Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “That’s when Eve would be home?”

  “Exactly. He told me it had to be just us, and I couldn’t tell anybody. Eve couldn’t know. She’d leave him, he said. She almost had the last time, apparently. I told him it’s just concrete, but he kept shaking his head saying she’d leave him, she’d leave him.”

  Clyde stops short. He rubs his thumb along the crease in his shirt again. His mouth turns inward, as he sucks in his lips.

  He looks up at me, across the desk. “I guess it’s all right me talking about it now. Since uh . . . I guess it’s ok. If you think it’d help your report.”

  “I’m not even sure this story has to go in. It just gives me a better understanding of what led up to—how everything unfolded,” I assure Clyde.

  He nods. “Anyhow, we did it. I had to come down here and pilfer my shotcrete gun.”

  “Shotcrete?”

  “Sprayable concrete. The wet process is best for high-strength applications. It’s good for reinforcing and averages about 5,500 psi. I added some accelerators to the mixture to get it dry as fast as possible. Then all we had to do was smooth it down with an air sander. We were done by lunchtime on Sunday. The only problem was the discoloration.”

  “The patch was a different tone?”

  “Yeah. I said Eve probably wouldn’t notice, but Reidier was not about to risk it.”

  “So how’d you guys match the color?”

  Clyde grins. “We didn’t. Reidier had a computer projector down there. He pointed it at the patch, found an image of Picasso’s Bullfighter on the web, threw it up on the wall, traced it, painted it in with black paint, and voilà, our very own Purloined Letter. See, you’re not the only one who can make literary allusions.”

  Through Clyde’s bizarre anecdote, we find a window into the Reidier household. It’s a home held together by tension, very much in danger of snapping apart both figuratively and literally.

  Tension is a unique type of interpersonal stress. It must, by its very nature, build. It is not something that can spring out of a single incident or misunderstanding. It’s an artifact of a couple’s history requiring investment and stakes. Likewise, it cannot be unbound with a single gesture—at least not safely or constructively. Pressure can be relieved with a variety of situation-specific tactics. An explosive confrontation can be diffused, but not dismantled. Without a systematic teardown and rebuild, however, it’s only a matter of time before the tension coils around and pulls everything taut.

  Unfortunately, too often in relationships many of us don’t have the foresight, the tools, or the wherewithal to disentangle ourselves from the roots of the tension. We tell ourselves it’s not the right time to do a proper unraveling. We just need to wait until things relax, we convince ourselves. And then we inevitably wait too long, we wait until we’re bound up in an agglomeration of knots and gnarls, too entangled and too turned around to even be looking the right way when something snaps. Our lifeline begins to fray with all the weight pulling on it, and we’re beyond unprepared. We’re so wound up, we can’t even think straight, and all we can focus on is how to cut out a little slack.

  That’s what happened with Reidier and the basement. Disoriented by stress, hampered by fear—fear of professional failure, fear of losing Eve and the boys—he had a knee-jerk reaction, and he ran with it. Fix the basement. Fix the basement and everything will be ok. Eve will be ok. His work will be ok. And the house will be fine.

  Phillip Moffitt, founder of the Life Balance Institute,19 explores this myopic mind-set in much of his writing. He observes how the rationalization is always “the same—‘Once this situation is remedied, then I will be happy.’ But it never works that way in reality: The goal is achieved, but the person who reaches it is not the same person who dreamed it. The goal was static, but the person’s identity was dynamic.” In Reidier’s case, the goal was clear and achievable.

  The basement foundation is cracked.

  He had done something like this before. It had been a problem.

  Eve can’t handle another incident. She won’t handle it.

  Fix the foundation. Fix Eve.

  What he didn’t realize is that he was addressing the wrong problem. Reidier was trying to fix their house—a static goal. Eve wanted him to fix their home—a dynamic desire.

