Here & There (6 page)

A

TITLE CARD:
GALILEE 6:21

TITLE CARD:
EXPERIMENT 7

CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-07-17 09:44

Dr. Reidier at console. Wears tweed sport coat - brown, elbow patches, lapel pin, size 42 regular

Addresses camera . . .

DR. REIDIER
(sighs)

Experiment seven, Inanimate Transfer. While attempts four through six did successfully teleport whole atoms and molecules, the macro, cubic structure was not preserved. Instead of reconstituting a cube, a pile of remarkably fine graphite dust was received.

INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

As Dr. Reidier continues, the Mirror Lab comes to life. Fiber-optic cables, circumscribing the Entanglement Channel, flare red for several seconds, then morph into an orbiting white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.

DR. REIDIER (OS)

In an effort to counteract the dissociation, the catalyzing quark burst has been raised to
███████
███████

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

DR. REIDIER (OS) (CONT’D)

Furthermore, the quark color wavelength has been altered
███████
████

The Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.

DR. REIDIER (OS) (CONT’D)

As with previous attempts, Inanimate is uniform carbon, graphite-layered, planar structure in a cube with sides measuring 81 mm.

INT. CONTROL ROOM - SAME TIME

Dr. Reidier tilts open the Plexiglas cover of Contact Button Alpha. While at far end of console, IS1 O’Brien does the same with Contact Button Bravo. Dr. Reidier absentmindedly taps his lapel pin twice, in a ritualized manner.

Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien simultaneously engage Contacts.

CUT TO:

MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

SPLIT SCREEN, on right side CLOSE-UP of an empty reinforced-acrylic sphere over target pad.

LEFT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: graphite cube sits inside reinforced-acrylic sphere over the transmission pad.

Cube remains perfectly still.

At 2007-07-17 09:47:11.5709411 a quiet THRUM coincides with the inside of the transmission acrylic sphere being suddenly coated with residue [subsequently determined to be a heterogeneous mixture of atoms and molecules ranging from P to Rb (including a variety of compounds within this range); the lowest concentration of elements consisting of Al and Y, whereas the concentrations increased from both extremes toward Fe, which had the highest].

NOTE: While undetectable to the naked eye, when high-speed footage was slowed down, a phenomenon was detected for the last 800 picoseconds on the left side. During this increment, a seeming digital artifact appears on screen as the cube seems to tessellate then (slightly) shudder.

RIGHT SIDE, at 2007-07-17 09:47:11.5709411, the graphite cube appears. On the outside of the acrylic sphere, frost immediately accumulates.

CONTROL ROOM - 09:47:17

IS1 O’Brien reads information off a screen.

IS1 O’BRIEN

Initial scan, structural integrity intact.

Dr. Reidier nods, sighs, collapses back into his chair.

INT. MIRROR LAB -

The HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out as the machine powers down.

GEARS SPINNING NOISE ramps up and down as the Boson Cannons and Pion Beams retract.

The circling indicator lights surrounding the Entanglement Channel orbit to a standstill, flash green, and then switch off.

II

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

~Benjamin Franklin

Where thou art—that—is Home.

~Emily Dickinson

Excerpts of Interview Transcript and Author’s Psynar
^®
Notes with Clyde Palmore, Professor of Materials Engineering, Brown University

April 3, 2009

“It was the second time he had broken the basement. Eve was gone for the weekend. She had taken the kids to New York, I believe. See some family, catch a show, you know the drill. Anyhow, she was gone, and Reidier was working down in the basement. He had set up a makeshift lab down there—well, a pretty high-end makeshift lab actually. I imagine Eve had been getting on him about late hours and
staying in the office too much. The basement workshop was sort of a compromise. At least it was Reidier’s attempt at a compromise.”

Clyde lets out a curt snort and shakes his head. More a befuddled amusement than a gesture of judgment. He’s a cherubic, middle-aged man with a shock of wavy gray hair. He carries his weight mostly in his gut but wears it well. It sort of lends an outward physical softness to his easy, welcoming demeanor. This is further emphasized by his rumpled casual attire: dark blue Polo shirt, wrinkled khakis, and a limp sport coat that dangles off the back of his chair.

