Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “That’d be fine. When will you be?”

  Reidier’s forehead smoothes out with surprise. “Oh, I didn’t realize you meant, that you were—

  “I’ll just—it’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

  Reidier hangs up his cell and looks at a now-bemused Eve.

  “Pierce is here. In Providence. Wants me to grab coffee with him at the Coffee Exchange down on Wickenden.”*

  * * *

  * That place is still there?! A friend of mine used to perform on open-mic nights with just his guitar and his fake sweet-guy persona. I’m not saying the guy was any worse than the rest of us, it’s just that he tried to pretend he wasn’t.

  He’d always give you that small town type of hello, in his soft tenor voice, and nod and smile while you talked, like he was genuinely interested. And you really thought he was, unless you watched how he was with others. It was almost exactly the same, nod for nod. Again and again. With everybody. Same smile. Same sweet voice.

  I tell you, it took a lot not to gag on my cappuccino foam while he sang his lyrics of “sincerity” and girls got all weak-kneed, humming along to the three-chord progression, not even noticing how he sang through a mask.

  That was the worst part. That I was the only one who saw it. No one else picked up on it. No one else smelled the bullshit. No one heard him whisper venom in my ear after I had challenged him on some point.

  That’s when I realized he knew, saw how I could see through him. And he hated me for it. But that only made him turn up the sweetness and the charm in public, and then spit up the bile on me in an isolated passing.

  Hey, I’ll take Toby and his artistry any day of the week. Toby doesn’t hide it, he flaunts it. Dances with it. And he doesn’t pretend it’s not there and it’s not a game. He embraces the reality of the illusion of it all with the constant reinvention of himself. He changes costume again and again, but purposefully drapes himself in the camouflage of people’s expectations. He’s more honest in transforming into what people want him to be, than any of the lemmings out there convinced they know who they are. There’s a truth to Toby’s deceit.

  Even lemmings are lies. Those little famous followers are not in fact nature’s notorious suicide cult. That lovely myth about their tendency toward mass suicide is nothing more than an urban legend propagated by Disney. White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award, featured a segment on lemmings and their compulsion to mass suicide. The truth is, the footage of those silly rodents leaping into the ocean was actually staged. They weren’t so much “jumping” as they were being hurled off a cliff by a custom-made, lemming-launching turntable. Not to mention, it wasn’t so much an “ocean” that the lemmings drowned in, but rather a tightly cropped river in the middle of landlocked Alberta, Canada. Not even the natural habitat for lemmings. No, these puppies were shipped in from the North Pole so the dedicated filmmakers could accurately document this bizarre, “natural” compulsion.

  Truth isn’t solid.

  It’s liquid.

  It takes on the shape of whatever container it’s poured into.

  * * *

  “He came up from Washington unannounced? You didn’t know?”

  “Not at all. We had our status conference call earlier this week. Do you think it’s something bad?”

  She considers Reidier’s question. “Apparently, you are his prize. I think it’s just something we’ll ’ave to get used to. You should go, though, no? I am sure it will be fine.”

  Reidier nods and stands up. He makes for the door. At the hall, he stops and turns around. “Would you like me to bring you back something? An ice tea?”

  “Peppermint. No white sugar.”

  “White sugar,” Reidier says along with her. “Yes, I know. I have met you before.”

  She nods once in concurrence. “I trust you, Rye, just not those sneaky, ignorant baristas. I’ll never understand America’s tolerance of bleached sugar. The demerara is so much bet’ah.”

  “We’re a processed culture,” he says, heading down the hall.

  Downstairs, Reidier stops into the kitchen to retrieve his keys off the counter. He snatches them up off the granite and then freezes. He stands there, keys in his fist hovering at shoulder height.

  After a few moments he approaches the kitchen table. The egg crates are nowhere to be found, but sitting on top of the Formica surface, like a dairy ziggurat, is a pyramid of eggs. Five eggs across the base, five levels high, culminating in a single egg apogee.

  Reidier reaches out his hand to touch it, but stops just short. His finger droops as he presumably considers the ramifications of upsetting the apple cart, so to speak. He looks around the room and checks the den.

  It is empty, and the TV is off.

  Noise of the boys playing upstairs echoes down the stairwell.

  Reidier returns to the kitchen, once again approaching the table. He stands over it, leaning one way and then the next, to inspect it from a variety of angles.

  “They must be hard-boiled,” he says out loud to himself and delicately lifts the top ovum off of its perch. In one fluid release, the pyramid sighs, and the delicate structure rolls outward, as if melting. Reidier, in a Three Stooges–esque reflex, drops his egg while trying to catch the others, and ends up scattering at least a dozen to the floor. Not one of them was hard-boiled.

  “Shit,” Reidier says, taking in the devastation left by the miniature avalanche. Pools of albumen and yolk droop across the tabletop and floor like a Dalí landscape.

  Excerpt from University of Chicago iTunes episode, Dr. Kerek Reidier lecture from his Physics of Science Fiction course, March 11, 2002

  Professor Reidier wanders back and forth in front of an oversized chalkboard, which is below an equally large projector screen. Hands thrust deep into his tweed coat pockets, head down, shoulders raised slightly upward, his winter boots squeak as he paces the length of the slate monolith.

