Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Event . . . Pierce’s use of the term is telling. “Event” demarcates the sense of hope and optimism present in driving toward The Reidier Test. The assumption of a positive happening. The presumed knowledge of what will happen at a certain place at a certain time. It’s a managed and celebrated occurrence.

  Terminology has played a crucial role in the fallout after The Reidier Test. While those in the know found themselves (and continue to find themselves) in complete and utter agreement as to “what happened,” many have also unwittingly engaged in a subconscious battle of semantics on how to label what in fact occurred. In our day-to-day lives, we often shrug off this type of disagreement with a dismissive, “We’re just arguing semantics.” More often than not, this is seen as the moment of agreement. The dispute has been resolved; until this point the two parties thought they were arguing toward different ends, and now it’s apparent that they were saying the same thing, just in different ways. Semantics.

  The type of terminology utilized in discussing The Reidier Test, however, lies at the very center of the conflict. How it’s described cannot be shrugged off with the assumption of moot inconsequentiality. Rather, its label utterly affects what it is. The exponential effects of this cannot be overestimated as we hold the potential to either defuse or detonate the volatile situation in the naming of it.

  In the various postdisaster interdepartment memos I have been copied on, The Reidier Test has been referred to with a variety of nomenclature including: the happening, the occurrence, the phenomenon, the episode, the enterprise, the feat, the attempt, the hazard, the Super SNAFU, the Major FUBAR, and the Atomic Clusterfuck. The two most consistent monikers have been “the incident” and “the accident.” It is these last two terms that successfully encapsulate the rest. And it is the distinction between the two that necessitated my services.

  In order to learn from the mistakes, and capitalize on further iterations, the Department must first accurately classify what The Reidier Test was.

  Was the experiment a failure and why? Clearly the experiment did not work, but it might not be an experimental failure. Instead it may have been an attempt at the impossible.

  Was it human error or the very unwieldy nature of the act itself?

  Was it sabotage?

  An incident is inherently singular in its occurrence. A one-time thing. It’s a distinct piece of action, one that is demarcated with boundaries. Still, incidents are not separate from a continuum. They can be connected to something else, without being a part of it. An incident carries with it the connotation of diminished importance: an act that didn’t warrant a full-blown name. We most often find this in military jargon, such as an international incident or a border incident. By using this terminology, the hope is to minimize or at least contain the matter.2 Perhaps in referring to The Reidier Test as an incident, Department members are hoping to do just this. Contain what happened. Minimize its importance. Separate it. Insulate it so, like a tumor, it can be excised, and in doing so the Department could move on as if it never happened. Or perhaps by circumscribing it, it can be safely quarantined and thereby allow the Department to proceed further down the Reidier road, comfortable that what happened was an isolated incident.

  Accidents, on the other hand, are an altogether different type of beast. Bear in mind the root of the word: ad- “to” plus cadere “fall.” Every accident is an act of falling—an act devoid of control, an act impossible to govern. There is no inherent singularity within. An accident could happen again and again. By definition, its occurrence is always undesirable, unintentional, and unfortunate. But accidents also are so very valuable because they are devoid of fault and blame. Of course, this cuts both ways. While accidents often lead to damage, sometimes they are merely unexpected events that can occasionally yield wondrous results. Still, chance and fortune do not make dependable partners. It is not too difficult to understand why some at the Department would be eager to avoid blame, while others would be frustrated by the inability to replicate results.

