War of the Encyclopaedists (40 page)

Almost at once Worsley and Crean fell asleep, and Shackleton, too, caught himself nodding. Suddenly, he jerked his head upright. All the years of Antarctic experience told him that this was the danger sign—the fatal sleep that trails off into freezing death.

Day 10 of my captivity.
Waking Period 10 of my captivity.

I cannot describe how soundly I have slept. The dark is gone again and I'm back in the low light of not
day
 . . . from now on, I'll use the phrase “waking period.”

Meals and tests. A shower. Blood sample. Saliva sample. Urine sample. After giving me the daily alertness questionnaire, Garret sat down to review his notes. I asked how long. He smiled and left.

Waking Period 11 of my captivity.

What an invaluable resource this book has been to me. I finished and started over yesterday and am now reading so fast I am almost halfway through it again.
Day after day after day dragged by in a gray, monotonous haze. Each day became so much like the one before that any unusual occurrence, however small, generated enormous interest.
I've taken to observing Garret, and the nurse, Barbara, and any other doctors who come into my room on rare occasions. When people ask, “Who watches the watchers?,” why do they always leave out the possibility that the watched can watch as well?

There was a small but strange incident earlier. Barbara was drawing my blood after the second meal of the waking period. She's in her mid-thirties, black hair in a bun, wears lots of makeup, smoker's voice, has a big rack. Not really my type, but Mickey would certainly bang her. Garret came in just after she had stuck the syringe into the IV in my right arm. I was holding my book in front of me, but I was actually looking out of the corner of my eye at Garret.

GARRET:
(walking in) Hey, how goes it?

NURSE BARBARA:
(not turning away from my arm) All right.

GARRET:
(affecting a shit-eating grin) He's not giving you any trouble, is he?

NURSE BARBARA:
(not turning away from my arm) No.

GARRET:
(shit-eating grin disappearing) Oh.

I couldn't believe it. Garret had been trying to flirt. And he'd failed his fucking nuts off. Nurse Barbara finished drawing my blood and left without so much as a word to Garret. Then Garret left, as if his walking into the room had been an innocent mistake. And I was alone. It felt like it should have been test time, or shower time, or mealtime, but it was nothing time. I lay in bed. I thought about picking up
Endurance
again. I thought about Mani at Swedish Hospital, unable to move, trapped in the gray monotony of her own unconscious mind. I look back at the person who left her there. He is so desperate for forgiveness. I wish I could give it to him.

W.P. 12 of my captivity.

Had a small breakdown this waking period. I finished
Endurance
again early in the day and couldn't bring myself to flip back to page one a third time. I didn't feel like writing. There was nothing to pass the time but the fucking PVT and meals. Garret's voice on the intercom:
Test time, Hal
. And the PVT had cycled back to the simple flashing light from the initial waking period. See light
hit space bar. See light
hit space bar. I began whapping my thumb down with a slight rotation of
my wrist, like how you strike a snare drum, and the causation seemed to flip. Whap!
Light, whap!
Light. I began striking the keyboard harder and the space bar stuck—it didn't pop back up. But the lights went on flashing in their inscrutable pattern—which didn't make any sense, because if my whaps were causing the lights to flash, then how—unless it was like winding a crank engine on an old-timey car, and once you got it going, it just kept on. Even if that was true, they weren't judging me by the efficiency of the motor, but by the rhythms that I turned the crank handle in, and the handle—the space bar—was broken!

So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I freaked the fuck out. I stood up from the PVT, I pulled my hair, Garret's voice on the intercom:
What's wrong, Hal? The test isn't over.
Hal?
I went into the shower and turned the water on and stood there with my gown on until Garret came in and shut the water off.

“I've got to get out of this room,” I said. “I can't do it anymore. Let me out. Garret, please, let me out.” He handed me a towel and stood there while I dried my head. I kept my face against the terry cloth for a good thirty seconds, and when I looked up, Garret was sitting down on top of the toilet lid. He looked up at me at said, “Don't do this, Hal. Please. We've had two other participants quit early.” He was earnest and exhausted. “Please,” he said. “Please just stick it out, Hal. I need this.”

