Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “Just doing your job,” he said with a sardonic tone.

  This wasn’t the same man I had first interviewed so many months ago. His reticence had hardened into guardedness; his doubt had devolved into distrust. “I’m not so sure I have a job when I get back.”

  Bertram watched me with a neutral expression. Was he evaluating, judging, or merely waiting?

  “They feel my loyalties shifting. I think. Or they figure I’m just not getting anywhere. Either way, their faith is dwindling.”

  “It would be best if they came to the conclusion that you’re not getting anywhere. That’s why you’re here. I prefer that narrative.”

  The word hung in the air, resistant to the offshore gusts. Narrative. He punched the word out. His eyes shifting back to my face. Reading my response. He’s heard of my work, my PsychoNarratives. “Right now, I’m just trying to get the story straight. The narrative is something altogether different.”

  “Is that normally the case? Do the story and the narrative often differ?”

  “The story is how I come to understand what happened. The narrative is how I communicate the why and how it happened.”

  “Shifting loyalties. I suppose that can happen, collateral empathy, from Psynaring.”

  There he said it. He knew. My secret specialty. It was out. But how?

  Bertram read my thoughts, written in the furrows of my brow. “I made some calls. Applied some pressure of my own. Information can be a valuable hostage nowadays.”

  Someone in the Department? One of the other organizations I had worked for? Ultimately it didn’t matter. It was out, and I didn’t have to dance around it anymore. “Normally my subjects are bad guys. Or victims. Empathy helps in either case.”

  “So which are the Reidiers?”

  “Neither.”

  Bertram retreated from the cliff edge and sat on a bench at a sandy clearing where two paths intersected. I joined him there, watching a bee land on an Ophrys orchid109 and pollinate it.

  “Kerek was out of town. Actually, he was on his way to DC to see Pierce. That’s why Eve called me.”D

  * * *

  D Note To Self: Go through NB footage, find this interaction!!

  * * *

  Eve was frantic when he finally saw her, screaming bloody murder and wrestling with two orderlies who were trying to keep her as prone as possible on the bed. She was a crazed animal, desperate to get to her pups.

  Bertram was a familiar face at Rhode Island Hospital. In fact, he had been there only a few days prior to oversee the implant of a small sensor into a clinical trial patient’s motor cortex.

  Eve stopped cold when she saw Bertram. Her brain of course had difficulty parsing him into this reality. In spite of having summoned him, she was bemused by a friendly face strolling into her nightmare. She didn’t know how he had gotten there and whether he was a part of this reality or not. But still, he was there, and he was a friend.

  Bertram! Bertram. Her tone was desperate, pleading as she exerted an immense effort to regain calm and convey lucidity.

  They’ll kill him! Please. Help me stop them. Even in this frenetic state, Eve’s grace and beauty gave her an air of poise.

  Who? Killing who? Bertram was at her side. The orderlies had released her and stepped back the moment she had relaxed her struggle. Bertram squatted next to her bed in order to maintain eye contact.

  ’Ze boy.

  Otto or Ecco?

  I . . . I don’t know.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually Bertram deciphered the story. Eve was disoriented and having trouble focusing when she was first brought in. While a triage nurse tried to determine the severity of her head trauma, another nurse took care of the boys. One of them had severely burned his hand and forearm in the accident. The nurse didn’t know which twin was which but cleaned and dressed the wound. She also administered a tetanus shot, which was standard procedure for severe burns.

  As Eve regained her focus, the nurses advised her of what measures had been taken and that the boys were fine.

  That’s when Eve lost it. Still struggling with the head injury, she was unable to articulate her concern. She kept yelling about vomiting, extreme pain, comas, warnings that if he ever got another one he could die.

  With Bertram’s help, Eve managed to finally convey that she was talking about Otto. He had gotten a shot once and reacted violently: the twins were allergic to tetanus.

  Everyone sprung into action. Bertram flew down the hall, followed by a nurse trying to direct him where to go.

  When Bertram found the boys, Otto and Ecco were sitting in front of the nurses’ station, giggling, bouncing an inflated surgical glove back and forth between them. Ecco’s right arm was bandaged. Other than that, though, he seemed perfectly fine.

