Here & There (35 page)

Reidier nods. “Yes. In Chicago, a few months ago.” Reidier shifts in his seat. “He was with me at work one day.” Reidier lets out a long sigh. “My printer was out of toner, so I had sent the document to the one in the main office. It was just down the hall.”

Reidier’s eyes search the surface of the picnic table, never focusing on anything in particular. “It was a few minutes. Five at most. But, on my way back, I heard his crying from down the hall and sprinted to the lab.”

He stops, his eyes now set, focused through the table, at this image from the past. “He was just lying there, curled into a fetal position, wailing. I don’t know what happened. My equipment, nothing was turned over or upset in any way. Exactly how I left it. I scooped him up off the platform. Everything seemed fine, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I rocked him in my arms for over half an hour until he finally calmed down.”

Reidier picks at the wood grain on the tabletop for a few moments before looking up at Bertram. “What happened is a complete mystery.”

Bertram frowns in sympathy. “That’s when Ecco . . . started being this way?”

Reidier nods slightly.

“Was it a gradual deterioration? Or all at once?”

“The Ecco you met today began that afternoon.”

It was also the same day Eve had her episode.
⁸⁹

In discussing what is obviously a very painful topic, Reidier exhibits very little emotion. Rather his distress manifests itself through a stilted delivery, filled with pauses, and a syntax that ultimately deteriorates into this sterile declarative structure, one that sounds almost mystical. Unable to manage whatever guilt he holds inside, or navigate the
culpability insinuated by Eve, Reidier can only manage to discuss it through simple statements of fact, tinted with almost cosmological overtones.
Ecco began that afternoon.

This absence is only further accentuated by the lack of any footage covering this incident, any examination in Eve’s journal, or examination in Reidier’s notes. Was it so painful that it had to be eradicated from their personal history, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s pruning of the Hundred Schools of Thought?
*
Or is it not even the truth? Another fiction perhaps, a riddle deciphered by the algebra of lying.

*
Sometimes Hilary is a little too erudite for her own good. In 213 BCE, the Emperor commanded the burning of all philosophy and history books from every state except Qin. He also made sure to bury alive a large number of intellectuals in case they caught the writing bug. The guy erased history.

If Ecco’s condition were an event rather than an accident, a happening rather than an act, then Reidier’s role would be that of an explorer as opposed to a creator (or destroyer, for that matter). He cannot take on the responsibility of that day. He cannot bear the weight of it. It must be externalized. Point in fact, rather than taking on the role of a deity in this origin myth,
⁹⁰
Reidier removes himself entirely from the tale. At most, he’s a herald.

This removal of self is even more evident a few seconds earlier, when he admits
what happened is a complete mystery
. It is his most vulnerable admission. However, there is no ego in this statement. No
I
. He doesn’t simply say, “I don’t know what happened.” Instead, he expresses it in third person. He evokes the cloak of “mystery,” affording himself room for deniability, or protection within the puzzle.

Perhaps this is why he pushes with such determination to find the answer of what’s wrong. He can only hold onto his innocence so long, but if he can figure out what’s wrong, if he can fix it, then he can not only save Ecco, but himself as well.

Bertram hesitates. “I wonder, now this is only just, you know, an idea . . .”

“I’m not going to sue you for malpractice Bert.”

“Well, if it happened all at once—”

“It did.”

“Have you ever heard of Korsakoff syndrome?”
*

*
There it is again. Hilary must have already watched this before meeting with Bertram. Why wouldn’t she? It was to her advantage. She didn’t just pull Korsakoff out of thin air before. No. The trick to her Psynar
^®
thing was not to use indiscriminate pings and just see what came back. She sent out very discriminate pings, smart-bomb pings, designed to find their way into the most protected bunkers of secrecy, denial, and consciousness itself. She had set Bertram up. There’s something to this Korsakoff syndrome. Ecco and Korsakoff were the public- and private-key match that would unlock all of this.

Reidier shakes his head no.

“It’s a brain disorder. A rather wide-reaching one at that. One of the symptoms can be retrograde amnesia.”

“Where someone can’t remember who they are?”

“Essentially, although it’s not always tied to identity. Someone
could just be incapable of remembering events that occurred before the amnesia. There tends to be a time gradient involved. Remote memories can sometimes be more easily accessible.”

Reidier’s body posture has completely changed. Instead of being guarded and distant—legs and arms crossed, leaning back, avoiding of eye contact—he’s available and focused—leaning toward Bertram, elbows resting on the table with open arms, focused eye contact. The Korsakoff hypothesis has transformed Reidier from a guilt-laden parent into an enthusiastic student.

“According to Ribot’s Law, recent memories are more likely to be lost than more remote ones.”
⁹¹
Bertram considers a moment. “To my knowledge, there’s never been a case of it in such a young subject. But I guess it could be argued that all Ecco has are recent memories. It’d explain why it seems like he was born yesterday.”

“Shouldn’t he then be unable to do things, like walk and talk?”

Bertram dips his head to the side. “Yes and no. Memory loss may only affect certain ‘classes’ of memory. If the victim were a concert pianist prior to the brain trauma, he might very well forget what a piano is but know how to play. In Ecco’s case, he’s maintained a remarkable skill set but is unencumbered by any expectations about life. Like I was saying before, I think that’s why he’s so gifted.”

“How so?”

“Consider how sketching is taught in an art class.”

“I never took art classes.”

