The Flicker Men (2 page)

“What would I be doing?”

“We pride ourselves on our independence; so you can choose whatever research you like, so long as it has scientific merit.”

“Whatever I like?”

“Yes.”

“Who decides merit?”

“Peer review, ultimately, in the publications, assuming your work gets that far. But before that, you have to get past our review board here. Probationary hiring is at the recruiting manager's discretion, but after four months, it's not up to me anymore. I have bosses, too; so you have to have something to show for it. Something publishable or on its way. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Four months.

“This can be a new start for you,” he said, and I knew that he'd already talked to Marie. I wondered when she'd called him.

I mean it, Eric, call me. If anything goes wrong.

“You did some great work at QSR,” he said. “I followed your publications; hell, we all did. But considering the circumstances under which you left…”

I nodded again. The inevitable moment.

He was silent, looking at me. “I'm going out on a limb for you,” he said. “But you've got to promise me.”

That was the closest he'd come to mentioning it. The thing people were so careful about.

I looked away. His office suited him, I decided. Not too large, but bright and comfortable. The window over his shoulder looked out on the front parking pad, where I saw my rental parked. A Notre Dame engineering diploma graced one wall. Only his desk was pretentious—a teak monstrosity large enough to land aircraft on—but I knew it was inherited. His father's old desk. I'd seen it once when we were still in college nearly a decade ago. A lifetime ago. Back when we still thought we'd be nothing like our fathers.

“Can you promise me?” he said.

I knew what he was asking. I met his eyes.

Silence.

And he was quiet for a long time after that, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Weighing our friendship against the odds this would come back to bite him.

“All right,” he said finally. He closed the folder. “Welcome to Hansen Research. You start tomorrow.”

 

2

There are days I don't drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my motel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says
RUGER
along the side in small, raised letters. It tastes like pennies and ashes. I look into the mirror across from the bed and tell myself,
If you drink today, you're going to kill yourself
. I look into my own blue-gray eyes and see that I mean it.

Those are the days I don't drink.

There is a rhythm to working in a research laboratory. Through the glass doors by 7:30, nodding to the other early arrivals; then you sit in your office until 8:00, pondering this fundamental truth: even shit coffee—even mud-thick, brackish, walkin'-out-the-pot shit coffee—is better than no coffee at all.

I like to be the one who makes the first pot in the morning. Swing open the cabinet doors in the coffee room, pop the tin cylinder, and take a deep breath, letting the smell of grounds fill my lungs. It is better than drinking the coffee, that smell.

There are days when I feel everything is an imposition—eating, speaking, walking out of the motel room in the morning. Everything is effort. I exist mostly in my head. It comes and goes, this crushing need, and I work hard not to let it show, because the truth is that it's not how you feel that matters. It's how you act. It's your behavior. As long as your intelligence is intact, you can make cognitive evaluations of what is appropriate. You can force the day-to-day.

And I want to keep this job; so I do force it. I want to get along. I want to be productive again. I want to make Marie proud of me.

Working at a research lab isn't like a normal job. There are peculiar rhythms, strange hours—special allowances are made for the creatives.

Two Chinese guys are the ringleaders of lunchtime basketball. They pulled me into a game my first week. “You look like you can play” was what they said.

One is tall, one is short. The tall one was raised in Ohio and has no accent. He is called Point Machine. The short one has no real idea of the rules of basketball and for this reason is the best defensive player. His fouls leave marks, and that becomes the meta game—the game within the game—to see how much abuse I can take without calling it. This is the real reason I play. I drive to the hoop and get hacked down. I drive again. The smack of skin on skin. Welts take the shape of handprints.

One player, a Norwegian named Ostlund, is six foot eight. I marvel at the sheer size of him. He can't run or jump or move at all, really, but his big body clogs up the lane, huge arms swatting down any jump shot made within his personal zone of asphalt real estate. We play four-on-four, or five-on-five, depending on who is free for lunch. At thirty-one, I'm a few years younger than most of them, a few inches taller—except for Ostlund, who is a head taller than everyone. Trash is talked in an assortment of accents.

“My grandmama shoots better than you.”

“Was that a shot or a pass? I couldn't tell.”

“Ostlund, don't hit your head on the rim.”

Some researchers go to restaurants on lunch hour. Others play computer games in their offices. Still others work through lunch—forget to eat for days. Satvik is one of those. I play basketball because it feels like punishment.

The atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system—you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you've got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent. Friendships with new hires can be fleeting.

Satvik works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he explained.

