Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “And then he points at the door. No shit. And every head in the jury snaps toward the door in expectation.

  “As they wait for this miraculous entrance, Toby calmly states, ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, is reasonable doubt.’”

  That’s about the time that Toby’ll chime in, “And he would’ve gotten off too, except that the judge noticed how in spite of everybody else looking toward the door, my client did not.”

  Then he’ll casually toss something out there like, “But if you want to hear a story, have Danny there pull up the right side of his shirt and show you his poor man’s version of the stigmata, and don’t let him con you into thinking it’s just a birthmark.”

  But maybe I’m just kidding myself about the whole kindred-spirit bullshit. Maybe it’s just he’s comfortable with me. He feels safe because we grew up together, and he knows how to mine my weak spots. How to turn my missing mom malaise into a swank loft in SoHo for us to entertain in after hours.

  Joke’s on him, though, instead of a loft in SoHo, he ended up having to fish me out of a porous carriage house in the ass bottom of Hell’s Kitchen.

  Maybe he was just trying to do what we do, find the silver lining in an otherwise mediocre and saddening world. He didn’t know how to bring my mom back any more than I did.

  It’s been over four and a half months now. Twenty weeks since Toby and I sailed down the New Jersey Turnpike, across the Delaware, underneath the Baltimore Harbor, and into the District, where I found the key to my mother’s secret, hidden away in my father’s art asylum.

  So far, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on rent, $54.99 on a space heater, and I don’t know how much on legal pads, highlighters, and click pens. I’ve found some elliptical references to Eve Tassat and her work on the Internet, and even less on Reidier. I’ve checked out about a dozen books on quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation and can’t make sense of any of it. Oh, and I’ve befriended a Jewish transvestite performer, Vitzi Vannu, who lives in the front building and performs down the street at this drag club called Escuelita.

  My institutional pursuits have proved equally unfruitful. No one at the Defense Department will take my phone calls or respond to my e-mails. It might be because I only call them from public telephones or e-mail them with fabricated addresses, assuming numerous different fictional identities from Clint Hoffstater, the Columbia Visiting Professor of Physics, to Aldin Whitehouse, the psychologist and founder of the Southwest Conference on Advancements of Art Therapy (and former colleague of Hilary Kahn). I don’t know.

  I also struck out on an appeal to Providence. Out of the three local-news stations there, only WJAR still had any footage from the day The Reidier Test went awry. A useless and utterly uninformative collection of clips of Dylan Secco getting a closer look at the dead fish washing up on the shore or standing on the Newport Bridge wistfully looking over his shoulder at Gould’s Island almost a mile away. Twenty-four-hour news coverage, and all I can get my hands on are shots of benchmarks of how high some of the waves splashed after the explosion.

  The funny thing is, it’s not until I’m sitting here, writing this, that I realize how obsessed I’ve become. How pathological is my need to find out. As long as I keep moving, then my dance with doubt won’t end in disappointment. Really I’m just trying to fight off the fact that the God’s honest truth of what happened is she really did just up and leave, molted and left all of her desiccated, withered, useless, old self behind . . . including me.

  * * *

  With periodic treatments, Kaleb’s deterioration was slowed. As a result, Reidier did get to enjoy an almost picture-perfect, Norman Rockwell–esque upbringing for the first seven years of his life. He made snowmen in the winter, built forts in the spring, caught frogs in the summer, and jumped into colorful leaf piles in the fall. Furthermore, being in a university town, Reidier had opportunities to participate in after school science programs that opened his eyes to the world around him.

  It was all but perfect, except when his parents left for the occasional trip to Boston. At first, family friends (an actor who needed a respite from New York, or a Williams professor they had befriended) would come stay with young Kerek, while they were at Mass General.

  Early on, according to Abi, Reidier’s parents decided a cancer ward was no place for a small child. They tried to insulate him from as much of it as possible. The two barely used the C-word, never discussed the gravity of the situation, and referred to the hospital trips as matinees. But they were powerless to stop the encroaching inevitability, like the uninvited guest in Prince Prospero’s Palace.*

  * * *

  * Once again my mother was referring to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

  * * *

  By the time Kerek was five, Kaleb was walking with a limp; within a year, Kaleb was growing lame; and by Kerek’s seventh birthday, Kaleb was all but paralyzed from the waist down.

  The family had no choice. Kaleb had to stay close to Mass General for more aggressive treatments and more intensive care. Refusing to “unsettle” their son’s childhood with the aromas of a chemo ward, they instead had Emily’s father come stay with Kerek. Emily and her father had a strained relationship at best, but he was the only surviving grandparent and the only person they could impose upon indefinitely.

  Luckily, the grandfather and the boy got on well together. A retired contractor, Emily’s father found the boy’s curiosity and boundless innovation a delight. The two spent many afternoons together working on projects, constructing this machine or that model. They made birdhouses, ant farms, and windmills in the first month, but as Kerek’s grandfather came to understand the extent of his grandson’s gifts, they moved on to motorcycle engines, radios, walkie-talkies, and the like. In fact, together they built a small-scale solar array that the college ultimately used as a model for solarizing its Library Shelving Facility.

