Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  She had more faith in the macabre fantasies of a bipolar author than in my mother’s report. That’s what she was saying. The Necronomicon, Hilary’s PsychoNarrative—they held about the same weight. Fictions within fictions.

  “Kind of sad, really. Lovecraft’s father and mother went crazy and died in Butler Hospital just a few miles from his home. Years apart. His dad died when he was like three, and his mom had a nervous breakdown right before he was thirty. Both were committed to Butler. Lovecraft modeled Arkham Asylum on the hospital.”

  Maybe Lorelei was onto something. Maybe I’d have better luck hunting for Hilary in Arkham, trying to save her from getting raped by some evil doctor in a psych ward. I could feel my stomach hardening. Like a cancer took seed there and was starting to digest me from the inside out. “My mother’s not crazy.”

  Lorelei finally took her hand off my leg. “I wasn’t saying she was. I wasn’t saying that at all.”

  “No?” I asked. The digestive acids from the hungry tumor singed my tone.

  “No. I just thought it was interesting. A cool little coincidence. Sometimes random disparate facts, while not necessarily clues, jog something loose. Get us to look at things differently. You know?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe Lovecraft can shake something loose. I mean Christ, it’s not like we haven’t both been thinking that Ecco’s a goddamn demon.”

  Lorelei didn’t say anything else. Neither did I. We drove the rest of the way back to Newport in silence. Her hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, while mine rested on my knees strangling my pen.

  We pulled into the compound and parked in front of the barn/garage.

  “You know the two things that Waco, Texas, is famous for?” I asked.

  Lorelei wrinkled her nose at my random question. “Well, I assume one of them is David Koresh.”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “Its pageant play.”

  “Pageant, like beauty pageant?”

  “Pageant play. Mystery play. York Cycle.”

  “Like the Nativity play?”

  “The Nativity play is definitely the most popular one. Especially for Christmas. Waco had one of those, but it was part of something bigger. Waco had developed a ten-year cycle that started with the birth-of-Jesus pageant and every year covered a different part of Jesus’s life, culminating on the tenth year with his crucifixion. Come the thirty-year anniversary, it was a spectacle. Waco went all out. They even brought in professionals from the Dallas Theater to set up a special light board, lighting grid, a whole fly system for sets and everything. All still done with local talent, ‘cause this was Waco’s baby, but set up with imported talent. It was really not to be missed. Especially for a sophomore at Brown, who had spent his entire life east of the Mississippi. Not to mention the added perk of getting to avoid his mother for the holidays, as well as an opportunity to prove some serious commitment to his beyond-cute, Star of Texas girlfriend to reconsider her no-sex-before-marriage policy. Especially, if said girl was playing the starring role of the Virgin Mary (type casting), since her father was on the pageant board and one of the biggest donors.”

  “How hot a girl are we talking?” Lorelei asked.

  “Her name was Summer Moore.”

  “That’s pretty hot. And she was a virgin to boot! You’d grab the Roman’s hammer and nails yourself for a taste of that.”

  “Or at least agree to pitch in and help out with the pageant when things went wrong.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Like I said, it was a big tadoo, and they needed a lot of help. Just to put their production value into perspective, if they had been doing the Noah story, there would’ve been elephants. The opera Carmen don’t got shit on Waco.”

  Lorelei nodded. “Sounds impressive.”

  “It was. You had the trial with Pontius Pilate rattling down at the masses from the church rafters, washing his hands of them; you had the Stations of the Cross spread out through the church’s massive aisles; you had a Foley artist in the wings ripping heads of lettuce apart against a microphone as a solemn Jesus was nailed to the cross, dozens of onlookers moaning, dozens of ancient priests mocking. Finally, the tribal Jewish leaders, concerned about this execution continuing into the Sabbath, ask the Romans to hasten their deaths. The actors/soldiers break the legs of the crucified slaves that flank Jesus while the Foley artist snaps stalks of celery in half. Then one centurion comes to Jesus, looks up at the drooping body and claims, ‘He is dead already.’”

  I waited a moment. Until Lorelei grew impatient.

  “And . . . !” she said.

  “And he said it again, ‘He is dead already.’ Nothing. The actor/centurion looked offstage to the assistant stage manager whose eyes widened with panic. She then sprinted around backstage to find the missing centurion who was supposed to be stabbing Jesus in the side, but instead was out back smoking a joint with a buddy, and was so stoned that when the stage manager did find him, he could barely stand, let alone walk, which was a problem since he also happened to be the Virgin Mary’s brother and the son of one of the biggest pageant donors. So the buddy had to grab the centurion’s helmet and breastplate, sprint inside, grab his spear, and rush onstage, not realizing he hadn’t grabbed the trick spear necessary for this scene. And for the third time the first centurion/actor announces, ‘He is already dead.’ At which point the disheveled stand-in centurion runs up and thrusts his very real prop spear into Jesus’s side.

