Psychologists like Mom call this immersion in stories “narrative transport.” It’s crucial for social interaction and communal living. It’s how we learn empathy. It’s why lines like my bedroom ceiling fan is spreading rumors about me strike a chord in us. We make stories out of everything.
My mother hammered her quill into a psychic scalpel and lobotomized the shit out of an inner monologue. What propaganda was to cinema, PsychoNarrative® is to storytelling. Her reports were beyond influential, they were the tablets from on high. Which is why they were locked away, thrown into the oubliette of CLASSIFIED. And most likely why she hid this last report.
When I uncovered the documents you now have, there was no DCPD, no FBI, no NSA, no acronyms of any sort. I didn’t find it for some time, not until I stared at the key she left for me. And when I say key, I don’t mean figuratively, but an actual, physical key. Like I said, she had a healthy respect for irony.
It had been over nine months since her birthday weekend. Toby and I were sucking down martinis at Olive (we had progressed to two-syllable joints). I was bitching about my recent rent hike, when Toby just sort of blurted out, “What about your mom’s house?”
I didn’t get it at first. Telling him that while a town house in northwest DC was styling, it would make the commute to SoHo a tad long.
“No, I mean like you could subsidize yourself by renting out your mom’s house. Not like there’s a mortgage on it or anything. With the money you get you could probably even move out and get yourself a sweet loft.”
I blinked at my glass of gin.
I wasn’t upset, just more shocked. Stunned that I hadn’t thought about it. It had been nine months, and somehow I had carried my mother’s disappearance to term. Her, the house, hope—I had kept it all in some sort of abeyance. It’s not like I was in denial or anything, I was on the phone with the FBI every other week. But it was her house. I mean, yeah it was our house, but it was my mom’s house. I guess it was denial. But I deserved a little denial in my life. I didn’t have her anymore, no Mom to cuddle and comfort me. But I had the house that still reeked of the scent of childhood. The house that she might open the front door to any day now.
Toby ordered another round for us, and offered to drive me down.
So there I was, sitting on the edge of my bed, in my old room that hadn’t changed since I left for college. On my walls hung prints of paintings by Magritte, Escher, Dalí, Kandinsky; a poster of Einstein; and a Norwegian Moose Crossing sign. (I was nerd-chic before it was hip.)
Bookshelves were stocked with everything from The Yearling to Tolkien to Hamlet to Kesey. Soccer trophies and annual sports-team photos stood guard over my bureau, and stacks of comic books cluttered my closet.
Toby was downstairs, mothballing my mom’s study. I was in my room, staring at a poster of Dalí from the Back Painting a Person at the Window from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Panes Provisionally. In the left foreground is the back of Dalí. He sits at his easel, paintbrush in hand, and leans to the right of it to look at his subject, the back side of a woman in a blue-striped house dress and a ribbon necklace, leaning on a windowsill. She stares out at a seascape. Opened inward, a six-paned window stands guard behind her. Reflected in the glass, divided up by the coordinate plane of windowpanes, is the woman and the face of Dalí leaning to the right of his easel. In the window’s reflection you can see the ribbon draped around the woman’s neck twists like a Möbius strip, and a key-shaped pendant dangles from it.
This painting had always been a favorite of mine. The stillness of the craft, the facing one’s self, and the secrets within the reflection. More than just themes, in this portrait Dalí simultaneously creates and compresses depth. It seemed both intimate and infinite. A little unnerving unless you just went with it, otherwise it’d just do-si-do with your middle ear. Even the key, which seemed locked in the distant reflection, at the same time bulged with proximity. The effect was hypnotic.
Something was off, though. I stumbled out of a middle-distance stare, wobbled back into two-dimensional analysis, and forced myself to focus. The key still really came out at me.
I stood up and approached the print. The image of the key was not an image at all; it was an actual key. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, my ass. It had been glued onto the painting. I tried to delicately pry it off, but after a few tentative snaps with my fingernail, I just ripped it off with a piece of the woman in tow.
