TITLE CARD: GALILEE 6:21
TITLE CARD: EXPERIMENT 25
CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-08-13 09:57
Dr. Reidier enters from transmission room. Shirt, tie, rolled-up sleeves (tweed sport coat rests on chair in front of Contact Button Alpha).
IS1 O’Brien is finishing up the calibration checklist.
DR. REIDIER
We good?
IS1 scratches off last item and nods.
DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)
Ok. Let’s go.
IS1 hesitates. Reidier notices. He approaches O’Brien who, clearly uncomfortable correcting an authority figure, mumbles quietly to Reidier and juts his chin out toward the camera.
DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)
Oh right, right. Jesus, O’Brien how many times do I have to tell you, for God’s sake, speak up if something isn’t right. I’m not your goddamn commanding officer.
O’BRIEN
Sir, yes sir.
Irritated, Reidier stomps over to his seat to address camera.
DR. REIDIER
Your sense of irony is singular, O’Brien.
INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME
As Dr. Reidier continues, fiber-optic cables, circumscribing the Entanglement Channel, flare red for several seconds, then morph into an orbiting white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.
DR. REIDIER (OS)
Ok, so yet another go at Biologic. So far we are O for six. Still doing better than Varitek. Ok, well, we have switched our subject up. We’re going with produce now.
The Boson Cannons and Pion Beams twitch to life. SOUNDS of the rapid ACCELERATION and DECELERATION of GEARS as Reidier and O’Brien take a series of readings of an orange. Once complete, they settle into optimized focal positions.
DR. REIDIER (OS) (CONT’D)
I don’t know, fruit seems to be a nice combination of liquid and solid. Maybe it’ll help. Also, should be fairly easy to detect its properties . . .
The Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.
INT. CONTROL ROOM - CONTINUOUS
DR. REIDIER
(blows out his lips)
Taste, texture, juiciness. I know, not very scientific, but our rigorous scientific process
(throws a look toward O’Brien)
hasn’t yielded much either. Of course, if we’re anywhere near close, we’ll make a more sophisticated and appropriate analysis. Power settings upped to ███ times █████ eVs while reversing quark spectrum from ███████ to ██.
Dr. Reidier stares at the camera. He seemingly debates whether there’s more to add. Finally he shrugs and turns back to the console. He flips up the Plexiglas cover over Contact Button Alpha and waits.
IS1 O’Brien, realizing Dr. Reidier is ready, scrambles to get into position with Contact Button Bravo. He nods at Dr. Reidier once he’s at the ready.
DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)
Three, two, one, go.
Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien simultaneously press Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo.
CUT TO:
MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME
SPLIT SCREEN, RIGHT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: empty reinforced-acrylic sphere over target pad.
LEFT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: orange sits inside reinforced-acrylic sphere over the transmission pad.
Orange remains perfectly still.
At 2007-08-13 09:59:17.3948877 the orange is suddenly gone and left in its place is an incredibly viscous and sticky ball of the telltale heterogeneous matter and what is later identified as orange-fruit gunk.
NOTE: for 2400 picoseconds prior to transfer, on the left side, the orange bulges and undulates (think somewhere between watching a baby move in her mother’s stomach and Alien) and then freezes in a tessellation for the last 400 picoseconds.
RIGHT SIDE, at 09:59:17.3948877, the orange looking slightly warped. Its spherical shape severely dimpled. On the outside of the acrylic sphere frost immediately accumulates.
TARGET ROOM - 10:00:22
Dr. Reidier stands over the orange that looks like a balloon that has gotten pruney a few days after it was originally inflated. Dr. Reidier cautiously pokes at it.
The orange . . . deflates as if the rind were simply giving up.
Reidier picks it up and struggles to tear it open.
DR. REIDIER
It’s really tough. Like elephant skin.
Dr. Reidier takes out a pocketknife, unfolds the blade, and punctures the rind. He saws almost all the way around the circumference and opens it.
DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)
Huh . . .
Dr. Reidier holds open the rind to IS1 O’Brien back in the control booth.
It is empty except for shredded pericarp. No pith, no flesh, no carpels.
The HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out as the machine powers down.
V
When pen hasted to write, on reaching the subject of love, it split in twain.
~Rumi
The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.
~Amelia Earhart
As Reidier’s work solidified, his marriage deteriorated. While he was aware of the tension between Eve and him, he misdiagnosed it as an adjustment to change, rather than as a symptom of distance. If Eve’s memoir novella, A Moi: Graffiti Me, is taken as more fact than fiction, Reidier not only seems unaware but incapable of changing their course. Tragically, his drive to set things right with Eve was what drove them apart. His successes were too tempting, too blinding to allow him to see the simple truth: Eve was in mourning. For them, for their past, for the invasion into and dismantling of the universe of each other.