Bertram throws Reidier a look. “Of course you didn’t. Art 101 almost always starts with drawing a still life. An apple, let’s say. The problem that most new students have is they try and draw the apple.”

“You’re channeling the Buddha again.”

“More like Plato, actually. We all have an idea in our head about what an apple is, and what it should look like. Those ideas get in the
way. Instead of drawing what’s there, novices draw what they think is there. What should be there. But any art teacher will tell you, the trick is to not see an apple, but a collection of curves, tones, shadows, what have you. You don’t draw the apple, you draw the shape.”

“Ecco doesn’t see tomatoes, he sees red curves.”

“Precisely. He’s unencumbered by shoulds.”

Reidier leans back, taking it in. “So his lack of ideas is the source of his genius.”

Bertram nods. “At least in theory.”

Bertram’s theory holds within it some remarkable possibilities. Especially if we consider the literal implications of his earlier comment about how Ecco seemed like he “was born yesterday.” If, somehow, Ecco’s clock had reset certain areas of the brain, then this might enhance certain skill sets and attributes possessed by the preverbal. To the point at hand, babies, in fact, have what could be classified as extreme eyesight. They are able to take in (or filter out less) information endowing them with what would comparatively be augmented perception. Observe the picture below of two monkeys and attempt to determine the differences between the two.

The monkeys look identical; it would be nearly impossible to pick out either one of them from a group of ten. They all look the same—unless you’re an infant.

At the University of Sheffield and the University College London, an experiment was conducted on a group of six- and nine-month-olds in which they were shown two sets of photographs of human and monkey faces, including one face they had seen before. Unsurprisingly, both groups could recognize and identify familiar human faces. But only the six-month-olds could distinguish one monkey from another. The results were consistent even when the photographs were presented to them upside down. Researchers hypothesize that as we age, our brains develop to only focus on overall “important” differences between human faces. We filter out what our brains consider extraneous information and, as a result, sacrifice discriminatory abilities.

Consider another study in England performed in 2008 to determine the possible unfiltered perception children have in processing “virgin” colors in a manner drastically different and more intense than adults.
⁹²
Infant eyes absorb colors and then process them in the prelinguistic parts of the brain (right-brain areas), while adults process colors in the brain’s language centers (left side), tinted, as it were, by concepts they already have. As brains age, they become busier and stop bothering to do things like “see” color. Instead, the brain perceives only its idea of color, trading unfiltered perception for a color scheme mediated by the constructs of language.
⁹³
*
Somewhere in growing up, the brain shifts to a language-bound perception of color and all that information is dismissed from then on.

*
My old semiotics professors would have a field day with this. I guess Plato and his whole obsession with his theory of forms was more science than philosophy. Plato asserted that the objects we see aren’t real, but literally mimic the real forms (kind of like that old Steven Wright joke
^Ϋ
). In essence our ideas of things, like say a table, are the only true objects. Fittingly, the concept of form predated the word for it. Most of the words used to describe it have to do with vision:
εἶδος
(eidos)
and
ἰδέα
(idea)
. Both stem from the Indo-European root
weid
, “see.” Apparently, Plato could figure all this out before he even had the proper words for it. I don’t know if that proves or negates his point. A little light-headed, to be honest. Haven’t eaten all day. I wonder if this is where the saying, “I see your point,” comes from.

^Ϋ
“I woke up one morning and looked around the room. Something wasn’t right. I realized that someone had broken in the night before and replaced everything in my apartment with an exact replica. I couldn’t believe it. I got my roommate and showed him. I said, ‘Look at this—everything’s been replaced with an exact replica!’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’”

Similarly, babies also have uncanny hearing abilities. As an evolutionary trait, this was necessary in order to hear the faint approach of a dangerous predator. At a young age, every sound is vital and equally audible, whether it’s raindrops or a mother’s voice down the hall. According to childdevelopment.columbia.edu, infants only a few days old can differentiate between their native tongue and a foreign language. At four months old, they can tell when people are speaking in their native languages without even hearing them. This gift vanishes by nine months of age.
⁹⁴
As with eyesight, the aging brain reduces the influx of information by focusing only on a narrow band of sound, shifting all nonessential information into background noise. Babies transform from universal learners who can pick up and master any language, to specialists in their native sounds, structures, and meanings, within their first year.
⁹⁵

Beyond sight and sound, Ecco might also have tapped into a host of other infant talents. When deprived of one sense or skill set, humans compensate with others, such as how some blind people can develop exquisite hearing or become incredibly adept mental cartographers, mapping out floor plans to the numerous buildings and landscapes they frequent. Babies, who have not fully acquired language, rapidly learn how to read nonverbal clues to determine the emotional states of adults around them. They can be so proficient at interpreting facial and body language that some experts compare it to mind reading.

The fact of the matter is that babies are highly intelligent. Professors Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff codirect the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. They believe a:

baby is a scientific miracle, the best learning machine on the planet, more powerful than the most advanced supercomputer, able to learn languages faster and better than adults, quick to recognize and manipulate the social cues that govern everything from war to animal cookies. Born with one hundred billion neurons . . . babies suck in new information and statistically analyze, comparing it with what they’ve previously heard, seen, tasted, and felt, constantly revising their theories of the world and how it works. By three years old, babies have about fifteen thousand synapses per neuron, three times the synapses of adults. That’s one of the reasons it’s easier to learn foreign languages when you’re young.
⁹⁶