Butch stands at the top of the basement stairwell, still clutching the busted piece of pipe. “I’ll uh clean everything up. Don’t you worry ’bout nothin’. I’ll do cah-puh, for the plastic price too.”*
* * *
* Pain is a remarkable creature. It’s a living, breathing, starving brute. The neuroscientists got it all wrong. They’ve tried to sterilize it, reduce it to mere electrical signals that leap from synapse to synapse, leaving a trail of lit-up neurotransmitters in its wake. An impression, a trick of the mind, a holographic warning system honed by evolution. It isn’t that at all. Pain has a life of its own. It is an unrelenting hunter that tracks the slightest scent of vulnerability. Stalking it along the spinal cord, burrowing into the soft wrinkled caverns of our mind. And once inside, it shreds everything it can get its talons on. It digs in and takes over. Hijacks the entire consciousness.
All anybody can do is run and leave behind a trail of scorched earth. Ask any torture victim, they all describe the same thing, a retreating into themselves, disappearing into their minds. But they’re not retreating, not really. They’re hiding. Fleeing its pursuit.
On the plus side, you’re never lonely when you’re in pain.
* * *
Bertram kicked his heel at the ground in front of the bench. An indentation started to form in the packed dirt.
I didn’t want to push him. Didn’t want to put his back against a wall . . . or a cliff.
He had been silent ever since uttering the word accident. It was an abrupt silence, one that had lain in wait until midstory to pounce. And now Bertram was wrestling with his doubt. The narrative up until then had still been safe—plausible deniability within a mundane occurrence. He knew I already knew about the hospital and about the accident.
I just didn’t know what had happened. Even that seemed somewhat moot. He had to imagine I’d probably either have or be able to access the nanobot footage.
But there was something else at the hospital, outside of the Department’s reach.
All his and Clyde’s precautions, cloak-and-dagger feints, raptor watches, and it still came down to trust. Did Bertram trust me?
Almost as if reading my thoughts, Bertram cocked his head at me, squinting one eye against the sun while measuring me with the other. “You know on the other side of the island, there’s a second lighthouse? It’s older than this one, though only by a few years. It’s the third iteration of the North Lighthouse. The first two were washed out to sea.”
“Neptune has a sense of irony, apparently.”
Bertram nodded. Not at my comment, but at something that was said in whatever internal dialogue was taking place in his head. “Not too far from it, just to the west of Corn Neck Road, there’s an old labyrinth in a field. It’s called the Sacred Labyrinth. Most people never even see it on their way to the North Light. I only found it because a local at the bar told me about it one night. Drew me a map on a napkin.”
“He gave you a mapkin.”
“Mapkin. Yeah. I like that. It’s a quirky little place. Just some ruts dug into the earth, lyed over, I assume. Maybe just worn down by walkers. On the far end of it there are even these little human-head sculptures. Like some little weird Easter Island. Anyway, you just start out at the entrance, wind your way along the path, around and around, until you reach the center. Then you unwind your way back out. No twists, no turns, no puzzle. It’s just one path. It’s not a maze, just a labyrinth.”
“They’re not the same?”
“That’s what I thought too. Most people think that maze and labyrinth are synonymous. Fact is, a maze is what you and I were imagining, a complex branching, multicursal puzzle. Dead ends, wrong turns, et cetera. Labyrinths only have a single, nonbranching path. Unicursal. Its ‘solution’ is unambiguous. There’s only one option, one answer. Labyrinths were never designed to confuse people or get them lost, on the contrary they’re a way for people to find themselves. They were constructed for meditation. A pattern. A path. A ritual.”
“I blame Daedalus for the confusion. I think he designed the famous one on Crete. To trap and hide away the Minotaur.”
Once again, Bertram seemed not to hear me. At least there was no outward acknowledgment. He spoke, but it felt more like I was merely being let in, allowed to listen to a private conversation he was having elsewhere. “Around the same time that the Greek labyrinth showed up, a topologically identical pattern appeared in Native American culture. The Tohono O’odham labyrinth. Where I’itoi lay in wait by the entrance.”
