Here & There (9 page)

“It’s just a prime number that is both prime itself as is the number you get when you multiply it by two and add one. So, eleven is a Sophie-Germain prime.”

“Because eleven is prime as is two times eleven plus one.”

“Precisely. Not just face after all.” He smiled.

She looked down at her paper.

“Ok so our inebriated friend hiccups out eleven and,” he shrugged, “three. Everybody in the bar hears him say those two numbers.” To emphasize the point, Reinier yelled to Naelle, “Eleven and three!”

“Eleven and three what
?
” Naelle challenged.

“Just that, eleven and three.”

“I’m making the mojito. Timing me only makes me go slower,” she says, while muddling the mint in the glass.

Reinier turned back to Elle. “So now we do a little math. It’s called mod, but don’t worry about that. Let’s take our public three. Raise to the exponent of your private number.”

This took her a moment. Three to the fourth equals, three times three is nine, times three is twenty-seven, times three, eighty-one. “Got it.”

“Ok now figure out the remainder when you divide that number by our other public number
?
”

Eighty-one, closest multiple of eleven is seventy-seven. “Got it,” she says.

“I got mine too. Ok, now tell me the answer you got, and I’ll tell you mine. Wait.” Naelle comes over with Elle’s mojito. As she rests it on the coffee table, Reinier asks her, “Naelle, just listen to this a moment. Ok Elle, tell me.”

“Four.”

“Good. Mine’s nine. Did you get all that, Naelle
?
”

“Course I did. You’re all spoutin’ random numbers. Eleven, three, four, and nine. Don’t you be testing Mama Naelle’s memory. It’s a-sharper than a moray eel’s teeth.” She smacked Reinier with a dishrag, and she walked back to the bar.

“Ok, now you take my number and raise it to your private number,” Reinier instructed Elle.

“Can I write down the math
?
”

He nodded. She calculated. Nine to the fourth, 6,561.

“It’s a pretty big number.”

“So, and you can write down your work again, as long as you don’t show me, what’s the remainder when you divide that number by eleven
?
”

Ugh, she thought. Eleven goes into 6,561 approximately 596 times. 596 times eleven is 6556. Remainder is . . . “Ok, I got it. I feel like I’m in Montessori all over again, but I got it.”

“Me too. Now I can tell you a secret.”

“Wait, what
?
How
?
” she asked.

“We both now know the same number.”

“We do
?
”

“Yes, through those calculations, we now both have arrived at the same number. We throw away our original numbers. I never know yours, you never know mine, but we now share this number in common. And only we know it. Nobody else at the bar. Not the inebriated primer, not Naelle. Just us. It’s our cipher. We use it to encode our secrets. Actually, we would do iteration upon iteration of this, but this is the basic idea of public-key encryption, cryptography.”

She stared at him. No blushing, no self-consciousness, no attempt at flirting. She smiled. “What’s our number
?
”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s five.”
³¹

“That’s amazing.” Her eyes widened.

“It’s just math.”

“Don’t be modest, it’s like, wow, it’ll be used everywhere.”

He laughed. “I’m not being modest, and it is used everywhere, ever since it was invented in the 70s.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that makes sense.” She takes a sip of her mojito. “So what’s your thing
?
”

“Quantum cryptography. I exploit entanglement. What we just did is fantastic and useful, except that it’s based on classical physics—”

“Not this again . . .”

He laughed again. “I know, right
?
I do get this tunnel vision, you know, blinders on, and I just go, and it makes me, well, inconsiderate I guess.”

“Might be the eye-patch.” She winked. “I wouldn’t call it inconsiderate. I’d just say you get focused.”

“You are good at PR, Elle.”

Her cheeks warmed up again at the sound of her name on his lips.

He sighed. “How do you say egghead in French
?
”

She cocked her head a moment, thinking. “In Paris, we just would call you ‘intelligent,’” she said in her heavy French accent.

He burst out laughing. She revealed a shy grin.

“You have a way with words.”

While it is unclear as to how much of this is fact and how much fiction, the two of them obviously made a connection that turned into something bigger. Further support of this is found in subsequent lab footage that clearly shows Reidier sitting at his workstation across the room using a hand mirror with a pink plastic frame and handle. Whatever the exact details may be, something did happen that night that was distinctly different from their initial encounter in his lab.

Rumors of Eve’s escapades still echoed around the office for some time. Apparently, neither party minded, particularly as both seemed to value discretion. According to former colleague Alfred Muoio, an Italian physicist who had a lab adjacent to Reidier’s, “ . . . Reidier and Eve . . . the two of them as an item was a grand surprise. To everyone. Not in a dismissive way, not that a little man could not cast a long shadow. More, eh, no one ever thought about it. If I recall correctly, at the time I thought she was having a liaison with some German oligarch
duce
overseeing one of ESA’s
³²
launches. So it was a total surprise when she and Reidier moved in together. Jaws dropped like dominoes throughout the entire center.”
³³

“You never saw them together?”

“I saw them at work. Rarely together.”

“Socially?”

