Here & There (48 page)

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.

Now I know how Duvalier must have felt—exile could’ve been worse.

We played it safe for a few days. Cloistered ourselves away and kept busy wandering the grounds of our own Little Elba, as Lorelei and I came to call it. We had to make sure we were free and clear, not that either of us had any counterespionage training to speak of. Not that that would even help against the likes of NBs. Still, it made us feel better. As luck would have it, we were blanketed with low-lying fog and gray skies, so at least Predators weren’t going to be an issue. A Bergman-esque setting with an Ian Fleming plot.

We took walks, counted starfish, harvested mussels, “caught” lobster, and cooked feasts. Lorelei was actually a pretty adept chef. I managed to impress her with my knife skills. She went gaga for my trick of halving a dozen cherry tomatoes at once.

“That’s ingenious, Tri-Me. Delivery soup lids. I would never even have thought to save them.”

I tried not to beam from her attention, but my shit-eating grin clawed its way right up my jawline and latched onto my ears for at least three hours. It was almost enough to make me forget what we were doing there in the first place.

“What other tricks you got?”

The twelve-year-old boy in me was spouting a Tourette-ian litany of bad innuendos. Somehow I managed to shout the horny little brat down
long enough to coolly slide out, “I can zest the hell out of lime. Makes for one killer gimlet.”