Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “Aha! Z’ere you are! Mon petit.”

  A baby giggles. Rapid kissing sounds.

  “Où est ton père?58 In the bathroom? Hm? Rye?” she calls lightly.

  At a distance, a door opens, footsteps, door closes.

  Murmuring.

  “Allô . . .” Eve yells.

  “Eve?” Reidier’s dampened voice rings out.

  “Oui?”

  At this point, Reidier, sitting at his desk, watching this video, shifts positions. He was leaning back, in a somewhat slouched position, but here he changes his posture. He leans hard on his left elbow while pressing down on the right armrest with his right arm, in order to push himself in the opposite direction and extend his torso over the left side of the chair. Simultaneously, his right leg rises up, and he places his right foot on the edge of the chair. Finally, he brings up his right arm and drapes the crook of his elbow over his right knee. It’s a disheveled fetal position.

  His face remains expressionless.

  Back in the soundscape, more muffled footsteps.

  “Down in my office?” Reidier calls.

  “Oui. Avec Otto!” she responds, with a tense tone.

  “What did you say?”

  A door creaks open.

  “Rye, why did you—”

  Three footfalls on the stairs.

  Silence.

  A piercing scream distorts the recording.

  From here on out, everything is a muddled cacophony of sounds. Rushing footsteps. Crying boys. Eve screaming. Reidier distinctly saying “Holy Christ” at one point and “Let’s just get a hold of ourselves” at another. Thunks and thumps of furniture crashing to the floor. More wailing from the boys. Several repeated frantic “Ce qui se passe?”59 Thundering pairs of footsteps up the stairs. Door slams. More distant rapid pairs of footsteps. More distant door slams. Muffled cries in the distance.

  Silence.

  The unseen video clip ends. Reidier still sits in his desk chair. He then leans forward, clicks with the computer mouse, and plays it all again.

  Reidier watches it eleven times. He never reacts physically, never emotes. The only evidence of some sort of tumult is in how he keeps replaying it. However, if one were to mute the sequence, it would appear the same as if he were studying the various iterations of an experiment.

  The actual footage that Reidier watched was never uncovered or recovered. The closest I got to it was through Bertram Malle’s secondhand account.

  Excerpted from interview with Dr. Bertram Malle, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Brown University, April 18, 2009

  “To make an appointment with me, most folks just call my assistant. But not Kerek. He has the State Department classify it as an act of National Security.” Bertram smiles through his fuzzy beard. “He never did like conventional methods.”

  He laughs.

  “I suppose if he did,” I say, “he never would have pursued his work.”

  Nodding. “True. True. It was very much who he was.”

  I note that Bertram’s eyes drop, and he gazes off to the left. He’s a relatively trim man. A shock of dark hair that clearly started off the day parted has slowly defected to anarchy. His facial hair is less of a full beard than unregulated stubble. Still, he gives off an air of casual kemptness, an impression of professionalism mitigated by his soothing smile. He appears to be present and focused on what’s at hand.

  “He didn’t even call first. It’d been weeks after the move. I’m sure there had probably been some sort of announcement, some article in the Brown Herald, mass e-mail.” Bertram shrugs. “But I totally missed his arrival.

  “I didn’t even know Eve was his wife. Just this new visiting Comp Lit professor who had gotten lost in the shuffle and somehow placed across the hall from my office.”

  “Had you two interacted?”

  A wave of his hand. “Simple pleasantries. Introductions of who we were and what we did. Hellos in the hallways. I recall bringing her an ice tea from Starbucks. But nothing beyond that, nothing below the surface. All I really knew was she was a striking woman who read a lot. I had no idea she was Kerek’s wife, until he showed up at my office one night.”

  Bertram takes another moment, staring down and to the left. “I hadn’t seen him since college. I’d receive the occasional letter from him—”

  “Letters and e-mails?”

