Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Joshua V. Scher

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503946842

  ISBN-10: 1503946843

  Cover design by M.S. Corley

  CONTENTS

  Letter to the Author

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Ecco I

  Ecco II

  Ecco III

  Leo’s Reidier’s Notebook: Decoded

  Hidden Files

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  May 16, 2011

  Dear Josh,

  I hope my “care package” finds you well. Wish I could say it left me that way. Who knew FedEx delivered Pandora’s boxes, right? I’m sure you must be looking over the edge of my letter, staring down at the unstable innards bound in an oversized leather briefcase, sealed with duct tape, and cradled by packing peanuts, wondering, “What the fuck did Dan send me?” It’s a beast. Trust me, I know. Probably dislocated your FedEx guy’s lower lumbar-region. Lift with your legs.

  When I first found all this, my mother had already been missing for close to a year. I’m not sure if I took possession of her report or it me.

  Things were always that way with Hilary.

  “Why in hell did Dan send me . . . ?” I know. I know. I didn’t really have many options. And honestly, you’re the only guy I know who might actually be able to help. Who am I to ask a favor, right? We bump into each other up at Brown last spring; before then we only hung out after a handful of run-ins around the city in the years since college. I don’t know, man, I hope your heart is still big and your tolerance for bullshit still miniscule.

  All I’m asking is that you take a look, and if you believe me—no—if you just think there’s something here, help me drag this behemoth out into the light. Just look inside, please. No promises necessary. Take a glance and see if it grabs you. It got me with the first line I happened upon:

  “It was the second time he had broken the basement.”

  Who the hell breaks a basement? Twice? I stumbled upon the thing while cleaning up my mother’s past and sifting through the jigsaw of skeletons in the back of a closet, ten fathoms deep. When I read that line, I knew. This was it, my cipher. This would help put the pieces together and give me more closure than a closet could ever contain. I was sure that somehow this aberrant phrase about a broken basement was the tip of the iceberg, just sharp enough to crack open the case and let me peer inside—and find my mother.

  I didn’t tell you any of this that afternoon we ran into each other up at Brown, ’cause, well, how do you just unload something like this on someone? Plus, back then I was channeling through my own river of shit, locked in with my tunneling tunnel vision. And honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was explain to anyone how my mother had vanished. I didn’t want to explain anything about her at all. It never went well. The last time I tried, I was fourteen and got sent to boarding school as a result. I mean sure, it stopped me from crawling into bed with my mother every night, but it didn’t bring my dad back from the dead. That looks weird as I write it. It wasn’t at the time. It was the only way I could cope. What do I know? I nursed till I was three. Psychologists’ kids are always fucked up.

  Did I mention yet that I miss her?

  I’d always been scared about losing my parents. What kid isn’t? I just went a little above and beyond. I had nightmares. Not your run-of-the-mill, wake-up-a-little-scared, turn-on-a-night-light, and go-back-to-sleep nightmares. No. I had slam-awake, screaming, drenched-in-a-cold-sweat, shiver-in-fear-for-the-next-three-hours nightmares. And they started galloping through my head at a very young age.

  Maybe I was having premonitions about my dad’s death. He was an artist, or wished he were: an artist dressed in lawyer’s clothing. My earliest memories are of him wearing stained painter pants and a T-shirt blotched with color. Whenever inspired, he would sneak off to his art studio on O Street to “keep the paint from drying out.” Maybe he should have let it go. Maybe it was the paint that killed him. All the carcinogens and lead and mercury and sarin gas and who the hell knows what else. Maybe that’s what gave him nonsmoking lung cancer. Twin tumors blossomed in each lung, replicating to their hearts’ content and my father’s demise. The doctors told him to stop eating artificial sweetener and instead to spike his coffee with massive doses of chemo cocktails, but those cells wouldn’t stop splitting. It took only four months from diagnosis to demise. That’s the velocity of death.

  I was thirteen.

  But you know all this. And I know all about your year of death and the whole high-school-classmate-killed-by-lightning thing. I’ve learned something new though since our tête-à-têtes from sophomore year. I’ve learned about the abeyant hell that is the lack of death.

  Legally speaking, the courts don’t consider someone dead until seven years after filing a missing person’s report. Dead in absentia. My mom’s only two years in. Well, two years plus however long it took me to realize she was gone in the first place.

  It had been at least a month since the last time we had talked. (According to the police investigation, my phone records stipulate it had actually been thirty-eight days since my mom and I had talked.) Some small talk, some work talk (me, not her, she rarely talked about her work), a little dancing around romantic relationships talk (again, me not her), and lastly a fight. As always, it escalated to a game of emotional chicken that ended with one of us hanging up on the other. I called her a few weeks after that. Left a voice mail. It’s hard to say if she had disappeared by that point, because my mom could hold a grudge. So fuck her for being so stubborn. She didn’t want to talk, fine by me.

