Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Eve’s gaze lifts up along with an eyebrow.

  “It’s the,” air quotes, “‘presumably’ random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. The Greeks called it pedesis: leaping. At the turn of the century there was a big schism in science surrounding this phenomenon. Everyone wanted to unify the physics, but no one could agree on how. Many had given up on Newton’s mechanics as a foundation. Instead they were focusing on the energetic and electromagnetic, heat and electromagnetism.”

  Eve looked at her glass. “It doesn’t look like it’s moving.”

  Reidier nodded. “In 1827 Robert Brown observed that it is. And then Einstein proved it by molecular theory.”

  Eve continues to stare at her glass of water. “All molecules are fungible. Sixty percent of me is just a bunch of run-of-the-mill H2O molecules anyhow.”

  “You’re still going to be you,” Reidier states.

  “But you’ll have to destroy that other forty percent of me as well. Constructive destruction, isn’t that what you say.” She stated her question.

  Reidier’s brow furrows. “You’re getting hung up on semantics.”

  “When you get down to it, isn’t that what we are? Semantics. Tones. Intentions.”

  “There are no connotations in physics, Eve.”

  “Now who’s hung up on semantics?”

  “The destruction is not an annihilation of you, merely the dissemination of a collection of molecules and atoms.”

  “My molecules and atoms!”

  “They’re not you. That’s not who you are.”

  Eve looks across the table at her husband. Without breaking eye contact, she takes her hand off the glass and pinches her other arm. “Ow.”

  “Almost all of the cells in your body turn over in a matter of weeks. Neurons, which last for a fairly long time relatively speaking, change all of their constituent molecules within a month. NMDA receptors in synapses only make it five days. The half-lives of the protein filaments within neurons are under ten minutes. Actin filaments in dendrites replace themselves every forty seconds. ‘You’ are completely different stuff every month. Yet still you’re the same as you were before. No one is missing you, including you.”

  “So Camus was correct.”

  “Ninety percent of the cells in your body don’t even have your DNA. They’re microorganisms, bacteria in your GI tract.”

  “‘I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.’”

  Reidier chose not to respond—perhaps he sensed her quotation from Le Mythe de Sisyphe inferred a rallying spirit. “Matter doesn’t matter. It’s a placeholder. For patterns.” His eyes read through several invisible lines of equations written in the air until he scrolled through and found a bit of philosophy written on the infinite whiteboard in his mind. “Cogito ergo sum. Maybe we’re all manifestations of Descartes’s Demon’s dream, but we know we exist because we think. And what distinguishes each of us is the signature arrangement of our thoughts and memories and molecules. Our brains, our neurons flit about in a chaotic dance, random interactions, a neural network of lateral connections out of which, eventually, emerges a stable pattern.* Patterns are who we are. Matter is nothing more than perfectly ordered energy. And order is simply information that fits a purpose. That is all we are, patterns that persist in time.”

  * * *

  * Much like this PsychoNarrative.

  * * *

  “Est qui quaerit quod petis,” Eve responds.

  “Translate please.”

  “St. Francis of Assisi said it. What you are looking for is who is looking.”

  Reidier rolls his eyes. “And Buddhist philosophies emphasize how there is no inherent boundary between us. Everything is in everything.”

  Eve’s chair screeches against the floor as she shoves it back. She takes her glass with her to the counter and places it in the sink. She rests her hands on either side of the sink and looks out the window into the dark. She exhales; another lock closes across the canal.

  Reidier slowly gets up. His footsteps barely make a sound as he crosses to her, tentatively, like someone trying not to startle a stray dog he’s trying to coax into trusting him. He gently places his hands on her shoulder blades and rubs them back and forth. “I know you’re scared. Your patterns are unraveling.”123

  “I was reading this book about brain disorders the other day. There was this story about a man, an attendant at the Natural History Museum in New York. He mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Maybe the actual reflection of himself in the glass caught his eye, and he shrugged it off as some stranger standing behind him.”

  Eve’s and Reidier’s gazes meet in the window. The darkness beyond the glass sharpens the virtual images of them into greater relief than the real, unlit world outside.

  Reidier’s hands keep circling softly on her back, desperately trying to smooth out the scars inside. A piece of him flutters back to French Guiana, where he once saw a shaman perform psychic surgery on a sick villager. She chanted herself into a sweat, while her hands pressed down on the villager’s greased abdomen, reading the illnesses within like braille, until finally her fingers found a weak point, drove inside the villager’s flesh through some conjured incision, blood spilling out everywhere, the shaman’s eyes rolled back, and her hands dragged out a black, slimy lump of pathological matter and threw it onto the fire. Her hands smoothed themselves over the abdomen and not a mark was left behind, just a greasy stomach. Reidier’s rational mind knew it was a complete hoax, but the villager got up and walked away, healed, unfettered by the painful abdominal symptoms that had plagued him for months.

  Reidier couldn’t find any opening on Eve’s back.

  “Empiricism takes no account of the soul,” she whispers to their reflections. “We are not memory alone. We have feelings, wills, and sensibilities. Just a simple touch yields a profound change. I saw it with my mother.”

