Here & There (56 page)

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Echo deterioration . . . Ecco’s deterioration . . .

white-and-blue toothbrush

WHITE-AND-BLUE Biotene SuperSoft toothbrush!! It had been right there, in the back chamber of my divining cave, an overlooked amulet. An artifact in the back of an earthen-floored root cellar, a disregarded talisman from 454’s prior alchemist. A white-and-blue, Biotene SuperSoft Toothbrush.

NB Footage REIDIER CAR November 27, 2007

Reidier absentmindedly rubs his thumbs back and forth on the steering wheel. He periodically glances at the rearview to check on Ecco, who sits strapped into his car seat in the back on the passenger side.

The child gazes out his window, down at the road. In his left hand, he still grips the blue cardboard-backed, plastic casing that his new toothbrush remains sealed within. A Biotene SuperSoft Toothbrush.

It’s Reidier’s uniformity of driving that suggests his mind is elsewhere. His hands never stray from their perch, his thumbs never stop brushing back and forth. No lane changing, no rapid acceleration or braking. Reidier is lost in a thousand-yard stare, coasting through a state of highway hypnosis, until a movement in his peripheral vision snaps him out of it. It’s in the rearview mirror. Reidier glances over his shoulder, back at Ecco.

The boy still looks out the window, still holds his toothbrush. At some point during the drive, though, he managed to push off his
sneakers. The movements that had caught Reidier’s eye were Ecco’s feet. Ecco was balling up his toes into a foot fist, alternating between his left foot and his right foot.

Left-foot fist, right-foot fist, left-foot fist, right-foot fist.

Reidier turns back to the road, his brow furrowed quizzically. He pushes down on the gas pedal and speeds up. From the corner of his eye, in the rear view mirror, Reidier notices a change in Ecco’s pace.

Leftfootfist, rightfootfist, leftfootfist, rightfootfist.

Reidier accelerates again.

Leftfootfistrightfootfistleftfootfistrightfootfist.

Reidier applies the brake.

Leftfootfist, rightfootfist, leftfootfist, rightfootfist.

Reidier takes the exit for 195 toward the east side.

Ecco squeezes up the toes on both feet, until they merge into 195.

Left-foot fist, right-foot fist, left-foot fist, right-foot fist, perfectly in sync with the new dashed white lines that pass by the car.

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You ain’t the only one, Mama. You ain’t the only one.

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prime

prime

prime

prime

prime

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NB Footage 454 Angell, November 27, 2007

Reidier and Ecco walk into the kitchen. Reidier drops his keys on the counter and grabs a glass from the cupboard.

Hearing the sounds of Otto and Eve playing in the den, Ecco rushes out into the den, still gripping his new toothbrush.

Eve comes out from the den and into the kitchen, as Reidier holds a carton of milk.

“You want a glass?” Reidier asks.

Eve holds up her mug of coffee in response.

Reidier sits down at the table, pours himself a full glass, drinks down half of it in one gulp, and sighs.

Eve takes the pot of coffee off of its warming pad and refills her mug. “
Alors
?” Eve asks.

“Well it’s not gingivitis, nor any type of gum disease.”

“What is it that’s making his gums bleed ’zen?”

“Brushing his teeth.”

Eve gives Reidier a confused look, as she reaches across the table and takes the milk carton and pours a dash into her coffee. “Since when is brushing your teeth a bad thing?”

Reidier shrugs. “Dentist thinks he might be brushing too hard. Maybe too much. So he gave him a special, ultrasoft-bristled toothbrush. If the bleeding doesn’t stop in a week or so, we’ll go back.”

“’Ave you seen my ring?” Eve pauses at the archway to the den.

“What ring?”

“My engagement ring.”

“Where did you lose it?”

“If I knew that, I’d have it.”

“It’ll turn up.”

Eve sighs and nods, leaning against the arch. Her thumb rubs against her bare ring finger.

Reidier sits at the table with a glass of milk in one hand, rubbing his beard stubble with the other. He’s lost in thought, until his eyes dart toward the doorway to the den. Eve’s gone. Reidier’s shoulders drop.

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NB Footage 454 Angell, November 26, 2007

7:34 a.m.: Ecco and Otto go into their bathroom and brush their teeth. Ecco brushes the front of his top teeth for exactly thirty seconds, then the front of his bottom teeth for exactly thirty seconds, then the back of his top teeth for exactly thirty seconds, then the back of his bottom teeth for exactly thirty seconds. There’s nothing particularly excessive or violent, or that could otherwise be detected as damaging.

7:47 a.m.: Ecco comes back to the bathroom and brushes his teeth. Ecco performs the exact same ritual of thirty seconds brushing on the top front, thirty seconds bottom front, thirty seconds top back, thirty seconds bottom back.

8:47 a.m.: Ecco comes back to his bathroom and brushes his teeth. Same two-minute procedure.