  “Always a letter. Handwritten and out of the blue. A note of congratulations, like when I received my post here. Or sometimes just a random thought about my work.” He laughs, remembering something. “Once I received a note from him after my book Intentions and Intentionality came out. It was a three-line message, a question really. It was something along the lines of ‘How much does unintentional behavior define identity? If one were to obliterate her accent or her habit of tugging at her earlobe, would she still be herself? Is an alcoholic still an alcoholic stranded on a desert island without a drop of liquor?’ Par for the course with Kerek. Thought provoking, supportive, and elusive. Try as I might, I could never find out anything about his work or echo my support and interest.”

  A hint of melancholy creeps across his face.

  “The nature of the places he worked, and the type of material he was working on, didn’t really lend itself to public support,” I offer.

  Bertram harrumphs. “I realize that now. DARPA has been an education in discretion to say the least. Both imposing and annihilating.60 At the time, though, I was reading intention into his absence, interpreting his behavior as a choice to keep me at arm’s length, never realizing that I was actually being kept closer than most. At least not until he showed up that first evening.”

  Bertram gestures to his office door. “It was ajar. I was just packing up my bag, and he slipped in, closed the door, and said ‘Hello, Bert.’”

  “How mundane.”

  “Exactly, its normalcy is what was so jarring about it. But there I was, hugging him before I even realized my own sense of shock. Kerek Reidier in my office. Over a decade since college, it felt like we picked up just where we left off. Him launching into how, while my work on the explanation of behavior was valid, it begged the question of how explaining behavior was a behavioral reaction in and of itself.”

  “So much for the pleasantries.”

  Bertram lets out a laugh, shaking his head. “Those were his pleasantries. But I had him in person. I at least had the opportunity to outflank his mercurial instincts.”

  “So you forced him to catch you up?”

  “Exactly. Made him sit there, in your seat, in his tweed jacket, his laptop bag resting vertically on his knees, and catch me up. At least the basics, his time at CSG, University of Chicago. His transfer here. His new hush-hush work. His wife and kids! I asked for pictures, but he balked. That’s when he let me know I had already met Eve. She had kept her maiden name, Tassat, and there had been no way for me to guess. Somehow though, I felt a little betrayed. For weeks, I had been casually conversing with this woman, never knowing who she was. Never knowing Kerek was in town, at the University, on campus.”

  “I can understand feeling deceived.”

  “Duped is how I would have put it. But honestly, it was a narcissistic knee-jerk response. I realized that as Kerek and I sat with the silence of his confession hanging between us. And that’s when I noticed that he was still holding his laptop bag propped up on his knees, his fingers tapping unconsciously on the zipper.

  “When he finally made eye contact with me, I smiled and asked if this was more than a social call. He just nodded and said, ‘I need your help, Bert.’ So then he unzipped his bag, pulled out his laptop, and set it up on his desk. He babbled a little about his history with Eve. How he wasn’t sure if she was ever happy in Chicago. Her writing was going well, but with the kids, and his own work, and the strains of both of them trying to make work work and family work, and how the newest move seemed more like an assault than a progression, and all of this with twins, well, he just didn’t know how to read her b
ehavior and how to help.”

  Bertram went on to describe a video that Reidier showed him. From the sound of it, it appears to be the missing footage that we could only listen to.

  By his account, it starts in Reidier’s home office in the basement. No one sits at the desk. In the background, though, on a large work-table covered with high-tech equipment, sits a three-year-old Otto. The child seems, to Bertram, to be in a pleasant state. The boy picks up and puts down the odd item. He places his hands on a stack of paper that slides out from under him. A quizzical look comes across the child’s face. He places his hands on the slightly shorter stack of paper and does this again.

  He smiles. And repeats a few more times. Then Otto claps his hands against his thighs with an excited patting.