“Eh, well, Eve was definitely at all the various functions, and I saw her several times at the hotel bars we frequented. Those were the most, to put it gently, continental establishments. Of course, every now and then you might venture out for some native flavor, but most of the time we congregated where we were comfortable. And that’s where Eve took a lot of the VIPs. I rarely saw Reidier socially. He did not go out much. Well, I guess he rarely went to the hotel bars. If I remember correctly though, he would go blow off steam at this place in the Old Quarter. I forget the name of it. It was in an old house.
Come si dice?
Yes, we were all stunned when they moved in together. Although, I have to say, around the labs there was definitely a sense of pride that she was with one of us.”

Despite the secrecy, Eve was neither embarrassed nor disappointed with the relationship. Quite the opposite actually, it seems her impulse toward discretion was more of a protective instinct. The relationship was something she treasured and wanted to isolate in order that it not be tainted by the world. It was this impulse in fact that paradoxically made her so ambivalent about cohabiting. As she wrote in her journal shortly after they moved in together,

. . . It’s ironic really. In finally carving out our private space, we’ve ended up exposing ourselves. While our space is our own, our
lives
life now belongs to the world. R laughs at me when I talk like this. He doesn’t believe in the corruption of scrutiny. I think he’s just happy to have me past sunrise now. No more predawn scurries home.

R teases me that if I want I can still pull the sheets over our heads and cocoon us in bed. “Our linen wall of last defense.” He scoffs, but every time I do this, he
drops his voice to a whisper too, underneath. Brushes his hands over my body while murmuring about how, with me, the world has been cleaved into us and everybody else. Those are the last two groups, the only two groups in the world.

There’s us and there’s everybody else.

Sealed underneath the sheets with his susurrations and our humid breathing . . . it oddly reminds me of playing in my father’s den, as a little girl, building forts out of blankets, couch cushions, and end tables . . . that is until R ‘s touch hardens and he pins me down, pinning down the covers . . .

There’s us and there’s everybody else.

Still, there is something delicious about announcing ourselves this way. Maybe it means the end to me having to harvest rumors. I have my ‘alpha nerd ’ to protect me.

There’s us and there’s everybody else.

I love our home.
³⁴

These are clearly not the words of someone who has any reservations about her relationship. Rather, Eve describes and exhibits a textbook example of one of the extremes of the Colonial Effect.

Embedded within Michelle Hausler’s work
³⁵
on cryptocolonialism is this oft-overlooked phenomenon. Most colonial and postcolonial
theory focuses (for good reason) on either the collateral repercussions inflicted or instilled in the native population or the complexities of the power dynamics, assimilation, and counter-assimilation. The Colonial Effect describes the polarizing consequences of the occupier’s isolation on the occupier, how foreignness warps the imperialists’ concepts of and means of engaging in intimacy. As Hausler puts it, eventually “the myth of domination and empowerment with its inferred überfreedom dissolves into a constricting reality. Cartesian orientation inverts in the foreigner’s eyes as the colony transforms from an exotic playground into an all too literal Prospero’s Palace.”
³⁶
Inevitably, pressure increases on intimate relationships as they take on all-encompassing importance in a contracting world. The stress has a polarizing effect of either cannibalizing the relationship or canonizing it. It becomes the scapegoat or panacea for all the escalating and destabilizing frustration of exile.

While Eve seems to embody the latter Colonial Effect, it would be incomplete to write off her excitement and investment in their relationship as a mere byproduct of this. Furthermore, even though Eve professes an almost euphoric satisfaction from her relationship with Reidier, she also exhibits signs of personal growth, increased confidence, heightened self-awareness, and creativity. Simply put, it was after moving in with Reidier that Eve finally started writing, or at least publishing. She wasn’t isolating herself from the world, she was embracing it.

Reidier, on the other hand, was having a difficult time professionally. Although by all accounts, his Swiss project was a success, his supervisors were becoming more intrusive, more oppressive, and more
distrustful. Perhaps they felt threatened by Reidier’s work, which was far beyond their abilities. Or they might have been trying to contain and exploit whatever his next innovation was. Regardless of the motivation, it was having a negative effect on Reidier. In fact, watching a high-speed montage of Reidier’s lab footage you can almost track the accelerating deterioration with every interruption by a superior over months. Reidier’s body language, which begins as welcoming and open, devolves into guarded defense and ultimately, outright aggression.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was on August 19, 2001. It was a Sunday. The video capture is activated by motion in the lab. Reidier is nowhere to be seen. Sitting at his computer, however, typing on his keyboard and opening various windows, is Diderot Pellat—Reidier’s lab supervisor. He squints his eyes, he clicks, he frowns. Eventually, he starts to wander around the lab, snooping. He paces the length of the laser arrays. He fiddles with the computer that monitors the sonic thermometers. He rifles through the rolling, two-door filing cabinets that loiter in front of the massive spool of dark fiber cable. According to the counter, he’s alone in Reidier’s lab for thirty-seven minutes. Diderot is thumbing through a stack of binders he found when Reidier walks in. There’s a solid ten seconds of silence as the two take each other in.

“Something I can help you with, Didi?” Reidier asks.

Diderot goes back to the binder he’s thumbing through and turns another page. “These look like the journals of a psychopath.”