I watched him toggle the focus, and the image on the screen shifted. I'd used an SEM in grad school, but this one was newer, better. As close to magic as I'd ever seen.

A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it's like looking at another world. What had been a flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex.

Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography—you're up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at the Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you've been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you're falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you're going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never hit the ground—like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, without ever reaching the other side. That's an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.

I zoomed in to 14,000X once, like God's eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.

*   *   *

Satvik and I both had offices on the second floor of the main building, a few doors down from each other.

Satvik was short and thin, somewhere in his forties. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His narrow features were balanced in such a way that he could have been alleged the heir to any number of nations: Mexico or Libya or Greece or Sicily—until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick, and you could not imagine him being anything else.

The first time I met Satvik, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then said, “Ah, a new face in the halls. How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” And that's how the word was used—
research
—like it was a location. A destination that could be arrived at. We were standing in the main hall outside the library. He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.

It was Satvik who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “You must be sure of it,” he said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”

I watched him work. He filled the SEM's reservoir—icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down the cylinder to drip on the tile floor.

Liquid nitrogen doesn't have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand, and they'll bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you—like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you're wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir of the SEM, the nitrogen could spill down inside the glove and be trapped against your skin. “And if that happens,” Satvik said while he poured, “it will hurt you bad.”

Satvik was the first to ask my area of research.

“I'm not sure,” I told him.

“How can you not be sure? You are here, so it must be something.”

“I'm still working on it.”

He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change—his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I'd become something different to him.

“Ah,” he said. “I know who you are now; they talked about you. You are the one from Stanford.”

“That was eight years ago.”

“You wrote that famous paper on decoherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”

Satvik was blunt, apparently.

“I wouldn't call it a breakdown.”

He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”

“I'm done with it.”

His brow creased. “Done? But you did important work.”

I shook my head. “After a while, quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview.”

“What does this mean?”

“The more research I did, the less I believed.”

“In quantum mechanics?”

“No,” I said. “In the world.”

 

3

There are days I don't drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father's .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.

But there are also days I
do
drink. Those are the days I wake up sick. I walk into the bathroom and puke into the toilet, needing a drink so bad my hands are shaking. The bile comes up—a heaving, muscular convulsion as I pour myself into the porcelain basin. My stomach empties in long spasms while my skull throbs, and my legs tremble, and the need grows into a ravening monster.

When I can stand, I look in the bathroom mirror and splash water on my face. I say nothing to myself. There is nothing I would believe.

It is vodka on these mornings. Vodka because vodka has no smell.

I pour it into an old coffee thermos.

A sip to calm the shakes. A few sips to get me moving.

It is a balancing act. Not too much, or it could be noticed. Not too little, or the shakes remain. Like a chemical reaction, I seek equilibrium. Enough to get by, to get level, as I walk through the front entrance of the lab.

I take the stairs up to my office. If Satvik knows, he says nothing.

*   *   *

Satvik studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Mather's Field-gated Array. The array's internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Like evolution in a box. The most efficient circuits were identified by automated program and worked as a template for subsequent iteration. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There's lots of modeling.”

I didn't have the slightest idea how it all worked.

Satvik was a genius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. He'd chosen electrical engineering because he liked the math. After that, Harvard and patents and job offers. All described to me in his matter-of-fact tone, like of course it had happened that way, anybody could do it. “There is no smart,” he said. “There is only trying hard.”

And he seemed to believe it.

Myself, I wasn't so sure.

Other researchers would come by to see the field-gated arrays set up around his workstation like some self-organizing digital art. The word
elegant
came up again and again—highest praise from those for whom mathematics was a first language. He stood crouching over his work, concentrating for hours. And that was part of it. His ability to focus. To just sit there and do the work.

“I am a simple farmer,” he liked to say when someone complimented his research. “I like to challenge the dirt.”

Satvik had endless expressions. When relaxed, he let himself lapse into broken English. Sometimes, after spending the morning with him, I'd fall into the pattern of his speech, talking his broken English back at him, an efficient pidgin that I came to respect for its streamlined efficiency and ability to convey nuance.

“I went to dentist yesterday,” Satvik told me. “She says I have good teeth. I tell her, ‘Forty-two years old, and it is my first time at dentist.' And she could not believe.”

“You've never been to the dentist?” I said.

“No, never.”

“How is that possible?”

“Until I am in twelfth grade in my village back home, I did not know there was a special doctor for teeth. Since then, I never went because I had no need. The dentist says I have good teeth, no cavities, but I have stain on my back molars on the left side where I chew tobacco.”