Here & There (50 page)

Lorelei’s eyes fluttered up from her tea to meet mine; she gave me a half smile.

And I fucking panicked.

The room spun, the couch dropped out from under me, and my lungs refused to inflate. The only thing that held me together was the pull of her half smile.

Somehow, in spite of me keeping just this side of chaos, I managed to lean forward, clink our mugs together, and nonchalantly joke, “Cheers to us. May our lonely futures be filled with sumo wrestlers.”

“Now that would be a great first date.”

“A sumo match? In Japan?”

“Wherever.”

“It would make me look svelte,” I noted.

Lorelei laughed.

And that’s how it went. We kept joking, talking, drinking, until we conked out on the couch together, her at one end, me at the other, our feet tucked under one another. It snowed on the beach that night.

Video .mp4 file found on Reidier’s personal hard drive created on July 2, 2007

Reidier sits in his basement laboratory. He appears to be lost in work, spinning his chair from one surface to another, scribbling down one thing or another, cross-checking some measurement stored within an Excel sheet.

A few distracted keystrokes, while he writes something down in one of Leo’s Notebooks. Reidier presses “Enter.” Nothing much happens. Reidier writes more down.

The video blinks and skips a second.

Reidier stops working, leans back, listens. He hears nothing.

Reidier: It sounds quiet. Are we alone now, Kai?

(Pause)

Female Voice: Yes, Kerek.

*

*
“Ever heard about how Borges got his start?” Lorelei asked.

I shook my head no while devouring another spoonful of soup. Our test run from Little Elba has taken us into town. We blended in with the throngs of tourists, bought saltwater taffy, took in the mansions, poked our noses into the Tennis Hall of Fame, and wandered down a cobblestone street that dead ended in a pier with a restaurant on it called The Black Pearl, no irony intended. It was an old colonial-style structure, dark wood, big exposed beams, claustrophobically low ceiling, and paned windows. It couldn’t decide if it was an old inn or the cabin of a three-masted ship.

We didn’t find any Department spooks on our tail, but we did find the best clam chowder of my life.

“What is this, dill?” I asked the waitress as she passed by.

She was a young blonde girl with big Irish freckles. The waitress nodded and whispered conspiratorially, “And a splash of rum.”

Lorelei waited for the waitress to get out of earshot and just shook her head at me. “What is it about guys and waitresses?”

“They smile a lot and are extra attentive to us.”

“For a bigger tip.”

“Which they deserve. Holy shit, this chowder is better than sex.”

Lorelei raised an eyebrow.

“At least the chowder won’t leave me feeling empty inside.” I scraped my spoon against the bottom of my bowl. “You were saying, Borges. ‘Death of a Compass,’ ‘The Library of Babel,’ ‘Book of Sand.’ I’ve read the guy.”

“It’s ‘Death and a Compass.’”

I thought about it a second, then shrugged, “Death of a Compass feels more evocative, don’t you think?”

“Whatever. Did you ever hear about how he got started writing?”

I hadn’t. And Lorelei didn’t seem too in the mood for one of my homemade answers.

“He grew up in Buenos Aires, but always loved English literature. At nine, he translated some Oscar Wilde work. As he grew older, he mastered a number of languages, authored scores of academic papers,
and even founded and edited several literary publications. But try as he might, he never seemed to be able to turn out a solid piece of fiction.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Until he finally figured out his way in. He fell back on his strengths and created his first fictional piece by writing an academic criticism of a work that didn’t exist.”

Lorelei had my attention.

“In fact, his entire early literary career was dominated by a slew of forgeries and hoaxes: translations of nonexistent works, falsely attributed pieces.”

I didn’t have an answer for Lorelei. It’s not like I hadn’t thought of it—that my mother might have made this whole thing up. That lovely idea had been gnawing away at the back of my mind for quite some time now. Until then, though, I had been fine ignoring it. Leaving it be, to cannibalize my brain in the dark shadows of my thoughts.

Fuck sunlight.

Fuck facing your fears.

And fuck Lorelei.

I was up and out the door before I even realized what was happening.

Lorelei found me a few minutes later at the end of the pier, watching the ship masts swing back and forth with the waves, like nautical metronomes. She didn’t say anything. Just rested her forearms next to mine on the wooden railing.

I never thought I would feel so ambivalent about her. I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t feel like connecting, let alone talking. The best I could do was not push her away.

So we just stood there, listening to the sporadic boat bell, watching a seagull float in place above us. The bird faced south, making the slightest angle adjustment to its wing, dancing this invisible tango with the wind. Then with another, almost imperceptible shift, it dove down, glided over the seaweed that clustered between the bows, and snatched up a dead fish that had been floating, half hidden.

My mother is a fish.

“Come on,” I said and headed for the docks.

XVI

And what happens when the regime becomes as mad as the ones they hunt?

~Mstislav Shklovsky

Physics has failed us.

~André de Broglie (
Recherches sur la théorie des quanta
, 1926, regarding wave-particle duality)

For when, either in ancient or modern times, have such great exploits been achieved by so few against so many, over so many climes, across so many seas, over such distances by land, to subdue the unseen and unknown? Whose deeds can be compared with those of Spain? Our Spaniards, being few in number, never having more than 200 or 300 men together, and sometimes only 100 and even fewer, have, in our times, conquered more territory than has ever been known before, or than all the faithful and infidel princes possess.