I wanted to ask him why he needed it—if he had to write a paper or something, or if he'd get in trouble with whoever was funding the study, but instead I asked him how many days were left and he said he couldn't tell me but that it wasn't much longer. He left and I lay down on my bed on top of the sheets.

I was wrong about Garret the whole time. He's not an asshole. He's just socially awkward. If he looked like your average dungeon master, it would be obvious that his social skills were lacking, but since he's handsome—curly hair, scraggly beard, a strong jawline—and dresses well, he seems like an elitist dick. But his reserve isn't reserving anything! He's even more socially inept than I am. This realization is oddly comforting, and hopefully it will get me through another battery of PVTs and blood and urine samples and interchangeable meals. It's got to be over soon. Please let it be over soon.

___

W.P. 13 of my captivity.

Another body in the river today. Ho-hum. Meals and tests. How can they expect us to walk through the rubble of this city like ballerinas when we're so bagged down with ammo and armor, which we couldn't even remove if we wanted to. At my easel today, my mind is a riot of color and shape. Substances course through my body. THC. Alcohol. Naproxen. Images bloom on the canvas: Hal in a white room. White sheets, white walls, everything stark. His thoughts taking shape above his wired skull: Mickey, ice floes, explosions, and most prominently, me, the woman stuck in the back of his brain, painting his likeness, half-awake and dreaming.

W.P. 14 of my captivity.

I awoke to the slow plucking of wires from my scalp, as I awake every waking period—but it wasn't Nurse Barbara. It was Mani leaning over me, nipping out even through her thick lab coat, carefully removing the engorged ticks and eating them like a monkey. And Mickey came in with his clipboard and said, “Sorry I'm late—you know how it is leaving your mom's house.” And he was huge—his arms were as big as my thighs—and he was bald, dog tags the size of playing cards hung down to his sternum. And once the EEG was off, Mani sat cross-legged on the bed and began knitting the wires into a little blanket and Mickey sat me down at the PVT and said, “Test time, Hal.” And I worked that PVT like I was pumping the holds of the
Endurance,
all night, working with closed eyes, like dead men attached to some evil contrivance which would not let them rest,
and I asked Mickey how I was doing and he said it was all subjective anyway, and Mani was gone, buried in a pile of blanket, pulsing with my brain waves. I could smell it in the air, the world was ending, one second at a time.

50

A wave of nicotine washed over Corderoy's brain. His body was still adjusting to the ball-freezing air of Boston in early March, his eyes still relearning daylight. Mani had rolled him a cigarette. They stamped out their butts on the cobbled walkway of Winthrop Street and ducked into the basement hideaway that was Grendel's Den. Corderoy grabbed a table in the corner and proceeded to wobble it intentionally while Mani took her seat. None of the furniture in the hospital had any wobble to it; how he had missed these imperfections.

“You okay?” she asked.

Corderoy transferred the task of nervous movement to his knee. “Yeah. I like the light in here.” There were low incandescents, a little daylight through street-level windows. The waitress came and left with their drink orders.

Corderoy stood abruptly and said, “I think I'm gonna hurl.”

He ran to the bathroom, hunched over a toilet, and began dry-heaving.

A minute passed.

His nausea ebbed.

He washed his face.

He felt fine, didn't he? He did.

“Nicotine hit me hard,” he said, sitting back down across from Mani.

“What was it like it in there?”

“It was. There were a lot of things it was. But mostly it was lonely.”

The waitress returned and set a Tom Collins in front of Mani. In front of Corderoy: a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, and a pint of Guinness. Mani ordered a burger, Corderoy a Reuben. As the waitress left, Corderoy lifted the coffee to his lips and carefully sipped, then slurped, then slugged the whole cup back like a shot. He savored the milk a bit longer, letting the slime linger on his tongue, and when it was drained, he settled into his Guinness, letting the foam froth over his mustache. His facial muscles began twitching from the caffeine.