  “Jesus screams, his eyes snap open, he looks down and shouts, ‘Jesus Christ, you stabbed me!’”

  “No!?” Lorelei exclaimed half in disbelief, half in hysterics.

  I nodded and kept going. “So they bring down the curtain. The centurions take Jesus down off the cross, load him into a Honda Civic, and rush him to the hospital.”

  Lorelei could barely breathe as she jumped forward. “So a Honda pulls up to an emergency room and three Roman soldiers jump out and carry in a bleeding Jesus, yelling, help he’s been stabbed?”

  “But back at the theater, the show has to go on because, even though the show was at the climax, it wasn’t over. They still needed Jesus to ascend to heaven for the thousands in the audience. So they get the understudy, they get him up on the cross, and get the curtain back up for the big moment.

  “The Foley artist is shaking sheets of metal for thunder, the dry ice machines are pumping out smoke, and the high school kid who works the fly pulleys uncleats the rope that holds the counterweight to the cross so that a crucified Jesus can rise up into Heaven. Only no one has accounted for the understudy being seventy pounds lighter than the original Jesus. So instead of floating up into the rafters, the new Jesus rockets up like a bat out of hell, slams into the rafters, and smacks his head on a light baton, knocking himself unconscious. The poor high school kid panics, ties off the fly, and runs out.

  “It’s not until the curtain call that they realize Jesus is dangling completely unconscious over fifty feet up. So they keep the curtain down, send what remains of the cast out in front to bow, while they struggle to pull coldcocked Christ down, drag him from the cross, and find out he’s bleeding from the head. So immediately, Pontius Pilate and two centurions load him into the back of a Ford pickup, and drive him to the emergency room.”

  Lorelei is literally crossing her legs at this point, shaking her head no, hyperventilating about the nurses who watched yet another wounded Jesus get carried into the ER by Romans.

  With a considered absentmindedness I rubbed the scar below my ribs through my shirt.

  Lorelei finally caught her breath.

  “So that’s how you got the scar. Playing Jesus in a pageant play?”

  “Not me. I was the asshole getting Summer’s brother high in the parking lot.”

  “You were the stabber, not the stabbee? But then how . . .”

  “Well, her brother and I were still pretty baked, and we were doing a piss-poor job of not laughing about the whole damn thing in t
he hospital waiting room. Everyone tried their best to ignore us until I saw a nurse by the vending machine and just yelled out, ‘Funyuns!’ Summer’s brother lost his shit, and her father lost his mind, and he just came at me yelling about how goddamn funny I thought everything was, how ironic, how elitist, how heehaw my Yankee perception, how funny did I think it felt, and he sunk the Bic pen he had used to sign some hospital forms right into my side.”

  Lorelei stopped cold.

  I knew she would. I knew what I had been doing the whole time.

  “Danny, I’m, I . . .”

  “Sometimes even pretend stories have real consequences,” I said, grabbed my knapsack full of Hilary’s folders, got out of the car, and slinked away down the path to the water, to the dock. Lorelei didn’t follow.

  * * *

  He’s spinning his magnets in a bowl again.114

  Metal rings against metal while Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” plays quietly on his computer.

  Reidier’s possessed, chanting over and over: Trust the ghost, trust the ghost, trust the ghost.

  In regione caecorum rex est luscus*

  * * *

  * In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hilary is drifting, drifting, drifting, and I’m drowning in her wake.

  PS Can someone please tell me what happened to the fucking twins??? Otto 1 and Otto 2. Ecco the echo.

  Boom the bomb dropped, and there’s been no sign of them in the rubble.

  WTF?

  * * *

  What to see?

  What to see?

  2C

  To sea

  Too sea

  XVII

  All sciences

  are now under

  the obligation

  to prepare the ground

  for the future task of the philosopher,

  which is to solve the problem

  of value,

  to determine the true hierarchy of values.

  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

  Where ambition can cover its enterprises,

  even to the person himself,

  under the appearance of principle,

  it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.”

  ~David Hume

  Rule III.

  The qualities of bodies are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies

  whatsoever.

  ~Newton

  Woman is not a collection of mere memories.

  She is a creature of will, of sense and sensation . . .

  it is there . . .

  you may touch her,

  and effect profound change.

  ~Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley

  Speaking of ghosts . . . how about a listen?

  Excerpt from University of Chicago iTunes episode, Dr. Kerek Reidier lecture from his Physics of Science Fiction course, December 12, 2005

  “When a reporter asked Peres if it was possible to teleport both the body and soul, he answered, ‘Only the soul.’”