~Eyewitness accounts by Hernando and Pedro Pizarro of their brother’s conquest

Transcript excerpt from the phone surveillance of Rear Admiral NAVSTA Office, Rear Admiral Wisecup 6/14/2007, 10:17 a.m.

Wisecup: (yelling into phone) What the hell else does he want?! Christ himself only needed two pieces of wood and some nails! I don’t care what theoretical horseshit he’s slinging now. You just tell him sometimes you got to try something even if it’s wrong. ‘Cause a mistake will still tell us a hell of a lot more than his foot-dragging. And don’t let him go off about hypothetical catastrophic what-ifs. If what-ifs dictated history, we’d all be living in some goddamn Japanese fiefdom! He’s a scientist. Scientists do experiments. Get him experimenting.

(Wisecup slams down the phone.)

It took a while to find it within the endless hours of footage. The innocuousness of the moment provided an effective camouflage: a revealing mundane still within a reel of banality. Nevertheless, it is most assuredly Reidier’s moment of discovery of the infestation.

NB footage, Reidier home, June 27, 2007

Reidier paces back and forth around the dining room, arguing into his mobile phone to some Department lackey. “I don’t care what Q Net did. They’re in the Stone Age as far as I’m concerned. And Bell’s paper disproves practically all of your objections.”

Reidier proceeds to tolerate a response, gestures rapidly for whoever’s on the other end to talk faster. Finally, Reidier interrupts. “Look, I need this so that I can put a single nano-object into an X-ray beam in order to determine position, chemical identity, and structure. If you insist on my doing it with what you’ve given me, everything will be corrupted with Loschmidt echoes.”

In spite of technological jargon, there is nothing very incisive about this conversation. It is just one of the myriad of phone calls, Skype sessions, and voice mail exchanges that Reidier is inundated with daily. As with this one, Reidier tends to wander about erratically while enmeshed in discussions about his work. Which is why his brief pause was almost completely overlooked.

While circling from the north end of the dining room table to the antique wooden credenza, right after Reidier’s assertion about Bell’s paper, his stride hiccups. When slowed down eight times, it’s possible to notice the slightest tilt of Reidier’s head to the side, like a baffled dog. All of this happens in less than a second, then Reidier’s pace picks back up where it left off, as he continues to circle the table.

However, as the conversation and laps continue, a pattern is detected, once again only when slowed down to one-eighth the normal speed. Every time Reidier passes the credenza, he briefly slows down.

Finally, Reidier ends the conversation near the archway that leads to the living room. He hangs up the phone, rests a hand against the archway, and gazes through the table, seemingly lost in thought—except for one quick flicker of his eyes, directly at the credenza. No head movement, just the eyes, a fast once-over, only captured in the slowness of one-eighth speed.

The second piece of the puzzle lay in the phone tap. From the logs, it appears that Pierce had the NSA tap all of the Reidiers’ various phones after Kerek’s first phone call to the Director’s office while still in Chicago. Coordinating the phone-tap recordings with NB
footage facilitated a triangulation, so to speak, of, for lack of a better term, the Credenza Phenomenon.

I don’t care what Q Net did. They’re in the Stone Age as far as I’m concerned. And Bell’s paper disproves practically all of your . . .

Again, the prosaic proved obfuscating. It took over a dozen listen-throughs to finally hear the forest from the trees. The problem was the dialogue. I kept focusing on the dialogue, homing in on the Department underling’s response to Reidier’s complaint. I spent hours dissecting the scientific vernacular, mining my limited knowledge of teleportation and X-rays and learning about Loschmidt echoes. All of it seemed scientifically sound. Nothing should have agitated Reidier, especially the credenza in the corner of the dining room, not to mention the fact that, ultimately, Reidier won the argument.

Once content proved a dead end, I refocused on form. There was something in the tone of the argument, hunting for subtext within the delivery of the jargon. Perhaps there was some complex passive-aggressiveness or habitual patronization that drove Reidier crazy. Of course, in order to determine that, it was necessary to listen to a litany of conversations between Reidier and this specific lackey, as well as Reidier and a number of other Department minions. These were played so many times that, at a certain point, they ceased to be words to me and simply became a sequence of sounds that danced up and down the scale, punctuated by grunts. I became the Jane Goodall of quantum engineers.

Nothing. At most, the conversation was laden with frustration, sighs, and impatience. And again, nothing that would elicit such a specific and peculiar behavior from Reidier.

I don’t care what Q Net did. They’re in the Stone Age as far as I’m concerned. And Bell’s paper disproves practically all of your . . .

Finally, frustrated and convinced I had fabricated the whole episode, I gave up. Reidier, the credenza, it was just a quirk in manner. Just one of the many nonsensical behaviors we all manifest erratically
throughout our day. There was nothing of significance there other than my own need to infuse the footage with meaning. I’m a model reader who wanted to warp the text into her own narrative.
*