War of the Encyclopaedists (41 page)

BOOM

51

Montauk awoke, covered in sweat. He hit the illuminator button on his Casio: 3:12 a.m. He'd been dreaming about the skull, the skull that Monkey had brought him. A skull in a paper bag. He slid out of his cot, opened his footlocker, and lifted out a pile of shirts and socks. There it was, barely visible in the dim light from the exit signs and the small glowing dots from sleeping electronics. A smell of damp earth. A smell he'd grown fond of over the past week, taking intermittent peeks at his prize, picturing it sitting on the mantel of the fireplace in the house he would have one day, making enigmatic comments about its origin to a dinner guest over a glass of brandy.

He'd obsessively researched Army regulation on penalties for possession of prohibited items, in this case, war trophies. Human remains, whether enemy or civilian, were certainly contraband. Who knew what they would do to him if they found out. There'd probably be a 15-6 investigation. He could get an other-than-honorable or possibly even jail time. Mostly he worried what his platoon would think.

He'd read about soldiers in World War II taking the ears, teeth, and even full skulls of Japanese dead in the Pacific theater. It was contraband then, too, but regulations must have been a lot more lax. From what he'd seen here, even snapping a photo of yourself with a hajji corpse would, at the very least, expose you to the salival spray of Greywolf Six.

Montauk had thought of a dozen different methods to smuggle the
skull back. There were thousands of packages and crates that left the country every day. He could ensconce it in dirty clothes in his duffel. He could build a false bottom in one of the electronics crates to be shipped back to Fort Lewis at the end of the deployment. He could buy a soccer ball and carefully slice it open.

But as he looked at the skull for the tenth time this week, at what was now surely three-fifteen a.m., the smell made him retch. Montauk shoved the skull in his backpack, laced up his boots, and left.

Outside, he passed a soldier from 1st Platoon who was standing guard. “Everything all right, sir?” he asked after taking a drag from his cigarette.

“Couldn't sleep,” Montauk said. He walked on, then turned abruptly and asked the soldier for a smoke.

The nicotine washed through his blood and brought a sense of calm to him as he stood on the bridge and leaned out over the Tigris. He was far enough from the BOB crew that no one would notice if he did it quickly. He fished out the skull. He moved to his left a little to avoid the mud pit around the pilings where Aladdin had gotten stuck. But he couldn't just drop it at an instant. He found himself staring at it wistfully. He or she might have been one of Saddam's victims—where could a kid like Monkey get a skull except from some mass grave? Mysteries piled on mysteries, but the mystery of death itself was surely at the top of the SecDef's known unknowns. Depending on the answer to that mystery, even murder could be a blessing. Some half-­remembered and malformed version of Hamlet's “poor Yorick” speech fluttered through Montauk's head, then he kissed the skull on its bony forehead and gave it a reverent toss into the water below.

Sodium Joh was hunched over in the backseat of the Millennium Falcon, trying to get his dick into the mouth of an empty plastic water bottle.

“What the . . . Are you jacking off back there?” demanded Ant from the driver's seat.

“I'm taking a leak, dude. Piss bottle,” yelled Joh. Thomas sat on the other side of the backseat, encased like a sweating sausage in his battle
rattle. Sergeant Fields's feet dangled between them as he reclined in the sling attached to the gunner's turret.

“Oh, dude, I gotta piss, too,” Ant said. “Hey, sir, could you find a bottle for me? I gotta piss.”

“I'll hold the wheel. I'm not holding your dick, though,” Montauk said.

Ant was chewing gum in a way that would have been loud if you could hear it over the roar of the Millennium Falcon moving over the highway. They had to keep a maximum speed of forty mph due to the extremely slow fuel trucks they were escorting, which was nerve-racking, as the trucks were fat and slow targets in one of the main IED alleys in central Iraq.

Montauk had fallen into that passenger's state of mind where, once you hit a certain speed, you perceive yourself as motionless, the world scrolling past you. And with the soft assurance of the pensive child he was when riding home on the yellow bus after a long day at school, he began to daydream. He daydreamed mostly of Tricia Burnham. He thought of her in Boston, which was probably cool and crisp right now. He thought of her reclining in a large, soft bed with puffy white sheets. Sipping tea and intelligently discussing the arts at a dinner party with her college friends. He'd been too harsh with her. She'd made a mistake, a big mistake, but what the fuck was he doing gathering his own intel through civilian sources anyway. He'd been an outright asshole, unwilling to admit his own fault in the Gorma shitstorm. It was calming to recognize that character flaw. He felt cleansed, as if admitting a sin. Knowing was half the battle.

“Hey, Joh,” Fields said, leaning down from the turret. “Hand me that bottle. I need to piss, too.”

