Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Carry Eve to the bathroom. Sit her next to the toilet. Let her expunge whatever aftershocks came into the porcelain receptacle. Soak a wash-cloth in cold water. Wash the mess off her face. Push her hair back. She’s so beautiful. Even now. Go clean up the mess. Supplies in kitchen. Vomit-soaked paper towels and glass shards outside in the trash. Polish the floor, the step, the wall.

  The light from the bathroom cuts a path across the hallway to the basement door. Reidier stands in the kitchen, looking down at the swath of light.

  Now what?

  “I wonder if this is what the chemo would be like? Lots of nights like this. Only without the absinthe.” Eve’s voice echoes inside the bathroom.

  Reidier strolls up the hallway, leans against the jamb, and peeks in on his depleted wife sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with a casual arm draped across the antique toilet. “On the other hand, you’ll have a prescription for medical marijuana.”

  “Ah, our silver lining. Always the optimist.”

  Reidier frowns at her classification. Somehow it feels more like an accusation than a compliment. “Doesn’t matter. You’re not getting chemo.”

  Eve nods slightly, her head still leaning against the wall. “I had a dream about being operated on the other night. I was getting ’ze crabe in my head looked at. The radiologist determined it had reached a critical mass and needed to be excised, tout de suite. I wandered around the ’ospital, in one of those gowns. It was an old ’ospital, like from the ’20s. I don’t mean old, like it was decrepit, I mean, it was new, spic and span, but an old design. Like the scene was set in the ’20s. It was bright. Sunlight blasted through the windows, like in a film. It was really quite stunning.

  “There was a song playing on an old gramophone, somewhere in the hospital. It echoed through the halls. “King Porter Stomp” by Benny Goodman. I could tell it was a gramophone because of the scratchiness. I kept going from hall to hall, following the music. Looking for you. And my father. Only the two of you were nowhere to be found. Just my cousins. I don’t know why they were there. But they kept joking about my procedure and how it’s not like it’s brain surgery, and then laughing. I kept insisting that I was not kidding, I was to be operated on immediately. But they thought it was a big joke, shrugged and said to each other, well, it’s not like it’s brain surgery.

  “The nurse finally came and gently grabbed my arm and took me away from them, down this long, windowless hall, to the operating room. The surgeons and several nurses, all in perfect white scrubs and masks, stood in a semicircle around the prepped table, waiting for me. A large round mirror hanging from above reflected a bright band of sunlight down at the head of the operating bed. The sunlight beam came out of a long dark hallway, like it was reflected down into a mummy’s tomb.

  “As I walked up to the operating table, the doctors and nurses all stepped back to give me room. I acknowledged each of them. I put my hands on the table, turned around to boost myself up, and saw music in the corner. Benny Goodman and his band. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing there. I mean they were playing the song, but not playing. They all had their instruments and bopped around like they were playing, but they were just miming it. In between the pianist and the drummer stood a gramophone. That’s what was playing the music.

  “I remember feeling very satisfied that I had been right about the scratchiness sound. It wasn’t live. That contentment of hearing things right somehow made it all make sense to me. So I boosted myself up onto the table and lay down. The doctor put the gas over my face, and as I inhaled the sleep, the song finished, and I watched Benny pull the needle up, flip the record over, and set the needle back down.

  “The next thing I knew I was waking up in our room. You and my father were both there waiting. At least it looked like you two. But somehow you weren’t you. Nothing was what it was anymore. It was all exactly the same but different somehow. Then I realized, it was me. I was different. I wasn’t me anymore. The weird thing was knowing I wasn’t me. Realizing that because of that, everything else was different too.

  “I kept waiting for the walls to fall back and reveal how they were just a two-dimensional film set propped up by two-by-fours. I wanted them to fall, so I could know, this was artifice, not reality. That I was hearing things right. It was a forgery, and that’s why I felt so disoriented. But they wouldn’t fall. They were as solid as ever. It was me who was lighter. It was me who was flimsier. It was me who was the illusion.”

  Reidier looks down at Eve. She’s still sort of staring through the wooden basement door.

