Here & There (46 page)

“Directing the nanobots is a challenge even within a small environment. They’ve only been effectively used within interiors or to blanket an urban enclave. A place like this, they’d scatter at the wind’s whim and dissipate too quickly to have any efficacy,” I offered.

Bertram turned back to me and smiled. “Our thoughts exactly. They can’t hear out here. We figured being spontaneous and improvising our movements would give us a bit of an edge too.”

Not knowing what else to say, I offered, “Thank you for trusting me.”

Bertram kicked a rock off the edge of the cliff. It fluttered down so long it seemed more like a feather than a stone dropping into the sea. “Awful lot of precautions for trust, wouldn’t you say?” he countered.

“They weren’t all on account of me.”

Bertram nodded. Again it was unclear whether this was to me, or to himself. “You know the history of the Mohegan Bluffs?”

I shook my head.

“Block Island was Niantic territory, a Native American tribe that eventually merged with the Narragansett people. They called this island Manisses. Well, somewhere in the midsixteenth century, the Mohegans decided that this island was a pretty desirable place. Good deer hunting, good shellfish. A great battle took place, which the Niantic won by forcing the Mohegans over these cliffs to fall to their deaths.”

I kicked my own rock over the edge this time. Again, it fluttered like a feather.

I waited in silence for more. Bertram was finished. The wind kept blowing.

“You planning on forcing me off?” I asked.

Bertram chuckled. “I imagine you’re not so interested in colonial history as much as my personal history.”

“I respect your privacy if you’re not comfortable sharing any more than you already have.” It was an empty offering. Bertram was ready to talk. He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if he weren’t.

“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 orchid
¹⁰⁹
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?”