War of the Encyclopaedists (4 page)

Then she remembered. She'd missed her period. She should tell them. The light turned green. She could press the button now. But she didn't. She closed her eyes and everything was white. She could press the button. Could she? Her hip pierced her head like it wasn't a part of her but a sharp instrument wielded against her. Maybe it was okay; maybe there was a different kind of pain medication that was safe. That wouldn't endanger the— She couldn't even think the word. She hit the call button and waited. And waited.

What seemed like hours later, a middle-aged man walked in and introduced himself as Dr. Santos. The fluorescent lights behind his head flared and Mani looked away, fixing her eyes on her tractioned legs.

“Ms. Saheli,” the doctor said, leaning down. “What can I do for you?”

“I think I might—I missed my period,” Mani said. “What if I shouldn't be taking morphine?”

“Don't worry. As a precaution before surgery, we do routine pregnancy tests.”

“I'm not . . .”

“You tested negative.”

Mani looked at him blankly.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said.

She burst into a fit of sobbing.

The doctor picked up the control pad and hit the button, administering another dose of morphine into her IV. The pain in her body ebbed. The doctor said something, then something else. Mani felt devastated and she didn't know why.

Corderoy and Montauk had passed out in the Encyclopad living room while watching
Seinfeld
reruns. It was five o'clock when Montauk woke up. Corderoy was sitting at the computer at the far end of the room, next to the bookshelves, which were alternately filled with much-thumbed editions of Livy, Virgil, and Herodotus, which Montauk had kept from school, and books chosen for purely ironic reasons by his housemates, such as the
British Guide to Etiquette,
Scandalous Saints,
and
Nitrogen Economy in Tropical Soils
.

“Come here,” Corderoy said. “Read this.”

Montauk got up and wiped a bit of drool from his lip. Corderoy was reading a Wikipedia article, “The 2003 invasion of Iraq.” He had highlighted a few sentences under the heading “Events leading to the invasion.” They read:

On the day of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reported to have written in his notes, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” Shortly thereafter, the George W. Bush administration announced a War on Terrorism, accompanied by the doctrine of preemptive military action dubbed the Bush doctrine.

“This is so poorly written,” Montauk said. “Like everything on Wikipedia. Give me that.” He took the mouse. “Ugh. It's all sticky.”

“Someone spilled beer on it last night.”

Montauk skimmed the rest of the article. “It mentions all these war crimes,” he said, “but nothing's attributed. Feels like it was written
by pissed-off liberal college students who know fuck-all about what's really going on.”

“C'mon,” Corderoy said.

Montauk sighed and continued scrolling down the page. “There, look at how it always uses the word
regime
instead of
government.
This is why you can't trust Wikipedia.” He walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “You want a beer?”

Corderoy leaned back, and his metal folding chair creaked. He looked down at it. He'd been sitting in this same chair last night, with Mani on his lap.

“Hey,” Montauk yelled. “You want a beer or not?”

“Yeah,” Corderoy said. He stood up, swapped the folding chair for a wooden one nearby, and sat back down at the computer. “But the bias, it's got to be only with contentious subjects, like the invasion of Iraq. Right? There's no way the article for ‘banana' is biased.”

“Look it up.”

Corderoy pulled up the entry as Montauk returned with beers. “Seems pretty neutral,” Corderoy said.

“I bet we can fix that.”

“Eh?”

“Click
edit
.”

“Ahh.” Corderoy did so and began editing the first sentence, smiling and nodding to himself as he typed. He clicked Save, reloaded the page, then read the new first sentence aloud: “ ‘Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fucking delicious but regrettably phallus-shaped fruit they produce.' ”

Beer vaulted up through Montauk's nose as he burst out laughing. “Shit, man,” he said. “Anybody can do anything on this. That's why Wikipedia's bullshit.”

“No, that's why it's awesome. We could have a page. About us.”

“Yeah?” Montauk took a swig of his PBR.

“Why not? We can write it. Add whatever subsections we want, stuff like . . . ‘Mickey's shitty deployment.' ”

“Or ‘Hal's video game addiction and its effect on his ignorance of geopolitical events.' ”

Corderoy laughed. “But it doesn't have to be so obviously about us.
Like we could make a section titled: ‘The taste of the mouth the morning after a hangover' . . .” He finished the rest of that sentence in his head: “while standing in the hospital room of a person whom you don't intend to ever see again but might love anyway because you are a fuckup.”

“Hmm.” Montauk wrinkled his brow. “But anyone could edit our article and make it say stupid shit.”

“It's not like we're bananas,” Corderoy said.

“What?”

“We're not as well known. As bananas. Who would even know our article existed, and if they did, why would they edit it?”

“But aren't there rules about being notable or something?”

“We meet the notability standards. We've been written up in a legit publication.” Corderoy began creating a new Wikipedia article. He titled it “The Encyclopaedists,” then sourced the new article with an external link to
The Stranger
's profile on the “The Encyclopaedists of Capitol Hill.” He began typing the overview:

Scholars generally agree that the Encyclopaedia is Truth, insofar as Truth exists, which it doesn't. Nevertheless, existence, which teeters on the precipice of subjective experience, is anchored by encyclopaedic reference. The Encyclopaedia, therefore, justifies itself with a recursive entry. And it should not be surprising that this article's subject is responsible for its origination. Fuckballs. Post-colonial cadaver sex. See, we can write anything, since no one else cares to define us for us.