“It's full, Sergeant,” Joh said.

“Thomas,” Fields said, “finish your bottle and hand it to me.”

“You kidding?” Thomas said. “Your crotch is right in our faces. Gunner's gotta hold it.”

“Drink your fucking water or pour it on your stupid face or whatever and hand it to me.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Okay,
what
?”

“Okay,
Sergeant
.” Thomas drained his water bottle, then handed it to Fields. “One more thing, Sergeant,” he said. “How long exactly should we look at your dick?”

There was a slight pause, then Ant burst out laughing. Then Joh, then Fields as well.

At just that moment, a bomb dug under the highway exploded directly beneath the Millennium Falcon. Montauk's view of the central Iraqi landscape skewed as the Falcon transformed into its namesake and the roll axis was introduced to its passengers. The altitude and roll became more pronounced as it picked up speed, and the landscape cut across Montauk's field of vision. His tympanic membranes ruptured from the overpressurized blast wave, and his brain, reacting belatedly to the new direction, sitting as it was in a liquid-filled chamber, misfired as it pushed up against the bottom of his skull. He did not feel the metal biting into him as his brain slipped a gear and the image of Tricia Burnham that had been framed in his imagination became a memory; a memory of her with conditioned hair in a cool New England morning, looking at him and smiling, her chin propped up in her hand, a gift from Tricia, a portrait of how she wanted him to remember her, a sepia tone in a tasteful pewter frame to be placed next to a computer in an office cubicle and gazed at every so often during decades of a unique but not especially noteworthy twenty-first-century middle-class American life.

FOOLS

52

“I'm looking for Mrs. Montauk. Is that you?”

Mani went blank.

In the hallway outside her loft, the soldier stood impossibly erect in his green dress uniform, bedazzled with an assortment of abstruse patches, insignia, and pins that glinted in the afternoon light.

“What is this about?” she asked. Had they somehow discovered their marriage was . . .

“Your husband, ma'am. We apologize for the delay in bringing you this news. We had trouble locating your contact information.”

How could she be so stupid. Of course it wasn't that. Her internal monologue trembled past her lips. “No, no no. He's not. He's not.”

“No, he's not,” the soldier said. “He's been wounded in action.”

“Oh my God.” Mani took a few quick deep breaths. “Is he okay?”

“He's at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was admitted with a compound fracture to his femur and cerebral edema due to . . .” The soldier's eyes broke Mani's gaze and looked past her into the room. “Traumatic brain injury.”

Mani turned and saw Corderoy standing there, shirtless, in his boxer shorts, looking like he'd just been startled out of a postcoital nap, which he had. They both had. Oh God. “Mickey . . . ?” Corderoy said.

The soldier looked back at Mani, a new sadness in his face. He sighed. Mani ran her hand through her mussed hair, knowing it didn't matter, that there was nothing she could do to look more put
together, dressed as she was in a torn pair of leggings and one of Hal's T-shirts.

“What happened?” Corderoy said.

The soldier continued to address Mani. “His Humvee hit an IED while on a convoy into Diyala Province.”

“What does that mean, cerebral, whatever you called it?”

He glanced at Corderoy again. “I'm not a doctor, ma'am. They'll have more information for you at Walter Reed.” He handed her an envelope.

“This isn't what you think,” Mani said. “It's—”

“It's none of my business, ma'am. Is there anything else I can do for you in this time of need?” The words were so polite, and so dead, so rehearsed.

“I guess not,” Mani said.

As the soldier left, Mani closed the door and fell back against it. She surveyed her loft, her home, the Montauk family home. Dirty dishes near the wash sink, open tubes of paint on the windowsill, beer bottles overflowing with cigarette butts. And a man who was decidedly not her husband standing in the middle of the room, half-naked, staring back at her.

“We have to go to D.C.,” he said.

Mani heard the words but not their meaning. She walked over to the unmade bed as if she were going to collapse into it and drown in the comforter, but she merely stood there, looking down at her feet. There was a torn condom wrapper on the floor. She turned around and swiped it toward the middle of the room with her foot. “Clean this shit up,” she said.

“What the fuck,” Corderoy said. “He's my best friend.”

The exterior of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with its rooftop cupola and its colonnaded portico, looked more like a mansion in the English countryside than a trauma center. Corderoy and Mani passed a circular fountain big enough to swim in. On the landscaped East Lawn, ranks of soldiers did sit-ups while others knelt beside them with clipboards. Your everyday fitness test, except many of the soldiers were double amputees.

“What if he's . . . different?” Corderoy asked.