  They were out of the woods. At least that’s what Bertram thought. Ecco’s doctor decided not to take any action, unless Ecco started to have a reaction. So they kept him under observation for a few hours.

  Bertram finally got hold of Kerek, who, after hearing the news, headed to Reagan National to catch a flight home.

  Bertram, Eve, Otto, and Ecco sat around and waited for nothing to happen to Ecco.

  It was only then that Bertram learned about the flood and the accident before the accident.

  NB Footage: Providence, 6:45 am, August 10, 2007—

  The resounding THUMP, of the front door being pulled shut, wakes Eve. Or seems to. She appears immune to the initial disorientation most of us experience when rising out of the lacuna of sleep. She does not yawn, or stretch, or groggily seek out the clock to orient herself within the day’s temporal landscape. She does not instinctually reach for her absent husband. She stirs in the empty bed and blinks up at the motionless ceiling fan.

  Rain patters against the window.

  Eve waits in bed, listening.

  Reidier’s car starts up. Gravel pops like cereal as he pulls down the driveway. The tires mute onto the road, and the thrum of the engine fades down the street.

  Eve gets up, puts on her silk robe, and proceeds with her morning ritual: teeth brushing, washing her hands then her face (once with a facial cleanser, a second time with a toner), taking an Rx pill case out of the medicine cabinet—pouring all the pills into her palm—counting how many are left—frowning—pouring all the pills back into the plastic bottle—putting the Rx case back into the medicine cabinet, hair combing, a touch of makeup. Morning ritual complete.

  By its very nature, a ritual is an unthinking, or more precisely, nonthinking act of repetition. Through iteration, performance is tamed into habit. While patternized actions are often utilized in meditation as a way to untether the mind, habitualized behavior can also evolve into addiction. In either case, however, the core impulse is the same, to sacrifice control and ultimately sacrifice the self. Ritual is an act of surrender, in which the acolyte and addict capitulate to rhythm and forego choice. Whether communing with a higher power through ascetic discipline or transcending into an altered state with chemical means, the goal is the same: escape.

  Flight requires fear—fear of the devil, fear of the ego, fear of reality. Or simply fear of cavities. Even the most mundane ritual is a form of flight. We clean our teeth daily because we’re scared that we’ll get cavities if we don’t, which will not only cause pain but ultimately lead to the loss of our teeth. This fear is so deeply rooted that many cultures interpret the nightmare about our teeth falling out as a sign that a family member or close friend is very sick or near death.

  Ironically, the ritualization of brushing our teeth enables us to simultaneously take and relinquish responsibility. By making the effort to internalize the habit of brushing every day, we drill it in until it’s second nature, and we no longer have to bother thinking about it anymore. We take responsibility for our dental hygiene by getting to the point where we no longer have to. More than anything, rituals are acts of faith, or the belief that such behavior will protect us against our fears. These repetitive actions can
eventually become so comforting that they can even be substituted for different fears. Just look at the man who reaches for a cigarette after his girlfriend breaks up with him, or the woman who goes home and cleans the house from top to bottom after getting fired, or any of us who check our e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter accounts on our phones when we’re uncomfortable in a crowd of strangers.

  Eve began her day hiding behind the cover of sleep. Once alone, once awake, she slipped behind a pattern of behavior. While Eve’s morning ritual is easy to dismiss as mere habit, it does raise the question of what is she escaping from? Her day? Her dreams? Her husband? Her children? Her self? Or is it some preternatural sense of what’s to come?

  “Putain.” Eve frowns at the overflowing laundry bin in their bathroom. The meditative spell is broken.

  Once again, though, Eve slips into a pattern.

  She sighs.

  She gathers the laundry into the laundry basket.

  She makes her way down the hall.

  She pauses for a moment to listen if the boys are awake.

  She stutter steps down the stairs. Bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum.

  She circles around the railing, shuffles toward the kitchen, hooks her left big toe between the basement door and the jamb, and swings the door open.

  At the landing at the bottom of the basement steps, Eve doesn’t even pause. She continues to stare down at her full laundry basket, turns right past the door to Reidier’s lab, heads down the last few steps, and splashes into an inch and a half of water.