  Eve’s mother died of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  “She didn’t so much unravel as fade, into the depths. At least that’s what we told ourselves. Somehow that was more ok. It was when she resurfaced, like a whale rising for a breath, said something lucid, recognized me as me instead of thinking I was her long-dead sister that was most jarring. She saw the leaves outside, and suggested we go for a walk and reminisced about how she had always loved fall walks with me. Leaves, like water, were scarce where she grew up and never changed color with the seasons. And this was an otherworldly palette compared with the limited beiges of her youth. She always insisted to my father that she and I join him for his autumnal trip to Paris. He’d go to Ministry meetings on the Left Bank, and we’d go for walks in the outskirts. She adored our simple strolls punctuated by my sporadic sprints at the leaf piles, fallen leaves exploding upward with every fearless plunge I took. Outside her window, the wind tugged at the remaining leaves on branches, pulling down whatever it could and carrying it off. ‘The world is stripping me bare, too,’ she’d say. Then she’d sink back down into the depths with cetacean inevitability.

  “The lucidity is what upset my father and me. In those moments it seemed as though she wasn’t fading at all. The world faded from her: a lone boat, carried out by the tide and the currents, the land left behind, diminishing into the distance. On those days she wasn’t fading, she retreated into her memories. She was trapped in her own oubliette, held hostage inside herself. It was easier to see her as dissolving rather than drowning. We couldn’t take seeing her still there, still whole, mired in a fog that slowly swallowed her up.”

  Reidier dared to stroke her hair.

  “Sometimes when I look at your Pinocchio, I see my mother, only in reverse. Coalescing out of the mist, sharpening from Ecco into Otto. A wily will-o’-the-wisp drawing us to our doom.”

  Without realizing it, they both look out into the dark, searching for any signs of ignis fatuus, some mischievous púca waving his tantalizing fairy fire, trying to lead the
m off the path into the dark forest.

  But they see only themselves in the window.

  Reidier keeps rubbing Eve’s bare shoulders, still unable to find a way back into her. A shaman without a follower has no magic. Her skin feels like Kevlar beneath his impotent fingers.

  As quarks get closer to each other, the binding force between them weakens.

  She lowers her gaze from the window. No will-o’-the-wisps outside. Just inside.

  Eve sighs and rubs her hands along the smooth edge of the marble counter. “Americans have no sense of the tragic. To compensate, you mechanize and objectify the human. Without the tragic it seems perfectly natural to desoul and resoul yourselves with la belle indifférence.”

  Reidier almost shrugs, but stops himself for fear of it reading like the very naïve unconcern she was talking about. “We need to transcend ourselves to find ourselves.”

  Eve laughs and shakes her head. “Freud, Marx, Nietzsche—they all agreed, the hope for transcendence is a delusion.” She then reaches back over her shoulder and cups her husband’s cheek in her hand. “Life without death would be something other than human. I don’t want this.”

  “I don’t want the alternative.”

  Eve doesn’t have an answer.

  Reidier interprets her silence as advantage. He presses forward. “I won’t lose you, Eve.”

  Eve still doesn’t respond.

  “You’ll still be you.”

  “Just like Ecco.”

  Reidier pulls his hands off his wife’s back as if they had been burned by dry ice.

  Eve turns and faces him. She shrugs, completing her thought before speaking it. “It doesn’t matter. I’m dead either way.”

  Eve kisses her husband on the lips. Her eyes glisten with tears that she holds back, refusing to let them loose, denying the inevitable, inexorable pull of gravity. She has shed enough tears for several lifetimes, even with this one cut short. These tears are hers, and she’s not relinquishing them to their sad descent. She has no interest in the salty trails they leave behind, like slugs on a sidewalk.*

  * * *

  * So, what, Hilary’s trying to write like Eve now? Internal monologues, observational similes, and all?

  * * *

  Eve takes her hand off Reidier’s cheek. “It’s ok. I won’t ask you again. I don’t want you to give up who you are anymore than I want to lose my own identity.”

  She walks out of the kitchen.

  Quarks could cross the universe . . . You can’t affect the state of one without affecting the other.

  Reidier listens to her footsteps pad down the hall, up the stairs, and into their bedroom. He stares at her glass of water, at her lip prints on the rim. Reidier picks up the glass, rinses it in the sink, and puts it in the dishwasher.

  He peers out the window into the darkness again. Nothing but his reflection in the glass. He watches it start. The tremor in his bottom lip. A fault line delineating the tectonic shifts below. He watches it break free and spread, like ripples in a pond, until his entire body is shuddering, spasming with silent, violent sobs.

  And then it passes. Reidier catches his breath. He sniffs in and pinches off the mucus from his nose. He rinses his hands in the sink, and then walks out into the hall and turns off the light. Reidier makes his way to the stairs in a daze. He turns off the hall light without even looking and heads up. His feet thump against the stairs in rhythm to the ticks of the grandfather clock. At the top of the stairs, he turns away from their bedroom and heads down the hall. It’s a mechanical trajectory at this point. He spends most nights in the boys’ room. Ecco’s room, technically. Eve insisted on separate rooms. But that doesn’t stop Otto from sneaking into Ecco’s after bedtime. The moon is rising, and silver light pours in through the window at the end of the hallway.