  Belongings are never just objects. They’re metaphors. Something happens, an emotional alchemy of sorts transforms a thing into a possession. It happens every day, all the time. A young child plays with a bunch of beads and string for an arts and crafts project. A parent thinks nothing of it, until a bead goes up the nose, a scream pierces the air, a family drives to the hospital, and a green bead is removed from deep within the nasal passage, washed, and strung on a blue string to dangle from a father’s neck, metamorphosed into his most valuable piece of jewelry.*

  * * *

  * I haven’t thought about this for years. I was playing with Remi Allens. We went to Hoey Camp together Mondays through Fridays from 9:00-11:30. In the fields out back, the big kids would play baseball with Mr. Hoey as the automatic pitcher. Inside, Mrs. Hoey would monitor the Ping-Pong and bumper pool tournaments and run the Arts ‘n Crafts activities. I don’t think there was a family within a ten-mile radius of that place that wasn’t rife with woven pot holders, gimp bracelets, and bead necklaces.

  Most days I played baseball. Even though I was technically a little kid, I knew how to hit Mr. Hoey’s underhand knuckleball. It was raining that day, though, and the game was called. While some undaunted souls still braved the elements, climbing the slippery jungle gym or playing chicken with centripetal force on the playground merry-go-round, I felt the call of the indoors.

  As typically happens on rainy days, the Ping-Pong tables were mobbed, and the bumper pool had a queue ten kids deep. Arts ‘n Crafts it was. Mom had made me swear off potholders after I finished filling the second drawer with my handwoven masterpieces. So beads it was.

  Remi sat next to me. She had already finished weaving some purple and pink gimp into a tight box-stitch key chain and was currently working on the ever-elusive spiral stitch to make, of all things, a pulley system. A gimp show-off if you asked me. Still, it was impressive, and I found myself paying less and less attention to the bead necklace I was making.

  By eleven thirty we had Remi’s pulley system anchored with a bag of marbles applying enough tension to the system to hoist a Ping-Pong paddle into the air. Meanwhile, my bead project was in a sad state that more closely resembled a three-day-old candy necklace ravaged by seagulls than a strand of colorful pearls. Mrs. Hoey, the altruistic liar that she was, suggested I take it home to finish up my beautiful start there. Clearly, she did not want this piece of junk cluttering up her craft table scaring away other would-be boy and girl artisans.

  “I’ll help you finish it this afternoon,” Remi whispered. “Your mom will love it.”

  I just raised the left side of my mouth in a half smile and kind of nodded.

  “She doesn’t even need to know I helped,” Remi added.

  The other side of my mouth turned up, completing the smile. We gathered up supplies and headed out the door.

  Remi lived four doors down from us. I didn’t know it at the time, but her parents were getting divorced. So three afternoons a week, Remi came home with us. Which is how she and I ended up in my playroom working on bead necklaces.

  There we were, sitting on the floor, me handing Remi beads, her shaking them down the string to join their counterparts. And somewhere along that assembly line of two, I noticed that the beads were just about nostril size.

  My mother heard the scream in her office.

  “Lean back and let me see,” she ordered after running down two flights of stairs. “It’s really up there. I don’t think I can get it.”

  I was nothing if not diligent.

  Dad, who happened to be home early that day, was no help either.

  Remi just sat quietly and watched. She didn’t say anything until the four of us were ha
lfway to the hospital.

  “Which bead did you stick up there?” she asked.

  “The green one.”

  “Oh,” she sighed. “That was my favorite one.”

  My father lost it. He couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t get it. Remi didn’t get it. Mom smiled at him, though.

  The doctor got it out. Remi joined us for pizza. And the necklace remained unfinished.

  A few weeks later, I was helping my father rake cut grass in the yard. He leaned over to hold open a garbage bag, and his shirt collar fell open. Circled around his neck was a blue string. And dangling from the string was my green bead.

  Mom gave it to me after he died. I keep it in a jewelry box in my underwear drawer. I just went to look for it the other day, after reading this section. It wasn’t there. Not in the box, not in the drawer, not on my bookshelves, or in any of my files. I tore up the entire place. No necklace. It must have gotten misplaced in one of my numerous moves. I dumped every drawer, swiped all the books off my shelves, overturned every plastic storage bin.

  Gone.

