Here & There (79 page)

121.
Here Reidier is misquoting the French saying, “Qui s’excuse, s’accuse,” which translates, “Who makes excuses, himself accuses.” While this could be an error, it seems more likely that Reidier is reversing it on purpose and insinuating that whoever accuses, herself excuses.

122.
Kai = QuAI = Quantum Accelerated Intelligence

Reidier put this all together only after the fact. He looks at his hand pressed against his right lapel. He had turned away, dropped down into a squat on the
first step, brought his arm across his chest, and swung his left arm protectively across his chest.
*

**

Reidier pulled his tweed sport coat out from under her elbow where it had been lying on the middle armrest.

Eve rolled her eyes. “It must be your blanket for security. Who brings a sport coat to the beach, honestly,
mon cheri
? It’s thirty-five.” In spite of having lived in America for well over five years, Eve still evaluated weather with a vestigial sense of Centigrade.
***

Then slowly, quietly, stepping off the raft of their bed, pulling the covers up, putting on over his pajamas his sport coat with its lapel pin, reaching inside the pocket to feel for his eye-patch, and heading down into his lair.
****

“Of course not. Great lapel pin, by the way. Where’d you get that?”

“Eve got it for me at a flea market with some matching computer chip cufflinks. What brings you up to Providence?”
*****

“With qubits, a quantum computer can hold a single bit of information that could be both zero and one at the same time. What this means is a quantum coin toss would be both heads and tails as long as no one actually looked at the coin. If they did then the coin instantly would become one or the other. That’s the trick . . .

“. . . 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.”
******

“Interesting tie clip,” she said.

“It’s the secret of my success.”

“Really
?
Because it looks like you ripped a piece out of a computer and soldered it to a paper clip.”

“Close. A transistor from my first computer that I ever made. My Alpha chip, I guess. I like to keep my spark of ingenuity close . . .” he trailed off, having finished unwrapping her peace offering. He was left holding a hand mirror with a pink plastic frame and handle.
*******

From off of the back of a chair, Reidier picks up, of all things, a worn tweed sport coat, adorned with worn elbow patches and a lapel pin made from an old computer transistor (circuit). He puts on the jacket and straightens his brown velvet tie.
********

Buddha is just as comfy in computer circuits and motorcycle gears as he is on mountain-tops or in lotus petals.
Oṃ maṇi padme
(David) Hūm(e).

~adulterated Robert M. Pirsig

The parking lot of the Foxxxy Lady was cold. Lorelei and I sat on the bumper of McMayflower’s Maserati GranTurismo. Lorelei kept looking at the club’s door, waiting for our WASP to fly out. He was apparently still inside settling our bill and doling out the tips to make sure no one called the cops.

“My hero,” I muttered.

“What?” Lorelei looked my way. “Are you bleeding?”

At some point between Pandora’s “box” and the Maserati bumper, I had cut my hand. I had been watching the blood drip from the end of my pinky finger onto the white parking line. I was pouring out of myself onto the pavement. A puddle of me but not me. I was no less myself even though there was less of me. How was that possible? How was I dripping away yet staying whole? I wanted to empty my essence into an ever-expanding pool of me. Melt away. Transmogrify. If my mother could be a fish, then I could be a pool of red. But it didn’t work that way. I am less and whole all at once. Just needed a leak plugged.

Hilary wasn’t making it up. Just misinterpreting. Suffering a misprint.

Panoramas = Pandora’s.

I shrugged.

Three hundred sixty-eight dollars and seventy-two cents overdue on a reserve shelf in the library to hold the nonexistent books that I did no research in for my thesis! Dazed by all the dead ends I had run into, I could see the reality didn’t sink in at the time. I never had a shelf. I never reserved books. I made the whole thing up: the utilization of reflections in Pierre Menard’s remake of Baudrillard’s
House of Mirrors
, a fabricated film. My thesis was a fiction. But there was a very real outstanding balance due at Brown University. So if I didn’t reserve the shelf, who did?

“Christ. Get up,” Lorelei nudged me. I stood up while she opened the trunk. “There must be a first-aid kit back here.”

“He has red leather seats. The Maserati’ll be fine,” I slurred.

“I’m not worried about the car, dickhole.” She went on to tell me to shut up and how she was trying to take care of me, help me, something like that. But I wasn’t paying attention. I was focused on the open trunk beneath her shoulder. The case of Propel Sports Drink she had pushed to the side in her search. And the sleeve of the puffy Michelin Man coat that now snaked out from the back of the trunk.

McMayflower was the Michelin Man?

Or did he just have the same coat?

Did Lorelei know? Was she in on it?

Fuck me.

I didn’t know what to think or say. Luckily, the inebriation gave me a viable cover. So I just stood there while Lorelei put the Band-Aids on me. I watched her close the trunk. I listened to her apologize to the recently emerged McMayflower, something about me having an absinthe allergy, like lightweights with tequila. And I curled myself into the fetal position in the claustrophobic, red-leather backseat, McMayflower’s modern 454-horsepowered Charon, for the trip back across the bay to Newport.

Lorelei tucked me in and put a garbage pail by my bed. And then she went downstairs to McMayflower.

I waited until I could reverse the spin of the room. Waited until their voices disappeared down distant halls. Waited until I was sure I could silently crawl my way into the bathroom, tear open a box of Sudafed, and chomp down on some sunny pseudoephedrine for the energy and focus boost I needed. It’s a far cry from meth, but it’ll do in a pinch.

A day of discoveries.

Don’t drift.

Don’t fall asleep.

Dig in, decode, and devise a plan.