Here & There (12 page)

As insightful as Pierce is, however, he has a glaring blind spot. He initially classifies Reidier as a competitive egoist: one whose ambition is his Achilles’ heel. Later, though, Pierce posits that Reidier is moving for Eve: a selfless act prioritizing her needs above his own. He never acknowledges how incongruous this seems. It’s the contradiction that’s Pierce’s blind spot. It’s his lack of scope.

My intuition tells me that Pierce operates from the philosopher’s view of character. Achilles is angry, Odysseus is cunning, a compassionate person is compassionate. Our traits trickle all the way down. They shape who we are and how we choose what to do. This doesn’t take into account how, as Kwame Anthony Appiah
⁴⁵
describes, the philosopher’s view is being challenged by the psychologist’s perspective. Psychologists, after a hundred years of experiments, are finding that there is no character. Behavior isn’t driven by permanent traits that apply across the board. Rather, someone could be honest at work, but deceptive with his spouse. People don’t have character, but rather a multiplicity of tendencies activated by context. As Paul Bloom of Yale writes, we are a community of competing selves “continually popping in and out of existence.”
⁴⁶

Pierce wants a set character who responds to specific leverage in a specific way every time. His snap judgments, though insightful and most likely correct, are not integrated into a dynamic whole. Rather they’re filed away as foregone conclusions. Accordingly, the road map to Reidier is set.

This blind spot of Pierce’s seems to have also led him astray in his assessment of Malle. While Pierce correctly divines Malle’s utility in relation to Reidier’s work, he overlooks Malle’s usefulness on a
personal level. Although Malle’s professional success has primarily been in the neurological field, his academic accomplishments (especially his early ones, during his time living with Reidier) were in psychology.
⁴⁷
Pierce, however, captivated by his ambitious character assessment of Reidier, classifies Malle merely as a professional asset. He fails to see how Reidier might have a more personal need for Malle: Eve.

Both Pierce and Reidier have played their hands close to their vests. Both apparently withheld and calculated. Interestingly, the two ended up working very well together in addressing the practicalities and necessities of the situation in order to make the project move forward. Ironically, it might have been this very dynamic of considered dealings that locked
The Reidier Test
onto its inevitable course.

A

TITLE CARD:
GALILEE 6:21

TITLE CARD:
EXPERIMENT 25

CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-08-13 09:57

Dr. Reidier enters from transmission room. Shirt, tie, rolled-up sleeves (tweed sport coat rests on chair in front of Contact Button Alpha).

IS1 O’Brien is finishing up the calibration checklist.

DR. REIDIER

We good?

IS1 scratches off last item and nods.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Ok. Let’s go.

IS1 hesitates. Reidier notices. He approaches O’Brien who, clearly uncomfortable correcting an authority figure, mumbles quietly to Reidier and juts his chin out toward the camera.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Oh right, right. Jesus, O’Brien how many times do I have to tell you, for God’s sake, speak up if something isn’t right. I’m not your goddamn commanding officer.

O’BRIEN

Sir, yes sir.

Irritated, Reidier stomps over to his seat to address camera.

DR. REIDIER

Your sense of irony is singular, O’Brien.

INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

As Dr. Reidier continues, 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)

Ok, so yet another go at Biologic. So far we are O for six. Still doing better than Varitek. Ok, well, we have switched our subject up. We’re going with produce now.

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

DR. REIDIER (OS) (CONT’D)

I don’t know, fruit seems to be a nice combination of liquid and solid. Maybe it’ll help. Also, should be fairly easy to detect its properties . . .

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

INT. CONTROL ROOM - CONTINUOUS

DR. REIDIER
(blows out his lips)

Taste, texture, juiciness. I know, not very scientific, but our rigorous scientific process

(throws a look toward O’Brien)

hasn’t yielded much either. Of course, if we’re anywhere near close, we’ll make a more sophisticated and appropriate analysis. Power settings upped to
███
times
█████
eVs while reversing quark spectrum from
███████
to
██
.

Dr. Reidier stares at the camera. He seemingly debates whether there’s more to add. Finally he shrugs and turns back to the console. He flips up the Plexiglas cover over Contact Button Alpha and waits.

IS1 O’Brien, realizing Dr. Reidier is ready, scrambles to get into position with Contact Button Bravo. He nods at Dr. Reidier once he’s at the ready.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Three, two, one, go.

Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien simultaneously press Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo.

CUT TO:

MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

SPLIT SCREEN, RIGHT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: empty reinforced-acrylic sphere over target pad.

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

Orange remains perfectly still.

At 2007-08-13 09:59:17.3948877 the orange is suddenly gone and left in its place is an incredibly viscous and sticky ball of the telltale heterogeneous matter and what is later identified as orange-fruit gunk.

NOTE: for 2400 picoseconds prior to transfer, on the left side, the orange bulges and undulates (think somewhere between watching a baby move in her mother’s stomach and
Alien
) and then freezes in a tessellation for the last 400 picoseconds.

RIGHT SIDE, at 09:59:17.3948877, the orange looking slightly warped. Its spherical shape severely dimpled. On the outside of the acrylic sphere frost immediately accumulates.