9:47 a.m.: Ecco brushes his teeth.

10:46 a.m.: Ecco brushes his teeth.

11:47 a.m.: Ecco brushes his teeth.

12:48 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

1:06 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

1:46 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

2:45 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

3:48 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

4:10 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

4:47 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

5:46 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

6:40 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

6:48 p.m.: Ecco brushes teeth.

7:46 p.m.: Ecco and Otto brush their teeth.
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While this is far from a scientific analysis, it appears that Ecco takes his cue to brush his teeth from the grandfather clock’s third quarter-hour chime (at forty-five minutes past the hour). The variation by a few minutes after the quarter hour (10:46 a.m. versus 6:48 p.m.) is attributed to Ecco’s whereabouts in the house and how long it then takes him to get to his and Otto’s bathroom.

Seeing as how there is no footage of Ecco ever having been conditioned to this behavior, it is unlikely that this is some sort of Pavlovian response and instead probably a manifestation of a newly developed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. This condition/behavior only recently emerged as part of Ecco’s habit patterns. It began only a few weeks prior, as observed in the NB footage over the past month. For roughly two weeks, Ecco followed nearly the same hygienic regimen, give or take a few minutes on the timing and the outliers. Prior to this fortnight, Ecco only ever brushed his teeth in the morning and the evening with Otto.

The OCD hypothesis is further supported by analysis of the anomalies. Each of the teeth-brushing instances that does not line up with this schedule is attributable to a priming stimulus. The first anomaly is the first teeth-brushing incident at 7:36 a.m. It occurs within minutes of the boys waking up. While the timing of when the boys wake up is not exact (it ranges from 6:25 to 7:37), they always brush their teeth within minutes of waking up in order to “scrape away the taste of yesterday and get a fresh start on today,” as Dr. Reidier always reminds them. The 7:47 a.m. cleaning subsequently demarcates the beginning of Ecco’s personal ritual, cued by the grandfather clock.

The 1:06 p.m. teeth brushing can be attributed to the boys having finished their lunch (which they did at 1:04), compelling Ecco with a need to clean his mouth. The 4:10 p.m. brushing is actually the most
telling. Right after a particularly aggressive (and rare) struggle between the boys for a toy, Ecco leaves Otto playing in the den (Otto won the confrontation), heads upstairs, and brushes his teeth. After finishing his ritual, Ecco is visibly relaxed and happy. He returns to the den with a smile and continues playing with his brother.

It seems that somehow Ecco came to understand the act of brushing his teeth as a way to clean the slate and start anew. He internalized his father’s rhyming mantra of scraping away the taste of yesterday and getting a fresh start, but has shrunk the time scale from a day to an hour—hence the quarter-till, ritualized brushings. They let him start anew for every hour. And for every skirmish as well.

The question remains why now? The NB footage yields answers, suggesting that the trigger for this is not nurture, but rather nature. If the environment has not instigated this, then perhaps either the biology or the physics has.

Reidier’s chimerical creation is deteriorating.
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Yeah, maybe it’s just that. Maybe it’s the fact that this little adorable freak show is a fucking replicant and has weird neural shit firing in his head. Maybe his OCD is simply symptomatic of his unnatural nature. Let’s not forget Eve’s chilling classification of the kid:
He’s not ok. He’s not real. He is twilight. An etiäinen, a vardøger, a ka, a doppelgänger.
The kid’s got issues ‘cause he’s not a kid. He’s an incarnation conjured out of some mystical infinitesimality. There are bound to be glitches.

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Prime. My “black stone” isn’t broken. It’s not a code. The numbers are just that: numbers. They’re prime factors! A two-thousand-digit behemoth and its prime factors; then a thousand-digit one and its prime factors.
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Hilary figured it out! I checked on
http://primes.utm.edu/
. The first run of numbers, before the first Anaxagoras quote, is a two-thousand digit number, followed by its two prime factors (which are separated by the other Anaxagoras quotes). Now I don’t feel so bad about not seeing anything in the numerology.

“It would take our current supercomputers billions of years just to find the prime factors of a thousand-digit number.”

But he did it.

He actually has one.

Reidier had a quantum computer.

It’s how he hacked the Department’s surveillance.

“The benefits of this paradoxical computer, its ability to scoff at
Principium Contradictionis
is twofold. One, it provides us the exponential computing power we need. Peter Shor came up with an algorithm in fact that proves a modest-size quantum computer can solve unfathomable problems in fractions of a second. A quantum computer with N qubits can simultaneously manipulate 2
^N
numbers as
opposed to a normal computer that can only be in one of those 2
^N
states at any one time. Miraculously, a collection of a mere three hundred atoms, each storing a single quantum bit, could hold more values than the number of particles in the universe . . . It would render almost every military, diplomatic, and commercial code laughably vulnerable. The most powerful computer ever, and we wouldn’t even have to see it.”
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