  He stops abruptly, startled by the distant sound of a door opening in the main house. It’s Eve. We hear her announce she’s home. When no one responds, Eve thumps about upstairs, hunting around until finally noticing the light coming up from Reidier’s office. She clumps down the stairs and discovers Otto. Delighted, she scoops the boy up.

  Otto giggles as Eve attacks him with a barrage of kisses.

  Finally, she stops, holding Otto against her side, resting him on her hip. She gazes around the basement.

  “Où est ton père? In the bathroom? Hm? Rye?” she takes a step off in one direction.

  Then she freezes, in almost exactly the same way that Otto had, at the sound of a door opening on the main floor. She tracks the footsteps, the door closing, the murmuring.

  Eve yells out hello.

  “Eve?” Reidier asks back, yelling down.

  Eve responds yes.

  Then there’s a slight pause.

  Reidier yells out again to pin down her location and finally gets that she’s down in his office, with Otto.

  Her tone seemed to have been filled with restrained anger and annoyance as she came to realize their son had been left downstairs, unattended.

  While it was clear on the tape, it could have been smoothed over by the interference of walls and furniture. This is bolstered by Reidier’s reaction, a simple and confused, “What did you say?”

  Eve bounces up and down as if to soothe Otto, who seems completely at ease and in no need of soothing.

  A flurry of footsteps above lead to the creak of the door opening and the footfalls of Reidier tromping down the first few steps.

  Unable to restrain her presumptions and anger, Eve starts in with a fiercer tone, “Rye, why did you—”

  She stops midsentence. Completely speechless as she stares up at Reidier.

  Due to the camera angle, the only part of him that was in view was his lower half, Ecco’s feet dangling by his waist.

  They’re all frozen in place. It almost seems as if the tape had paused, according to Bertram.

  That’s when Eve let out a piercing scream.

  She backs away, dropping Otto to the floor. He starts crying, which, along with Eve’s scream, triggers Ecco’s crying.

  Reidier rushes down the rest of the stairs, yelling “Holy Christ!”

  Eve can’t stop screaming and covering her mouth yelling what’s happening, what’s happening again and again in French.

  Reidier crouches down with a crying Ecco in his arms to comfort a crying Otto.

  Eve keeps yelling and backs offscreen knocking over various objects. Every bang and thump amps up the boys’ hysteria.

  Reidier unsuccessfully tries to calm things down, insisting that they all need to get a hold of themselves.

  An inconsolable Eve rushes past him and up the stairs, slamming the door behind her.

  Reidier stands up, watching her go.

  He’s clearly in a panicked state himself. He takes a step with Ecco before stopping himself, turning back, and scooping up Otto.

  Reidier carries the boys up the stairs and out of sight.

  Another door slams, and cries bounce around in the distance, and then the tape stops.

  “That’s a pretty detailed memory,” I point out (even considering I helped him recall with prompts from my transcripts).

  Bertram nodded. “It’s not something you easily forget. And we must have watched it at least a dozen times. Reidier was adamant that I study it, consider every nuance. In a weird way it felt like it was my own personal reality-television show made for an audience of one.”

  I could relate to that feeling. Already I have been alone for months Psynaring in the depths of an abyss of primary sources, the size of it all constantly threatening to drown me.*

  * * *

  * It’s still jarring when she does this. Inserts her experience of the report into the report. I’m betting this was just her process. The way she got through the first draft, always planning to go back later and clean out these artifacts of her. Sterilize the whole damn thing.

  I wonder at what point she realized this might be the only draft.

  * * *

  “Kerek wouldn’t go into any details,” Bertram went on. “You know, other than showing me the film. He just wanted me to help, both Eve and the kids. Kept insisting that any insight he provided would bias me with his perspective. I suppose he thought the tape, at least, was an objective record. He was an old friend in distress. I didn’t push. It was all a little overwhelming. I guess the proper word for it would be ‘stunning.’ Kerek’s appearance, my new office neighbor turning out to be his wife, the footage, and then Pierce.”