  The unexpected wetness shocks her out of her routine.

  Eve screams and jumps back up onto the lowest step.

  She stands there, mouth agape, taking in the inundation.

  The basement floor is nowhere to be found. In its place lies a wall-to-wall pool of dark water.

  Her gaze drifts over to the washing machine and dryer on the far wall. The plastic scoop she uses to measure out detergent floats in front of them.

  Eve wrinkles her nose at the machine, her eyes narrowing with accusation.

  The patter of rain crescendos with a gust of wind against the high-set basement window.

  Eve’s suspicious gaze shifts from the washing machine to the window.

  She puffs up at a strand of hair that has fallen in front of her eye. “Putain.”

  Half a morning later, Butch from Demarco Plumbing wades through the subterranean lagoon in search of a culprit, while Eve finally gets around to making some breakfast for the boys. The entire kitchen vibrates with the efforts of Butch’s pump, as it struggles to drain the lower level.

  Eve pinches the brow of her nose and presses against her sinuses. After a moment she moves over to the stove to check the water in the pot. Boiling. Eve throws in some salt, picks the eggs out of the carton, and drops them in one by one. Some splashback catches her wrist.

  “Aïe! Putain, putain, putain.”

  “Maman! You said a bad word,” Otto’s scold flutters in from the den.

  “I said a French word.”

  “A bad French word.”

  Irritated, Eve silently mimics her son, saying a bad French word while she sets the oven timer for eight minutes.

  A laugh catches Eve off guard.

  Ecco stands in the doorway to the den, holding some half-finished Lego construction, smiling at his mother’s antics.

  “Go play Legos with Otto.”

  Ecco mimics her saying this and smiles back at her.

  Eve grabs a wooden spoon off the counter. “Va-tu!”

  Ecco giggles and dashes back into the den.

  Eve collapses into a chair at the kitchen table and rests her head in her hands. Being knocked out of a routine can be exhausting.

  “Mrs. Tassat . . .” Butch yells up from the basement.

  “Oui. Yes? Coming.”

  Butch explains to her the problem. “That right theh’s yuh culprit.”

  “So it is not the rain?” Eve yells over the noise of the pump. She holds a two-foot section of plumbing pipe, turning a section of pipe over as if searching for other, larger holes. “That little sliver did all this?”

  In the middle of the pipe, the metal wall had swollen up like a blister and then split open. “Yep. Doesn’t look like much but ya gotta figure, ya got aroun’ a maximum of five gpm, gallon ’puh minute, in a typical one-half-inch supply pipe. Let’s figure since the wuh’tah’s squirtin’ out the slit theh’, it’s flowing at roughly three gpm. One gallon’s roughly .13 cubic feet. So ya got three gpm fuh sixty minutes an ow-ah, fuh eight ow-ahs, that’s around 192 cubic feet of wuh-tah. And as you can see, 192 cubic feet can easily covuh 2300 squ-eh foot with one inch of wuh-tah.”

  “Is this normal?” Eve shouts.

  “Oh, shew-uh. This saw-tah thing happens all the time. Although mostly during the wint-ah. Pipes freezing and whatnot. Actually it is pretty unusual fo’ah the pipes ta blis’tah open like this in the summ’ah. But ya know, these colonial houses, all ov’ah the East Side, they gotta lot of old pipes that have all been jerry-rigged togeth’uh over the ye-uhs. Maybe somehow it got real cold in the wall between this room and yaw husband’s office.”

  “Ok, but now it is all fixed. How much longer for your pump to finish emptying out my basement?”

  “Oh, I haven’t fixed it yet.”

  Eve throws Butch a quizzical look. “What?”

  “I mean, I turned off the wuh-tah and, well,” he gestures at the pipe in her hand, “removed the busted section. But I needed to ask you what kind of pipe you want me to put in.”

  Eve wrinkles her brow at him, confused. “Why would I care? Whatever pipe is necessary.” The annoyance in Eve’s tone is discernible even above the din of the machine.

  As confused as Eve was at Butch asking for her pipe preference, Butch is even more perplexed that Eve wouldn’t have an opinion on this. “Well, I can go one of two ways, cah-puh or plastic.”