So there I was, staring down at this key that, to my discombobulated mind, had somehow been magically transported from one world to another. It looked like an old key, worn, stained with some old paint, a piece of poster stuck to it. What the hell had it been doing there, like the Purloined Letter? More importantly, what did it open? I know you’ve already jumped ahead of me at this point, but you have to remember, at the time I wasn’t in the most incisive of mental states. And then I turned it over, and it all snapped into focus.
On the back of the key, underneath the piece of poster, were more blotches of paint. I knew those blotches, like a suicide girl knows her tats. It was the key to my father’s old art studio.
It was exactly like he left it. Preserved like a shrine. Canvases leaned against the walls, tubes of paint scattered asunder on his drafting table, easel, and an almost finished painting. It was a portrait of my mother when she was younger. The brushstrokes seemed blatantly impressionistic as if each blot was made up of a tiny picture. And in fact, they were. As I moved close to the canvas, the portrait of my mother dissolved into a collage of a thousand little portraits of me.
I took it all in: the clutter, the silence, the thick air that smelled like my father. She had kept my dad’s studio all these years. Her little secret. Her little piece of him.
That’s when the tsunami of guilt hit me. Knocked me right off my feet and left me dazed, in the middle of the floor, on my ass. Here I was sitting in the middle of this shrine that my mother had preserved all these years, while back at the house, Toby mummified my mother’s china in Bubble Wrap.
What was I doing? Putting the final nail in my mother’s coffin? No, not even. Worse. I was burying her alive.
I needed to stand up, get my sea legs, march myself back to the house, and put an end to this lunacy. Rent hike be damned, I wasn’t going to close the door just yet.
If I weren’t looking at things from my particular lowly vantage point, I would have done exactly that. But instead I noticed something of an anomaly. A briefcase. A black leather, oversized, catalog briefcase. Which was somewhat of a bibelot of conformity ensconced beneath a drafting table cluttered with tubes of paint, brushes, and sketches.
I crawled over and dragged it out from the shadows. It felt like it was filled with mercury. With a few determined tugs, I overpowered its static friction and hauled that disobedient puppy into the light.
It didn’t look like one of my dad’s old cases. Nor did it make any sense that he would have brought it here, to his sanctuary.
The combo locks were securely fastened. I tried the obvious combinations: 123, 321, 789, 987, and all the triple repeats like 000, 111, 222—so much for my inner hacker.
I sifted through the disheveled studio looking for a knife, scissors, a can top, anything sharp. He had to have cut the canvases with something. Once again, the portrait caught my attention. I stood and stared, played back and forth with my focus: my mom, to a million me’s, back to my mom, back to me . . .
That’s what gave me the idea. I dashed back to the briefcase and scrolled through the numbers until both combo locks read 315. My birthday. They popped right open.
The case was stuffed full of folders, papers, reports, transcripts, and notes in her handwriting. It was one of her PsychoNarratives®.
I had rarely caught glimpses of her filing them away in her office. From what I could tell, they were always neat, well organized, streamlined. Nothing ever this prolific. Maybe it’s because it was unfinished. Maybe they all started this way, and then she would whittle them down over time. A
nd for some reason, she hid it here and left me a personalized trail of breadcrumbs and a scavenger hunt of memory echoes.
I had every intention of going through the whole thing right then, like some sort of masochistic Sisyphus. I pulled out a hunk of manila folders, set them on the floor next to me, and picked up the top one. She had written diagonally down the front, like an e. e. cummings poem, the title:
here
&
there
And for some reason, in the moment, staring at her handwriting, I felt overwhelmingly vulnerable. I was not safe. I had to get it away. Hide it. Cloister it in some hermetic safe harbor. Up until that moment, my father’s studio had been an asylum, but once I had found it, opened it up, and let the air in, its cloak of secrecy started to disintegrate. Soon the hungry, watchful moths would flutter in and devour it.