  -----Original Message-----

  From: Donald Pierce [mailto:donald.pierce@darpa.mil]

  Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 9:58 a.m.

  To: larry.woodbury@darpa.mil

  Subject: Doctor Patient Privilege

  Larry,

  Had coffee with Bertram Malle. Per our discussion on Tuesday, I went up to RI to ensure Reidier had everything he needed for his lab and to meet with Rear Adm Wisecup about the ██ ███ on USS █████.

  Malle seems malleable enough. He was certainly surprised enough. Your suggestion to not make an introductory phone call was spot on.

  I stressed to him the importance of Reidier’s work, and subsequently the importance of his work with Eve. I assured Malle that in no way did we want to violate doctor-patient privilege, but that in accordance with Title II of the USA Patriot Act, specifically the “sneak and peek” provision, we were entitled to access in uncovering any patterns that were important to national security. I further emphasized that Eve’s rights were limited as she wasn’t a US citizen, but that we of course want her to receive the best treatment.

  He agreed to help and seemed to accept that he could never publish anything about this and that his notes, with regard to the Reidiers, were classified documents.

  Please confer with legal and have them put together an appropriate summary to forward to Malle.

  -DP

  Bertram was unfamiliar with the Department and its techniques. Pierce pushed his advantage and manipulated Bertram’s concern for Reidier, as well as his genuine impulse to be a good friend. It’s not that Pierce lied, just equivocated. In spite of Pierce’s undisclosed agenda, Bertram’s support of and insight into the Reidier family were both helpful to and ultimately healthy for them.

  Nevertheless, considering Pierce’s earlier e-mail to Woodbury, it’s telling that Pierce never brings up Malle’s neurological expertise. He never mentions how Malle’s work in cybernetic interfacing could help Reidier with his mysterious Stage 4.

  Pierce’s behavior with Bertram is no different than Reidier’s. Both men surprise Bertram with their initial meetings. Both acknowledge his professional success and appeal to him for help. And both withhold crucial information. The common thread seems to be Reidier’s work.

  In the meantime Bertram is left, like me, to sift through the gaps and mine the void. All we can do is backtrack through time and try to figure out just what happened.

  Why did Eve break down like that? As it appears, anger would have been a much more comprehensible response to Reidier shirking his p
arental babysitting duties.

  Why not fill in the blanks a little for Bertram? Reidier only shows Bertram this loop of time. Reidier was intelligent enough to realize that providing some sort of time line, some context, would help immensely.

  Why did Reidier delete the footage from his hard drive? Although it was a record of a personal, not professional, exchange, it was anomalistic for Reidier to excise it. There is not a single other instance where this occurs (at least as far as the records show). Something significant motivated this decision.

  Was this act his own rudimentary attempt to erase the past or was it something more?

  TITLE CARD: GALILEE 6:21

  TITLE CARD: EXPERIMENT 47

  CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-10-26 12:34

  Dr. Reidier, sitting at console, tweed sport coat on chair behind him. He goes back and forth reading/mumbling notes from a spiral notebook and then typing into the console computer.

  IS1 O’Brien enters from transmission room.

  IS1 O’BRIEN

  All set.

  DR. REIDIER

  (nodding)

  Almost . . . and . . . done.

  Dr. Reidier finishes at the computer. From off, the HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator WHINES.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Ok.

  IS1 O’Brien takes his seat. Dr. Reidier addresses the camera.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Take Umpteen with the ever-elusive, Citric Devil. All calibrations have been uploaded and recorded.

  (makes contemplative raspberry noise with lips)

  Quantum chromodynamics are in the ██ █████ range, and we are piping in ██████████ electron volts from the ███████ █████ Ok. Here we go.

  (beat)

  Again.

  Dr. Reidier double taps his lapel pin, flips up his Plexiglas cover over Contact Button Alpha. IS1 O’Brien does the same at Contact Button Bravo.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  In three, two, one, go.