  Reidier lets the counterintuitiveness of the anecdote sink in. Students shift, uncomfortable with the statement but unsure as to why.

  “Any biology majors here?”

  A lone student speaks up about how he took Bio 20.

  “All right, Mr. Siemens. Assuming you were at least half as engaged with that class as with my riveting lectures, you should have a sufficient grasp of humanity.”

  A laugh ripples through the class.

  “What makes us who we are, biologically speaking?”

  There’s a prolonged ummmmmm from the darkness.

  “A hint then: What is the building block of life, that which sequences our very existence?”

  Mr. Siemens excitedly shouts out, “DNA!”

  “And how does it do that?”

  Mr. Siemens launches into great detail about how DNA replicates itself through unzipping its double helix and replicating two mirror images through base pairing, and how the specific arrangement of the four nucleobases of A, T, C, G is what dictates every physical trait about us.

  “Exactly!” Reidier cuts Mr. Siemens off. “DNA is a blueprint for us. Psychology and development aside, that’s all we are, a signature pattern, from which our entire bodies are constructed. That’s all anything is, really. Matter is nothing more than rigidly ordered energy. Every bit of matter is simply a precise pattern held in check by forces until they wink out of existence.”

  Reidier let the concept sink in.

  “The entire human genome is simply a sequential binary code containing roughly eight hundred million bytes of information. So, what does this mean for our purposes?”

  No responses are proffered.

  “We never have to teleport a ‘thing.’ Nothing need be transmitted through space. Only information. If the pattern of an object is extracted, it can then be used on the other end as a blueprint to make a perfect copy.”

  “How would that work though? Aren’t we more than patterns?” another student asks from out of the darkness.

  “Not at a quantum level. At the quantum level, all that exists are patterns. Wave functions.”

  “But the wave function would be disrupted by the extraction, no?” interrupts another student.

  “Very astute, Ms. Echeverria. That is the essence exactly. You can extract and transmit any and all quantum information as long as you’re willing to destroy the original in exchange for an exact replica on the other end.”

  To demonstrate what he’s pointing out, as well as to provide some much needed comedic relief, Reidier holds up a piece of chalk in his right hand, waves it about dramatically, says abracadabra, palms the piece of chalk, and smashes it against the surface of his desk. He then dramatically opens his left hand to reveal another piece of chalk. While not an exact replica, the point is made.

  “Voilà!” Reidier brushes the pulverized pieces of chalk dust off his desk. “Just need to wipe the slate clean, so to speak.”

  The class laughs.

  “Scientists are currently doing this by transmitting information through a Brassard circuit. But, can you tell me what other problem this presents?”

  Ms. Echeverria appears to mumble an answer.

  “Precisely. Next time with more confidence, though, please. No upspeak in my class. For a full-scale teleportation, like of a person, it would take a huge amount of data processing.”

  Another student pipes up and suggests using a supercomputer.

  “Not a bad suggestion, Mr. Hurwitz. However, right now it would take our current supercomputers billions of years just to find the prime factors of a thousand-digit number. Our sun would die before we could even teleport your left foot.”

  Some snickers.

  Mr. Hurwitz keeps pushing, “What about your quantum computer?”

  Reidier smiles and looks back at the remaining chalk on his otherwise empty desk. “Let’s hope I didn’t just smash it.”

  The class laughs.

  “But yes, a quantum computer would be able crunch these numbers at the velocity we’d require. As long as they’re not disrupted by Loschmidt Echoes.”

  Reidier moves to the board and with his piece of “teleported” chalk writes down the equation:

  M(t) = ∣〈ψ∣ei(ℋ0+Σ)t/ħe-iℋ0t/ħ)∣ψ〉∣2,

  “It’s a rather simple mathematical expression that basically describes how sensitive a quantum system is to changes in energy. The problem it points out is that quantum particles are so sensitive that when you run energy through them, as one does through computer circuits when asking them to perform calculations, the adjacent shifts in energy disrupt or destroy the states of neighboring quantum particles. Right now, as it is, nobody out there,” Reidier gestures out the classroom door to the world at large, “has been able to put together a long enough string of quantum circuits to make a computer. The quantum particles can’t help but fuck with each other.”

  The class erupts with laughter at Reidier’s dropping the f-bomb.

  “The other minor issue is th
at physicists can’t seem to agree whether or not time and space can actually be broken down into discrete quanta, i.e. fragments of information. Basically, it’s a debate about whether energy and matter are ultimately digital or analog in nature.”

  *

  * * *

  * Presumably here, dear, sweet, gone-round-the-bend Hilary is referring to another installment from Reidier’s Leo’s Notebooks, see page 302. I guess her codebreaker has cracked open another fragment.

  * * *

  Ἀναξαγόρας115

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