Here & There (71 page)

-----Memo-----
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2) a communiqué from Larry Woodbury to Donald Pierce,

From: Larry Woodbury [mailto: [email protected]]

Sent: Monday, September 8, 2008 11:18 p.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject: redundant architecture

Pierce,

Engineers finished work. All kernel relays have been hardwired in. Team predicts this will circumvent issues we’ve been having with software hacks penetrating R’s encryption. Any and all activities that occur in the Gould Island Control Room will be mirrored on your console in Observation Deck. Should provide you with unfettered and unadulterated access to everything Reidier is doing. Whatever
under the radar experiments
he might be hiding/running within official experiments will be relayed to you instantaneously. Whatever happens at his console, happens at yours.

Tech team has also rigged a secondary storage system inside the university’s servers to duplicate all of the data Reidier runs through or already stores there, so you’ll be able to analyze the copied information without Reidier knowing.

~L. Woodbury

My dearest Daniel,
*

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and 3) a letter from Hilary . . .

I hope this letter finds you intact. If you’re reading this, then my precautions didn’t quite work out as planned. In a way this letter is itself (if ever read) an admission of defeat, an acknowledgment that all of my efforts to protect you with an insulated distance were for naught. Not to mention a testament to my contradictory efforts: Why go to all this trouble to hold you at arm’s length for my entire process only to entangle you after I’ve stopped? Why leave the key for you, the research, this letter?

I can only imagine the knowing sneer on your face while reading this.
Why indeed
, you had already asked yourself.

Selfishness
, I’d say. At the end of the day, I needed my son to know me. To know how much I love him, despite the consequences.

Narcissism
, you’d reply, then counter how at the end of the day, I needed a reader to know my work. To marvel at its insight and carry it forward. Damn those consequences too.

I miss arguing with you. I miss sparring with your passion, laughing at your frustration with me, admiring how sharp your mind has become, how my little boy can now outmaneuver me. Sometimes.

I don’t trust myself on the train ride I have ahead of me. On two different trips, I thought I saw you walking up the train car aisle. I’ll have to take an Ambien to get through Penn Station without getting off. The impulse has been overwhelming every time I’ve come through. A visceral need to see my son. I feel untethered, like I’m drifting away in every direction at once and powerless to do anything about it. But if I could just see Danny. How I wish to hop off of Amtrak, hop on the downtown C, surprise you at work and take you out for lunch. If I could simply touch your hand across a restaurant table, see your silhouette in the sunlight as you turn your head, the slope of nose and curve of chin that describes the same profile captured in my first sonogram, the world could take shape again, regain its weight. And then I wouldn’t mind disintegrating so much. I know it’s mundane, but there’s a simple joy a mother gets watching her son eat. At least once during every meal we’ve shared together, there’s a moment when I marvel at this full-grown man who was a part of me, drew all sustenance from me, who now sits across the table, towering over me, echoing mannerisms of his father.

I miss you both so much. This ordeal, this isolation weighs on me—no, that’s not right, it’s not a pressure from the outside. The force is internal, it grows in me, taking hold of my chest, reaching up my esophagus, sometimes crushing my throat from the inside out.

But if I get off that train, what would I say? What could I tell you? You were so angered by our last “conversation,” by my taciturnity, by my distance. My evasive, protective answers would only set off the tinderbox of dried-up memories you’ve been filling up for years.

I rely on Clyde and Bertram’s paranoid warnings to bolster my will. For all we know, the Department’s been staking out your office at Anomaly for months. It’s almost certain they’ve been listening in on our conversations, tracking our disagreements, and taking the temperature of our relationship. Surfacing now to indulge my need to see you would not only pop me up on their radar, it would make you a potential target.

I can manage my son’s anger, but not his loss. I will not ensnare you in the Department’s skein.

But I can’t leave you with nothing. I can’t leave you to simply swallow our acid-coated last words.

