Here & There (32 page)

“How so?”

“All orbits, I believe, are elliptical.
*
Regardless of the trajectory taken and the distance traveled, there’s the inevitability of a return. Like Reidier into my life.”

*
Orbits are in fact elliptical as described by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. The degree of the warping, however, varies with each planet. The earth’s is in nearly a perfect circle, while Pluto’s is a longer and thinner ellipse.

He swallows another mouthful of Half-Crazed beef.

“So you always knew he would come back?”

“Not in any conscious way. I wasn’t awaiting Reidier per se but was unsurprised when he came back into my daily life.”

I liked Bertram, and more and more found myself veering off course, sometimes enjoying the direction of the conversation and forgetting the focus of my inquiry.
*
“If I remember correctly, ellipses are differentiated by their degree of eccentricity.”

*
So apparently Hilary’s back to injecting these little personal touches. I thought we were done with that. Guess it’s just subject to the tides of her process. Is this merely a personal observation, something she’d edit out of the final draft, or within this is some clue?

“I think you’re right. How wonderfully accurate. Kerek obviously would have had a very eccentric curvature.” Bertram pauses in revelation. “Ellipses also have two foci. Two forces fighting for the center position.”
*

*
Mom ought to know all about that.

I ask the obvious question. “What were his?”

“His work and his family. The two pulls he felt on himself, sometimes in opposition while other times in conjunction.”

“And that’s where you came in?”

“I suppose it is.”

Reidier had approached Bertram about testing and possibly diagnosing Ecco. To both fix Ecco and help Eve. Was this Reidier’s true motivation in seeking out his old friend? Was Stage 4 an official cover?

“Who was Ecco?” I ask.

“At home or not at home?”

The question gives me pause. “Was there a difference?”

“I guess the more accurate question is who was Ecco with his family, and who was he on his own? The environment itself precipitated drastically different results from the boy. The simple act of observing him seemed to impact him.”

“As if he were performing for you?”

Bertram fidgets with his silverware, ignores my question, and avoids eye contact. It’s the first time I’ve ever detected any nervousness from him. “I initially misdiagnosed him. At first glance, he was a textbook case for a savant.”

In the footage,
⁸²
Bertram’s first afternoon “testing” Ecco couldn’t have seemed less probing. It was framed as a Saturday afternoon barbeque.

The boys play outside in the backyard, while Reidier and Bertram drink ice teas at a distance. They gossip about old classmates, discuss the beauty of Victorian architecture and the hassle of upkeep that goes along with living in a historical landmark, tease each other about
how soft a science psychology is or how physics is merely philosophy for math geeks who can’t write well.

Eve is happy for the distraction. She goes back and forth from harvesting mint from her herb garden for the tea, to pumping Bertram for embarrassing stories about Reidier from their college days.

Bertram obliges with a story about how Reidier ended his brief career in collegiate a cappella. For the Parents’ Weekend concert, Reidier wanted to amp up his group’s wow factor and came up with an idea to electromagnetize the stage in Burnham Hall so that the group could have “floating microphones.”

“You can do that?” Eve asks.

“Of course.”

“Sort of,” Bertram amends Reidier’s assertion.

“It worked.” Reidier smiles proudly at his wife.

“It did,” Bertram concedes. “For almost ten seconds.”

“I told everybody, no metal of any kind,” Reidier defends himself.

“Like with an MRI?” Eve asks, enjoying how Bertram teases her husband.

“He did. He was very thorough, I saw the list he passed out to the group.” Bertram attempts to maintain a serious tone. “No watches, rings, pens, belts, tie clips, glasses.”

Eve stands, hands on hips, wanting more.

A practiced raconteur, Bertram takes a long sip of ice tea. “You’re right, Eve; this mint mixed with the lemon balm really gives the tea a zing.”

“Bertram,” she scolds him in her French accent. “What ’appened?”

Bertram raises his eyebrows to Reidier and nods for him to tell Eve.

Reidier sighs, eyes cast down, and quietly mutters one word, “Zippers.”

Eve leans her head in, repeating what she thinks her husband said, “Zippers?”

Reidier nods. Bertram’s face contorts with contained laughter.

“What ’appened with ’ze zippers?” Eve asks, letting out a little laugh.

“It was a very powerful electromagnet. Khaki and denim are only so strong,” Reidier sighs.

