Here & There (24 page)

*
A bedtime ritual with Mom? I guess every kid with a dying father has to have one.

The boy lay down in the bed, cradling the phone against his cheek, as he did every night.

Her soft voice trickled out of the receiver into his ear. “Are you lying down
?
”

“Yes, Mom,” he’d nod.

“What side are you lying on, honey
?
”

“Right.”

“Ok, move just left of the center and I’ll lie just right of center.”

He’d scoot slightly to the left.

“Is your half under your pillow
?
” She was referring to the lodestone they had broken in two before the first time she and his father went away.

“Mmmhmm,” he’d nod.

“Mine’s under my pillow. So now, in our sleep . . .”

“We can find our way,” he’d always finish the statement.

“Through the between,” she’d assure him.

“My bed is a rectangle.”

“Just like . . .”

“A door,” he’d yawn.

“As is my bed. Two sides of the same coin. Tangled rectangles bound by lodestones.”

“Tangled rectangles.”

Then she’d start singing their song, “The 59th Street Bridge Song.”

His breathing would slow down as he mumble-hummed, “Ba da, Ba da, Ba da, da . . . Feelin’ Groovy.”
*

*
If Mom and I had had a song, it would’ve been “The End” by the Doors.

By the time she made it to the I’m-dappled-and-drowsy-and-ready-to-sleep part, he’d have drifted off. Slipping through the limen. His grandfather would gingerly lift the receiver out of the boy’s grasp. He’d murmur soft assurances to his daughter, as he slipped out of the room, careful not to wake his grandson, and ask about how his son-in-law’s treatments were going.

The boy would dream of magic doorways that opened onto a mountaintop where his parents set out a picnic, or an afternoon at the beach, or a stroll on the moon. The anxiety of the coming darkness was snuffed out by his mother’s embrace in the in-between.

Kaleb died a few weeks before Kerek’s eighth birthday. Emily stayed with him until the very end. According to the nurses, when Emily finally found herself alone in the ICU ward, she sat in the room staring at the empty bed for almost an entire day.

Finally, she called Williamstown and told her father she was
driving back soon. He expressed his condolences, but let her know how at least Kerek would be glad to have her home. She replied, she didn’t know what home was anymore.

It happened on the I-90 just after the exit ramp for Highway 91 at 9:49 p.m. According to the accident report, Emily’s car was going seventy-three miles per hour when she lost control of the vehicle. The vehicle swerved, hit the reinforced safety railings, and then flipped over twice. She was dead by the time the paramedics arrived.

No other cars were involved in the accident. No traces of alcohol were found in her system. It is unlikely that she fell asleep at the wheel, as it was still before ten p.m. The police officer who filed the report suggested that a deer could have run in front of her car, causing her to swerve, or maybe another driver could have cut off her car in order to make it to the exit ramp. There’s no mention of it having been a possible suicide. It was classified as a single-vehicle accident.

Perhaps it was during this period that the seeds of teleportation were set. A confusing, painful time defined by separation. It began with an innocent longing, a deep homesickness. Maybe one night while he drifted off to sleep in his tangled rectangle he thought, “What if . . . ?”

Other elements were at play obviously, for who among us didn’t wonder “what if?” about a great many things when we were children? But Reidier never let go of his fierce hold on this question. He already had a passion for solving puzzles. A compression of tragedies like his, at such a fragile age, would naturally leave him at a loss for answers. And no one could provide a satisfactory explanation for his most basic question, why?

Perhaps that’s how he ended up gravitating to physics: it promised, if not answers, at least access to the secret workings of the universe. Ignorant at arm’s length, the world seems mystical or callously random. But with the tools of physics and mathematics, Reidier could get close enough to scratch beneath the surface, convinced that, just underneath the sheen of chaotic mysticism, there was an explanation.

Nevertheless, no matter how many answers one finds, each answer always leads to more questions. Knowledge is a hydra dressed in the veils of enlightenment. Where did we come from? Our parents. Where did they come from? Their parents, and so on and so forth, until we speed past the begets of the Bible and arrive at the theory of evolution. Yes, but how did life come to start in the first place so that it could evolve? Well, out of the primordial soup. So what made the primordial soup? An asteroid, the coalescing and aggregation of stardust. But then what made that? The Big Bang! There we have it. We’re done. That’s the initial moment, the beginning. But what made that concentrated dense pinhead of everything, and why did it explode?

Answers only lead to more questions.

So while Reidier worked harder and harder, unveiling the secrets of more and more mysteries and becoming more and more successful, he ultimately found himself playing with matryoshka dolls.
*
Each discovery led him further down the rabbit hole, to smaller and smaller worlds, but none of it made him feel like he was getting closer to the answer of why, nor did it do anything to close the distance between
him and his parents that stretched back to his childhood. Unable to mend the gap, incapable of repairing that basic connection and consistency that is so vital at a young age for providing a sense of security, Reidier worked to keep himself just this side of sane.

*
Yeah, I had to look this one up . . . they’re just Russian nesting dolls AKA matryoshka dolls: a set of dolls of decreasing sizes placed inside one another.

A man of science convinces himself to believe in fate, that it all happened for a reason, to give him purpose. He was meant to perform some ultimate, all-important purpose. That’s why everything happened the way it did. If he can just understand it all, if he could accomplish this feat of science fiction, it would be something tangible, something of worth. He would conjure an unmitigated paradigm shift that would ensconce him in the annals of history and provide him with both professional and financial security, lasting stability and fame for him and his family. So, he works to convince himself (with as much denial as he can muster) that he’s not just chasing the horizon. He’s on a teleological journey, not caught in some tautological labyrinth.