  “It won’t be like that, you know,” Reidier says.

  Eve pulls herself back into herself, looks up at her husband, and half smiles. “No. No operating room. No team of surgeons. No scars. No me. I still won’t be me anymore, Rye.”

  “You will be—”

  Eve holds up her right hand and pats at the air for him to stop. “Arrête. Arrête.”

  Reidier stops.

  Eve shakes her head at him, her eyes filled with sympathy. “‘This is the patent age of new inventions, for killing bodies, and for saving souls, all propagated with the best intentions.’”

  “More Wilde?” Reidier asks.

  “No. Byron.”

  Eve nods her head toward the basement door. “Do you know ’ow many nights I ’ave sat at the top of those stairs and listened to the two of you whisper your secrets in your conspiratorial tones?”

  “They weren’t secrets,” Reidier protests.

  “No? Secrets of ’ze self. Of ’ze mind. ’Ze heart. ’Ze universe itself. I would listen to you two talk and talk into ’ze night. Such intensity. Such focus. Such intimacy. You’re different with her.”

  “Eve, you realize how absurd this sounds. It’s just Kai! How can you have . . . ? You never had a problem with Kai.”

  “Why? Why is it absurd? Is it any more absurd than everything else in this house? You are. You are different with her. Boyish and wizened all at the same time. Uninhibited, unfiltered—”

  “Unencumbered,” Reidier snaps. It is out of his mouth before he catches himself, like a tectonic plate suddenly shifting against another before catching against the subterranean friction again. He’s startled. Terrified. He thought his checked rage had subsided.

  Reidier’s eyes dart across the floor to quickly scan the terrain of Eve and assess what damage has been sustained.

  Eve nods. “Mm. Oui. That is it. You are unencumbered. It was, it is magical. Sitting at the top of those stairs, I felt like I was meeting you all over again. I never knew this part of you.”

  “I talk about my work with you all the time!” Another slippage of plates.

  “Yes, you tell me all about it. Oui. But that’s a report, an analysis. A presentation, I guess. This is you. A part of you I never met. The fever of it. Almost like a possession. A trance. ’Ze joy, no not joy. That’s too frivolous a word. The sublimity? I don’t know how to say. It’s the difference between watching a horse race and being the jockey atop the horse. To feel what you feel, to ride your exhilaration, to sweat your sweat, feel your frustration closing in around you, see that bit of opening, and break through with you.”

  “Eve—”

  “You’ve always been present, Rye. But not quite—present but reined in. You’ve always been open and sensitive and giving. You’ve just never been fully you. That in it. That exposed. That poetic. Except with her.”

  Reidier strokes his hand along his lapel.

  “Is she ok? Did I . . .”

  “She’s fine. It wouldn’t’ve mattered much anyway.”

  “No, I suppose not. Kai is here and not here. Everywhere and nowhere. Of course, she is your confidant. She is the only one who can share all that with you. Dive down into those deepest depths with you. The rest of us cannot keep up.”

  “Eve, she’s not real.”

  “Rye, she’s very real. She’s yours.”

  “She’s a computer.”

  “Yes, your little
supercomputer shit! A Quantum Accelerated Intelligence,” she says mockingly. “Your other creature. The first, the Alpha that begat the Omega. Faust and his demon. A man-made Watson with a minicam and microphone to boot.”122

  Reidier steps into the bathroom and washes his hands. It was less about cleaning—he had already scrubbed them twice while sterilizing the hall and disposing the refuse—and more a way to introduce a pause into the conversation, to prevent any further tectonic slippage.

  Reidier pulls a hand towel off the brass ring to the left of the mirror and dries his hands. He wants to tell her she sounds like a jealous lover. He wants to insist on how necessary QuAI is to his work. How she’s the indecipherable key to it all. That she’s an unrelenting aid. He wants to shout at his wife that QuAI is her—their—salvation. But he won’t. He doesn’t want to give Eve that opening. He doesn’t want to go down that road. He knows where it leads, and he doesn’t have the stomach for another fight about Ecco, another character assassination, another excoriation of his work and ethics.