  At the time I was at a company called Anomaly, which was defiantly “not an ad agency.” No, no. We were executionally agnostic market innovators who utilized a multi-disciplinary approach to unravel the advertising enigmas of the modern media arena. We eschewed the old and embraced the numinous. We thought we were hotter than a lava monster shitting in a deep fryer turned up to high. I myself was the head of Innovation and Intellectual Initiatives, III, the Trinity of Me, or Tri-Me for short.

  Being the steward of strategy was no easy task at a place like that. To make it work, I not only had to con an entire bullpen of bullshitters, I had to make it stick to the fan like it was covered in airplane glue. Looks like a Brown semiotics degree had some use in the real world. Who would’ve thought that my fabricated thesis about the utilization of reflections in Pierre Menard’s remake of Baudrillard’s House of Mirrors (a film, mind you, that itself was a complete fabrication of my imagination) would give me a corporate edge? I mean, how many different ways can someone describe how when a driver sees a red octagon atop a pole on the side of the road, he knows to stop
, even if he doesn’t see the letters S-T-O-P? He “reads” the sign. That’s it. That’s semiotics: brand recognition, for academics.

  With my days flooded by the deluge of Anomaly, my nights were inundated by the tide of Toby. Do you remember him? I think you met the night we ran into each other at the club, K-OS. You were there with that insecure producer named Doubtie, I think. Toby’s the guy I grew up with in the “alleys” of Foggy Bottom, while you were living large up above Woodley Park. Toby had become my very own Manhattan Virgil, ferrying me along a river of spirits around the nine circles of the Lower East Side. We’d start out downing ambrosia at Milk and Honey, sipping overpriced mojitos through stainless steel straws, sweetened by the nectar of exclusivity. I always thought it was a cloying attempt at a speakeasy in a city where Prohibition was a bar on the Upper West Side. Still, the mojitos were delicious, and the dark, retronouvelle twenties décor reflected in the copper-tiled ceiling had a certain charm. Even if we all knew that, behind that thick velvet curtain of exclusivity, there was a garbage-choked Delancey Street. From there, we would stumble to any one of a bevy of hip scenes, so cool they needed only a monosyllabic name: Branch, Tree, Land, Sea, Salt, Bread, Rain, Spice, and the coup de grâce of creativity—Bar.

  Well, late one night, Toby and I found ourselves in a renowned lesbian bar in the West Village. I was swinging for the fences and doing about as well as a one-legged kid at kickball. Toby, on the other hand, couldn’t even raise his drink to his lips as it was weighed down by the diesel dyke hanging on his arm. Jesus, that body-building gay girl had more muscle than a Blue Bell cow and less body fat than a Eurasian model. There I was commiserating with a suicide grrrl about how we always end up with loonies with extra crazy sprinkled on top, and there he was, murmuring into a sinewy ear, talking Hippolyta right out of her magical girdle. My only conciliation was stealing sips of Toby’s bourbon. And damnitall if while leaning in to purloin another slug, I didn’t overhear his athletic ornament whisper an inquiry as to Toby’s preference for anal. I couldn’t believe it, not only was Toby picking up a lovely lady in a lesbian bar, he had found one that could make a porn star blush. Having long since hit my limit, I took that as my cue to head out.

  I wandered homeward, clip-clopping along the sidewalk, watching my shadow circle round me to avoid the street lamps. I must have had a lot more of Toby’s bourbons than I’d realized, because the next thing I knew I woke up sitting on a bench in Union Square. A patch of drool had blossomed on the collar of my peacoat. My breath condensed into plumes of sighs. Fall was coming. My phone BEEPED/VIBRATED in my pocket. That must have been what woke me.

  It was a text from Toby. If a diesel dyke ever asks if ur into backdoor action, the answer is always NO.

  BEEP/VIBRATE: I think she jammed a coatrack up my arse.

  I grinned so big it hurt my ears, watched the clouds of my breath evaporate, stood up, and glanced at the frenetic digital clock that glowed eight stories above the southeast corner of the park.

  It was 4:52.

  It was the 30th.

  It was my mother’s birthday.

  Like I said, it took a while for it all to coalesce in my head. I left long messages for her while riding the Acela down to DC. Called her again from the cab. And shouted her name as I unlocked the front door to my childhood home. I spent the entire weekend in the empty house. I waited, I watched TV, I snooped through my mother’s bedroom, closets, drawers. Everything was there. No missing underwear or suspiciously absent luggage. However, it also wasn’t like there was a cigarette in the ashtray still quietly trailing a ribbon of smoke into the air over a glass of milk, still wet with condensation. Just a rotten, desiccated orange on her desk and a busted water pipe in the basement weeping from an early frost. Like she just went out one day and never came home. That’s how I explained it to the police. Except her car was still in the garage.

  The folks at Anomaly were nice enough about the whole thing when I told them I wouldn’t be in for a few days. I called Toby. He offered to come down, but I didn’t see the point. The FBI and I were already going through the house and her office looking for clues. The Bureau got involved due to my mom’s position with the government—with DARPA—the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency.