The fact that Eve could only begin to write this work a year after the move to Providence is indicative of how profound her grief was at this time. She herself needed distance to safely approach and unpack the pain from the loss. It was the only way to safely untangle the tension that had tightened as she tried to hold on to the past while he worked to pull them into the future. Or maybe instead the desolate distance is what drove her backward. Unlike the cloistered experience they shared in French Guiana, their present post was more of an exile . . . from each other. Before, Kerek hungered for her. Eve fed his passions (intellectual, professional, physical). Now, she fed his kids. She wrestled with a sense of abandonment as Reidier went out to change the world, demoted from erotic muse to nurturing caretaker. Ironically, this transformation did not result from Eve’s diminishing independence, but rather from Reidier’s (and the boys’) increasing dependence. Although with Eve it was less of a transformation—from lover, to wife, to mother—and more of an acquisition of roles, a contravention of selves. In picking up her pen, however, Eve Tassat could reclaim herself and rewrite her narrative. Only through the writing itself could Eve come to understand herself, her husband, and his work. Through the narrative she somehow managed to breach the contradiction within and understand how her longing for the man-that-was necessitated her support of the man that is. Only through her work could the gravity of their distant dynamic reveal itself and how, at the time, ironically, it was their loneliness that bound them.
Excerpt from A Moi: Graffiti Me48
She could feel the emptiness. The sheets lay too flat, pulled on her too uniformly. He wasn’t there. She knew where he was, hiding down in the darkness, with her, fueled by coffee sweetened with crushed up Bennies.
Physicists are machines for turning stimulants into theories, he would paraphrase the mathematician Paul Erdos. The pills helped him keep up with his thoughts, he insisted. She would warn him about burning the candle at both ends, and he would brush it off, saying that’s because there isn’t enough daylight.
He would have waited until her breathing slowed and deepened. That was his idea of a compromise: to lie with her until she slipped from the moorings of consciousness. She imagined him listening for a
switch in tempo of her in- and exhales. Leaning over, checking if her eyes were shifting beneath their lids. Then slowly, quietly, stepping off the raft of their bed, pulling the covers up, putting on over his pajamas his sport coat with its lapel pin, reaching inside the pocket to feel for his eye-patch, and heading down into his lair.
It was neither loneliness nor aloneness she felt. Rather, distance seemed like the best approximation, though still an inadequate analogy. It wasn’t distance in the sense of a gap, or any type of chasm, it was instead distance to the unmeasured eye. Having grown up on the edge of the Sahara, she knew and loved vastness, adored the beauty of emptiness. Where others saw expanse, she saw mirages, ideas sprouting up everywhere with infinite room to grow and blossom. The expanse wasn’t daunting or lacking to her. It was an invitation, a playground for her imagination. The uniform void, the span of the between, was a constant comfort, a touchstone of awe that always gave her the room she needed.
This wasn’t that, though.
This was different.
It wasn’t the desert.
It was the mountains, it was the forced perspective.
When she was a little girl, her father took her for a vacation to Switzerland, a kingdom of lakes and mountains. But she never trusted the water, which shimmered with the false promise of clarity. The crystal lakes suggested a beckoning, transparent openness that revealed nothing, instead snuffing out sunlight within their depths. Snowcapped peaks rippled across the watery surfaces, offering only reflections.
The mountains were what drew her. Their fierce silhouettes, jagged against the sky, were at least honest, boasting danger, challenging onlookers with their blatant monstrousness, but promising an undeniable perspective.
One afternoon, while walking along the lake, she got it in her head that her father and she must hike up a mountain. She knew which one. She pointed, pouted, and finally insisted. He laughed and, as was often the case, gave in to her flight of fancy. And so they set out, a spontaneous pair, hand in hand, marching toward adventure.
It was a quest that never arrived. No matter how fast they walked, nor how long they persisted, the mountain refused to come within reach. It lingered by the horizon, still massive, but no larger or closer.
What she came to learn that afternoon was that a desert girl had no business in the mountains. She had no sense of their proportions. Her lack of perspective failed to grasp the immensity. She couldn’t coordinate with their reality. The mountain should be getting closer, but after hours and hours of walking, it stood there, where it had always been, looming in the distance. The honest, bleak perspective had forced her hand, and she and her father finally gave in and turned back. During their retreat, she kept looking over her shoulder, watching, trying to measure, but only glimpsing an awesome size that failed to waver.
That’s how it felt with him now. Inexorably drawn toward him, but never any closer and utterly baffled by the disconnect between her efforts and her progress.
He would speak of the inability of infinity. The myopia of minutiae, he would quip. There’s always more room at the bottom, he would paraphrase Feynman.
It used to be different with them. He wouldn’t run away to do work—he would sneak away from work to be with her. The more he had of her, the hungrier he became.
You are a perpetual-motion-of-longing machine, he would say. You defy the physics of desire. A source of unceasing concupiscence, licking the sweat off of her chin as if it were distilled from the fountain of youth.
Back then she was his solace, his escape hatch, a sanctuary from the frustration of uninspiration. It was with her—having freed himself from a relentless and fruitless focus—in bed, sticky with sweat and spit and cum, that he would find his epiphanies, connect disparate abstract concepts, grab her lipstick off the nightstand, and draft equations across her body, filling up the blank page of her belly with calculations that spilled down the tabula rasa of her thigh.
She adored the sensation of him tracing his graffiti over her, of being painted with his physics hieroglyphics.