“You sure you're okay?” Mani said.

Corderoy smiled and gulped down the cold black of his Guinness. “How are you?” he said. “What have you been up to?”

Mani stared at him as if he were an art object, a favorite sculpture she hadn't seen in years. “I finished the last two paintings in the Seuss series,” she said. “I have to drop them off at the gallery next Friday.”

“That's incredible. Are you excited?”

“They're not good enough yet.”

“They never will be.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“You have high standards is all.”

“Hal,” Mani said, reaching out to touch his arm.

But the waitress returned with their orders, and Mani drew back to make room for the plates.

The waitress left, and Corderoy snatched up his Reuben to take a huge bite. “Hot sauce,” he said. “How have I lived without hot sauce?” He half stood, holding the dripping sandwich.

“Sit down, dork,” Mani said.

As she walked away, Corderoy followed her ass, the way his eyes sometimes latched on to a railroad tie from the train window.

He was still holding his sandwich when Mani returned. He opened it up and she dashed some Tabasco on it. Corderoy bit in. He chewed and chewed and just kept on chewing that first bite—the meat was fatty and moist and delicious. He barely said a word as he devoured the rest of the sandwich. Mani had eaten only half her burger.

“Did they feed you in there?” she asked.

“Hospital food,” Corderoy said. “But hey, can't complain. They paid
me two grand. That's enough to put first and last month's on an apartment.” He had been waiting to say those exact words and was now carefully observing Mani's reaction.

“It is,” Mani said.

Something tiny snuffed out in Corderoy's chest. After a moment, he said, “Where should I look?”

Mani finished off her Tom Collins, then stared enigmatically at him. “Don't look,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Right now, I mean. Close your eyes.”

Corderoy did so, and the pub became a soundscape of clinking silverware and chaotic chatter, laughter, indie music.

“Open your hand,” Mani said.

Corderoy felt the object. It was cold, jagged. It was metal. “Can I look?”

“You can't tell what it is?”

“It's a key,” Corderoy said.

Mani said nothing.

Corderoy opened his eyes and found hers, still and attentive.

“I missed you,” she said. “But that's not a good enough reason.”

“Is there one?”

“Don't know.”

“So.” He looked down at the key and rubbed it between his fingers like an old coin.

“That key is for tonight.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Maybe I change the locks tomorrow.”

A weakness rippled through Corderoy's being but quickly passed.

“And maybe I don't,” she said. “That's the best I can offer you.”

“I fucking love you,” he said.

• • •

It was dark when they left Grendel's Den. Mani lit up a joint in the alley, and when Corderoy took a hit, his mind bloomed like a bud opening after weeks of night. They made out against the wall for a moment, then stumbled back to what had been Mani's home, what was, for tonight at least, their home.

Corderoy slung his body into what had been Mani's bed—tonight, their bed—and exhaustion clocked him in the head. Mani crawled in beside him and fitted her body against his. His face was numb with oncoming sleep, and his last thought felt like the last thought he would have before his soul—if he had a soul—slipped from the husk of his harrowed body. It was a thought aware of itself as a weed-and-booze quintessence: all of Boston, and his months of floating through grad school, of giving away his blood, his urine, his semen, his sleep—it was a voyage in a lifeboat in the Weddell Sea, dodging floes and slowly dying of thirst, and now, after a winter on the treacherous ice, he'd found solid, unsinkable land, right where he'd left it, land at the end of the known world, a rocky inhospitable island leagues from civilization, but land, immovable, magnificent land. Corderoy melted into a dead and dreamless unconsciousness and slept as he had never slept before.

Mani lay awake for a moment, staring at his child's face. In the two weeks since her visit to the clinic, she had come to think about her life in a new way. You make decisions; some are reversible and some are not; and they have consequences that are both bad and good. Nothing is pure. Nothing easy. When she settled into sleep, she did so uncertain of what her world would be like upon waking, her mind circling the suspicion that there was a deep relationship between uncertainty and beauty.