Here & There (36 page)

Somewhere between years four and six, to prevent the brain from being overwhelmed, the number of synapses is cut down by 67 percent.

All of these possibilities resonate with Ecco’s behavior. However, none of it is conclusive, as it is unclear as to how exactly his clock has been reset and precisely where in the developmental process he might fall in all of this.

“How did he end up being like this instead of a bumbling, drooling idiot?” Reidier asks Bertram.

“It all depends how and where the brain has been damaged.”

The word damaged gives them both pause.

“Is something definitely damaged in his brain?”

“If it’s Korsakoff syndrome. We need to run some tests. Brain scans. Completely noninvasive.”

Reidier nods. He picks at the table again. Finally, after almost a minute of silence he asks, “What causes Korsakoff?”

Bertram shrugs. “Usually chronic alcoholism.”

“And all this time I thought it was Eve who was dipping into my absinthe.”

“At least he’s got good taste.”

Reidier chuckles.

“Who knows, though,” Bertram continues. “It could’ve been a seizure or some infection. Like I said, we should take a look.”

Reidier nods, mumbling, “Of course, of course.” His attention has wandered. He stares out across the backyard at the kitchen window. Eve passes back and forth across the frame. “Is there a way to run some tests unofficially?”

Bertram casts a sideways glance at his friend. “I’ve got a lab. Over at the med school, for my work with assistive technology with robotic control.”

“How’s the motor cortex neural interface working?” Reidier asks.

“Quite well. My quadriplegic test subjects can move a cursor around a computer screen with their thoughts. They can type, play games, move robotic arms even. It’s rather impressive. But, yes, toward our purposes I have access to all the equipment we’d need. Multielectrode recoding arrays, fMRI machines, the works.”

“And you’d be amenable to helping?”

Bertram smiles. “Kerek, you know beneath this imposing academic veneer lies a rather eccentric iconoclast. I like to think of myself as independent from the culture of control, as it were. A diligent scientist to the last, but a revolutionary poet at heart.”

Having decided on a course of action—tests—Reidier and Bertram relax. Reidier pours ice tea for the two of them. They sit taking in the late afternoon rays of sun and the soothing sound of crickets.

“Funny,” Bertram remarks about nothing in particular.

“What’s that?” Reidier replies on cue.

“After all these years, it was a bout of memory loss that got us in touch with our past.”

“I imagine I’m not the best at maintaining interpersonal connections over long distances.”

Bertram places a reassuring hand on Reidier’s forearm. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s the way life is, people come together, grow apart—”

The conversation abruptly stops with the sound of creaking. The two turn toward the house. Ecco pushes open the screen door and holds it for Otto, who wanders out carrying a small paper plate covered with macaroni salad. Otto plops himself down on the porch steps. Ecco follows, in kind, sitting next to his brother. Reidier and Bertram watch in silence. Otto pulls a plastic fork out of his back pocket and eats a bite of salad. While chewing, he looks over at his brother and offers him his fork.

Ecco reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a straw.

Otto giggles as he watches Ecco put the straw in his mouth, lean over the plate, and suck a single piece of elbow macaroni off the plate, up the straw, and into his mouth, like a vacuum.

Ecco chews and offers his brother the straw. The two giggle, going back and forth, “drinking” their macaroni salad.

“Well, now, that’s efficient,” Bertram says.

“I think they have the right idea,” Reidier replies, reaching across the table toward the salad bowls.

“They’re amazing boys.”

After a moment, when Reidier doesn’t respond, Bertram turns away from the boys and looks at his friend who’s staring down into a large bowl of tomato salad with finely chopped Bermuda onions, fresh oregano, virgin olive oil, and red Legos.

“Did Ecco do that?” Bertram asks, confused.

Reidier shakes his head no.

“Eve?”

“It’s her idea of sarcasm.” Reidier places it off to the side and reaches for another bowl.