  Long before the jargon balkanization within the Department, competing terminologies were finding footholds in Providence’s various network affiliates. NBC’s WJAR provided all-day coverage of the “catastrophic accident,” while ABC’s WLNE provided minute-to-minute updates on the “Gould Island Incident.” Oddly, while Fox’s WPRI based in East Providence had a running banner on Ocean State of Fear, its Providence counterpart bounced all around from “tragedy” to “marine mishap” to “waterloo” to “cataclysm” to “debacle” to “disaster.”3 Despite the frenzy of captions, the majority of the news coverage focused primarily on the fish kill: the swaths of dead marine life that washed up on the shores of both Jamestown and Newport, and the Naval Station (NAVSTA) on Newport. Suppositions were made about oil spills, chemical pollution, secret Naval weapons testing,4 and algae blooms brought on by global warming. The algae bloom was supported by the discovery of a film/residue that coated some coastal rocks. (It was later determined that this was very fine iron/manganese/cobalt-based dust, not algae.) There was almost no mention of an intense, incinerating flash of light. WJAR’s meteorology report referred to an aberrant lightning discharge, but that was about it. As the news is essentially a visual medium, the imagery of fish kill occupied significantly more airtime than nomenclature or reporting.

  None of the stations ever mentioned The Reidier Test, or Reidier himself. A few weeks after, the Providence Journal ran an obituary on Reidier referring to his untimely death in a freak lab accident. No connection to Gould Island was ever made or has yet to be made publicly.

  Having considered the various factions within the Department, as well as the sensationalist impulses of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, we can see that the classification of The Reidier Test has as much, if not more, to do with the observer as with the observed. Nevertheless, it is also important to consider Reidier’s own worldview. He vehemently denied the idea of accidents. As he himself said while discussing serendipity at a colloquium, “. . . It echoes tones of divining and fortune smiling down on you, but really it’s just a highfalutin way of saying you pulled something completely out of your rear end . . . The thing is, though, you would have never discovered your answer to begin with if you weren’t already looking for it. Archimedes didn’t take a bath and accidentally discover that the volume of displaced water equals the volume of the displacing object. He was already trying to figure out how to calculate the density of King Hiero’s golden crown. It just happens that he found the answer in the tub. ‘Chance favors the prepared mind,’ as Pasteur said. Without intent, accidents go unnoticed or are misunderstood; with intent, they cannot, by definition, occur. There are no such things as accidents.”

  Reidier’s passionate insight is both compelling and revealing. And if we take a page from a book of one of his favorite authors, we find yet another perspective. According to Isaac Asimov, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny . . .’”

  It would be wrong to dismiss this etymological unpacking as merely an intellectual exercise of wordplay. In analyzing the connotations and denotations of the terminology, what we are attempting to uncover are underlying motivations for using this word or that one. What is gained or sacrificed in choosing one noun over another? Who profits or loses from it? To grasp the significance of this, one need merely read any of the various periodicals covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Do they refer to the Palestinians as defenders or aggressors, victims or perpetrators, liberators or jihadists, freedom fighters or terrorists? Even our own history changes with this same duplicity of language. In the 1770s, the British were outraged by the terrorist campaigns waged against their honorable Red Coats. Ben Franklin noted the malleability and power of language: “A rebellion is always legal in the first person, such as ‘our rebellion.’ It is only in the third person—‘their rebellion’—that it becomes illegal.”

  Words build ideas. Ideas build ideologi
es. Ideologies build nations.

  The Reidier Test, however, could render all of this meaningless.

  It is important to not be distracted by all the magnitude and grandeur of the ideological and literal creative destruction. At its heart, the narrative of The Reidier Test is a human story about a man, his wife, and their children. On another video feed, following the commencement speech to his colleagues, Director Pierce enters the control room where Dr. Kerek Reidier prepares and his family sits. His young twin boys sit at opposite ends of the console: Otto on the left side, Ecco on the right. Eve Tassat, his wife, stands behind in a corner, dressed in a hunter-green blouse and a faded red sweater with waist tie. Her arms wrap around herself, one over the other, in a V. Her hands just poke out of the stretched sleeves of the sweater and hook over her shoulders.

  Reidier adjusts a few knobs, calibrating off of a monitor.

  “You boys going to do the honor for us?” Pierce asks the twins.

  Otto looks up, smiles, and nods vigorously. Ecco looks over at his brother and nods too.

