Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  ANGELL LEFT: shows Dr. Reidier (in his tweed sport coat and pajamas) seated at his desk in Angell Lab.

  Dr. Reidier reads information off his respective screen, while absentmindedly pinching a small metal hoop, with four prongs sticking out of one spot on the circumference, back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, flicking it from one fingertip to the other.

  NOTE: closer inspection with enhanced amplification shows this to be an engagement ring setting without a diamond.

  Dr. Reidier enters several commands into his keyboard.

  Encrypted calibrations rapidly scroll up the Mirror Lab console computer screen.

  NOTE: unlike with other experiments, all of the calibrations and settings were encrypted. I2O has been unable to decrypt to date.

  Dr. Reidier brushes something off his lapel and leans out of frame (presumably to adjust something).

  Dr. Reidier sits back into his chair, looks everything over again, while fidgeting with the ring (he snaps the edge of a card from the kid’s game Concentration [with the picture of a lion on it] in between the setting’s empty tongs). He presses “Enter” on his keyboard . . .

  On the console, inside their Plexiglas covers, Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo simultaneously engage.

  CUT TO:

  MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

  ---MULTIPLE SCREENS---

  NGELL LAB RIGHT: empty target pad

  MIRROR LAB LEFT: the Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.

  The small diamond remains perfectly still on the transmission pad.

  At 2007-11-17 00:09:11.1011000 a quiet THRUM coincides with . . . nothing. The diamond still sits on the pad.

  NOTE: While undetectable to the naked eye, when high-speed footage was slowed down, a phenomenon was detected for the last 1600 picoseconds on the left side.

  During this increment, a seeming digital artifact appears on screen as the diamond seems to tessellate then glimmer then return to its previous “normal” state.

  ANGELL LAB RIGHT: at 2007-11-17 00:09:11.1011000, the video feed distorts with static waves as a diamond coalesces on the Angell Lab target pad . . . into two jagged halves. It cleaved in two during transmission.

  Dr. Reidier bites his top lip several times contemplatively. There is neither surprise, nor disappointment in his essentially neutral expression.

  He keeps rotating the ring setting back and forth, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

  He moves over to read information off his computer screen.

  Dr. Reidier exits out of his readouts and implements (presumably) his encryption program.

  Dr. Reidier pockets the ring setting as his screen flashes off.

  INT. CONTROL ROOM - MOMENTS LATER

  Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo depress.

  Data scrolls up the screen, then stops, and the screen and computer shut down.

  The console lights turn off.

  INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

  The HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out as the machine powers down.

  GEARS SPINNING NOISE ramps up and down as the Boson Cannons and Pion Beams retract.

  The circling indicator lights surrounding the Entanglement Channel orbit to a standstill, flash green, and then switch off.

  The Mirror Lab Transmission Room light turns off.

  IX

  Cells replace themselves constantly. Month to month, moment to moment. I am not me; I am a memory of me.

  Rōjin Haruki

  Apport: the transfer of an object from one location to another without traveling through space-time. Basically, “beaming up,” a feat which, so far, is a completely bogus idea.

  ~Hamid Al-Ghazali, scholar and skeptic

  Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  I’m doing this all wrong.

  All this time and I barely know them. I’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s the data. An infestation of information. It’s too easy to get lost, go down a wrong path, swamp the boat.

  I’ve been doing this all wrong—*

  * * *

  * I know how she feels. What’s this mean though?

  * * *

  NB Footage: Providence, February 1, 2007—

  Reidier walks in the front door, drops his satchel on the wooden chair in the vestibule, peels off his parka and boots, and calls out Eve’s name, thrusting his hands in and out of the various pockets of his sport coat, looking for something. He steps into the house, casting a glance to the left and right, and looks upstairs when he hears a noise from the kitchen. “I’m home,” he says, strolling into the kitchen. He lets his keys clatter onto the countertop.

  Reidier stops short, finding only Ecco in the room. The boy sits at the kitchen table. He holds an empty cardboard egg carton in his hand, and there are several more on the table. Ecco looks over his shoulder and smiles at his father.

  “Well, hello. Just taking care of some kitchen work?” Reidier asks as he approaches his son. He places a hand on his son’s back, bends over, and kisses the top of his head.

  Ecco, who has already turned his attention back to the egg cartons, makes a loud kissing noise in unison with his father’s display of affection.

  “Happen to know where Mommy is?” Reidier asks, watching Ecco play.

  “Up in her writing room,” comes a voice from the den.

  Reidier turns and follows the voice to discover his other son midheadstand on the couch, watching a nature show on television. Reidier leans against the doorjamb and tilts his head almost upside down to make eye contact with Otto.

  “Good day, sir,” Reidier says.

  Otto smiles at his father and then corrects him, “It’s good afternoon.”

  “So it is.” Reidier turns his head back upright. “Didn’t you hear me come in?”

  Otto shakes his head back and forth, which takes some effort as a significant portion of his weight is resting on it. “Watching TV.”

  “So I see. Manta rays, eh?”