Clyde rubs the back of his right thumb along the crease in his Polo shirt where his belly dives into his chest. A dark patch of sweat bleeds out, demarcating the change in topography. “I sort of got the feeling that it was more of a jury-rigged gesture than an actual solution.”

“How’s that?” I ask.

“Well,” he leans back in his chair, securing his sport coat’s precarious position, “I guess it was his tone. Very curt. Tense. Urgent, bordering on panic. Clearly, there was a lot of tension down in that basement.”

“That’s pretty specific of you.”

“Somebody calls you in the middle of a Sox game on Saturday afternoon about how he broke the house and how quickly could you get there, it tends to stay with you.”

“I’d imagine so. So you went over?”

“Right over. Anybody else calls you, saying something like that, you laugh and hang up. But Reidier, well he just wasn’t a prankster. Yeah, let’s leave it at that. Plus, you always knew that with Reidier it was going to make a great story.”

“Broken homes often do. At least according to Tolstoy.”

Clyde laughs. “
Anna Karenina
, right?”

“I’m impressed.”

“What, you think just ’cause I’m an expert at load engineering stress I don’t dabble in literature?”

“Not at all, Professor Palmore.”

He chuckles some more and winks at me. “I had a fifty-fifty shot, it was either that or
War and Peace
. Anyhow, this was a more literal predicament, not literary, otherwise that would have been right up Eve’s alley.”
¹⁸
He winks again. “There was a crack with an amplitude of up to nine centimeters at points that ran about three and a half meters laterally through the concrete foundation of Reidier’s basement.”

“How did he do that?”

“That’s exactly what I asked . . . But Reidier, he had this frantic look in his eye. He just stared at the wall and asked ‘Can you fix it by six p.m., Sunday?’”

“That’s when Eve would be home?”

“Exactly. He told me it had to be just us, and I couldn’t tell anybody. Eve couldn’t know. She’d leave him, he said. She almost had the last time, apparently. I told him it’s just concrete, but he kept shaking his head saying she’d leave him, she’d leave him.”

Clyde stops short. He rubs his thumb along the crease in his shirt again. His mouth turns inward, as he sucks in his lips.

He looks up at me, across the desk. “I guess it’s all right me talking about it now. Since uh . . . I guess it’s ok. If you think it’d help your report.”

“I’m not even sure this story has to go in. It just gives me a better understanding of what led up to—how everything unfolded,” I assure Clyde.

He nods. “Anyhow, we did it. I had to come down here and pilfer my shotcrete gun.”

“Shotcrete?”

“Sprayable concrete. The wet process is best for high-strength applications. It’s good for reinforcing and averages about 5,500 psi. I
added some accelerators to the mixture to get it dry as fast as possible. Then all we had to do was smooth it down with an air sander. We were done by lunchtime on Sunday. The only problem was the discoloration.”

“The patch was a different tone?”

“Yeah. I said Eve probably wouldn’t notice, but Reidier was not about to risk it.”

“So how’d you guys match the color?”

Clyde grins. “We didn’t. Reidier had a computer projector down there. He pointed it at the patch, found an image of Picasso’s Bullfighter on the web, threw it up on the wall, traced it, painted it in with black paint, and voilà, our very own Purloined Letter. See, you’re not the only one who can make literary allusions.”

Through Clyde’s bizarre anecdote, we find a window into the Reidier household. It’s a home held together by tension, very much in danger of snapping apart both figuratively and literally.

Tension is a unique type of interpersonal stress. It must, by its very nature, build. It is not something that can spring out of a single incident or misunderstanding. It’s an artifact of a couple’s history requiring investment and stakes. Likewise, it cannot be unbound with a single gesture—at least not safely or constructively. Pressure can be relieved with a variety of situation-specific tactics. An explosive confrontation can be diffused, but not dismantled. Without a systematic teardown and rebuild, however, it’s only a matter of time before the tension coils around and pulls everything taut.