“I’itoi?”
“The Man in the Maze. The mischievous creator god. It was an identical pattern but for two differences, a radial design and the entrance at the top.”
“Coincidental maybe?”
Bertram kicked a second divot into the dirt with his other heel. Identical indentations. “Halfway around the planet, well before transoceanic ships were built, before global trade routes had been established, and this design surfaces in two disparate cultures. This same pattern.”
“Maybe it’s just some deep-rooted mode of thinking. Like our disgust reflex or our fear of snakes,” I suggested.
“Maybe.” He finished with his divots and stared out at the ocean. The breeze was picking up. “It was quaint, the labyrinth. Sort of pleasant to walk it, not think about my direction, just follow the path. I can see how it’d help some to meditate.”
“Not you, though?”
Bertram shook his head. “No. Problem is, you have to follow that same path out, and it leaves you right where you started. Standing with I’itoi at the entrance. You still have to figure out where to go next for yourself.”
Bertram looked at me, sort of half smiled, and sighed. He went on with his story.
After several hours, Ecco seemed to be stable. No reaction to the tetanus. The doctors hypothesized that in spite of the boys’ identical appearance, perhaps they were in fact fraternal twins, each with a unique genetic makeup. Or somehow, Ecco had developed a mutation in the second or third trimester. One even posited the supposed allergy could have been misremembered or even fabricated as a result of Eve’s concussion.
Surprisingly, the better Ecco turned out, the worse Eve got. Perhaps her mild concussion wasn’t so mild. She became increasingly irritated, aggressive. After two hours, Eve was glaring at the boys, muttering to herself in French.
Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien.
Bertram grew concerned. He took the boys for a stroll to see if that calmed her down. Left them to play again by the nurses’ station.
She wasn’t better when he returned. He tried to soothe her. He held her hand. Told her she was fine. The boys were fine. Ecco was ok.
That’s when Eve snapped out of it. She grabbed Bertram’s hand back, looked him in the eyes.
No, he’s not. He’s not ok. He’s not real. He’s twilight. An etiäinen, a vardøger, a ka, a doppelgänger.
Bertram brushed past her haunting accusations. Reassured her that her twins were just that, twins. She had two beautiful twin boys.
Il n’est pas le mien. Eve hissed. He is not mine. He’s a facsimile. An empty copy. Un imposteur.
Bertram immediately ordered an MRI.
That’s how he found Eve’s brain tumor.
Later that evening, when Kerek finally arrived, Bertram broke the news to him. He first assured him that the boys were fine. Ecco would most likely have some scarring, but no nerve damage. Neither they, nor Eve, suffered any sort of severe injury. But Kerek saw something deeper and darker was amiss for Bertram; he read it in his enervated body language, his beleaguered voice, his tensed jaw.
Bertram sighed and slipped into the safety of a clinical tone. He explained how Eve’s erratic behavior had concerned him and the other doctors, especially considering that she had sustained a concussion. They gave her an MRI. They found a mass. It was growing deep inside of her temporal lobe, where the temporal cortex bordered
the limbic system.
Bertram wasn’t sure if Kerek was taking it in stride or in shock. Kerek stared at his feet a few moments until he asked how it was affecting her mind.
Bertram was sorry to inform him it was in a pretty severe place, and as a result was apparently disrupting her understanding of reality. She was suffering from Capgras delusions. It was Imposter syndrome. Patients with this syndrome regard people whom they know well—family, friends—as imposters.
She thinks you’re an imposter?!
No, Bertram told his friend. Your son. Ecco.
Kerek then stunned Bertram by letting out a huge sigh. He sat down on a waiting-room couch and laughed a little.