  It had been a while since I’d stepped foot in her office. It looked the same, pretty much, just felt like everything had been shifted three inches to the left. At the time I wrote it off to memory echo. Mom’s term. She came up with it to explain how memories tended to persist, but distort a little. Fade, but not uniformly, in patches. Like how in an echo certain syllables still get punched clearly, while the other parts muddle into gibberish due to the destructive interference.

  That’s what I thought it was. Back then.

  Before all this.

  Still, it was all there. Her desk in the corner, her bookshelves filled with The Drama of the Gifted Child, I & Thou, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent; the DSM-IV-TR—her ergonomic lounge chair in which she did the majority of her work: listening to patients, taking notes, and of course her trademark Psynar®-ing; the abstract wooden sculptures that looked like 3-D Rorschach tests (even though she always denied it); and the oriental rug, bordered by not one, but two leather couches. These weren’t the prototypical Freud-mind-fuck leather couches. You know the kind, the armless, dimpled-cushioned, psychoanalytic sofas with the raised back. She had way too strong a sense of irony for that. No, these were just your typical Design Within Reach leather couches. Still, these artifacts were exactly the type of thing semioticians get off on. What better symbol to signify therapy than a leather couch? I guess a Polaroid of Freud sucking on a thick, long phallus of a cigar would trump it, but in a pinch: leather couch.

  She wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill, tell-me-about-your-childhood kind of therapist. My mother was a Pneumagrapher . . . or more colloquially put, a mind-mapper. The authorities would bring her in, after some aberrant occurrence, to reverse engineer the psychological state of the perpetrator. This was less criminal profiling and more demonic possession. She wasn’t just called in for any old crime, though. They only used her when it was open-ended, when something needed to be shaken loose.

  Once she was summoned after Alan Teleos, the serial kidnapper, was killed during his attempted arrest. She found the secret lair where two of his intended victims were slowly starving to death. Another time she was brought in after that student went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University. The ATF asked her to ascertain if he was an individual who had a psychological break or rather was the by-product of a confluence of insidious memes that could be diverted and dispersed through government regulation. And on three separate occasions, I can attest to my mother taking sudden vacations to undisclosed destinations within twenty-four hours of three different terrorist attacks. I can only posit that she was needed to determine whether these were multitiered attacks with still-pending targets or something along those lines.

  My mother would inhabit the scene of the crime; she would delve into the landscape of her subject’s life. She’d read his books, taste his food, study his life, take volumes of notes, and then sit in her ergonomic chair, collating iterations of what was and what ifs and Psynar® her way into his skin. Psy(chological) na(vigation) r(anging). In navigating her subjects, my mother tracked the footprints of their animas, listening for memory echoes and following them right inside the hollow. You see, objects, things . . . they muffle acoustic reflections. Only empty places can house echoes of lasting clarity. So she went spelunking around the caverns of their minds, sat inside their empty dwellings, and sent out waves of empathy that bounced back. She let iteration after iteration wash over her until she could “see” it. See how they felt.

  Once her talent was recognized, she was ushered into the upper levels of anonymity through a variety of “classified” government agencies. While her Psynar® was what originally attracted the attention of these shadow walkers, her success was due to another trademarked innovation, her
PsychoNarrative®.

  With Psynar® she could map out the subconscious of her subjects and sound the depths of their psyches. However, it was only useful to her. But the PsychoNarrative®: that puppy took her data and interpolated the shit out of it, transforming it from a visceral, singular immersion into a transportive, engrossing, almost seductive window of access to others. It provided the higher-ups with insights they could assimilate, integrate, and implement. Simply put, she used the good old-fashioned time-travel and mind-reading technology of a good book and wrote a story (cleverly disguised as a report) they couldn’t put down.

  Based on my mother’s doctoral work, PsychoNarration taps into ancient neurological roots tied to crucial parts of our social cognition dealing with both the telling of tales and the enjoyment of them. She discovered all this by studying the have-nots, by poking and prodding those with dysnarrativia, which is basically a state of narrative impairment due to brain damage. These poor souls can’t separate between narrativity and personhood. Essentially, in losing the ability to construct narrative, they lose themselves. Am I me or the character of me? I can relate.

  Anyway, the habit of engaging the world around us through narrative is hardwired into our central nervous system. It’s why storytelling is one of the few human traits universal across cultures and throughout history. Folktales even predate the written word. What do you think those Neanderthals were doing painting bison and deer on their cave walls in Lascaux? They were telling one of the three basic stories and tapping into our common, underlying biology. As Jeremy Tsu summarizes the theory of Patrick Colm Hogan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, “As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes . . . The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed ‘sacrificial’ by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.” We’re programmed to respond to them as our very survival depends on it. Hence, the power of PsychoNarratives®.