  Written on the board in large letters is the phrase Principium Contradictionis.

  “Any Latin scholars in the house?”

  A lone voice rolls out from the sea of seated students. “Contradiction principle?”

  “Yes. The Principle of Contradiction. One of the so-called three classic laws of thought. Can anyone tell me what the other two are?”

  A different voice calls out, “The law of identity.”

  “Yes, that most profound of concepts that states an object is the same as itself. A equals A. A quaint little tautology that we all learned the first day of high school geometry. And the other?”

  The students murmur until someone says, “The law of the excluded middle.”

  “Glad to see at least some of the homework is seeping in. The law of the excluded middle is the principle that for any proposition, it is either true or its negation is. As Aristotle put it, when you have two contradictory propositions, one must be true and the other false. Unless you’ve been out with Alexander the Great, and he drunkenly asks if he’s great enough to both build and move an unmovable mountain.”

  Only a few sporadic chortles from the class.

  “Ok, don’t insult conquerors, just their wussy tutors, check.”

  More laughter this time.

  “The principle of contradiction is the basis for all of these. It posits that contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time, e.g. the two propositions, A is B and A is not B, are mutually exclusive. Seems believable enough. It’s either raining right now or not raining right now. Right? But consider a little situation discovered by Bertrand Russell a hundred years ago. There’s a barber who lives in a small town. The barber shaves all those men and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?”

  Dead silence.

  “It hurts to think about, I know. That’s philosophy for you.” Reidier leans forward, launching himself away from the lectern. “Someone once posited that physics, at its highest level, becomes philosophy. I think whoever said that just wasn’t good enough at math.” />
  Snickers ripple through the class. A student speaks up, “Isn’t math at the highest level, philosophy?”

  Reidier smiles at the crowd, “I was hoping I could just slip that little tautology right by you. It’s a fair point. Our beloved Bertrand Russell did once say, ‘To create a good philosophy, you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician,’ which one could interpret as philosophy at its highest level is just mathematics. Still all of this begs the question, what is mathematics?”*

  * * *

  * I feel like my head should hurt, and I should be more than a little confused, but somehow this all makes sense. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m about a third of the way through a liter of Highland Park Scotch and am reading this like it’s a high school Spanish assignment. Cruise over the details and go for gist.

  * * *

  “Einstein believed that ‘As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’* Me, I believe math is merely a language. It’s nature’s accountant. Math is no more of a philosophy than a picture of a cake is a dessert. Still, it has its uses, one of which is that it provides a nifty way to both explain and sidestep paradoxes. Which brings us to today’s science-fictional feat: teleportation. I’m sure the majority of you associate this with the phrase, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’”75

  * * *

  * Toby loves that one. As did the head honchos at Anomaly. So much so, that they actually approved my hypothetical project proposal, or, more formally, my Project Proposal of the Hypothetical. They bought into it hook, line, and sinker: website development, graphic design team support, and a sizable marketing budget all for me to sell a hypothetical.

  Did I already mention this? I’m getting swamped by all of this paper. And the scotch probably isn’t helping much either. In vino veritas, sure; but in Highland Park . . . lacuna. I’m not about to start thumbing back through all of my notes.

  Anomaly’s giving me free rein to launch a campaign for Chameleon. It’s a mind-blowing, game-changing, revolutionizing new product. And it doesn’t even exist. Scratch that, it’s not even defined. The concept is that it will serve as a type of advertisement for us. A proof of concept. The pitch is simple, if we can sell something that’s not even real, imagine what we can do with your product.

  It was one of our bimonthly Trailblazer Idea Harvest Sessions, a required “creative” experience that felt more like its acronym: a backward SHIT. It’s not that I had forgotten about the meeting, it’s that it wasn’t even on my radar. There I was, sitting at my workstation, doing yet another Google search on the works of Eve Tassat, when I looked up and realized Lorelei was standing next to me, waiting for an answer to some question I didn’t hear.

  “You all right there, Tri-Me?”

  That was her specific variation on my office nickname, the Trinity of Me. I was always a tad sheepish around her. It’s not that I was intimidated or anything like that, it’s just that most of the time, she found me amusing. Which normally would be a plus, right? Except with her, I was never trying to amuse. No matter how many stops I pulled out, she just sifted through my bag of tricks and inspected them all with a quaint detachment, like you might while looking at tchotchkes in an antique toy store.

  None of this would be a problem really if it weren’t for the fact that she was the kind of a girl who made a skirt suit look better than lingerie. She knew it too. The bizarre thing was, it wasn’t in any stuck up sort of way, just an understanding that yes, this is the way things are, yeah she knows how she affects men (and women), and then she’d shrug with a sort of can-we-please-get-on-with-this-now manner. And for whatever reason, she’s taken a shine to me. Like at one point she just decided I’m ok, I’m going to be her buddy, and then just told me, come on buddy, we’re going for a drink. I have no idea why. My only clue is that when we’re drinking and she’s complaining about this investment banker boyfriend who took her paintballing or that trust fund baby who flew her to New Orleans for crawdaddies, she always rolls her eyes and smacks my arm with the back of her hand and says something like, You’d’ve gotten a real kick out of it, Tri-Me, grinding away at his organ not even realizing he’s the dancing monkey.