TARGET ROOM - 10:00:22

Dr. Reidier stands over the orange that looks like a balloon that has gotten pruney a few days after it was originally inflated. Dr. Reidier cautiously pokes at it.

The orange . . . deflates as if the rind were simply giving up.

Reidier picks it up and struggles to tear it open.

DR. REIDIER

It’s really tough. Like elephant skin.

Dr. Reidier takes out a pocketknife, unfolds the blade, and punctures the rind. He saws almost all the way around the circumference and opens it.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Huh . . .

Dr. Reidier holds open the rind to IS1 O’Brien back in the control booth.

It is empty except for shredded pericarp. No pith, no flesh, no carpels.

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

V

When pen hasted to write, on reaching the subject of love, it split in twain.

~Rumi

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

~Amelia Earhart

As Reidier’s work solidified, his marriage deteriorated. While he was aware of the tension between Eve and him, he misdiagnosed it as an adjustment to change, rather than as a symptom of distance. If Eve’s memoir novella,
A Moi: Graffiti Me
, is taken as more fact than fiction, Reidier not only seems unaware but incapable of changing their course. Tragically, his drive to set things right with Eve was what drove them apart. His successes were too tempting, too blinding to allow him to see the simple truth: Eve was in mourning. For them, for their past, for the invasion into and dismantling of the universe of each other.

The fact that Eve could only begin to write this work a year after the move to Providence is indicative of how profound her grief was
at this time. She herself needed distance to safely approach and unpack the pain from the loss. It was the only way to safely untangle the tension that had tightened as she tried to hold on to the past while he worked to pull them into the future. Or maybe instead the desolate distance is what drove her backward. Unlike the cloistered experience they shared in French Guiana, their present post was more of an exile . . . from each other. Before, Kerek hungered for her. Eve fed his passions (intellectual, professional, physical). Now, she fed his kids. She wrestled with a sense of abandonment as Reidier went out to change the world, demoted from erotic muse to nurturing caretaker. Ironically, this transformation did not result from Eve’s diminishing independence, but rather from Reidier’s (and the boys’) increasing dependence. Although with Eve it was less of a transformation—from lover, to wife, to mother—and more of an acquisition of roles, a contravention of selves. In picking up her pen, however, Eve Tassat could reclaim herself and rewrite her narrative. Only through the writing itself could Eve come to understand herself, her husband, and his work. Through the narrative she somehow managed to breach the contradiction within and understand how her longing for the man-that-was necessitated her support of the man that is. Only through her work could the gravity of their distant dynamic reveal itself and how, at the time, ironically, it was their loneliness that bound them.

Excerpt from
A Moi: Graffiti Me
⁴⁸

She could feel the emptiness. The sheets lay too flat, pulled on her too uniformly. He wasn’t there. She knew where he was, hiding down
in the darkness, with her, fueled by coffee sweetened with crushed up Bennies.

Physicists are machines for turning stimulants into theories, he would paraphrase the mathematician Paul Erdos. The pills helped him keep up with his thoughts, he insisted. She would warn him about burning the candle at both ends, and he would brush it off, saying that’s because there isn’t enough daylight.

He would have waited until her breathing slowed and deepened. That was his idea of a compromise: to lie with her until she slipped from the moorings of consciousness. She imagined him listening for a switch in tempo of her in- and exhales. Leaning over, checking if her eyes were shifting beneath their lids. 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.

It was neither loneliness nor aloneness she felt. Rather, distance seemed like the best approximation, though still an inadequate analogy. It wasn’t distance in the sense of a gap, or any type of chasm, it was instead distance to the unmeasured eye. Having grown up on the edge of the Sahara, she knew and loved vastness, adored the beauty of emptiness. Where others saw expanse, she saw mirages, ideas sprouting up everywhere with infinite room to grow and blossom. The expanse wasn’t daunting or lacking to her. It was an invitation, a playground for her imagination. The uniform void, the span of the between, was a constant comfort, a touchstone of awe that always gave her the room she needed.

This wasn’t that, though.

This was different.

It wasn’t the desert.

It was the mountains, it was the forced perspective.

When she was a little girl, her father took her for a vacation to Switzerland, a kingdom of lakes and mountains. But she never trusted the water, which shimmered with the false promise of clarity. The crystal lakes suggested a beckoning, transparent openness that revealed nothing, instead snuffing out sunlight within their depths. Snowcapped peaks rippled across the watery surfaces, offering only reflections.

The mountains were what drew her. Their fierce silhouettes, jagged against the sky, were at least honest, boasting danger, challenging onlookers with their blatant monstrousness, but promising an undeniable perspective.

One afternoon, while walking along the lake, she got it in her head that her father and she must hike up a mountain. She knew which one. She pointed, pouted, and finally insisted. He laughed and, as was often the case, gave in to her flight of fancy. And so they set out, a spontaneous pair, hand in hand, marching toward adventure.

It was a quest that never arrived. No matter how fast they walked, nor how long they persisted, the mountain refused to come within reach. It lingered by the horizon, still massive, but no larger or closer.