A look of surprise and horror rises in Eve’s face.

“It was a very different kind of wow factor,” Bertram manages to get out before he explodes in laughter.

Eve likewise disintegrates into hysterics.

“Everybody panicked after their pants ripped,” Bertram says. “One of the guys accidentally kicked over the mercury arc, which blew the whole system, blacking out the entire building, all of campus, and half of the city.”

“Not to mention the mercury spill,” Reidier adds.

Between laughs, Eve manages to ask if anyone was hurt.

“Eight seconds in to the all-male a cappella rendition of
Flash Dance
, and Kerek’s stardom had burnt out.”

“’Zay kicked you out?”

“The school banned him from any and all performance spaces.” Bertram collapses onto a bench and tries to catch his breath.

The afternoon continues on with similar levity. Bertram seems to act as a foil for Reidier and Eve, essentially as a medium through which they can connect to each other. Sporadically, throughout the afternoon, they become affectionate toward one another: a hand on the small of the back, leaning against each other, hooking a finger in the other’s belt. The tension that has pulled at them for the past few months seems to have been cut free. Perhaps in helping them recollect the past, Bertram has coaxed them back into the present.

It’s not until Eve finally picks up on how the two keep maneuvering, facing one way, and then another, that she realizes they are taking turns surreptitiously observing the boys. “All this time, I thought we were ’aving a nice leisurely afternoon. How silly of me not to take note that you two are ’ard at work.” And with that she retreats to the wicker bench on the veranda.

Reidier shrugs and shakes his head, murmuring, it seems, some sort of explanation to Bertram.

Eve attempts to force herself to read. Her gaze, however, keeps drifting above the edge of her novel toward the men in the yard. Finally, in an anxious flurry of motion, she retreats into the house, calling for Otto to come help mommy in the kitchen.

It’s Bertram, not Reidier, who seems concerned with Eve’s exit. He suggests that maybe they should talk to Eve. Apologize. Reidier dismisses the idea with the slightest of shrugs, and mumbles something about how she only sees through cucumber eyes.
⁸³
The awkwardness dissolves into silence.

What had been a social Saturday afternoon, full of anecdotes, cold drinks, sunshine, and the laughter of children becomes an impromptu lab experiment. Bertram and Reidier standing on the lawn, staring at the sandbox. A pair of lost UFO hunters searching for crop circles in the carpet.

The two scientists have shed all of the familiarity and affection that was between them. Instead of teasing each other, they stand together in antiseptic observation. Mirror images of each other,
staring at Ecco. Perhaps they’re afraid of disturbing the experiment. The friendship has molted off, leaving only a raw sense of purpose.

As Heisenberg himself could have predicted, their hypnosis is ultimately broken by the subject itself. Ecco, sensing the attention, breaks away from his play and looks back at them. The three consider each other. Ecco is unfazed by their gaze. Quite the contrary, he seems more fascinated with it than the toys and sand he was playing with.

Bertram begins to move, but Reidier stops him with a quiet, “Wait.”

The three remain in this quiet abeyance for several minutes. They watch him, and he them. It’s not aggressive. Nor is it play (even though it might sound like a staring contest). Ever so subtly, Ecco begins to move. His right elbow circling. His finger tapping against his thigh. It takes a while for Bertram to realize Ecco is mirroring Reidier’s absentminded fidgeting.

Bertram describes it best after almost ten minutes. “I feel like we’re in a scene out of
Gorillas in the Mist
.”

Reidier nods with an mmhm.

“Only he’s Diane Fossey.”
*

*
Sounds a lot more like
Children of the Corn
, drawing crop circles in the sandbox. What is wrong with this kid?

“What do you make of it?” Reidier asks.

“It’s remarkable focus. An unerring curiosity.”

“In you or him?”

Reidier and Bertram laugh.

The spell broken, Ecco mimics them with his own laugh. So adept is he at matching up his own laugh to theirs in both timbre and rhythm, it startles them into silence. For a moment they all stare at each other. Finally Ecco’s hands drift back into the sand, and he again excavates the silt into abstract patterns.