“Don't say that?” Mani said. “Whatever he's gone through—”

Corderoy grabbed Mani's hand as they ascended the steps. They passed soldiers on crutches, in wheelchairs, and soldiers who looked perfectly healthy. Were they staff? Were they visitors? Or had they been wounded in some invisible way? Corderoy felt a gnawing anxiety in his gut that every normal-looking person they passed was either mentally crippled or missing his genitalia.

“I haven't stayed in touch like you have,” he said. “I'm not his best friend anymore.”

“Stop it,” Mani said.

But that statement had a mental momentum that carried him forward. He and Montauk had an intense connection, they'd become friends overnight, but it lacked the stability of a childhood friendship. Maybe it had already withered, maybe it had snapped the night of the last Encyclopaedists party. How would he know? What would he even say to Montauk? “Our relationship,” he said, “it was never really characterized by emotional disclosure.”

“Who
are
you?” Mani said.

“What?”

“Did you consider that maybe you've changed, too?”

They reached Montauk's room, but before Mani could open the door, Corderoy reached forward to ward her off. “I have to,” he said. “I have to ask.”

Mani turned toward him expectantly.

Corderoy hesitated. “Did you two hook up?”

“No,” Mani said flatly. “Can we go in now?”

Corderoy sighed. “Not at all?”

Mani's shoulders slumped as if she couldn't muster the energy for anything but the unadorned truth. “We kissed,” she said. “And honestly, I would have. But Mickey's a good guy. He's a good friend to you.” As she said the words, though they felt true, they also felt hollow. She had been proud, those months ago, that her relationship with Mickey had not become sexual. Perhaps, on the threshold of witnessing Montauk's injuries, she needed to see him in a heroic light. Or perhaps, as messed up as it was, she wanted to see how this new Corderoy would react to that sting. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“No, you're right. He's a good friend. Much better—”

“Let's go in already.”

Montauk was asleep when they walked into his room. His left leg was in a cast, and his ear was covered with a gauze bandage that left a piece of sutured flesh visible. “Ohhhh, Mickey,” Mani said. She walked to him while Corderoy stood back, surveying the room. There were cards, books, flowers on the side table. Montauk's parents had obviously visited. Venetian blinds on the windows, one of them twisted the wrong way. Something ugly breathed inside Corderoy, an oppressive guilt centered on the unconscious body of his friend. But then Montauk stirred. He blinked a few times, inhabiting the silence, taking in the presence of his friends. Corderoy pushed the feeling away. “It's good to see your face,” he said.

Montauk blinked a few more times. “Hi,” he said.

“Tell us what happened,” Mani said, squeezing his right hand.

Montauk took a moment to process the question. “I got blown up,” he said.

“Duh,” Corderoy said. “But how?”

“The usual, dude. IED.” Montauk seemed to finally recognize the expression on Corderoy's face and he returned a tentative smile of his own. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“What about your head, Mickey?”

“It's fine,” Montauk said.

“They said you had cerebral edema.”

“I'm okay.”

“I looked it up. You—”

“I'm fine, all right? Jesus. I just got my bell rung. I'm healing up. I'm really lucky.”

“Lucky?” Corderoy said.

“Yeah. Lucky. I'm not dead and my face isn't melted off.”

“Did someone die?” Corderoy asked.

“Yeah, my gunner died. Fields. A really good guy. Just a really nice guy. Evan Fields. His girl was pregnant.”

“Oh . . . shit. Shit, dude.”

“Yeah. Do you know Ant? Maybe I told you about him, I don't know. I'm a little drugged out right now. He's here, too.”

Mani and Corderoy looked at each other. “We're just worried,” Mani said.

“I get it. I'm fine, though. Everything's fine except that my parents are pissed. They found out from the Army about our, that we . . .” Montauk glanced at Corderoy, then back at Mani.

“He knows,” Mani said.

“I know,” Corderoy said.

“Oh, shit, they sent someone to your house, too, didn't they?”

“Yeah,” Mani said. “At first we thought you were . . .”

“God, I'm sorry,” Montauk said.

“Don't be,” Corderoy said. “We're just glad you're okay.”

“Stop it, already. I'm fine. I've still got my face. Dick's still attached, so your mom will be relieved, bro.”

“My dad will be, too. They called last week. They were worried about you. So was I.”

Montauk glared at Corderoy as though his unflinching sincerity were some kind of trick. “It was just a fucking roadside bomb,” he said. “I don't really remember getting blown up, just getting medevaced. Whatever. Like I said. Nothing to complain about. I mean, the cast sucks, but I'm getting paid. I feel kind of guilty about it, honestly. Ant is down the hall with his fucking face burned off.”

Mani stroked his forearm. “Well, I'm glad it's not you,” she said.