During our lunch, Bertram told me a much more condensed story. He never brought up Ecco’s tomato sculpture, Reidier’s confession, Eve’s coldness. Bertram reduced it all to clinical speak instead, discussing test results, the Korsakoff diagnosis, and his suggestion of doing a more thorough neurological examination.

I’m still unsure as to whether this censorship, or equivocation, was a conscious decision or a subconscious reaction. Perhaps he believed he was distilling for me the salient information from all his time spent with the Reidiers. Colleague to colleague, providing me with the conclusions rather than taking me down all the wrong turns and dead ends of his journey. Obviously, he wasn’t aware of the true nature of my interview and had no conception of Psynaring, nor what my process required. Then again, considering our introduction through the Department, he would naturally respond in like fashion.
Revealing only what he must, but never sharing. On that note, he could have still been resistant to the idea of revealing anything at all about the Reidiers, as they were his patients as much as his friends. Forced to violate doctor-patient confidentiality, he complied only as much as was necessary.

Considering what happened next, though, I wonder if the explanation is much simpler. On a personal level, the loss of the Reidiers makes him scared; on a professional level, insecure; and on an emotional level, unsettled.

In his notes from that day, Bertram Malle wrote,
Enigmas are inherently enticing and prickly, like a spiny seed. They latch on with unpredictable holds. E is, as it were, born again, enhanced by his rejuvenated innocence, for which he is simultaneously canonized and vilified by his respective parents. He is haunted by a past that cannot be remembered. Still I’m surprised. In spite of how fascinating I find E, and all the mysteries that lie within him, it is Mrs. R. who I keep wondering about. Worrying about? What E cannot remember, Mrs. R. cannot forget.

A

TITLE CARD:
GALILEE 6:21

TITLE CARD:
EXPERIMENT 74

MIRROR LAB, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2008-5-5 13:31:00

SPLIT SCREEN, on right side, target room: an intricate maze. A hunk of cheese sits in the bottom right corner.

LEFT SIDE, transmission room: an exact replica of the maze on the right. Only in this one, a hunk of cheese rests at the end in the upper left-hand corner. At the lower right-hand corner, a lab rat, nicknamed JOHN GLENN, is lowered in by a gloved hand.

(NOTE: John is calm in his handler’s hand, clearly used to both the person and the process.)

John knows the drill. He rears up onto his hindquarters, his forelegs pressed against the maze wall for balance. John’s nostrils flare with each rapid inhale as he orients the scent. Then he’s off through the maze.

Without a single misturn, John Glenn navigates his way through the maze and finds the cheese. He devours the cheese.

When he’s finished, a gloved hand comes into view, holding yet another piece of cheese. It carries it over and past John, who once again rears up on his hindquarters.

The cheese is deposited in the bottom right corner of the maze (mirroring the arrangement in the target room).

John flares his nostrils a few more times and is off.

The maze pulses with red light, then a white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.

SOUNDS of the rapid ACCELERATION and DECELERATION of GEARS as the Boson Cannons and Pion Beams constantly reorient into optimized focal positions.

As he approaches the center of the maze, the countdown begins . . .

DR. REIDIER (OS)

In three, two, one, go.

LEFT SIDE, John scampers through the center of the maze.

The Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE.

At 2008-5-5 13:33:32.1331224 a quiet THRUM coincides with John, midstride, turning into a pile of heterogeneous dust [predominately iron diantimonide] that drops to the floor of the maze, devoid of any forward inertia.

NOTE: at 800 picoseconds prior to transmission, on the left side prior to transfer, the maze and John tessellate.

RIGHT SIDE, at 13:33:32.1331224, John appears midstride, just past the center of the target maze.

He slips on the now frost-covered surface of the maze, but continues on. Without a single misturn, John Glenn navigates his way through the maze to the bottom right corner where he
began, and finds the cheese. He devours the cheese.

IS1 O’BRIEN (OS)
(official tone)

Trained Biologic completed second half of maze just under his average time.

(beat. More relaxed tone)

Wow. He did it. You did it.