I would hide it in habit. Continue on with my life as if nothing had happened. Put her stuff in storage, rent out her house, and go back to New York. Only instead of using the extra money to move into a loft, I decided to hand over the cash to an ex-girlfriend of Toby’s. For a little cheese, she rented me a carriage house tucked away behind apartment buildings, in the middle of a block, at the bottom of Hell’s Kitchen.
I know, it sounds nuts, but I needed a hideaway and had to make sure I wasn’t being followed. So like always, I’d periodically hit some bars on Ninth Avenue, ending up at a nondescript door on 40th Street, with a single red light over it. It was the entrance to Siberia, a low-frills bar that was large, unadorned, and had a voluminous lower level. But that’s not why I’d go there. I’d go there to use the door in back that opened up into the rear of Bellevue, another bar, which had its own entrance on Ninth. Once discharged, I’d swing down the avenue, and make my way to 357 West 39th. I’d open the two security doors, walk past the stairwell leading up to several floors of apartments, beyond the row of garbage and recycling cans, and out yet another back door. I’d cross the wrought iron bridge spanning a cement “courtyard” and unlock the door to the carriage house. On the entrance level there would be a kitchenette and an empty living room; on the top level, a bathroom and a bedroom with a mattress resting on the floor; and on the courtyard level, another bathroom and bedroom with a fold-up card table, a chair, and my mother’s leather, catalog-sized briefcase.
The place needed to be all but empty. For the echoes. So I’d go and immerse myself in her report and try and track the echoes of her words. If I could just follow them to the source, I’d find out what happened. I’d find her.
If only it had happened that way.
How could I have known then that by the time I was far enough in to begin to put the pieces together, the picture would have already changed? At that time, I didn’t know if I was going mental or if my mother had gone round the bend while Psynar®-ing. The only thing that was clear was our shared sense of paranoia. But at least we were determined.
Unfortunately, so was the other side.
I’ve been running for a long time now. So long it’s hard to differentiate between pounding heartbeats and pursuing footsteps. All I know, with any real clarity, is that my only chance of getting through all this is to publish it.
I need you to get my mom’s story out there.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, for a variety of reasons:
To protect myself. Once this is published, the powers that be will have to either acknowledge or deny the existence of this report, my mother, and the accident. No matter what track they take, I’ll be safe from any government retribution. It would be too obvious, not to mention suspicious, were I to meet some tragic end.
To possibly find her. If my mother has not disappeared completely into the void, if she is still alive, then with this, I can send her a message. I can let her know I found the inheritance she left me.
To save her. This was her last narrative. Her last words. I’m trying to keep her alive.
I can’t publish it myself because it’s too dangerous to slow down. I’m hot on her trail, and the last thing I want to do is give them the time to catch up and catch me. By the time you read this, if you’ve gotten this far, I’ve already left the country. If I find what I’m looking for, somehow I’ll get in touch.
If you think it’s got any legs, help me take it for a run. Market it as my memoir or Hilary’s. And if publishers are too skittish to bite—sell it as goddamn fiction. Make yourself the author and change the names if necessary. Do whatever it takes.
I realize that it won’t be easy. Very few people have ever heard of my mother or PsychoNarrative®. Her entire report focuses on an unverified, paradigm-shifting discovery and a military project that doesn’t officially exist.
Even Reidier—the star, as you’ll see, of this massive clusterfuck—is a ghost, a phantom pariah. Brown University removed him from their public records. Informally, they justify this as necessary in order to expunge any of the bad PR concerning his “lab accident.” All they’ll acknowledge is that Reidier and his family were killed while he was performing an unauthorized experiment, layering Bose-Einstein condensates with deuterium while using a pulsed beam of photons from an ALS to ionize the electrons, which caused it to fragment into a severe “Coulomb explosion.”
If you believe my mother’s records, though, this had absolutely nothing to do with Reidier’s work and is not even close to what went down.