“What?” Montauk pulled his arm out from under her fingers.

“She didn't mean it that way,” Corderoy said. “We're just glad you're back. We should celebrate. We should throw an Encyclopaedists party. In Boston.”

“I don't know, man,” Montauk said.

“We can do it at Mani's loft. When do they release you?”

“I'll be outpatient soon, but I have to be in and out of here every week for rehab for like months.”

“But you can get a pass or something, just for the weekend.”

“I guess. Maybe.”

“Hal's right,” Mani said. She linked arms with him and took Montauk's hand at the same time. “It would be good for you. Let's throw a party.”

Montauk sighed and turned toward the window. It was good to see
his friends, but they would leave in a moment, and it would be even better for them to leave now. He hated feeling that way, but hating the feeling didn't make it go away.

“Light the candles,” Ant said. Thanks to some industrial pain meds, his speech was slurred and slowed.

“I don't know how,” Montauk said. “Oh, wait. I found the menu. They're lit.”

“All right, hooah. Do you see the stereo? I think it's by the couch.”

Montauk clicked the action menu, and the stereo began pumping out eighties-sounding R&B. He was sitting in a wheelchair with Ant's laptop resting on his legs.

“Yeah,” Ant said. “Everything we've worked for is coming to fruition. The neighbor lady should be just outside. Go invite her in.”

Montauk navigated Ant's Sim outside. There was the neighbor lady. “Wow, she's smoking,” Montauk said.

“What's she wearing? I forget.”

“A blue midriff and Daisy Dukes.”

The entire left side of Ant's body was covered in bandages, and most of his face, including both of his eyes, was hidden behind gauze. “Not for long,” Ant said.

Montauk looked over at him and imagined that Ant was making the slight narrowing of the eyes that conveyed satisfied recognition. Of course, he was doing no such thing. Ant was in such constant pain that he probably wouldn't dare move any more facial muscles than necessary. Worse, he might never again be able to narrow his eyes. Montauk had seen the doctors change the bandages and reapply a salve. Most of Ant's eyelids had been burned off.

“Well?”

“There's no invite button,” Montauk said.

“Just click on her and make her walk in the house.”

Montauk did so. “Wait, her name is Hotass Neighborlady?”

“Yeah. I named her that when I created her.”

“You created Hotass Neighborlady just so your Sim would have someone to bone?”

“Hooah.”

“Hooah.” Montauk navigated the two Sims to the table. “Now what?”

“Click on her. What romantic interactions do we got?”

“Flirt. Hold Hands. Whisper In Ear. There's a bunch, I don't know.”

“Definitely Whisper In Ear.”

Montauk selected that, and Ant's Sim leaned in for a sweet nothing.

“Check again. We have any kiss interactions?”

“I'm pleased to announce that Make Out is now available. Proceeding,” Montauk said.

A few minutes later, Montauk had guided Ant's Sim and Hotass Neighborlady out to the back patio, where Ant had previously installed a hot tub. The Sims threw off their clothes, revealing shimmering pixels of obscured nudity, and leapt in.

“Sit next to her,” Ant said.

“We got an option for WooHoo,” Montauk said. “You ready?”

“Wait. Check the relationship menu. Are both their hearts red?”

“Hers is pink.”

“Don't WooHoo yet or we'll get rejected, sir. Go for Cuddle.”

Ant's Sim sidled up next to Hotass Neighborlady, and Montauk watched her heart symbol deepen in color. When it was finally time to engage in WooHoo, he counted down from T-minus ten before clicking the button. The Sims embraced each other, splashed, dove underwater, resurfaced, dove again, and one could only imagine how those pixelated genitals were interacting.

“How does it feel to tap that neighbor lady?” Montauk asked.

“Awesome,” Ant said.

Silence descended on the room.

Montauk looked away, both from the game and from Ant, as he began imagining Ant's future romantic prospects. “What now?” he asked.

“I don't know. Go into Buy Mode? Maybe get a new couch?”

Montauk navigated through the options.

“You know, there was this girl back in Seattle that I was huge into,” Ant said. “We had a philosophy class together.”

“Yeah? There's a red leather couch here. Looks pretty nice.”

“Sure,” Ant said. “She invited me to this house party, was supposed to be a rager.”

“Looks like you don't have enough cash for that couch,” Montauk said.

“Ah, fuck it, then.”

“So tell me about this party.”

“Couldn't go. It was the weekend after we shipped out.”

“Sucks.”

“I think I coulda tapped that. I mean, it could have been something. Maybe.”

Montauk looked out the window at a small patch of bluish D.C. sky. “My buddy wants to throw a big house party, like we used to.”