  At first, Emily and Kaleb would make the five-hour drive back home every weekend, but soon it turned into every other weekend, then just Emily every other weekend, then once a month, until eventually it was every six weeks or so. While Kerek’s grandfather had no problem stimulating the child’s mind during the day, he was at a complete loss for how to soothe the boy’s heart at night. Kerek longed for his parents. Every night he would cry on the phone to his mother, begging her to come home or come get him. Every night she would promise to come home as soon as she could.

  If Eve’s short story, “In the Gloaming,” is to be taken as more fact than fiction, then one of the few consistencies Reidier could count on was his and his mother’s bedtime ritual.*

  * * *

  * A bedtime ritual with Mom? I guess every kid with a dying father has to have one.

  * * *

  The boy lay down in the bed, cradling the phone against his cheek, as he did every night.

  Her soft voice trickled out of the receiver into his ear. “Are you lying down?”

  “Yes, Mom,” he’d nod.

  “What side are you lying on, honey?”

  “Right.”

  “Ok, move just left of the center and I’ll lie just right of center.”

  He’d scoot slightly to the left.

  “Is your half under your pillow?” She was referring to the lodestone they had broken in two before the first time she and his father went away.

  “Mmmhmm,” he’d nod.

  “Mine’s under my pillow. So now, in our sleep . . .”

  “We can find our way,” he’d always finish the statement.

  “Through the between,” she’d assure him.

  “My bed is a rectangle.”

  “Just like . . .”

  “A door,” he’d yawn.

  “As is my bed. Two sides of the same coin. Tangled rectangles bound by lodestones.”

  “Tangled rectangles.”

  Then she’d start singing their song, “The 59th Street Bridge Song.”

  His breathing would slow down as he mumble-hummed, “Ba da, Ba da, B
a da, da . . . Feelin’ Groovy.” *

  * * *

  * If Mom and I had had a song, it would’ve been “The End” by the Doors.

  * * *

  By the time she made it to the I’m-dappled-and-drowsy-and-ready-to-sleep part, he’d have drifted off. Slipping through the limen. His grandfather would gingerly lift the receiver out of the boy’s grasp. He’d murmur soft assurances to his daughter, as he slipped out of the room, careful not to wake his grandson, and ask about how his son-in-law’s treatments were going.

  The boy would dream of magic doorways that opened onto a mountaintop where his parents set out a picnic, or an afternoon at the beach, or a stroll on the moon. The anxiety of the coming darkness was snuffed out by his mother’s embrace in the in-between.

  Kaleb died a few weeks before Kerek’s eighth birthday. Emily stayed with him until the very end. According to the nurses, when Emily finally found herself alone in the ICU ward, she sat in the room staring at the empty bed for almost an entire day.

  Finally, she called Williamstown and told her father she was driving back soon. He expressed his condolences, but let her know how at least Kerek would be glad to have her home. She replied, she didn’t know what home was anymore.

  It happened on the I-90 just after the exit ramp for Highway 91 at 9:49 p.m. According to the accident report, Emily’s car was going seventy-three miles per hour when she lost control of the vehicle. The vehicle swerved, hit the reinforced safety railings, and then flipped over twice. She was dead by the time the paramedics arrived.

  No other cars were involved in the accident. No traces of alcohol were found in her system. It is unlikely that she fell asleep at the wheel, as it was still before ten p.m. The police officer who filed the report suggested that a deer could have run in front of her car, causing her to swerve, or maybe another driver could have cut off her car in order to make it to the exit ramp. There’s no mention of it having been a possible suicide. It was classified as a single-vehicle accident.

  Perhaps it was during this period that the seeds of teleportation were set. A confusing, painful time defined by separation. It began with an innocent longing, a deep homesickness. Maybe one night while he drifted off to sleep in his tangled rectangle he thought, “What if . . . ?”

  Other elements were at play obviously, for who among us didn’t wonder “what if?” about a great many things when we were children? But Reidier never let go of his fierce hold on this question. He already had a passion for solving puzzles. A compression of tragedies like his, at such a fragile age, would naturally leave him at a loss for answers. And no one could provide a satisfactory explanation for his most basic question, why?

  Perhaps that’s how he ended up gravitating to physics: it promised, if not answers, at least access to the secret workings of the universe. Ignorant at arm’s length, the world seems mystical or callously random. But with the tools of physics and mathematics, Reidier could get close enough to scratch beneath the surface, convinced that, just underneath the sheen of chaotic mysticism, there was an explanation.

  Nevertheless, no matter how many answers one finds, each answer always leads to more questions. Knowledge is a hydra dressed in the veils of enlightenment. Where did we come from? Our parents. Where did they come from? Their parents, and so on and so forth, until we speed past the begets of the Bible and arrive at the theory of evolution. Yes, but how did life come to start in the first place so that it could evolve? Well, out of the primordial soup. So what made the primordial soup? An asteroid, the coalescing and aggregation of stardust. But then what made that? The Big Bang! There we have it. We’re done. That’s the initial moment, the beginning. But what made that concentrated dense pinhead of everything, and why did it explode?