The manner in which these two old friends approach the Ecco question couldn’t be more revealing about the differences between them. Bertram is excited by the uniqueness of the child and content to observe him for as long as possible. Reidier instead is consternated, eager to classify his child’s deficiency, and determined to map out his psychological trajectory. Bertram watches, Reidier studies. Bertram wants to see, Reidier must sequence. One wants to understand, the other to master. Still, despite disparity in their methods, anyone who watches them can detect a similar sense of purpose. If one merely looks past Bertram’s soft-bearded smile and considers his eyes, he’ll find a fiery excitement. Reidier stands just to his left, his eyes dancing with the same spark. It is a look of longing, drawn out by the curiosity to know, driven by the arrogance to grasp. The two of them stand together fueled by Promethean ambitions.

The moment ends with a single word. Reidier’s need to contain, to categorize and quantify, takes over. His habitualized training is reflex at this point, but also a protective effort to bottle up the emotions threatening to bubble up and overwhelm. It is the best way he’s learned to manage the unknown. He falls back on the scientific method itself, and offers up a hypothesis: “Autism?”

“It was simultaneously surprising yet expected,” Bertram shares with me in our interview. “Here he had gone for so long, not telling me anything, letting me see for myself, not muddying the water. He wanted, as I told you, my complete and unbiased opinion. And half an afternoon into my investigation, he tosses out his hypothesis, rippling the surface, blurring my view into the depths of his son.

“That being said, it was his son. And a boy who exhibited enigmatic behavior that was amplified when brought into disturbing relief with his twin brother. Otto was a doppelgänger of normalcy
that only accentuated Ecco’s otherness. A contrast so painful, so glaring, that Eve, his mother, couldn’t even see Ecco anymore. Blinded by the difference.”

Bertram stops for a moment, looking down and to the left. His eyes fill with sadness. “As much as Reidier wanted my professional perspective, I think he craved my personal support more. He needed to voice his fear. And he couldn’t with Eve. He wanted me for himself as much as for his son. Sharing his suspicion with me made it easier to bear. Heal his son, his wife, his family. He could lean on me a little.”
*

*
Sometimes voicing a fear is the worst thing you could do. Speaking it out loud is what wakes the dogs of fury. Gets their attention. Makes your presence known, and you either find yourself running like hell, ’cause as crazy as it sounded in your head, turns out your fear was right, or you find yourself in a tight jacket on the way to Bellevue (the nuthouse, not the bar that shares a backdoor with Siberia up on 40th).

No, fear is your friend. Fear keeps you safe. Fear’s what makes sure you don’t just pack this whole thing up, lock the door behind you, run out, and go cry to Lorelei.

Fear’s my guardian angel.

“As a friend and a professional?” I ask.

Bertram pauses in surprise. “Now that I think about it, maybe Kerek was relying on my professionalism more than I realized. Maybe he knew, deep down, that he couldn’t possibly remain objective, but hoped that somehow I could pull him back to center. Keep him grounded. Guide him past the fear.”

Fear is a powerful motivator.
*
A constant presence that dominates all of our lives, more than most of us care to admit. We treat it as something to be avoided, tamped down, repressed. We encourage each other not to live in fear. Devise methods to cope with it. Go to any Barnes &
Noble and you’ll find entire aisles of self-help literature. No matter what the context, each of these books has the same basic spine, a core of fear.

*
Agreed.

What’s rarely discussed, though, is how necessary fear has been for our survival. Fear has been shaped by evolution over thousands of years. Individuals who were sufficiently afraid successfully avoided dangerous predators, precarious cliff edges, lethal rip tides, dark labyrinthine caverns, and the likes thereof. The fearful maximized their probability for survival, living long enough to successfully procreate and instill those same fears in their offspring so that they could also go on to procreate.

Fear is our inheritance.

Fear is in our DNA. We are wired for it.

At Carnegie Mellon’s Infant Cognition Laboratory, David Rakison has been using innovative techniques to uncover how and when babies learn about the world. He says that “babies are born with a tendency to pay more attention to the shapes of snakes and spiders than to other kinds of creatures.”
⁸⁴
Even five-month-olds pay more attention to drawings of spiders on a video screen than they do to a scrambled version of the same picture. In other studies, psychologists have found that both adults and children detect images of snakes from among a variety of nonthreatening objects much faster than they pick out fish, butterflies, or flowers. Similarly, Susan Mineka at Northwestern University, working with monkeys, showed that primates’ brains are wired to react more strongly to snakes. We’re biologically disposed to be afraid. This tendency, along with our unparalleled ability to also pass down knowledge of danger, is one of the reasons we’ve been such a successful species.