  On the way here, though—I’m taking a two hour lunch, and I needed to get away from the weightless phrases of advertising and sink into my mother’s words—I walked by a bead store. This part of Hell’s Kitchen masquerades as the Garment District by day. I bought a green bead and a blue string. And I made a replica.

  It’s now hanging off of a single nail in the center of the otherwise barren beige wall in the bottom floor of the carriage house. So when I lean back from the table, to take a break from Mom’s report, I see it there. Hanging.

  It’s not the original. Never been in any kid’s orifice, that I know of.

  Not exact. Not the same. Close enough, though, I guess. A doppelgänger of sentiment. It’s not the object anyway. It’s the memory. Still, I like to see it, look at it, and pretend.

  * * *

  A house is merely the place where you live. A home is where you inhabit. Eve was not invested in the house. She was invested in Reidier, in their home, in their new start. His cracking the concrete foundation in the basement wouldn’t have been an accident to her. It would have been a symbol. I don’t think Reidier ever realized that Eve, at best, had an ambivalent relationship with the house.

  TITLE CARD: GALILEE 6:21

  TITLE CARD: EXPERIMENT 10

  CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-07-23 13:36

  On console rest remnants of Dr. Reidier’s and IS1 O’Brien’s lunches: wax paper, balled up paper napkins, empty Ruffles bag and Cape Cod Salt & Vinegar Chips (snack-pack size), half-finished Orange Mango Nantucket Nectar, and one white bottle cap.

  Dr. Reidier steps into screen (tweed sport coat, etc.), leans down to be in center of frame. Addresses camera . . .

  DR. REIDIER

  (mouth full of last bite of sandwich)

  Experiment 10, Inanimate Transfer. Having logged a run of successful transfers with “regular” polyhedrons, we are now attempting a transfer maintaining the same settings with an irregular shape of Polyethylene terephthalate compound.

  Dr. Reidier nods to IS1 O’BRIEN, takes his own seat, tilts open the Plexiglas cover of Contact Button Alpha, and taps his lapel pin for luck. At far end of console, IS1 O’Brien does the same with Contact Button Bravo.

  Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien simultaneously engage Contacts.

  CUT TO:

  MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

  SPLIT SCREEN, on right side CLOSE-UP: empty reinforced-acrylic sphere over target pad.

  LEFT SIDE, CLOSE-UP of an empty bottle of Coca-Cola (plastic) sits inside reinforced-acrylic sphere over the transmission pad.

  The Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.

  Coke bottle remains perfectly still.

  At 2007-07-23 13:38:04.5748395 a quiet THRUM coincides with the inside of the transmission acrylic sphere being suddenly coated with residue [ranging from Li to In].

  NOTE: 600 picoseconds of tessellation on the left side prior to transfer.

  RIGHT SIDE, at 2007-07-23 13:38:04.5748395, the Coke bottle appears. On the outside of the acrylic sphere, frost immediately accumulates.

  CONTROL ROOM - 13:38:10

  IS1 O’Brien reads information off a screen.

  IS1 O’BRIEN

  Initial scan, structural integrity intact.

  DR. REIDIER

  Apparently, Coke is it.

  III

  To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

  ~H. P. Lovecraft

  Truth only sets out the facts. It places events in order on a superficial map of interpretation. A lie, however, excavates essence. It requires a series of decisions, each turn, twist, dive, and rise chart out a topography of the liar’s motivations, fears, joys—her very identity. In choosing between fact and fiction, it is the fiction that will always reveal more.

  ~J. Jumeau

  Judging from her diary entries, letters, and e-mails, Eve had been happiest when she and Reidier lived in Kourou. It was there that the two of them first met, fell in love, and entangled themselves with each other. It was also there that Eve had all the power. In Kourou, Reidier wasn’t just a fish out of water; he was a fish out of water in a jungle.

  Eve had graduated from the Sorbonne with a double major in French Literature and Communications. Her thesis advisor, Jacques Jumeau,20 remembers her as “a stunning woman with a jagged intellect. An enigma in high heels.” Often stereotyped for her beauty, she took advantage of her colleagues’ misjudgments. She was a wolf in a low-cut shearling vest.