  Reidier gazes down through the floor ahead of him as he shuffles down the hall. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that the door to Ecco’s room is almost completely open. Otto must have already snuck in. Dim moonlight fills the dark room. Reidier heads in.

  The SLAM seems to come from inside of him. It doesn’t make sense, though, a noise that loud thundering out through his skull. Nor does he understand how he ended up sitting on the floor in the middle of the hall. He’s been knocked out of his stupor only to find himself in a daze. The THUD still echoes around his inner ear. He keeps squeezing his eyes shut and opening them trying to focus, but his perspective still makes no sense to him. Reidier presses his thumb and forefinger hard against the bridge of his nose and scrunches his eyes shut. He finally pulls back and blinks down the hall at the moonlight. And that’s when he sees it.

  A second door.

  There are two identical doors to Ecco’s room.

  Reidier shakes his head and refocuses. The twin doors are still there. As he rolls onto all fours, the hall spins around him and then snaps back to where it should be. Reidier presses one hand onto the floor and the other against the wall, and struggles to get upright.

  Halfway through his ascent, after he lifts his hand off the floor, he finally realizes his other hand is leaning hard against thin air. The gap between the doorframe to Ecco’s room. He’s leaning against the empty space of a threshold for balance. Pushing against moonlight. Reidier, overwhelmed with curiosity, leans in closer to inspect the phenomenon.

  His nose realizes it before his brain. The faint smell of paint gives it away. This is not a door.*

  * * *

  * And this is not a report, Hilary. Nor a transcript of some secret QuAI video. You’ve Psynar’d your way ‘round the bend and into a narrative of historical fiction. Not that I blame you, mama. Who among us hasn’t taken some liberties on this journey?

  * * *

  Reidier is perched against a nearly picture-perfect nightscape. It’s a portrait of a portal. It is practically identical to the real door only a few feet further down the hall. Especially, lit up by the moon, the painting itself seems to glow with an inner light.

  “Where . . .” Reidier whispers to himself, petting the painting with his fingertips. The detail. The verisimilitude. It would’ve taken a painstaking focus, an unrelenting compulsion to the minutiae.

  The answer echoes back at him from out of the dining room.

  “No. I had her babysit. The boys fingerpainted today, did you see?”

  “Ecco.”*

  * * *

  * OCD huffing paint fumes.

  * * *

  For the second time in barely five minutes, Reidier yanks back his fingers from the searing sensation of frostbite. He retreats from the door, from the painting of the door. He’s breathing heavily now. He’s shaking his head and muttering indecipherable denials to himself.

  Finally, Reidier tucks his hands into the pockets of his tweed sport coat and shuffles to the stairs. He casts a quick glance down the hall to Eve’s, to their room.

  Reidier descends the stairs, stepping in time with inevitable ticks from the grandfather clock below. He walks down the front hall toward the kitchen, stops in front of the bathroom where Eve had sat recovering from her regurgitations, turns, and heads down into the basement.

  Several minutes later, the soft murmur of his and QuAI’s voices dance up the stairs.

  ECCO II

  Eve’s diagnosis demarcated a drastic shift in the Reidiers’ relationship. Whether it was Eve’s

  ?

  ?

  ?

  R & E no longer sleep together

  Beneath a gossipy ceiling fan, He spends

  most nights in Ecco’s room or downstairs, working

  into the wee

  hours,

  ?

  with

  ?

  Q

  Her habits were her undoing. Not the habits in and of themselves, but rather the surrendering to a modus operandi, her resignation and assimilation of the way of things. Eve still had her reservations, dissatisfactions, and repulsions; she just worked around them, like an inexperienced tennis player running around
her backhand.

  Humans are adept at adapting. The seesaw of life balances on the fulcrum of circumstance. Somewhere along the way, life kicks the fulcrum out from under us. We fall, we hurt, and then we push the seesaw down to where the fulcrum waits, and rebalance, until the next kick. It’s the journey of living. Whether it’s a changing environment, an emotional loss, a damning diagnosis—we accept, we endure, we normalize. However, this act of preservation is also an act of destruction, old parts of ourselves must be excised, amputated, calcified, or calloused over. After the molting, scar tissue becomes our new skin.

  Ecco, her issues with Reidier, her tumor: it became routine, commonplace.

  Eve’s assuetude is her assassin.

  NB Footage: Providence, 8:01 p.m., May 24, 2008—

  The boys sit on porch stairs, staring out at the backyard. They sit side by side, practically leaning against each other. Like twin radars, their heads shift back and forth watching. The sun has slipped past the horizon and shadows dash around the gloaming. “Twelve!” Otto whispers excitedly.

  Ecco nods and scans the twilight, while Otto keeps staring off at where he was pointing.

  The sounds of Kerek, Bertram, and Clyde watching a Red Sox game filter out through a screened window. Clyde yells in disgust as the A’s score in the bottom of the second. Kerek and Bertram laugh at their friend’s dismay.

  Ecco taps his brother’s shoulder lightly and points off toward the garage. “Thirteen.”