  Otto tries a headstand nod. It doesn’t work, and he ends up collapsing on his side onto the couch.

  “I give it an eight. You’ve got to stick the dismount.”

  Otto screws his face up at his father.

  “Nowhere near as graceful as a manta ray,” Reidier teases.

  “Manta birostris,” Otto singsongs.

  “Looks like we have a little Latin scholar in our midst. Mommy will be pleased. Speaking of Mommy, she’s up in her writing room?”

  “I think so,” he says, his eyes glued to the TV as a manta breaches the surface.

  Reidier observes his son watching the manta ray, then leans away from the door, and heads down the hall.

  “They look like swimming angels,” Otto says to no one in particular.

  Reidier calls back to Otto, “I always thought so too. Ironically, it used to be called the devilfish.”

  He finds Eve kneeling on the floor of her study, in front of a half-unpacked box of books, a lilting stack of hardbacks, and several coffee-stained manuscripts. Bronze bookend replicas of Rodin’s The Thinker balance on each thigh; she stares at the partially filled bookshelf.

  Reidier’s voice fills the room, “. . . assuming we’ve already solved both the communication-speed and bandwidth issue, as well as the blueprinting and reconstruction of the entire molecular landscape, then we find ourselves in a netherland that straddles the boundaries of both stages three and four. We must not only map out, mirror, and induce cognitive patterns; we must do so instantaneously so as to avoid any loss of information, somehow transforming a static mind into a kinetic one. The transference of consciousness requires an animate host and therefore goes hand in hand with what I have thoughtfully termed Golem’s breath, but you might better understand it as the Frankenstein problem.”

  It is bewildering to watch both Eve and Reidier remain silent while Reidier’s voice washes over both o
f them. The aural disorientation isn’t apparent until he crosses the room to Eve’s computer and stops the podcast.*

  * * *

  * I think I get it. She’s shifting her approach. Her comments are restrained. She’s pulled back.

  That’s what was wrong before. At least in her eyes, there was too much of her. That’s rich—she’s always the last to realize that. Oh, but now she’s convinced that the only proper way to Psynar® the shit out of this is to get out of the way. Observe from a great enough distance so as to be sure not to affect the subject.

  Objectivity. That’s her key now. Only report so that the interpretation doesn’t affect the analysis.

  I wonder if she considered at all how objective she can be when she’s the one editing all this?

  Who knows? Maybe I’m the one reading into this a bit too much.

  * * *

  “You listen to my lectures?”

  “Oui. It’s perfect for background noise or for when I am having trouble sleeping,” Eve says with a smile.

  “Don’t think you’re the first person to say that. You’re just the meanest.”

  Eve turns toward her husband and puffs some wearied strands of hair dangling in front of her face upward. As the hair drifts down to almost the exact same longitude she blurts out in her French accent, “Why do I ’av these?”

  Reidier takes her in for a moment and then offers, “To hold up your books?”

  “Isn’t that what the end of the bookshelf does?”

  Reidier considers her point. “Well, yes, but when your books don’t reach the end of the shelf. And some shelves aren’t in bookcases. They’re just shelves and might be in the middle of a wall with no end in sight.”

  “In that case I could use a stack of books. But for the most part, I have plenty of books to fill every shelf and still make a coffee table out of the rest. And I did not ask why one has these. I asked why I have these. These. Packed away, so securely for the voyage here. These.”

  She lifts them up in the air slightly and then drops them back to her thighs. She then inhales with staccato breaths and sighs.

  Reidier is across the room in a few strides. He squats down behind her and slides his hands along the length of her arms, leaning his chest against her back. He holds her like that for a few minutes while Eve fights off tears.

  Eventually he leans back and sits on his bum, and Eve likewise shifts off of her knees and onto hers. They sit motionless: her back resting on his chest, his arms pressed against hers, and a small replica of The Thinker clasped in her hands sitting on each of her thighs.

  He whispers into her, “We’ll find them. They’ll turn up. We’ll find them.”*

  * * *

  * It took me a while, I had to go back over fifty pages, but I think I figured out what the hell they’re talking about. Reidier’s referring to her lost diaries from Chicago. That’s my best guess. I’d feel a lot more confident about my conjecture if Hilary had weighed in a little, but she’s taking a leave of absence. I guess I’m not the only one she disappeared on.

  I know she felt like she was doing this all wrong before, blah, blah, goddamn blah. But that doesn’t help me and this overwhelming disorientation I’m stumbling around with, trying to excavate this entire artifact without her. I’ve become Dante, wandering around hell, only Virgil’s nowhere to be found, and I’m fumbling about for any sense of direction trying to ignore the distinct impression I’m heading downhill.

  * * *

  She nods.

  He kisses the back of her head and repeats, “We’ll find them.”

  She turns The Thinkers toward each other, “I adore z’ese actually.”

  “I got you those.”

  She nods and says, “When we were in Guiana, and I was ’omesick. You left them for me in my office with a note that said, ‘Thinking of you. Here’s a little bit of ’ome.’” She shakes her head back and forth, smiling, “An atrocious pun, no?”