Read this and ask yourself, what would you do in my shoes? Either my mother was an imaginative storyteller with an immense and serious case of OCD, who one day just upped and left her life behind—left me; or she was a soul mapper and scribe of the State, whose testimony had to be annulled.
From what I can tell, she started not too long after the incident. DARPA hired her to decipher if it all was an accident or sabotage. And in either case, they needed her to find out what led up to it.
I think she did just that.
Your friend,
Daniel Brand
PS In the beginning is the deed. ~Goethe
I
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
~Arthur Schopenhauer
Knowledge, its pursuit, its mastery, is merely an illusion of comprehension that conveniently distracts us from our limits.
~E. Tassat, “Fencing in the Liminal State”
“My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident.”
~Hans Christian Andersen
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
~Mark Twain
All those involved in* privy to The Reidier Test found themselves (and continue to find themselves) in complete and utter agreement as to “what happened.” DARPA had gathered its top brass, a handful of military personnel, and physicist Kerek Reidier, along with his family, for a test on September 14, 2008, of a top-secret Department developmental program requiring so much energy that it necessitated the USS ████████ aircraft** carrier to act, essentially, as a battery. Shortly after sunset, with the Navy’s help, DARPA ferried everyone over from the Newport Naval Station to the Navy’s decommissioned bunker—which had been recommissioned by DARPA for Reidier’s lab—on Gould Island, a small isle at the bottom of the Narragansett Bay tucked between Jamestown and Newport. At 8:58 p.m. a switch was thrown, and a brilliant white light, similar to a magnesium ignition, engulfed the northeastern end of Gould Island, immediately accompanied by what’s best described as a thunderclap. The bunker and the USS █████ were no longer there, and all those present at the test are presumed dead.
* * *
* This is a handwritten edit by Dr. Hilary Kahn of her report.
** The name of the specific aircraft carrier utilized was redacted by DARPA.
* * *
While the classified footage of the fallout is both awing and unnerving, it merely encapsulates the spectacle of it all, not the essence. The significance lies in the before. Not the what, but the how. The moments before the test initiation, as captur
ed in the lab video records,1 reveal a striking contrast to the catastrophic aftermath.
Donald Pierce, the Director of the Strategic Technology Office within DARPA, struts around the Plexiglased observation area, shaking hands with fellow brass. The heads of the four other technical offices of the Department are present: Director of the Tactical Technology Office, Dr. David Walker; Acting Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office, Dr. Carol Eberhart; Director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, Dr. Wendy Morefield; and Deputy Director of the Microsystems Technology Office, Gregory Pica. Rear Admiral Russell Wisecup, Naval Station Newport’s Commanding Officer, is in attendance as well, along with various other military and Department personnel.
Director Pierce makes it a point to personally interact with every member of the gathered audience. With some, like David Walker, Director Pierce shakes hands without letting go. Instead, he maintains his grasp, and pulls them in, leans toward their ear, and offers a conspiratorial whisper. With others, Pierce similarly transforms the handshake into a bear hug, only to lean back and announce his pleasure that so-and-so could make it to their little show. These are his respective supporters and skeptics. After several minutes of this, everybody finds their seats, and Pierce says a few words.
“All of us here understand the excitement and the hardship in preparing for our nation’s future. Some of us, through our ambitious and varied enterprises, have set out to develop, master, and harness all that which is possible. Others here have sought to bring about and tame the impossible. Tonight, I hope we accomplish a little of both. This achievement would provide us the ultimate tool. We cannot imagine how a successful test will completely change the world as we know it, nor comprehend the importance of this newly discovered phenomenon. At the very least, for our nation, it will forever alter international relations, rendering war practically obsolete, saving not only American lives, but the citizens of any would-be aggressor. This technology will liberate humankind. Thank you all for your support, your criticisms, your contributions, and your participation here in this incredible event.”
Here & There Page 2