By now I’m sure you’ve put many of the pieces together. You’ve gotten to know the Reidiers. You’ve honed your own suspicions about the Department’s ambitions, not to mention Beimini’s machinations. I’m sure you have developed a sense for the tectonic pressures at play in the final few months leading up to
The Reidier Test
: Kerek’s drive, Eve’s fear, Ecco’s deterioration. The tumor eating away at Eve’s sanity—and Kerek’s. He had to simultaneously reject and embrace his evolution into the Destroyer of Death, dance along the border of the finale of frontiers. It was the only way out, and the only way to save Eve.

The Reidier Test
was Kerek’s future.

The Reidier Test
was Pierce’s legacy.

Blinded by their own agendas, they both misread their barometers. The wind had blown them in different directions and finally sent them spinning out of control toward one another, two hurricanes tossing an atom bomb back and forth.

An incident and accident. A triumph and catastrophe.

I am sorry for pulling you into all this, Daniel. The stakes swirling around this spin with a hungry fury. It is what has drawn us apart and now funnels us together. We have become the report’s collateral damage. Our distance is the last line of defense for the Reidiers, maybe the world. It sounds histrionic, yes, but the destructive capability of this singularity is too great a secret.

The closer I get, the more important it becomes to hide Reidier’s success and survival.

My proximity is toxic.

Are you touching your scar right now? The resentment locked in its tissue is a constant irritation. For too long, ever since your father died, my work has cleaved through our relationship. It was always so imminent, so imperative, and so masking. I could disappear into it and leave my sadness at home with you and the ghost of your father that I saw in every one of your gestures and smiles. He lived in you, a constant incarnation of my loss. The despair of losing him was too much to swallow, and the shame of abandoning you too difficult to stomach. Work was my salvation, an outlet that I ironically justified as for you. I needed to work to support us while leaving you completely unsupported.

I know that’s why you fell. And why you let go.

I should’ve been in the hospital waiting room. I should’ve been waiting back at the dorms with your bags packed and ready to take you home. I should’ve never forced you to go to boarding school. If I had been able to look past myself, I would’ve seen you “accidentally” leave your key in your room when you snuck out to get high and drunk at the water tower. You were a teenager after
all, these things happen. I should’ve known you would’ve shrugged it off and climbed the dogwood out front, shimmied up the branch that reached out to the study room’s Juliet balcony on the second floor, like you had done so many times before. I should’ve guessed your adolescent mind would disregard the risk of leaping out across the void. After all it was only a body-length away, and you were more than capable. I should’ve predicted you’d make the jump, hook your arm over the railing as soon as your torso thumped hard against the concrete balusters. I should’ve understood how you would’ve felt in that moment, dangling from the second story, locked out of your dorm, exiled from your home, fatherless with an absentee mother who couldn’t manage to snap out of her own grief long enough to help you carry yours. What else could you do? Something had to give. Something had to snap.

So you let go.

You couldn’t have known that the branch had broken in the storm the previous week. You couldn’t have guessed that it had landed just so and the mud had hardened around it. You couldn’t have calculated that the broken edge would be propped up at just the right angle to pierce your skin, slide in just below your rib cage, and scrape your liver. All you knew is you wanted out. And one way or another, this was your way out.

I knew. I’ve always known. I’m so sorry. My weakness was unforgiveable.

I’d like to think my current distance was more a considered act of love than some habitual reflex of neglect. I’d like to believe this report has morphed from our wedge
to our link. That in leaving this for you, I’m not throwing you to the wolves, but rather reaching out and pulling you close in the only way possible.

If I’ve been successful, then my distance would have been worth it.

If I’ve failed, then maybe my report can serve as my apology. Or as an offering. You might not be able to forgive me, but you can know me. What I was doing, and what I was trying to do. You can at least have this piece of me and understand. With everything at stake, you having that is worth the risk. I don’t want to leave you, and I won’t leave you with nothing. Not again.

I love you, more than you can know. More than I deserve to.

An ocean of love,

Mom
*

*
. . . is what she should’ve written.

There was no letter.

Just the journal entry and memo.

Fuck you, Hilary.