“Let me do it,” Montauk said. He leaned over and pushed Corde­roy's hands out of the way. Before he knew what he was typing, Mani's name appeared.

The exact origins of this article are a matter of some debate, the most popular (and most contentious) theory aligning its inception with Mani's hospitalization on the early morning of July 3rd, 2004—one year, three months, fourteen days, ten hours, and twenty-six minutes after the beginning of the Iraq War,

Corderoy took the keyboard back.

in which Mickey Montauk would learn to shut the fuck up . . .

He thought a moment, then added:

while Halifax Corderoy deconstructed in the bricked and hobbling streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They read through it again in silence.

“Huh,” Montauk said. “I feel weird.”

“Like we didn't really exist until just now?”

They put on music—Ice Cube, Wu-Tang—and drank another two beers. On some level, they were aware that through booze and conversation, they were holding down the lid of a black trunk, about the size of a woman, which could not be locked, and which they would eventually have to leave unguarded.

3

Over the next two months, Corderoy took extra tutoring shifts and drank a bottle of wine each night. He shrank and shrank until he barely existed—and Mani disappeared with him. When he wasn't making lesson plans or grading essays, he was scouring Craigslist for a room to sublet in Boston. This kept him from imagining Mani's hypothetical futures. She healed miraculously, say, and fell in love with her doctor—they moved to Aruba, where he became the personal physician of Queen Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard van Oranje-Nassau, and Mani taught diving lessons. Alternatively, the ceiling in her hospital room collapsed while she was still rigged up in traction, fracturing her spine and paralyzing her. In this future, she was later found underneath an overpass in her wheelchair, OD'ed on heroin. Each day he thought about visiting her in the hospital. Each day he rejected the idea. Tomorrow's hangover was punishment for failing to stamp that thought into nothingness.

Montauk was due for train-up at Fort Lewis on August 30th. He continued working at the record shop, and once or twice in the intervening weeks, he thought he saw Mani on the street, but he told himself he was seeing things. He had not been close with her, but the callousness with which he'd kicked her out that early morning had bitten him like a brown recluse—an ulcer had formed in his chest, and it was slowly turning black and gangrenous.

He soothed it with constant recreation. He threw a barbecue in Gas
Works Park, but Corderoy had to work. He went kayaking on Lake Union, but Corderoy had to renew his driver's license. He played beer pong, he saw the Mountain Goats at the Crocodile Café, he hiked the ice fields of Mount Rainier, he went paintballing with all eight of his housemates, he closed out the Cha Cha Lounge five nights a week, but Corderoy was in the middle of a book, he was busy reinstalling Windows on his laptop, he had to work.

The few times they'd spoken on the phone, the absurdist riffing that had cemented their friendship was noticeably willed. A gulf had grown between them, about the length of a hospital gurney: not wide, but not close enough for easy conversation. When Montauk offered to buy Corderoy a beer the night before his flight to Boston, he declined on account of having to pack. Montauk said he'd see him off at the airport, despite Corderoy's protestations.

• • •

Montauk found him in line for the security check and flicked the back of his ear. Corderoy jumped, turned, grimaced, smiled, then settled into an uncomfortable sigh. “I told you not to come,” he said. They were separated by a black nylon belt held taut between stanchions.

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“You have a place in Boston yet?”

“I think so.”

“Stay away from the Fens, I heard that's where the hookers hang out.”

“Yeah? Is that where your mom's from?”

Montauk smiled in relief. “No, she just works there.”

“You know this is backward, right?”

“Huh?”

“I'm just going to
school
. You're going to
war
. I should be seeing you off.”

“That's what a sweetheart is for. You're not my sweetheart, dickface.”

The line moved forward and Corderoy slid his bag with his foot. “I'll write you—once you get there.”

“No you won't,” Montauk said.

Corderoy exhaled and gazed over at the stainless-steel salmon sculptures that lined Sea-Tac's main terminal. “I saw you updated our Wiki entry. Fixed a few of your typos.”

Montauk smiled. “I can neither confirm nor deny any updates to the Encyclopaedists article.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. The line moved forward. Corderoy had almost reached the podium. “Hey,” he said. “I've been thinking about everything with Mani—”

“Then stop.” Montauk leaned over the nylon belt, gave Corderoy a bro hug, pushed him back, and said, “Don't screw up in Boston.”

“You know I will.”

“I know, but still.”

“Oh, hey, take these.” Corderoy pulled a half-empty pack of Camels from his pocket. “I'm trying to quit, start fresh in Boston. You might as well have them.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks, too. For coming.”

“Don't get all teary on me.”

Corderoy entered the security check, smiling. Montauk walked back into the humid evening surrounding Sea-Tac Airport and took out a cigarette. He was about to light it, but instead, he threw the pack and his lighter into a trash can and headed to the bus stop. Corderoy wasn't going to write him; that would be far too serious. But maybe they'd stay in touch if they kept dicking with the Wikipedia entry.

On the bus ride home, a sense of equanimity penetrated his consciousness, like rainwater seeping into a basement. Some bad shit had gone down, and they'd survived. He felt like he'd reached the end of a movie, when the killer is dead, and the hero is blood-soaked, and the world is right again, at least for now. But when he walked up his steps that evening, while Corderoy was high above the continent, he was greeted by a woman balancing precariously on crutches.

“Hi,” Mani said. “Been a while.”