Bertram knew his friend was in shock then. He took a seat next to Kerek and filled him in on the afternoon’s events, the fight with the orderlies, the tetanus shot, the monitoring, Eve’s downward spiral.
Ecco didn’t have a reaction!? Kerek surprised his friend once again.
Bertram was at a loss, but he went with it. He assumed Ecco’s close call was easier—a happier thing to focus on—than Kerek’s sadness about Eve. Bertram explained in detail how Ecco exhibited no allergy to the tetanus. Obviously, he still needed to be monitored for a few more hours, but the doctor thought it highly unlikely at this point.
But Otto is allergic to it. Kerek pointed out.
Bertram, still at a loss, simply nodded.
And they’re identical. Kerek was fixated. So aren’t they then genetically identical? Two sides of the same double helix . . .
Bertram shrugged and offered a matter-of-fact Apparently not.
Kerek took this in, leaned back against the couch, and disappeared into his thoughts.
Finally, after several minutes, Bertram broke the silence. As far as Eve, there are some promising experimental techniques—
Kerek interrupted Bertram with an Eve is going to be fine.
Bertram supported his friend’s optimism, pointed out how important a positive attitude can be through a process like this, however it’s equally important to maintain a grasp on the severity of her condition—
She isn’t having Capgras delusions, Kerek interrupted again.
Bertram was sympathetic. It was a difficult thing to accept. Even Bertram hadn’t wanted to see the signs. He brought up the picnic at Kerek’s house, with the Lego tomato salad, how that was most likely a result of her neurological condition.
Kerek shook his head, placed a sympathetic hand on Bertram, and told him the truth.
“Eve wasn’t delusional. Ecco was a copy. A simulacrum of Otto,” Bertram told me. “That scene he had me first watch, from their basement in Chicago. The one you and I discussed. Where Eve finds Ecco in the basement, and Kerek comes home with Otto, and Eve has a breakdown.110
“Kerek had taken Otto to work with him one weekend. While Kerek went to retrieve something from a supply room down the hall, he left the boy for a minute. Otto found his way into Kerek’s machine and turned it on, or it was already on, and . . . Then there was Ecco.”
Ten days after meeting with Bertram on Block Island, his body was found at the bottom of the Mohegan Bluffs. The New Shoreham police department reported it as a suicide, as there was no evidence of a struggle. Due to the site of death’s exposure to the elements, however, they were unable to rule out foul play. The coroner diagnosed the cause of death as severe head trauma and a broken neck.
I am at a loss. I am frightened.*
* * *
* Me too.
* * *
*
* * *
* Things are not always what they seem. Things are not always what they are.
* * *
XV
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
~C. G. Jung
So I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can to deceive me . . . I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment.
~René Descartes
And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
~Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
“He was willing to throw out whole swaths of his work. Turn the stumbling block of consciousness from a physics problem into a biological one. That’s why he became obsessed with my work,” Bertram had said. “He wanted to try and adapt my motor cortex implant and transform the BrainGate into some sort of neurological interface with his device.
“He became obsessed. We both did, I guess. After Ecco’s origin was revealed, the floodgates opened.
“But what he was seeking was still merely theory. I mean, I had been tapping into brain impulses and rerouting them to a robotic arm with only ninety-six tiny electrodes. Maybe it was a just a question of scale, make the pipe bigger or make a million little pipes. Ultimately though, I deal in impulse, electrical impulses. Nothing more. I’m just a neuroelectrical engineer. Kerek needed a plumber. He needed a way to funnel out thoughts, to drain out the entire consciousness. Soul slipping.”
*
* * *
* My dim apparition reflected in the rest-stop window ate a French fry tipped with ketchup. It briefly disappeared in the bright glare of headlights as a car pulled into a parking space outside. The fluorescent McDonald’s menu behind me hovered above my image, a crisper ghost in the fenestral ether, seemingly immune to the flow of high beams that slid past along I-95.