  “How’s that, Eve, not only does your family get to watch your husband make a miracle, your boys get to be a part of it and start it all off?” Pierce says.

  She looks up at him for a moment. “It ease quite compelling, Pierce,” she replies with only a trace of her French accent.

  “I had to pull a few strings to get all of you in here.” Pierce gives Eve an expectant look, perhaps in anticipation of a thank-you. When it doesn’t come, he continues unfazed. “A momentous day indeed!” he says, no longer looking at her. His eyes follow Reidier on his adjustments. “Not just the final frontier, beyond the frontier. Not even. No. It’s the destruction of frontiers altogether.”

  Eve doesn’t respond. Her face is devoid of expression. Her hands, however, keep flexing and relaxing and grasping her shoulders, while she stares at Otto. It’s difficult to tell, with the complete lack of cinematography, but there might be tears in her eyes.

  “The finale of frontiers,” Pierce quips to himself.

  Reidier, still focused on the console, absentmindedly paraphrases the first law of thermodynamics. “Nothing is ever created or destroyed.” Before Pierce can counter, Reidier stands up and announces, “We’re ready.”

  Pierce straightens himself. “It will work?”

  Reidier faces Pierce. “Is your floating battery out there going to give me the ████████5 of power I need?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then my physics will work.”

  Pierce puts his hand on Reidier’s shoulder. “You’ve definitely earned yourself a vacation. But first, let’s change the world. Wait till I’m back in the observation deck.”

  He exits.

  From off of the back of a chair, Reidier picks up, of all things, a tattered tweed sport coat, adorned with worn elbow patches and a lapel pin made from an old computer transistor. He puts on the jacket and straightens his brown velvet tie.

  Reidier looks at Eve. She gives the slightest of nods. The corners of his lips flutter up briefly. He walks over to Otto and opens up the Plexiglas cover over the button in front of the boy.

  “Wait until I tell you,” Reidier says.

  Otto nods.

  Eve moves to stand behind Otto and places her hands on his shoulders.

  Reidier walks over to Ecco. In similar fashion, he opens the button cover in front of Ecco.6

  Once again, Reidier admonishes, “Wait until I tell you.”

  Ecco smiles up at his father.

  Reidier stands behind him and glances over at a monitor. It shows Pierce taking his seat in the observation area. Reidier places his hands on Ecco’s shoulders.

  For a moment, the four of them stay perfectly still, a tableau of the nuclear family: mother, father, and twin boys, mirror images of each other.

  “On ‘go,’ boys. Three, two, one, go.”

  The boys press their respective buttons as Reidier says something to himself, but the audio garbles it into guttural gibberish as the video interference begins. The image freezes. Some areas transform into static, lines pixilate, artifacts randomly pop up. Still you can decipher the four of them, until the next iteration of interference. The images of all four of them stretch sideways in a wavelike pattern and split, so now there are eight of them, and then the video goes black. It all happens in a matter of seconds.

  The hard drives at Brown and at the Reidier home cannot back up instantaneously. Depending on the cycle, there can be anywhere from an eight to a sixteen second delay. This is why we never actually see the boys press the buttons.

  None of those present survived. No remains were ever recovered. Officially, the immense power the test was pulling from Pierce’s floating battery or some unforeseen, exothermic factor vaporized all living matter within a hundred meter radius.

  Still, there’s something perplexing about that final image of the four of them.

  There’s a similarly intimate moment in the last recordings of the Reidier home footage.7 It’s in Eve and Reidier’s bedroom. It’s the night before, according to the video counter, 12:21 a.m. Eve sits on the bottom edge of their queen bed. She’s wearing old gray sweatpants and a white ribbed tank top. She’s staring down.

  Reidier shuffles down the hallway and into view. He leans against the doorway, dressed in flannel pajama bottoms, slippers, a V-neck undershirt, and fittingly, his tweed sport coat. He watches his wife, his head tilting to the right like a confused beagle. Reidier bites his lower lip and sighs.