  Eve cuts him off. “Which one is cheaper?”

  “Well, that’d be plastic.”

  “Done.” Eve starts up the stairs.

  “Cah-puh isn’t that much more, though. And in the long run, it’ll actually cost you less—”

  “I don’t particularly care about the long run. I care about being able to wash clothes today. In a dry basement. Will I be able to do that?” Eve turns and hands Butch the busted pipe, crossing her arms.

  “Most of the wuh-tah should be out in few ow-uhs. Should be safe to run your wash-uh by then.”

  “I look forward to—”

  The scream comes from above, clearly discernible over the noise of Butch’s pump. As is the subsequent metallic clatter. Eve is halfway up the stairs before the high-pitched cry stops.

  Otto stands in the middle of the kitchen, wailing, holding his right hand in front of his mouth. Eve races in and slips, almost taking a bad spill, but somehow manages to catch herself on the countertop. She moves to her crying son.

  The kitchen floor is covered with water. The empty pot lies on its side, on the floor next to a fallen stool. Hard-boiled eggs have rolled every which way. The oven timer beeps incessantly like an apathetic, needy metronome keeping the beat of chaos.

  Eve squats down to Otto’s height, whispering in comforting tones, inspecting him for damage. “Ce n’est pas grave, mon chéri. Ça va bien. Dire à maman ce qui s’est passé. Où es-tu blessé?”

  Otto holds out his right hand to his mother. His fingertips are bright scarlet with mild burns.

  “Aïe! You burned yourself.” Eve scoops him up with one arm and tenderly holds the wrist of his burnt arm with her other hand. She blows lightly on his pink fingers as she carries him to the sink. “It’s not so bad. We can fix it. We can fix it.”

  Eve turns on the sink, first the cold water, then a little of the hot. After a few moments she tests the temperature with her own fingers, then leans over with Otto and gently moves his hand under the water. “There, better. No?”

  Otto nods and says, “Putain.”

  Eve g
uffaws. “Putain, indeed, mon trésor. Putain indeed.”

  Otto smiles.

  “You burnt yourself just like maman. You were trying to help me with the eggs, eh? You should never play in the kitchen alone, ok?”

  “I wasn’t alone,” Otto says. “Ecco was helping too.”

  Eve turns and finally sees Ecco for the first time.

  A quiet Ecco stands by the stove, staring at his brother, his lips pouting with sympathy.

  Eve almost smiles at the attachment he has to Otto, but stops short when she notices Ecco’s arm. Just below Ecco’s elbow, a rage of white blisters boil up and blossom down the length of his arm, enveloping his tender, swollen hand, which still clutches a steaming, hard-boiled egg.

  Otto smiles at Ecco who laughs back at his brother.

  Eve’s eyes widen with fear and she stutters into motion, moving toward Ecco, then stopping, then back to the sink.

  She sits Otto on the counter, making him continue to hold his hand under the water.

  She grabs a dishtowel off the counter and tosses it into the sink.

  She moves over to Ecco as quickly as she can on the slippery floor. In a panic, she’s at a loss for what to do next. Presumably trying to figure out how to touch him without hurting him. Water vapor condenses in air, like smoke, around the hard-boiled egg still in his grasp.

  “Lâche prise. Lâche prise. Let go! Dépose l’oeuf.” Eve half grabs, half smacks the egg out of Ecco’s hand.

  It cracks a little and rolls.

  Eve gingerly picks Ecco up and carries him to the sink. She blows on his arm but can only manage a suspiration, daunted by the violent topographical eruptions along his arm. She leans over the sink and puts Ecco’s arm below Otto’s fingers in the rush of water.

  Eve takes the now-soaked dishtowel and gently wraps it around Ecco’s arm.

  Ecco doesn’t scream out. He doesn’t flinch. He just watches his mother’s barely controlled panic and his brother’s pain.

  Eve soaks another dishtowel and wraps it around Otto’s hand.

  Never pausing, Eve moves on through her improvised triage tactics, snatches her car keys off the counter, and scoops up both boys from the sink. She rushes down the hall and out the front door.