Between my reflection in the window and me on my plastic rotating seat, the real Lorelei dipped her own fries into a chocolate shake. We hadn’t said anything until after New London, when Lorelei pulled into the rest stop and asked if I was hungry.
The manila folder sat on the table beneath the dark brown food tray. I don’t know why I brought it in with us. It had been sitting on my lap for over an hour. It seemed safer to keep it close. Its contents were disorienting enough and I think I was terrified it would disintegrate if left unguarded. The ink would fade. And we’d be left asking ourselves was that real or some shared acid trip?, while our compass needle did laps around its circumference.
Lorelei hadn’t pushed. A sideways glance or two as I turned the pages. A shared exhale when I closed the folder. Mostly she just kept her hands at ten and two and her eyes fixated on the black road that snaked out ahead of us.
“I guess I sort of knew,” I said, as I turned my red cardboard container upside down and shook out the last few stubborn fries. “Like I saw a glimpse of it in some corner of my mind. Pointed it out and said, ‘Huh, I wonder if . . .’ And I don’t know, I must have just let it fade into an echo or distracted myself with another clue in my hunt for Hilary or just flooded that compartment with booze and drowned the fucking thought.”
“I gotta say, Tri-Me, it’s a pretty heavy reveal.”
“No shit.”
“No wonder you’ve been going insane.”
I don’t know what I felt when she said that, but it must’ve looked pretty pathetic, ’cause Lorelei reached across the table and gave my hand a sympathetic squeeze. I gave her a half smile back and just sighed one of those little-kid-stutter sighs, like when you’ve been crying for a while and you can’t exhale right, so your breath just comes out of you like it’s been dammed up inside for weeks, and there’s so much sheer volume and pressure that the pipes vibrate with the force of the release.
Of course, I punctuated it with a half wow-where’d-that-come-from-I’m-ok-though smile. I mean, I’m a man after all.
“So whaddya think? You think your mom was for real? Or did she simply have a great story to tell?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. At the very least I think she believed it.”
“Do you believe it?” Lorelei searched my eyes.
God, she was
so beautiful. Her attention was almost too goddamn much. Milton had it right:
Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceive
Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine
Must needs impair and weary human sight. (XII, 8-10)
My professional acolyte turned personal savior, sitting across from me, somehow radiant in a light blue hoodie, white V-neck, and jeans. Lorelei was the kind of girl that could pull off wearing a Kevlar vest while reading Wordsworth. What a first-date story this would make for the grandkids. Her, impenetrable and romantic; me, lost and longing.
Her slender fingers plucked up another fry, with a grace that concert pianists would covet. She slid it through the viscous surface of her shake, like the mother of Achilles baptizing her baby in liquid Lethe. Then a subtle twist of the fingers as she pulled it free, the milkshake reaching up after it, trying to hold tight, to fill in the emptiness her fry had drilled out, until finally gravity overtook it, and the chocolate stalagmite let go, dropped back into itself, a brief peak of nostalgia, until its tip tilted downward and wept its way back into uniform smoothness, all evidence erased and forgotten.
I wonder if Reidier ever felt this way looking at Eve.
Lorelei held the fry in her mouth, like a lollipop almost, and tilted her head to the side with bemused sympathy, waiting for my reply.
“I’m at a loss, honestly. You’re an objective observer, what’s your take?”
Lorelei shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out in Rhode Island.”
We made it to Newport a little after midnight. To the friend of a friend’s “beach house.” It was a friggin’ estate. A vast piece of property, circumvented by an old stone wall (not stone and mortar mind you, just stonework and craft) and orchards; a vestigial colonial farm that had been modernized with the likes of running water, Jacuzzi tubs, granite counter tops, and Viking ranges; with an old barn that had been converted into a three-car garage and guest quarters; and its own stretch of New England shoreline equipped with tidal pools, a dock, two lobster traps, and in the distance our own little lighthouse that stood at the point of Jamestown Island halfway across the bay.
Here & There Page 35
