R F H G A S L Q I R P

and I have to hit the space bar every time an
S
passes through the brackets in the center. This goes on for fifteen minutes. I want to just hit the space bar randomly, but I feel this stupid need to score well.

At least the tests, which happen eight to ten times a day, feel like work. Work I can deal with. But after twenty-odd years of eating food, I've come to associate it with relaxation and enjoyment. So you can imagine how frustrating it is that the meals take on this same repetitive tasklike quality. After days of the same basic things switched around—bread, meat, veggie, starch—I've found myself combining the food in strange ways. Today's meal: toast with jam, scoop of tuna salad, pickled beets, oatmeal, apple, small milk. I slid the beets over the lip of the tray trough and into the oatmeal. I spread the tuna on the jammed toast. That was quite good, actually—reminded me of a cranberry turkey sandwich. The beets in oatmeal were harder to swallow but interesting—the creaminess of the oatmeal and the sugar seemed to repel the flavor of the vinegary, salty beets. I took one bite of the apple. I didn't touch the milk.

When Shackleton's ship was crushed by the pack ice, and they were stranded on the featureless white floes of the Antarctic, they ate meals of bannock and seal hoosh, whatever those are. They were each rationed a cube of sugar, a mug of powdered milk. Once, they ate dog pemmican, baked beans, canned cauliflower, and beets cooked together in an empty gasoline can.

Day 5 of my captivity.

Wake. Shower. Test. Eat. I wrote about my day, Garret!

Day 6 of my captivity.

Didn't sleep well last sleep time. I had finally adjusted to the EEG cap prickling my scalp. But I started thinking about my brain waves being recorded, and then I thought, My brain waves must be different when I'm waking and when I'm sleeping, and do they change depending on what I'm thinking about and how hard I'm thinking? And if I'm thinking about my own brain waves, will that throw the electroencephalograph into some sort of recursive feedback loop until the machine explodes?

The lights went back up sometime later. I took out
Endurance
and tried reading. I've been going through it slowly, rereading paragraphs, even whole chapters sometimes, lingering, savoring the experience of that world. It's my only book in here and it feels like the last book in the universe. The waking-period light is sufficient for reading but not comfortably so. It's never bright, never like sunlight or even like cafeteria lighting. More like restaurant lighting at dinnertime, soft yellow, never energizing or oppressive—like twilight—that hour of the day when you can't tell if it's just after dawn or just before sundown. As Lansing describes it,
a hazy, deceiving half-light remained . . . But it was difficult to perceive distances. Even the ice underfoot grew strangely indistinct so that walking became hazardous.

But I found a way, Garret. I found a way to tell the time. You came in late in the waking period—shoulders slouched, eyelids a quarter closed, hair mussed, strong cologne covering a hint of booze—a hung­over dude if I've ever seen one. It must be late morning. Out in the real world. In Boston, where Mani is. Which means it must be late afternoon, I think, in Baghdad.

Day 7 of my captivity.

Wasn't hungry today, but found myself craving milk for the first time in my life. I took a bite of my dinner roll and washed it down with 2 percent. It was so cold I had to stop halfway through the carton. I wiped the milk off my mustache and realized how long it was, projecting out over my lip like an awning. I haven't trimmed my beard in over a week. There are no mirrors in here. I finished the milk in one long series of gulps. The sliminess, stickiness of it in the back of the throat.

They took the tray away and I saw Garret note something down on his clipboard. He left, and a minute or two later, his voice on the intercom announced that it was test time. But I couldn't focus. Mani drinks milk. Not like her cereal milk, or dipping cookies or anything, but she'll just pour herself a glass of milk. I never understood it before. But I do now. I think it reminds you that you're human—the way it lin
gers in your esophagus, it makes you conscious of the whole process, the fact of your biology.

Day 8–9 of my captivity.

I've been up for who knows how many hours. This is the part Garret warned me about—a double-length waking period. I can't leave the bed. The lights are on. They stay on. The room is hazy and featureless and everything is white. Even I'm white. I was already vitamin D
–
deficient.

They put the computer on a wheeled cart and brought it next to the bed. I sit here with the keyboard on my lap, waiting for the letter
S,
waiting for the flashing light. My scalp is wired and itching and wet. I make my way slowly through
Endurance
.
One looks forward to meals, not for what one will get, but as definite breaks in the day. All around us we have day after day the same unbroken whiteness, unrelieved by anything at all.
I picked the right fucking book. The same apple, the same milk, dinner roll, slice of ham, steamed carrots. I've had five meals already, which means, I think, that I might get to sleep soon.

I need to sleep soon. I can't take any more tests. My legs ache. Bedsores? I've begun counting again, like on day 1.
A tally sheet of infinity. Every individual minute had to be noted, then lived through and finally checked off. There was not even a crisis to relieve the tortured monotony.

• • •

Have had my last meal—I think—and they've got to shut the lights off soon. I'm nearly done with
Endurance.
The lights are on. The EEG is reading my brain waves. Writing keeps me awake—sort of. It would be so easy—I've slept under brighter lights than this—to just doze off. Shackleton leaves twenty-two men stranded on Elephant Island and goes for help. He takes the small lifeboat, the
James Caird,
and after crossing seven hundred miles of the deadliest waters on the planet, he and five others arrive at South Georgia. But they arrive on the wrong side of the island. He hasn't slept in days. But there's nothing else to be done. He and two other men prepare to cross the uncrossable glacier that covers South Georgia, riddled with uncharted chasms and crev
ices. They've only got fifty feet of rope and a carpenter's adze—the woodscrews from their boat extracted and driven through the soles of their tattered boots. And they make it to the top of a crest, but they're exhausted, and night is falling, and if they camp up here they'll freeze to death. And so they slide two thousand feet down and incredibly, they live. And they continue marching, with no time for rest and only small breaks for seal hoosh. And after several wrong turns and hours of wasted exertion, they're very nearly across the island and they've been traveling for over two days without rest. And they are so close to salvation but so near utter ruin.