  “As I recall, it made you laugh.”

  “L’amour c’est être stupide ensemble.”

  “I got the words love and stupid and ensemble, but that can’t be right.”

  “’Ow do you not know French yet after all z’ese years?”

  “You know I could spit out some big physics terms while talking to you, like Bell’s theorem or the principle of locality.”

  “Bell’s theorem is the one that says normal physical theories can’t completely predict quantum mechanics, and the locality is the idea that an object can only be influenced directly by something in its immediate vicinity.”

  Reidier blinks. “Well, I got three of the French words.”

  Eve laughs, then tilts her head back, and smiles up at her husband. “See, I do listen to you sometimes.”

  “I listen to you too, I just don’t understand you. Although with that accent, it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying.”

  She thumps her head reproachfully back against his chest. “I do not ’ave an accent,” she says in a thick French accent.

  “You’re absolutely right. You don’t ’ave one at all. But as you say, ‘amour, stupide, ensemble.’”

  She laughs at his atrocious accent and sighs, “It means, ‘Love is being stupid together.’”70*

  * * *

  * If Mom were more in this she might write about how this is a rare moment of intimacy between these two in this tense first summer in Providence. Or something like that. But for all I know, they were fucking their brains out the entire damn season once they got over the initial hump and pain in the ass of moving. But what do I know? She’s the one with all the footage. She’s the one with all the insight. I’m just the Son of Psynar®.

  Honestly, it’s just like her to get out of the game. Deciding that somehow by stepping back, she was making everything better. Like somehow it was better for her and me to be talking to our own respective “respectable” shrinks after Dad died, rather than to each other. She didn’t want to weigh down my grief with her own or something like that. Like I never heard her crying in bed.

  All that “space” did was make me feel more alone than before. So alone that I would do anything for a little contact. I didn’t learn anything about how to cope with death. All I learned about was desperation. How it can take you over. Possess you. Make you capable of shit you never even considered, let alone thought possible. All under the protective cloak of an accident.

  I feel like Charlie Brown and Hilary is Lucy holding that football. I keep coming back, and she keeps leaving me all over again.

  * * *

  “That doesn’t sound entirely like a compliment, but I’ll take it, especially if we’re together.”

  They both adjust their positions slightly, but stay sitting up together on the floor, her surrounded by him, Eve’s head braced against his chest, Reidier’s chin resting on her shoulder.

  “Funny, your people are so much more fascinated with the thinker rather than the thought.”

  “L’ homme est beaucoup plus compliqué que ses pensées.”71

  “Sure, when you put it that way.”

  “A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.”

  “His thoughts are him. They are who he is.”

  “What about his urges, his emotions, his pains?” Eve asks.

  “Those are all varying manifestations of thought,” Reidier says.

  Eve grunts in response, then rolls back onto her knees, stretches, and places the bookends on the lowest shelf. She then twists around, grabs one of the book stacks off the floor, and drags them over to the shelf.

  Reidier sits where she left him and watches. “I’m glad to . . .” he trails off and considers as Eve continues to set up books. “It’s good you’re getting your books out.”

  “I know. They were suffocating in their boxes.”

  “Right next to Schrödinger’s cat.” He lets out a short laugh at his own joke.

  Eve cocks her head at her husband, flashes a quick pity smile, and goes back to unpacking. �
��Professor Golub and I were ’aving a discussion about Foucault’s extrapolations on the Panopticon.72 He was asserting there was a certain mise en scène aspect to the design. I conceded that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, this could be true. Still, the roots of that term, mise en scène, stem from the theater.”

  Seeing the bemused look on her husband’s face, she suggests he see if the French Department would let him audit a class, and then explains, “It literally means putting on stage. In the theater, however, the power lies with those producing the scenes, that is the director, designer, and performers. They are in control of what is being presented and how it is being looked at.”

  “Got it,” Reidier says.

  “This is the complete opposite of what Foucault was emphasizing in Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison.73 Inside of his architecture, the ‘unequal gaze’ was at play.”

  “What exactly is the unequal gaze? Other than what it sounds like,” Reidier says.

  “In the prison, it is the constant possibility of undetected observation. In this system, the gaze is not controlled by the performer, i.e. the prisoner, nor is its purpose entertainment. The unequal gaze is a punishment, a form of subjugation, and discipline in and of itself.”74

  “Makes sense. Although I still don’t see any connection to you unpacking your boxes.”

  “I wanted to find the section where Foucault writes about it and to show it to Spencer.”

  “Spencer?”

  Reidier’s cell phone rings from inside his sport coat.

  “Professor Golub,” Eve says over the ring.

  Reidier pulls his phone out of his pocket. “So you had to dig Foucault out of his dungeon.”

  Eve nods, and watches her husband glance down and wrinkle his forehead.

  The phone rings again.

  “It’s Pierce,” Reidier says.

  “You going to answer?”

  He does. “Hello.

  “Well, thank you. And you?

  “No, not a bad time at all, I was just—