Unfortunately, too often in relationships many of us don’t have the foresight, the tools, or the wherewithal to disentangle ourselves from the roots of the tension. We tell ourselves it’s not the right time to do a proper unraveling. We just need to wait until things relax, we
convince ourselves. And then we inevitably wait too long, we wait until we’re bound up in an agglomeration of knots and gnarls, too entangled and too turned around to even be looking the right way when something snaps. Our lifeline begins to fray with all the weight pulling on it, and we’re beyond unprepared. We’re so wound up, we can’t even think straight, and all we can focus on is how to cut out a little slack.

That’s what happened with Reidier and the basement. Disoriented by stress, hampered by fear—fear of professional failure, fear of losing Eve and the boys—he had a knee-jerk reaction, and he ran with it. Fix the basement. Fix the basement and everything will be ok. Eve will be ok. His work will be ok. And the house will be fine.

Phillip Moffitt, founder of the Life Balance Institute,
¹⁹
explores this myopic mind-set in much of his writing. He observes how the rationalization is always “the same—‘Once this situation is remedied, then I will be happy.’ But it never works that way in reality: The goal is achieved, but the person who reaches it is not the same person who dreamed it. The goal was static, but the person’s identity was dynamic.” In Reidier’s case, the goal was clear and achievable.

The basement foundation is cracked.

He had done something like this before. It had been a problem.

Eve can’t handle another incident. She won’t handle it.

Fix the foundation. Fix Eve.

What he didn’t realize is that he was addressing the wrong problem. Reidier was trying to fix their house—a static goal. Eve wanted him to fix their home—a dynamic desire.

Belongings are never just objects. They’re metaphors. Something happens, an emotional alchemy of sorts transforms a thing into a possession. It happens every day, all the time. A young child plays
with a bunch of beads and string for an arts and crafts project. A parent thinks nothing of it, until a bead goes up the nose, a scream pierces the air, a family drives to the hospital, and a green bead is removed from deep within the nasal passage, washed, and strung on a blue string to dangle from a father’s neck, metamorphosed into his most valuable piece of jewelry.
*

*
I haven’t thought about this for years. I was playing with Remi Allens. We went to Hoey Camp together Mondays through Fridays from 9:00-11:30. In the fields out back, the big kids would play baseball with Mr. Hoey as the automatic pitcher. Inside, Mrs. Hoey would monitor the Ping-Pong and bumper pool tournaments and run the Arts ‘n Crafts activities. I don’t think there was a family within a ten-mile radius of that place that wasn’t rife with woven pot holders, gimp bracelets, and bead necklaces.

Most days I played baseball. Even though I was technically a little kid, I knew how to hit Mr. Hoey’s underhand knuckleball. It was raining that day, though, and the game was called. While some undaunted souls still braved the elements, climbing the slippery jungle gym or playing chicken with centripetal force on the playground merry-go-round, I felt the call of the indoors.

As typically happens on rainy days, the Ping-Pong tables were mobbed, and the bumper pool had a queue ten kids deep. Arts ‘n Crafts it was. Mom had made me swear off potholders after I finished filling the second drawer with my handwoven masterpieces. So beads it was.

Remi sat next to me. She had already finished weaving some purple and pink gimp into a tight box-stitch key chain and was currently working on the ever-elusive spiral stitch to make, of all things, a pulley system. A gimp show-off if you asked me. Still, it was impressive, and I found myself paying less and less attention to the bead necklace I was making.

By eleven thirty we had Remi’s pulley system anchored with a bag of marbles applying enough tension to the system to hoist a Ping-Pong paddle into the air. Meanwhile, my bead project was in a sad state that more closely resembled a three-day-old candy necklace ravaged by seagulls than a strand of colorful pearls. Mrs. Hoey, the altruistic liar that she was, suggested I take it home to finish up my beautiful start there. Clearly, she did not want this piece of junk cluttering up her craft table scaring away other would-be boy and girl artisans.