  “She detested pretense, posturing, and pedigree. The cool had no appeal to her, only the real. Which is why she was so vicious with her more pompous classmates. She’d listen, nod enticingly, bite her pencil coquettishly, and then ask a seemingly surface question that would shatter his self-image. She pierced right through the weakness of her opponent’s argument or applied pressure to a core insecurity of the opponent himself. Following up with a few more direct questions, she’d put him in a position where he either had to concede her point or admit he was an ass. In the end, she’d wrap up the wreckage in a bow with a flirtatious smile.

  “Still, she was too often obsessed with being right, rather than being true. It is this that always got in the way of her writing.”21

  Emboldened by her success at university, fed up with France, and in search of stories to write, Eve set out for adventure. In spite of Eve’s distaste for elitism, she was not above accepting her father’s help. Even though he had retired to their estate in Provence, he still had some pull from his days as France’s Ambassador to Morocco. The two adored each other, and were often described as “ils sont comme deux gouttes d’eau.”22 As family friends recall, he was just as thrilled for her as he was to vicariously satisfy his own wanderlust. Within weeks, she was packing. She had accepted a PR position at Centre Spatial Guyanis and was getting the necessary vaccinations for French Guiana.

  Eve had already been there for six months before Reidier arrived. And it was another few months before she even learned of his existence. Between press briefings, VIP tours, and wooing potential clients, Eve had become a popular presence around CSG. In spite of her austere, almost ascetic, personal life (if her diary is to be believed), or perhaps because of it, rumors and gossip circulated. She was having an affair with this Deputy Director. She had a tryst with that Division Head. She had a three-way with the Dutch clients. She was a lesbian involved in a tryst with a local Guianese woman who ran a shack of a bar on the outskirts of town and was suspected to be a voodoo witch.23

  Eve was well aware of her reputation but did nothing to dispel the stories. By remaining aloof, she even encouraged them. In fact, it seems likely she was responsible for the voodoo-witch rumor.

  Eve had been navigating the French man’s gaze since she was fourteen. She had learned not to fight it, but rather exploit its blind spot. It helped her do her job. Clients were happier flirti
ng with her than haggling over price; coworkers expedited reports she needed done so they could focus on innuendo; and bosses looked the other way when she cut corners, preferring instead to ogle. Furthermore, it helped her personally. After years of being coveted, Eve had garnered a simple axiom: men prefer myth to truth. If they couldn’t have her, better it be because she “belonged” to someone else, rather than she simply wasn’t interested. This way, the possibility persisted, however unattainable it was for now. Though CSG’s business was the heavens, the office’s apogee was Eve.

  Keeping all this in mind, it made sense that Reidier would know who she was, and not the other way around. Which is why it was all the more surprising to her that he didn’t. It threw her. As did his dismissive and annoyed manner.

  UBS had funded an upcoming launch. Specifically, they were paying to put a new communications satellite into orbit that could handle all of their international transactions between the Chinese and US markets. It was going to be a radical implementation of a new type of protocol. While most clients were thrilled to tour the facility and visit the launch site, the Swiss bankers were nonplussed by the spectacle of it all and impatient to meet the man securing their transactions. Unprepared, Eve adapted, lied about saving the best for last, and promptly convinced a coworker to help her find Reidier’s lab.

  Through the small, windowless, steel door at its west end, the lab opened up to spacious eighteen-foot ceilings. The lab was dominated by two massive, black tables—one running along the north wall, the other along the south—that spanned the forty-foot length of the room. Two industrial lasers sat atop each north end, next to their respective fiber-optic receiving stations and detection filters; two photon gates coupled with polarization filters stood in the middle; and two fiber-optic transmission apertures waited at the south end, attached to a length of “dark fiber.” Each array was encased within a temperature-controlled Plexiglas housing, flanked by sonic thermometers. The two apparati were connected by fifty kilometers of the “dark fiber” coiled around a colossal spool that covered most of the east wall. It was just short enough to let in the sunlight through a rectangular window stretching over the top third of the back wall.