  Answers only lead to more questions.

  So while Reidier worked harder and harder, unveiling the secrets of more and more mysteries and becoming more and more successful, he ultimately found himself playing with matryoshka dolls.* Each discovery led him further down the rabbit hole, to smaller and smaller worlds, but none of it made him feel like he was getting closer to the answer of why, nor did it do anything to close the distance between him and his parents that stretched back to his childhood. Unable to mend the gap, incapable of repairing that basic connection and consistency that is so vital at a young age for providing a sense of security, Reidier worked to keep himself just this side of sane.

  * * *

  * Yeah, I had to look this one up . . . they’re just Russian nesting dolls AKA matryoshka dolls: a set of dolls of decreasing sizes placed inside one another.

  * * *

  A man of science convinces himself to believe in fate, that it all happened for a reason, to give him purpose. He was meant to perform some ultimate, all-important purpose. That’s why everything happened the way it did. If he can just understand it all, if he could accomplish this feat of science fiction, it would be something tangible, something of worth. He would conjure an unmitigated paradigm shift that would ensconce him in the annals of history and provide him with both professional and financial security, lasting stability and fame for him and his family. So, he works to convince himself (with as much denial as he can muster) that he’s not just chasing the horizon. He’s on a teleological journey, not caught in some tautological labyrinth.

  He digs deeper, past atoms, past protons and neutrons, past quarks, and finally finds comfort in the words of another great physicist, “There is plenty of room at the bottom,”69 which he pins up on the bulletin board in his lab, right next to another quip by the same, “The philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

  For this reason, it makes sense to reexamine one of the few moments when Reidier actually does take pause: He and Eve sitting on their bench swing on their veranda in Providence. She leans against his shoulder, reading her book. He sits up straight, lifting his face to the slight breeze, his nail-bitten fingers clasping a sweaty bottle of Nantucket Nectar ice tea. “It’s so quiet. So settled. It feels like our own little sanctuary in a way,” he comments.

  Eve’s gaze lifts slightly from her book as she listens.

  “I was thinking the room at the far end of the second floor, the one with the window seat, would make a good writing den for you. It struck me as a perfect place for your work. Built-ins for your books, a nice tree to look at when you need a break, but not too distracting. You writing upstairs there, me tinkering with my work in the basement. The boys free to play in between, in earshot of both of us. Our own little sanctuary cloistered away behind those hedges.”

  A lovely little sentiment punctuated by one particular word: sanctuary. It immediately conjures up connotations of a sacred or holy place. 454 Angell, by its very address, evokes Biblical ideas. Still it seems Reidier is fixated on this idea for deeper reasons. Sitting on the veranda, Reidier could be imagining their new home to be his own little Eden, every move with Eve having been an attempt at a more perfect iteration of their own haven. They would create a sanctuary that even has its very own Tree of Knowledge taking root in the basement (with his work) and branching up to the far side of the second floor where Eve summons the Muses. This interpretation supports his aforementioned impulse of an almost divine purpose.

  There’s us and there’s everybody else.

  Nevertheless, there’s also a slightly more ominous element within this word. A sanctuary is also a place of refuge. Clearly, being under the Department’s watchful gaze carries with it an inherent sense of security. But what is it Reidier and his family needed protection from? Reidier’s work was the source of all of this. Ironically, where Eve saw it as the threat from within, Reidier believed it to be their salvation. For him, there was no sanctuary without his work. It was his talisman protecting them from loss. To abandon his work and leave it outside the walls of their asylum would have meant letting go of the past, of his quest, of his idea to be of value. For Reidier, 454 Angell was to be his own version of Prospero’s Palace.

&nbs
p; Consequently, we find ourselves back at our original inquiries:

  How did Reidier do it?

  Sidestepping the technical aspect to this question, it seems that the secret to Reidier’s how was that he never took on any preconceptions about elephants or tangled rectangles. Without the shackles of limitations, he was able to transform the impossible into merely the improbable.

  Why him?

  In retrospect now, it’s no huge insight as to why teleportation would appeal to Reidier. He never learned to manage the pain of distance, and as a result focused his exceptional talents at alleviating it. In doing so, he opened a door that the world wasn’t ready to go through.

  TITLE CARD: GALILEE 6:21

  TITLE CARD: EXPERIMENT 9 DELTA

  CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-11-17 00:09

  The dark room lights up a little as console lights and video screen flicker on.

  Ambient light pours in from the Mirror Lab.

  On video screen in console, SPLIT SCREEN-RIGHT SIDE, target room: blackness.

  LEFT SIDE, transmission room: a small object sits on the pad. (After magnification, it appears to be a small, emerald-cut diamond. Maybe 1.5 carats.)

  Fiber-optic cables, circumscribing the Entanglement Channel flare red for several seconds, then morph into an orbiting white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.

  The Boson Cannons and Pion Beams twitch to life. SOUNDS of the rapid ACCELERATION and DECELERATION of GEARS as the men take a series of readings of the diamond. Once complete they settle into optimized focal positions.

  On another console screen, SPLIT SCREEN:

  ANGELL RIGHT: empty target pad in Angell Lab.