  The arm smack cues me to nod and laugh, and say something about how they just don’t realize that artifice and architecture are the same things. All the while, I’m just wondering how she got her hair to be as shiny and lustrous as they make it look in commercials. It always smelled really good too, even in a dive bar. Like some jasmine-gardenia hybrid.

  “You look like shit, partner,” she said, still standing over me at my desk.

  “I just haven’t been sleeping much.”

  “For good reasons or bad?”

  I gave her something back like you know me, or hard to tell the difference. I wanted to tell her all about my mother, her disappearance, the report. I wanted to take her to the carriage house and show her and then go to some bar and talk it out over a couple dozen pints. She’d nod. She’d rest a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. A connection would start to buzz, like when you throw up the ancient light switch in a big industrial space. She’d tell me something like she knows just what I need. And she’d take me back to her place, lay me down on her couch, and rest my head on her lap. She’d run her fingers through my hair, and we’d just talk until I drifted off.

  And I’d stop feeling alone, sensing the warmth of her thighs beneath my head.

  In real life, she guided me down the hall into our glass-walled conference room, whispering something to me about how frustrated the top dogs were getting with redundant innovations. I think I made a joke about them being out-ovations. I don’t know, it’s all a blur.

  The only thing that really stuck out was her sitting next to me. I swear I could feel her body heat radiating outward.

  The bosses were railing against us becoming stagnant. Something about sharks and how if they don’t keep moving they die. Ideas were tossed out and quickly crushed like cheap beer cans.

  I was off obsessing about Reidier and Eve and the bookend Thinkers. She found bookends, I found a book. A tome, really. A consciousness trapped in the words. It’s the last thing I have of Mom.

  A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

  A woman, too. Hilary’s essence is similarly locked up in her words, pinging out an image of the Reidiers. She’s in there in the echoes of the Psynar®. The problem is, I’m losing myself trying to find her.

  Lorelei’s voice pinged me out of my own darkness. She was taking a swing at knocking Anomaly out of its doldrums. The top dogs tore it up with a lot of howling about thinking in and out of the box and all we were doing was getting boxed in.

  “Why don’t we just throw out the fucking box?” I blurted out.

  The room went still.

  I don’t know what had spurred me into motion. Probably some chivalrous impulse to step between Lorelei and the rocks she was getting tossed against. Or just frustration against the unimpeded flow of uninspiring bullshit. Or maybe I was sleep deprived.

  It got their attention though.

  They asked me to expand on my idea. I didn’t really have one, so that’s when I dropped the Einstein quote about reality and math, math and reality. I was buying time, but it caused an honest-to-God hullabaloo.

  I had them. Just didn’t know what I had them in.

  Before I knew it, I was off and running about dedicating our powers and skills to conjure up a reality about nothing. A non-product. An illusion of a mirage. We’ll call it Chameleon. And, well, you pretty much know the rest.

  I’m getting good at asking “what if?”

  * * *

  The class laughs again.

  “So, teleportation, the moving of matter from one place to another. A long-imagined dream of humanity. How do we travel without traveling? There are essentially three fairly straightforward methodologies.”

  “Method one is the most popular version, i.e
. the Star Trek version. It entails transforming all of the matter that is you into energy, transmitting that energy to a specific, distant location, and then reconstituting that energy into the matter that is you.

  “The second is more Harry Potter–esque. It would require tearing a hole through several dimensions of space at your location all the way to your desired location and then simply pushing you through it.

  “Makes going through security at the airport a lot more appealing, eh?”

  More laughter.

  “The third method involves a process more akin to replication. It involves scanning your person, destroying the original you, transmitting that information, and reconstructing ‘you’ at a distant location.

  “So of these three, the first one is utter hogwash. While matter and energy are indeed two sides of the same coin, as dictated by E = mc2, once matter is transformed into energy, it can no longer maintain the various properties of matter, i.e. ordered structure and patterns. It is structure and patterns that make you you, rather than just a lump of carbon and hydrogen. While one might conceivably be able to transform your energy back into matter, it would not be pretty.

  “The dimensional-hole option is also a dead end since all we’ve been able to do is theorize about the existence of other dimensions. Furthermore, traveling through the multiverse would expose our three-dimensional, this-universe selves to a myriad of respective physical laws within each parallel universe that would most certainly annihilate us, or at least distort us in uncomfortable ways.”

  An unintelligible question from a student.

  “Maybe it’s a universe without the weak nuclear force, requiring the modification of several constants that we’ve grown accustomed to. Or one where quarks have different masses, so that neutrons became heavier than protons, resulting in the negation of any carbon-or oxygen-based life form, i.e. us. Or perhaps the quark mass adjustment would result in the proton being heavier than the neutron, negating the possibility of the basic hydrogen atom. Anyhow, you see the complications with that mode of travel.*