  Instead, he bends over, reaches down, and gently takes her hands. “Come on, let me help you up to bed. I can’t imagine you’ve got anything left in you to expel. And you absolutely need to brush your teeth.”

  Eve doesn’t get up. Instead her fingers tighten around his hands. Her eyes find his. Suddenly she is a little girl, consumed by a dangerous fever. Her father has lifted up her naked, sweaty, and shivering body, and is about to lower her into a bath filled with ice and water. Her little fingers dig into his shoulders as she pulls herself up, while he tries to set her down in the cold tub. Whatever rationality the fever hasn’t burned up disintegrates in the wake of fear that rockets through her. No, no, no, no . . . Papa. Please . . . she pleads, her eyes wide with desperation, accusing him of betrayal. There are tears in her father’s eyes as he whispers Je suis désolé, c’est pour votre propre bien and lowers his little girl into the searing ice bath. Nous avons besoin de casser votre fièvre.

  The shock of the cold snaps her back to the present, sitting on the bathroom floor, holding her husband’s hands, looking up into his eyes with that same desperation, that same sense of betrayal, that same hopeless last-ditch plea.

  “What if I asked you to stop?” she whispers up at him.

  Reidier freezes. “What do you mean? Stop pulling you up?” Now he’s the one pleading, hoping what he already knows to be true is just a silly misunderstanding.

  Eve gives him the slightest shake of the head. “No.”

  “I can’t.”

  The rage rises up in her so violently, it pulls her to her feet so suddenly, both of them are thrown off balance, their positions almost inexplicably reversed, her now standing over him, him now sitting on the floor, his head thunking against the sink.

  Eve looks down at him. She wants to apologize, wants to feel sympathy, wants to pull herself back down to him, and kiss his lips, his head, his closed eyelids, but she is no longer in control of herself. The wrath has taken over, possessed her, infiltrated every cell, and hardened the lipid bilayer membrane with an armor of fear, seized her muscles, and contorted her face into an expression of disgust. It forces her lungs to convulse and squeeze out a mist of venom, “No, of course not, you prefer playing God with QuAI to playing house with us.”

  She is out the door and down the hall before Reidier can reorient himself to the shifting landscape.

  “We all play at God! It is what defines us as humans!” he shouts to the empty bathroom. “We were made in His image after all. Ever since the first man dragged fire into the cave we’ve been playing God. Manipulating our environment, trying to control the chaos, augmenting ourselves at every turn, with clothes, with shoes, with shelter, with spears to expand our dominion beyond its natural limitations. We create and recreate our world every day. It is the course of evolution. We might never reach the ideal, but we get closer with every iteration. There’s nothing more human than playing God!”

  The empty bathroom has no reply to Reidier’s divine assertions.

  He grabs the sink edge and pulls himself up to standing. Reidier’s eyes shift and trace invisible flow charts in the air. He catches a glance of himself in the mirror, however, and quickly exits that bathroom himself, and follows his wife down the hall to the kitchen.

  Eve stands at the counter next to the refrigerator. A Brita pitcher sits on the granite surface next to a tall glass of water. Her thumb and middle finger swivel back and forth around the circumference of the glass, as if her hand is debating whether to pick up this vessel, lift it to her mouth, and empty it of its contents in order to wash away the metallic taste of adrenaline, or whether it’s simply better to have a full cup at the ready around which she can continue with the meditative swiveling of her fingers.

  Eve’s breath shudders out of her with a strained rumbling, like the creaks of a lock closing off the flow of a canal. She turns when she hears Reidier shuffle into the room. He frowns.

  For a moment, except for the kitchen table between them, it feels like an Old West standoff. Eve’s fingers stop swiveling around the glass, settling instead into a solid grasp. Reidier stands frozen, waiting to see if his wife is going to shoot off yet another projectile of glass and water at him. The ticks of the grandfather clock down in the living room count off the seconds.

