Here & There (26 page)

“That doesn’t sound entirely like a compliment, but I’ll take it, especially if we’re together.”

They both adjust their positions slightly, but stay sitting up together on the floor, her surrounded by him, Eve’s head braced against his chest, Reidier’s chin resting on her shoulder.

“Funny, your people are so much more fascinated with the thinker rather than the thought.”

“L’ homme est beaucoup plus compliqué que ses pensées.”
⁷¹

“Sure, when you put it that way.”

“A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.”

“His thoughts are him. They are who he is.”

“What about his urges, his emotions, his pains?” Eve asks.

“Those are all varying manifestations of thought,” Reidier says.

Eve grunts in response, then rolls back onto her knees, stretches, and places the bookends on the lowest shelf. She then twists around, grabs one of the book stacks off the floor, and drags them over to the shelf.

Reidier sits where she left him and watches. “I’m glad to . . .” he trails off and considers as Eve continues to set up books. “It’s good you’re getting your books out.”

“I know. They were suffocating in their boxes.”

“Right next to Schrödinger’s cat.” He lets out a short laugh at his own joke.

Eve cocks her head at her husband, flashes a quick pity smile, and goes back to unpacking. “Professor Golub and I were ’aving a discussion about Foucault’s extrapolations on the Panopticon.
⁷²
He was asserting there was a certain
mise en scène
aspect to the design. I conceded that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, this could be true. Still, the roots of that term,
mise en scène
, stem from the theater.”

Seeing the bemused look on her husband’s face, she suggests he see if the French Department would let him audit a class, and then explains, “It literally means putting on stage. In the theater, however, the power lies with those producing the scenes, that is the director, designer, and performers. They are in control of what is being presented and how it is being looked at.”

“Got it,” Reidier says.

“This is the complete opposite of what Foucault was emphasizing in
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison.
⁷³
Inside of his architecture, the ‘unequal gaze’ was at play.”

“What exactly is the unequal gaze? Other than what it sounds like,” Reidier says.

“In the prison, it is the constant possibility of undetected observation. In this system, the gaze is not controlled by the performer, i.e. the prisoner, nor is its purpose entertainment. The unequal gaze is a punishment, a form of subjugation, and discipline in and of itself.”
⁷⁴

“Makes sense. Although I still don’t see any connection to you unpacking your boxes.”

“I wanted to find the section where Foucault writes about it and to show it to Spencer.”

“Spencer?”

Reidier’s cell phone rings from inside his sport coat.

“Professor Golub,” Eve says over the ring.

Reidier pulls his phone out of his pocket. “So you had to dig Foucault out of his dungeon.”

Eve nods, and watches her husband glance down and wrinkle his forehead.

The phone rings again.

“It’s Pierce,” Reidier says.

“You going to answer?”

He does. “Hello.

“Well, thank you. And you?

“No, not a bad time at all, I was just—

“That’d be fine. When will you be?”

Reidier’s forehead smoothes out with surprise. “Oh, I didn’t realize you meant, that you were—

“I’ll just—it’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

Reidier hangs up his cell and looks at a now-bemused Eve.

“Pierce is here. In Providence. Wants me to grab coffee with him at the Coffee Exchange down on Wickenden.”
*

*
That place is still there?! A friend of mine used to perform on open-mic nights with just his guitar and his fake sweet-guy persona. I’m not saying the guy was any worse than the rest of us, it’s just that he tried to pretend he wasn’t.

He’d always give you that small town type of hello, in his soft tenor voice, and nod and smile while you talked, like he was genuinely interested. And you really thought he was, unless you watched how he was with others. It was almost exactly the same, nod for nod. Again and again. With everybody. Same smile. Same sweet voice.

I tell you, it took a lot not to gag on my cappuccino foam while he sang his lyrics of “sincerity” and girls got all weak-kneed, humming along to the three-chord progression, not even noticing how he sang through a mask.

That was the worst part. That I was the only one who saw it. No one else picked up on it. No one else smelled the bullshit. No one heard him whisper venom in my ear after I had challenged him on some point.

That’s when I realized he knew, saw how I could see through him. And he hated me for it. But that only made him turn up the sweetness and the charm in public, and then spit up the bile on me in an isolated passing.

Hey, I’ll take Toby and his artistry any day of the week. Toby doesn’t hide it, he flaunts it. Dances with it. And he doesn’t pretend it’s not there and it’s not a game. He embraces the reality of the illusion of it all with the constant reinvention of himself. He changes costume again and again, but purposefully drapes himself in the camouflage of people’s expectations. He’s more honest in transforming into what people want him to be, than any of the lemmings out there convinced they know who they are. There’s a truth to Toby’s deceit.

Even lemmings are lies. Those little famous followers are not in fact nature’s notorious suicide cult. That lovely myth about their tendency toward mass suicide is nothing more than an urban legend propagated by Disney.
White Wilderness
, which won an Academy Award, featured a segment on lemmings and their compulsion to mass suicide. The truth is, the footage of those silly rodents leaping into the ocean was actually staged. They weren’t so much “jumping” as they were being hurled off a cliff by a custom-made, lemming-launching turntable. Not to mention, it wasn’t so much an “ocean” that the lemmings drowned in, but rather a tightly cropped river in the middle of landlocked Alberta, Canada. Not even the natural habitat for lemmings. No, these puppies were shipped in from the North Pole so the dedicated filmmakers could accurately document this bizarre, “natural” compulsion.

Truth isn’t solid.

It’s liquid.

It takes on the shape of whatever container it’s poured into.

“He came up from Washington unannounced? You didn’t know?”

“Not at all. We had our status conference call earlier this week. Do you think it’s something bad?”