It was an amaranthine time. One filled with love and hushed laughter, during scandalous, furtive excursions to his lab in the middle of the night because she refused to let him photograph his work on her naked body.
But my equations, he would protest.
Are mine as of now. If you want them, you have to take me too. Take me with you, she would tease.
So off they would sneak, into the office at night, him in pajamas and a tweed sport coat, her in her Burberry raincoat and sneakers. She would stand by the window, bathed in the moonlight, adorned in his henna that held within its labyrinthine design the secrets of the universe, while he scribbled furiously on his whiteboard.
It could not last. Eventually the petals fell from the bloom. They are not who they once were.
Elle propped herself up on several of his pillows. The moonlight strained through the mosquito netting. Reinier lay perpendicular to her at the bottom of her legs. His fingers traced over the graffiti he had left on the inside of her thigh.
“Your equations are fading,” she exhaled, having just finished gulping half a liter of water out of the bottle.
“It’s ok. They’re already backed up.”
“If Venus only knew you were going to put Galatea to work, she might never have woken her up for you.”
“Don’t be jealous. A Greek statue could never compete with Elle. Especially considering the way you tabula the hell out of my rasa.”
Elle rolled her eyes. Even groaned a little and kicked him, not to inflict any punishment, but rather to physically connect with him, reassure herself that her lover was, in fact, skin and bone and not just some moonlit apparition. While Reinier groaned with exaggerated injury, her foot didn’t pull back from the strike; instead it remained in contact with his stomach, and rubbed back and forth.
Years ago Elle had seen a news program that featured a blind and deaf Dalmatian dog. The canine was part of a loving family and led a happy life, but it manifested a peculiar habit of having to always be in physical contact with one of the family members. As long as the animal could maintain a constant assurance of their presence, it felt safe and secure. At the time, it had struck Elle as tragically (eye-roll) touching, but an impulse, an existence she could never understand from the inside out. Nevertheless, it stayed with her. It wasn’t until she met Reinier that she finally empathized with that dog’s need. It wasn’t possessiveness or insecurity. The closest she could get to describing it was as an addiction to the warmth, the happiness that would immediately leech into her like a secretion of adrenaline, the pure, unadulterated (eye-roll) joy.
“What does it all mean, anyway?” Elle kicked her leg out to indicate she was inquiring about his equations written down her limb.
“It describes the relationship between quantum chromodynamics and the hadronization process.”
“So secondary school science merde,” Elle said with a dismissive tone, all the more dismissive with her French accent. “I figured it’d have something to do with quantum cryptography. Public- and private-key encryption et cetera. Or it described the relationship of my exquisite derriere to the gravitational pull of your hands. One of those two phenomenon.”
“Well, they are all fundamental forces.” Reinier’s hand slid up between her thigh and the sheets, and grabbed a handful of derriere.
Elle moaned playfully and then shoved him back with her foot. “No, no. First you explain quantum chronamyics then we delve into my derriere.”
Reinier started to correct her but was stopped by his brain catching up to her double entendre.
She laughed at his speechlessness. “Come, come. Edify me,” she teased in a sexy voice.
“Ah, well, so you see, um, physics. Normal physics. All physics really. It’s ok.” Reinier took a breath, still trying to orient past her evocative entendres. “The problem with physics is it’s still all about locality. One object can only be affected by another object that has some sort of dir
ect contact. A pitcher throws a baseball that smacks into a catcher’s mitt, a submarine launches a missile that travels thousands of miles and collides with its target, thunder undulates as sound waves through a medium of air particles and crashes in our ears. Even light must obey locality. Photons emitted from the sun zip through the void of space for over eight minutes, hit the moon, induce a photoelectric effect that essentially coaxes a ricocheting beam of photons out that then travel to the earth, through its atmosphere, past our window, between the mosquito netting, and collide with your leg making your skin glow.”
“I am glowing a bit, aren’t I?”
This time Reinier smacked her and similarly left his striking hand in contact with her leg.
Elle couldn’t help but curl toward the affection. Negative attention was still attention. “Locality definitely feels like a problem,” Elle quipped, as she bent her leg in an effort to make Reinier’s hand slide down from her knee and up her thigh.
Alas, she had already nudged him down the path of physics. Reinier started to speak animatedly, with his hands. “So in essence, everything has to travel. Everything has to go from here,” Reinier held out his left hand to indicate a hypothetical location, “to there,” Reinier held out his right hand as far from his left as possible to indicate a hypothetical destination.
“Je comprends. Aren’t there a handful of kinematic equations that describe that movement? I seem to recall something of ’zat sort from my secondary school days.”
“Yes, no. There are. And they describe the movement beautifully.”
“Alors?”
“But I think it’s a waste of time.”
Elle snort-laughed.
Reinier tilted his head at her, curious as to the joke. “I’m not kidding.”
“I know, mon trésor. ’Zat is what’s so funny.”
Reinier grinned, still not getting it, but thrilled to make Elle laugh. “Ok, so imagine a yardstick, or in your case a meter stick.”
Here & There Page 9