  Slowly, with his eyes still locked on his wife, Reidier reaches his hand toward the countertop to his right, with the same careful precision of a gunslinger sweeping his duster back behind his holster. His stretched out fingers find what they are hunting for, curl around the worn leathered heel, and draw up . . . Otto’s baseball mitt.

  Eve can’t help but smile. Overwhelmed with a sudden wave of exhaustion, she pulls out a chair from the table and collapses into it. She drinks her entire glass of water in one gulp.

  Reidier picks up the Brita pitcher and refills her glass, sitting down next to her. “You should drink as much as you can. Try to rehydrate. The human body is about sixty percent water, and judging from the clean-up, you probably lost a good thirty percent of yourself.”

  Eve laughs while drinking her second glass and has to pull it away to keep from snarfing. Reidier holds up the baseball mitt as a vomit shield, which only makes Eve laugh harder.

  “Arrête, arrête . . .” she wheezes and slaps his arm softly.

  Reidier reaches out and pushes a strand of hair back up over her ear.

  Eve catches her breath and finishes the water. Reidier refills her glass, but Eve leaves it on the table with both her hands wrapped around the base. She stares down at her fingers distorted by the refraction of the water.

  “Je suis désolée.”

  “Everybody gets sick, love.”

  “No, I have no right to ask you to stop.”

  Reidier frowns again. He feels guilty for her actions. Regardless of right and wrong, he feels responsible for what she sees as their solutionless situation. Nevertheless, he knows he’s entirely incapable of giving in to her simple request. As a result, all he can do is hide behind circumstance. “Eve, I’m not sure they’ll let me—”

  “This isn’t about the Department, Rye. It’s not like they can compel you to have an insight.”

  At this point, Eve was still naïve as to the capabilities of the Department. This was before she fled to New York.

  “Eve . . .”

  “Je comprends. Asking you to stop, is like asking you to be someone else. To give up who you are. Your work, it’s not like other people’s work. It’s not like a job that you go to, and do your tasks, and meet your quotas, and win some and lose some. It’s your identity. You are your work.”

  “I’m not just my work. I identify as a husband and a father and—”

  “Of course you do, mon trésor. The cat can be a pet, but it is still a predator. You are what you are, you are what I fell in love with. Prometheus at full sprint, hauling a flaming fennel stalk down the slope of Olympus.”

  “You make me sound like a tragic hero doomed by hubris.”
r />   Eve half smiles at her husband. “You and Clyde, the classic-quoting scientists.” She takes a sip of water. “Neither hubris nor ego, but compulsion. You have a need for it all to matter. All the loss, all the separation, the yearning, the isolation. All the suffering you bore in those tender years, well, they all will have meant something if you accomplish this. Change the world forever, climb up to your spot atop the shoulders of giants, and take your place as a Titan. If you can do that, it will have all been for a reason. Your father, your mother, Ecco. Every bad thing that ever happened will have all been part of a grand teleological plan to get you here.”

  She looks down at her glass of water and contemplates another sip. “You are a creator. What are you doing if you’re not doing something to change humankind, to have an effect, to contribute something? If you do this, you’ll have meaning. Your life’s story will pupate from a report into a narrative.”

  Reidier sits in the quiet Eve leaves in the wake of her ideas. Once again he finds himself at a loss for what to do. Once again he registers how her observations have the distinct timbre of accusations.

  The silence bears down on him.

  The ticks from the living room mark the measured rhythm of his impotence.

  He looks to his wife. He follows her gaze down to the glass of water. Reidier’s tectonics shift again, along an altogether different axis, as he slips into motion and takes the only direction he feels he has any sense of. “You know Einstein’s big breakthrough was his paper on Brownian motion. Most people only think of his theory of relativity, E = mc2 and whatnot. I mean he put it all out there in the same year, 1905. His annus mirabilis. Five groundbreaking papers at the age of twenty-six, including the one introducing relativity.” Reidier shakes his head, almost saddened by the masses’ misimpression of Anarchist Al. “It’s a snappy theory and all, but far from his best work. Didn’t win the Nobel for it—that he got for his ground-breaking interpretation of the photoelectric effect. Brownian motion, though, that’s what put him on the map.”