Here & There (61 page)

Slowly, with his eyes still locked on his wife, Reidier reaches his hand toward the countertop to his right, with the same careful precision of a gunslinger sweeping his duster back behind his holster. His stretched out fingers find what they are hunting for, curl around the worn leathered heel, and draw up . . . Otto’s baseball mitt.

Eve can’t help but smile. Overwhelmed with a sudden wave of exhaustion, she pulls out a chair from the table and collapses into it. She drinks her entire glass of water in one gulp.

Reidier picks up the Brita pitcher and refills her glass, sitting down next to her. “You should drink as much as you can. Try to rehydrate. The human body is about sixty percent water, and judging from the clean-up, you probably lost a good thirty percent of yourself.”

Eve laughs while drinking her second glass and has to pull it away to keep from snarfing. Reidier holds up the baseball mitt as a vomit shield, which only makes Eve laugh harder.

“Arrête, arrête . . .”
she wheezes and slaps his arm softly.

Reidier reaches out and pushes a strand of hair back up over her ear.

Eve catches her breath and finishes the water. Reidier refills her glass, but Eve leaves it on the table with both her hands wrapped around the base. She stares down at her fingers distorted by the refraction of the water.

“Je suis désolée.”

“Everybody gets sick, love.”

“No, I have no right to ask you to stop.”

Reidier frowns again. He feels guilty for her actions. Regardless of right and wrong, he feels responsible for what she sees as their solutionless situation. Nevertheless, he knows he’s entirely incapable of giving in to her simple request. As a result, all he can do is hide behind circumstance. “Eve, I’m not sure they’ll let me—”

“This isn’t about the Department, Rye. It’s not like they can compel you to have an insight.”

At this point, Eve was still naïve as to the capabilities of the Department. This was before she fled to New York.

“Eve . . .”

“
Je comprends
. Asking you to stop, is like asking you to be someone else. To give up who you are. Your work, it’s not like other people’s work. It’s not like a job that you go to, and do your tasks, and meet your quotas, and win some and lose some. It’s your identity. You are your work.”

“I’m not just my work. I identify as a husband and a father and—”

“Of course you do,
mon trésor.
The cat can be a pet, but it is still a predator. You are what you are, you are what I fell in love with. Prometheus at full sprint, hauling a flaming fennel stalk down the slope of Olympus.”

“You make me sound like a tragic hero doomed by hubris.”

Eve half smiles at her husband. “You and Clyde, the classic-quoting scientists.” She takes a sip of water. “Neither hubris nor ego,
but compulsion. You have a need for it all to matter. All the loss, all the separation, the yearning, the isolation. All the suffering you bore in those tender years, well, they all will have meant something if you accomplish this. Change the world forever, climb up to your spot atop the shoulders of giants, and take your place as a Titan. If you can do that, it will have all been for a reason. Your father, your mother, Ecco. Every bad thing that ever happened will have all been part of a grand teleological plan to get you here.”

She looks down at her glass of water and contemplates another sip. “You are a creator. What are you doing if you’re not doing something to change humankind, to have an effect, to contribute something? If you do this, you’ll have meaning. Your life’s story will pupate from a report into a narrative.”

Reidier sits in the quiet Eve leaves in the wake of her ideas. Once again he finds himself at a loss for what to do. Once again he registers how her observations have the distinct timbre of accusations.

The silence bears down on him.

The ticks from the living room mark the measured rhythm of his impotence.

He looks to his wife. He follows her gaze down to the glass of water. Reidier’s tectonics shift again, along an altogether different axis, as he slips into motion and takes the only direction he feels he has any sense of. “You know Einstein’s big breakthrough was his paper on Brownian motion. Most people only think of his theory of relativity, E = mc
²
and whatnot. I mean he put it all out there in the same year, 1905. His
annus mirabilis
. Five groundbreaking papers at the age of twenty-six, including the one introducing relativity.” Reidier shakes his head, almost saddened by the masses’ misimpression of Anarchist Al. “It’s a snappy theory and all, but far from his best work. Didn’t win the Nobel for it—that he got for his ground-breaking interpretation of the photoelectric effect. Brownian motion, though, that’s what put him on the map.”

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 H
₂
O 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 them 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.