  It’s the sigh that gets Eve’s attention. She shrugs, her eyes finally pulling up to find him. “I know. I know.”

  Reidier smiles and shuffles across the room to the edge of the bed. The two of them sit there, side by side, staring down.

  From one of the high-angle camera feeds,8 we can follow their gaze. In front of them, on the middle of the carpet, is a zipped-up suitcase. Folded on top of it lies the faded red sweater.

  They were planning a family vacation regardless of the outcome of Reidier’s test the following day. As Eve put it, the trip would be either a “much needed celebration or refuge.”

  They lean against each other at the edge of the bed. “Wear it tomorrow,” Reidier says.

  “It doesn’t go with my favorite blouse. I’ll look like a color-blind leprechaun at a Christmas party.”

  The two sit on the bed for a moment and then burst out laughing. He wraps an arm around her back. Eve curls into Reidier, snorting laughter into his armpit, their bodies shaking with amusement. Reidier kisses the top of her head.

  It’s a rare moment of relief for them. Somehow, in this mundane suggestion, Reidier and Eve found a way to cut through the months of tension and alienation they had endured.

  Eve slept that night.

  Reidier did not.

  Instead, a few hours later he’s sitting on the floor of his sons’ room. He rests with his back against the nightstand between their two beds. Reidier barely moves. He just rubs his thumb against his forefinger absentmindedly. The only sound is the synchronized breathing of the twins.

  Less than a half hour later, Reidier is downstairs in his home office/lab in the basement. The footage is discontinuous, jarring. It is not from the Department feeds, but recorded with his computer’s webcam. Reidier obviously made this recording himself, but without any decipherable purpose or method. Instead, it’s a disconnected montage of half thoughts and disjointed moments. The overall effect suggests that he randomly, and sometimes accidentally, hit the record and pause buttons. There’s no indication of any review or editing. More of a stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness as the case may be.

  The first shot is of Reidier at his desk, still in his pajama bottoms and sport coat. He faces the camera in a whispered testimonial. Reidier’s manner and tone are conspiratorial, bordering on paranoid. “It’s all about tomorrow. If I’m right, then . . .”

  A quick smile curls at the corners of his lips and flattens back out. He nods to himself, then finally stop
s. “It solves everything. You’ll see, Kai. Then we’ll—”

  He abruptly turns around and stares up the stairs. He appears to be searching for the source of a noise that either didn’t occur or didn’t get picked up by the computer’s microphone.9

  After almost half a minute, Reidier turns back to the camera. He leans in close to the camera and confides, “The ceiling fan is still trying to eavesdrop.” He shakes his head. “Don’t think it can hear down here. But it doesn’t matter. It still can’t read Leo’s Notebooks.”

  Jump-cut to his empty chair. In the background, Reidier, wearing an eye-patch on his right eye, paces back and forth, holding, of all things, a wok. He makes small circular motions with it as he walks. From inside the wok swishes out the tinny sound of metal on metal.

  Jump-cut to a God shot (presumably Reidier holds the webcam above, pointed down) of the wok. At the center of it sits a metal marble. Reidier’s hand comes into view and spins a second metal marble around the wok’s lateral surface like a roulette ball. As it spirals down, the other marble jumps away from the first, as if pushed by an invisible force. It’s disorienting at first until you realize the two marbles are similarly charged magnets. They move in tandem together, circling the center. Every now and then Reidier reaches his hand in and nudges one. Instantly, the other moves in response.

  Jump-cut to Reidier sitting with his back to the camera at a three-quarter angle. He seems completely motionless, possibly asleep. At the bottom left corner of the screen, a fluttering movement catches the eye. He holds an unframed photograph. He tilts the photo ever so slightly back and forth. Due to the angle, the dim lighting, and the general low quality of webcams, we cannot see what’s in the photograph.