He digs deeper, past atoms, past protons and neutrons, past quarks, and finally finds comfort in the words of another great physicist, “There is plenty of room at the bottom,”
⁶⁹
which he pins up on the bulletin board in his lab, right next to another quip by the same, “The philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

For this reason, it makes sense to reexamine one of the few moments when Reidier actually does take pause: He and Eve sitting on their bench swing on their veranda in Providence. She leans against his shoulder, reading her book. He sits up straight, lifting his
face to the slight breeze, his nail-bitten fingers clasping a sweaty bottle of Nantucket Nectar ice tea. “It’s so quiet. So settled. It feels like our own little sanctuary in a way,” he comments.

Eve’s gaze lifts slightly from her book as she listens.

“I was thinking the room at the far end of the second floor, the one with the window seat, would make a good writing den for you. It struck me as a perfect place for your work. Built-ins for your books, a nice tree to look at when you need a break, but not too distracting. You writing upstairs there, me tinkering with my work in the basement. The boys free to play in between, in earshot of both of us. Our own little sanctuary cloistered away behind those hedges.”

A lovely little sentiment punctuated by one particular word: sanctuary. It immediately conjures up connotations of a sacred or holy place. 454 Angell, by its very address, evokes Biblical ideas. Still it seems Reidier is fixated on this idea for deeper reasons. Sitting on the veranda, Reidier could be imagining their new home to be his own little Eden, every move with Eve having been an attempt at a more perfect iteration of their own haven. They would create a sanctuary that even has its very own Tree of Knowledge taking root in the basement (with his work) and branching up to the far side of the second floor where Eve summons the Muses. This interpretation supports his aforementioned impulse of an almost divine purpose.

There’s us and there’s everybody else.

Nevertheless, there’s also a slightly more ominous element within this word. A sanctuary is also a place of refuge. Clearly, being under the Department’s watchful gaze carries with it an inherent sense of security. But what is it Reidier and his family needed protection from? Reidier’s work was the source of all of this. Ironically, where Eve saw it as the threat from within, Reidier believed it to be their salvation. For him, there was no sanctuary without his work. It
was his talisman protecting them from loss. To abandon his work and leave it outside the walls of their asylum would have meant letting go of the past, of his quest, of his idea to be of value. For Reidier, 454 Angell was to be his own version of Prospero’s Palace.

Consequently, we find ourselves back at our original inquiries:

How did Reidier do it?

Sidestepping the technical aspect to this question, it seems that the secret to Reidier’s
how
was that he never took on any preconceptions about elephants or tangled rectangles. Without the shackles of limitations, he was able to transform the impossible into merely the improbable.

Why him?

In retrospect now, it’s no huge insight as to why teleportation would appeal to Reidier. He never learned to manage the pain of distance, and as a result focused his exceptional talents at alleviating it. In doing so, he opened a door that the world wasn’t ready to go through.

A

TITLE CARD:
GALILEE 6:21

TITLE CARD:
EXPERIMENT 9 DELTA

CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-11-17 00:09

The dark room lights up a little as console lights and video screen flicker on.

Ambient light pours in from the Mirror Lab.

On video screen in console, SPLIT SCREEN-RIGHT SIDE, target room: blackness.

LEFT SIDE, transmission room: a small object sits on the pad. (After magnification, it appears to be a small, emerald-cut diamond. Maybe 1.5 carats.)

Fiber-optic cables, circumscribing the Entanglement Channel flare red for several seconds, then morph into an orbiting white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.

The Boson Cannons and Pion Beams twitch to life. SOUNDS of the rapid ACCELERATION and DECELERATION of GEARS as the men take a series of readings of the diamond. Once complete they settle into optimized focal positions.

On another console screen, SPLIT SCREEN:

ANGELL RIGHT: empty target pad in Angell Lab.

ANGELL LEFT: shows Dr. Reidier (in his tweed sport coat and pajamas) seated at his desk in Angell Lab.

Dr. Reidier reads information off his respective screen, while absentmindedly pinching a small metal hoop, with four prongs sticking out of one spot on the circumference, back and forth
between his thumb and forefinger, flicking it from one fingertip to the other.

NOTE: closer inspection with enhanced amplification shows this to be an engagement ring setting without a diamond.

Dr. Reidier enters several commands into his keyboard.

Encrypted calibrations rapidly scroll up the Mirror Lab console computer screen.

NOTE: unlike with other experiments, all of the calibrations and settings were encrypted. I2O has been unable to decrypt to date.

Dr. Reidier brushes something off his lapel and leans out of frame (presumably to adjust something).

Dr. Reidier sits back into his chair, looks everything over again, while fidgeting with the ring (he snaps the edge of a card from the kid’s game Concentration [with the picture of a lion on it] in between the setting’s empty tongs). He presses “Enter” on his keyboard . . .

On the console, inside their Plexiglas covers, Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo simultaneously engage.

CUT TO:

MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

---MULTIPLE SCREENS---

NGELL LAB RIGHT: empty target pad

MIRROR LAB LEFT: the Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.

The small diamond remains perfectly still on the transmission pad.

At 2007-11-17 00:09:11.1011000 a quiet THRUM coincides with . . . nothing. The diamond still sits on the pad.