She considers Reidier’s question. “Apparently, you are his prize. I think it’s just something we’ll ’ave to get used to. You should go, though, no? I am sure it will be fine.”

Reidier nods and stands up. He makes for the door. At the hall, he stops and turns around. “Would you like me to bring you back something? An ice tea?”

“Peppermint. No white sugar.”

“White sugar,” Reidier says along with her. “Yes, I know. I have met you before.”

She nods once in concurrence. “I trust you, Rye, just not those sneaky, ignorant baristas. I’ll never understand America’s tolerance of bleached sugar. The demerara is so much bet’ah.”

“We’re a processed culture,” he says, heading down the hall.

Downstairs, Reidier stops into the kitchen to retrieve his keys off the counter. He snatches them up off the granite and then freezes. He stands there, keys in his fist hovering at shoulder height.

After a few moments he approaches the kitchen table. The egg crates are nowhere to be found, but sitting on top of the Formica surface, like a dairy ziggurat, is a pyramid of eggs. Five eggs across the base, five levels high, culminating in a single egg apogee.

Reidier reaches out his hand to touch it, but stops just short. His finger droops as he presumably considers the ramifications of upsetting the apple cart, so to speak. He looks around the room and checks the den.

It is empty, and the TV is off.

Noise of the boys playing upstairs echoes down the stairwell.

Reidier returns to the kitchen, once again approaching the table. He stands over it, leaning one way and then the next, to inspect it from a variety of angles.

“They must be hard-boiled,” he says out loud to himself and delicately lifts the top ovum off of its perch. In one fluid release, the pyramid sighs, and the delicate structure rolls outward, as if melting. Reidier, in a Three Stooges–esque reflex, drops his egg while trying to catch the others, and ends up scattering at least a dozen to the floor. Not one of them was hard-boiled.

“Shit,” Reidier says, taking in the devastation left by the miniature avalanche. Pools of albumen and yolk droop across the tabletop and floor like a Dalí landscape.

Excerpt from University of Chicago iTunes episode, Dr. Kerek Reidier lecture from his Physics of Science Fiction course, March 11, 2002

Professor Reidier wanders back and forth in front of an oversized chalkboard, which is below an equally large projector screen. Hands thrust deep into his tweed coat pockets, head down, shoulders raised slightly upward, his winter boots squeak as he paces the length of the slate monolith.

Written on the board in large letters is the phrase
Principium Contradictionis.

“Any Latin scholars in the house?”

A lone voice rolls out from the sea of seated students. “Contradiction principle?”

“Yes. The Principle of Contradiction. One of the so-called three classic laws of thought. Can anyone tell me what the other two are?”

A different voice calls out, “The law of identity.”

“Yes, that most profound of concepts that states an object is the same as itself.
A
equals
A
. A quaint little tautology that we all learned the first day of high school geometry. And the other?”

The students murmur until someone says, “The law of the excluded middle.”

“Glad to see at least some of the homework is seeping in. The law of the excluded middle is the principle that for any proposition, it is either true or its negation is. As Aristotle put it, when you have two contradictory propositions, one must be true and the other false. Unless you’ve been out with Alexander the Great, and he drunkenly asks if he’s great enough to both build and move an unmovable mountain.”

Only a few sporadic chortles from the class.

“Ok, don’t insult conquerors, just their wussy tutors, check.”

More laughter this time.

“The principle of contradiction is the basis for all of these. It posits that contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time, e.g. the two propositions,
A
is
B
and
A
is not
B,
are mutually exclusive. Seems believable enough. It’s either raining right now or not raining right now. Right? But consider a little situation discovered by Bertrand Russell a hundred years ago. There’s a barber who lives in a small town. The barber shaves all those men and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?”

Dead silence.

“It hurts to think about, I know. That’s philosophy for you.” Reidier leans forward, launching himself away from the lectern. “Someone once posited that physics, at its highest level, becomes philosophy. I think whoever said that just wasn’t good enough at math.”

Snickers ripple through the class. A student speaks up, “Isn’t math at the highest level, philosophy?”

Reidier smiles at the crowd, “I was hoping I could just slip that little tautology right by you. It’s a fair point. Our beloved Bertrand Russell did once say, ‘To create a good philosophy, you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician,’ which one could interpret as philosophy at its highest level is just mathematics. Still all of this begs the question, what is mathematics?”
*

*
I feel like my head should hurt, and I should be more than a little confused, but somehow this all makes sense. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m about a third of the way through a liter of Highland Park Scotch and am reading this like it’s a high school Spanish assignment. Cruise over the details and go for gist.

“Einstein believed that ‘As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’
*
Me, I believe math is merely a language. It’s nature’s accountant. Math is no more of a philosophy than a picture of a cake is a dessert. Still, it has its uses, one of which is that it provides a nifty
way to both explain and sidestep paradoxes. Which brings us to today’s science-fictional feat: teleportation. I’m sure the majority of you associate this with the phrase, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’”
⁷⁵

*
Toby loves that one. As did the head honchos at Anomaly. So much so, that they actually approved my hypothetical project proposal, or, more formally, my Project Proposal of the Hypothetical. They bought into it hook, line, and sinker: website development, graphic design team support, and a sizable marketing budget all for me to sell a hypothetical.

Did I already mention this? I’m getting swamped by all of this paper. And the scotch probably isn’t helping much either.
In vino veritas
, sure; but
in Highland Park . . . lacuna
. I’m not about to start thumbing back through all of my notes.

Anomaly’s giving me free rein to launch a campaign for
Chameleon
. It’s a mind-blowing, game-changing, revolutionizing new product. And it doesn’t even exist. Scratch that, it’s not even defined. The concept is that it will serve as a type of advertisement for us. A proof of concept. The pitch is simple, if we can sell something that’s not even real, imagine what we can do with your product.