DR. REIDIER (OS)

Wait . . .

John finishes the cheese.

The handler’s gloved hand comes into view. It slowly reaches down into the maze to retrieve John Glenn.

The lab rat goes berserk and attacks. It’s a flurry of teeth, claws, foamy saliva, and HIGH-PITCHED savage SCREECHES.

The handler yanks his hand back, retreating, leaving John in the maze.

The lab rat immediately calms down and sniffs around.

Beat.

IS1 O’BRIEN (OS)

Jesus.

The HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out.

XI

Curiosity is defiance distilled to its essence.

~Vladimir Onegin

All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Contrary to what television crime dramas might lead one to believe, most murders are pretty straightforward. More than 70 percent of all cases are solved and done so within the first seventy-two hours. This is because most murders are not premeditated: a domestic dispute escalates, someone snaps at the loss of a job. Circumstances, more than character, influence crime. Murderers rarely take precautions or cover their tracks. If it looks like the husband did it, he probably did.

But with psychology, especially Psynaring, the results are rarely tangible and almost never cut-and-dried. And this is why it might be premature to present this next section so soon, before adequate investigation and analysis have been concluded. However, it seems that the nature of the information begs the question of validation. It’s from a
single, unofficial (i.e. non-Departmental) source. As such, only impressions and supposition will ever be derived from it now and later.

Regardless of the “truth” of this, its existence is still telling. If it were manufactured, then the fiction of it reveals a certain awareness of the Department’s motive and methods. If it actually happened, then this provides critical insight into an additional, and heretofore unknown, stress on Reidier as well as providing credence to the sabotage hypothesis. In either case, the way in which it was created and hidden is most revealing.

The Newport Naval Station, following the failed Reidier test, released the collection of Reidier’s binders.
⁹⁷
They are an intricate and enigmatic collection of riddles written in alternating trajectories: left to right, right to left, down, up, spiraled, backward, inverted, transver-sally through pages. If they had been found in an abandoned apartment, they would have been classified as the pathological writings of a lunatic. However, knowing their source and seeing them firsthand, one cannot help but marvel at the elaborately calculated beauty of it all. Its level of detail is hypnotic. It feels designed, following a complex logic with a hidden understanding like that of a master watchmaker.

These binders are not the doodles of an absent mind or raving madman. They are considered, plotted, and mapped out with an intent to hide and to keep. These binders are an answer. They are, without a doubt, Leo’s Notebooks.
⁹⁸

And Reidier is still right; we can’t read them.

At least the Navy can’t.

For the next few weeks, I spent several hours a day poring through the notebooks, mesmerized. Like the countless pilgrims who meditate by
walking the labyrinth on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France, I would trace Reidier’s textual mazes with my fingertips, hoping to find some crack that let me in. Yet while my aesthetic sense draws me to these enigmas, my affinities lie elsewhere.

It is both unorthodox and unauthorized for me to approach anyone outside the Department without clearance. Likewise, I am fully aware of the classified status of any and all documents from or pertaining to the Reidier file.
⁹⁹
That being said, in an effort to enrich and accelerate the report, I sought out help from an external source.

Considering the resistance/restraint exhibited by Bertram due to the Department’s heavy-handedness, as well as the fragile sensitivity of the source, adhering to protocol seemed counterproductive. Moreover, disclosure of this source would be a violation of doctor-patient privilege. As the source is institutionalized and not what would commonly be considered in a right state of mind, I consider (and hope that the Department concurs) that the source is not a security risk.
¹⁰⁰

My source succeeded where the Navy’s (and presumably the NSA’s) codebreakers failed. My source has only successfully deciphered sporadic sections of a little over a page to date (but will continue to play with and puzzle out). Apparently, part of the challenge is that Reidier processed his thoughts through multiple layers of ciphers at a time. He would have encoded his ideas in his head, then further encoded the encryption within another cipher. Literally a mystery wrapped within an enigma, wheels within wheels.