War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Robinson, a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and McSweeney’s.

Gavin Kovite was an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad from 2004-2005. He attended NYU Law and served as an Army prosecutor. His writing has appeared in literary magazines and in Fire and Forget, an anthology of war fiction.  He lives in Seattle.  

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War of the Encyclopaedists

1

It was the Friday before Independence Day and the twentysomethings of early-millennium Seattle were celebrating alcohol and freedom as they had done every Friday since time immemorial. And though they breathed and imbibed as one massive citywide organism, each group thought itself discrete, with its own goals and exclusions, its own playlist gurus and backroom smoke-outs. On Fifteenth Avenue, in Capitol Hill, Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy were hosting their sixth event as “The Encyclopaedists.”

They had no real artistic talent, but they had a knack for carrying stupid jokes to their absurd conclusions. Six months ago, following one about the arbitrary nature of modern art, they decided to put on an art show themselves. They chose their subject, “monocularity,” by flipping randomly through a 1914 Anglo-American Cyclopedia. They built a multimedia installation involving cyclopean monsters, monocled British financiers, a chandelier made of dildos and periscopes, and a video loop of the burning eye of Sauron. They wore eye patches and threw a raging party. They both got laid, which was reason enough to continue the monthly “exhibits.” After their third event, whose theme was “pupa,” The Stranger, Seattle’s widely read and ever-relevant free arts weekly, had profiled “The Encyclopaedists of Capitol Hill.”

Tonight’s theme was “conspiracy.” The cavernous Great Room on the main floor of Montauk’s house had been retrofitted as a lunar soundstage—papier-mâché craters, glow-in-the-dark stars, and tripod-mounted lights and cameras. Montauk was dressed as an astronaut, welcoming guests with slow lunar movements.

•  •  •

Corderoy and his girlfriend, Mani, were four miles north in the Roosevelt neighborhood, where the I-5 overpass shadows a park-and-ride littered with brown-bagged forties and the occasional hypodermic needle. Corderoy stood at one end of a fourth-floor hallway in a rundown apartment building. He was facing a police officer.

“Who are you supposed to be?” the officer asked.

Corderoy wore a dark blue suit with a red tie; his lapel was pinned with an American flag. His eyebrows, so blond they were normally invisible, had been dusted with white makeup, his reddish-blond hair was covered with a neatly combed powder-gray wig, and Mani had given him wrinkles around the nose and eyes with eyeliner pencil. Corderoy was six-one (though a mere one hundred and fifty pounds, with a posture reminiscent of Gumby) and he wasn’t used to looking up at people, but the officer must have been at least six-four.

“President Bush,” Corderoy said.

“And she’s what, bin Laden?”

Mani stood at the other end of the hallway near the open door to an apartment, opposite another police officer. She wore heels, a low-cut white minidress, and a camouflage bolero jacket, which was little more than a pair of sleeves and two short flaps near her bust that could not possibly fasten together. Her long black hair spilled out from a white turban, and the olive skin of her face was obscured by a scraggly black beard with streaks of gray. Her costume was perfect, or it would have been if they’d managed to retrieve the pièce de résistance from inside the apartment. Mani was smoking a Camel Light.

“Sexy bin Laden,” Corderoy corrected.

The officer clenched his jaw. “Why are you dressed up?”

“We’re going to a party. We just came by to pick up her AK.” He was speaking faster than he could think.

“Her what?”

“Her AK-47. It’s a toy. A toy gun. For the costume. It has an orange tip.”

“Take your hands out of your pockets.”

“Sorry. So, we had to get the AK, and she’s been living here with Steph—”

“She’s on the lease?”

“Well, no. She just met Steph a few months ago, when she moved to Seattle. Steph usually leaves the apartment unlocked because Mani doesn’t have a key. But when we got here, the door was locked. We knocked and knocked and tried calling Steph, but no answer. So . . . I tried to pick the lock.”

The officer stopped writing. “You picked the lock?”

“No. I tried to pick the lock.” Corderoy had read the MIT Guide to Lock Picking when he was in high school and had made his own picks out of coat hangers. It had taken him two weeks to pick the lock on his own front door. That had been his only success.

The officer’s face was expressionless.

“So Mani said maybe go up to the roof and I tried that and it was easy enough to hop down to the balcony. The sliding glass door was locked, too, but—”

“Hands out of your pockets.”

“Sorry. Can I just take my jacket off so I’m not tempted to do that?”

“No.”

“So, I checked the window, which also opens onto the balcony, and it wasn’t locked. All the lights were off, so I thought, No one’s home. I was just going to climb in, open the front door from the inside, take the toy gun, and leave. But when I opened the window, there was Steph, sitting by herself in the dark, and she screamed, ‘Get the fuck out of here I’m calling the cops!’ So I climbed back onto the roof and came down to the hallway. And then you got here.”

“You entered the room?”

“Well, I opened the window and leaned in.”

“But you crossed the threshold of the window.”

“I suppose, yeah.” Corderoy looked over at Mani. Her officer was speaking with Steph just inside the apartment. Steph’s hands flashed into view through the doorjamb. Mani looked away from Corderoy, then lit another cigarette. Corderoy felt like an idiot. Sure, he thought, I’ll break into someone’s house for you. Because you’re hot, no biggie. I do that all the time.

“Son, do you know what that’s called, what you did there at the window?”

Corderoy took a moment to respond. “Breaking and entering?”

“We don’t have breaking and entering in Washington State. It’s called burglary. And it’s a felony offense. That’s a minimum of five years in prison.”

“Oh.” Corderoy’s eyes slipped out of focus.

The officers went to converse with each other, and Corderoy and Mani were finally able to speak.

“Steph’s crying,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think they’re going to arrest you.”

That’s when Phil arrived.

Before the officers could stop him, Corderoy yelled down the hall, “Hey, man, can you talk to Steph?”

“Do you know these two?” one of the officers asked Phil.

Corderoy and Phil were on good terms, but they barely knew each other. Phil was Steph’s friend, and business partners with a guy named Braiden, whom everyone called “Bomb,” as in, That shit’s the bomb. Braiden and Phil were pot dealers and they routinely smoked out Steph, who was flirtatious enough to get her pot for free. There was no guarantee that Phil’s intervention would be positive, and in all likelihood he had drugs on him, which wouldn’t be good for any of them if the officers found out.

The cops let Phil through.

Corderoy couldn’t hear Phil’s voice, but...