The Flicker Men (3 page)

“You chew.” I tried to picture Satvik hawking a plug like a baseball player, but the image wouldn't come.

“I am ashamed. None of my brothers chew tobacco. Out of my family, I am the only one. I started years ago on the farm. Now I try to stop.” Satvik spread his hands in exasperation. “But I cannot. I told my wife I stopped two months ago, but I started again, and I have not told her.” His eyes grew sad. “I am a bad person.”

Satvik's brow furrowed. “You are laughing,” he said. “Why are you laughing?”

*   *   *

Hansen was a gravity well in the tech industry—a constantly expanding force of nature, always buying out other labs, buying equipment, absorbing the competition

Hansen labs only hired the best, without regard to national origin. It was the kind of place where you'd walk into the coffee room and find a Nigerian speaking German to an Iranian. Speaking German because they both spoke it better than English, the other language they had in common. Hansen was always hungry for talent.

The Boston lab was just one of Hansen's locations, but we had the largest storage facility, which meant that much of the surplus lab equipment ended up shipped to us. We opened boxes. We sorted through supplies. If we needed anything for our research, we signed for it, and it was ours. It was the antithesis of most corporate bureaucracy, where red tape was the order of the day.

Most mornings I spent with Satvik. We'd stand side by side at his lab bench, talking and keeping busy. I helped him with his gate arrays. He talked of his daughter while he worked. Lunch I spent on basketball.

Sometimes after basketball, as a distraction, I'd drop by Point Machine's lab in the North building to see what he was up to. He worked with organics, searching for chemical alternatives that wouldn't cause birth defects in amphibians. He tested water samples for cadmium, mercury, arsenic.

Point Machine was a kind of shaman. He studied the gene expression patterns of amphioxus; he read the future in deformities. The kind of research my mother would have liked—equal parts alarm and conspiracy.

“Unless something is done,” he said, “most amphibians will go extinct.” He had aquariums filled with salamanders and frogs—frogs with too many legs, with tails, with no arms. Monsters. They hopped or swam or dragged themselves along, Chernobyl nightmares in long glass jars.

Next to his lab was the office of a woman named Joy. Like me, she was new to the lab, but it wasn't clear when she'd started, exactly. The others only seemed to know her first name. Sometimes Joy would hear us talking, and she'd swing by, delicate hand sliding along the wall—tall and beautiful and blind. Did acoustical research of some kind. She had long hair and high cheekbones—eyes so clear and blue and perfect that I didn't even realize at first.

“It's okay,” she said to one researcher's stammering apology. “I get that a lot.” She never wore dark glasses, never used a white cane. “Detached retinas,” she explained. “I was three. It's nothing to me.”

“How do you find your room?” It was Satvik who asked it. Blunt Satvik.

“Who needs eyes when you have ears and memory? The blind are good at counting steps. Besides, you shouldn't trust your eyes.” She smiled. “Nothing is what it seems.”

In the afternoons, back in the main building, I tried to work.

Alone in my office, I stared at the marker board. The great empty expanse of it. I picked up the marker, closed my eyes.
Nothing is what it seems.

I wrote from memory, the formula spooling out of my left hand with practiced ease. A series of letters and numbers, like the archaic runes of some forgotten sorcery—a shape I could see in my head. The work from QSR. I stopped. When I looked at what I'd written, I threw the marker against the wall. The stack of notes on my desk shifted and fell to the floor.

Jeremy came by later that night.

He stood in the doorway, cup of coffee in his hand. He saw the papers scattered across the floor, the formula scrawled across the marker board.

“Math is merely metaphor,” his voice drifted from the doorway. “Isn't that what you always used to say?”

“Ah, the self-assuredness of youth. So rich in simple declarations.”

“You have nothing to declare?”

“I've lost the stomach.”

He patted his own stomach. “What you've lost, I've gained, eh?”

That raised a smile from me. He wasn't a pound overweight; he simply no longer looked like he was starving. “Isn't that just like us,” I said, “giving ourselves primacy. Maybe
we're
the metaphor.”

He held out his coffee cup in mock salute. “You always were the smart one.”

“The crazy one, you mean.”

He shook his head. “No,
Stuart
was the crazy one. But you were the one to watch. We all knew it. Before you came along, I'd never seen a student get into an argument with a professor.”

“That was forever ago.”

“But you won the argument.”

“Funny, but I don't remember it like that.”

“Oh, you won, all right, if you think about it.” He sipped his coffee. “It just took you a few years.”

Jeremy walked farther into the room, careful not to step on the papers. “Do you still talk to Stuart?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Too bad,” he said. “You partnered on some interesting work.”

Which was one way to put it. It was also Jeremy's way of bringing up his reason for dropping in. Work. “I got a visit from one of the review board members today,” he said. “He asked about your progress.”

“Already?”

“It's been a few weeks. The board is just staying on top of things, curious how you're adjusting.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I'd look in on you, so here I am. Looking in.” He gestured toward the formula on the marker board. “It's good to see you working on something.”

“It's not work,” I said.

“These things take time.”

Honesty welled up. There was no point in lying. To myself or him. A rising bubble in my chest, and just like that, it burst: “Time is what I'm wasting here,” I said. “Your time. This lab's time.”

“It's fine, Eric,” he said. “It'll come.”

“I don't think it will.”

“We have researchers on staff who don't have a third of your citings. You belong here. The first few weeks can be the toughest.”

“It's not like before
. I'm
not like before.”

“You're being too hard on yourself.”

“No, I've accomplished nothing.” I gestured at the board. “One unfinished formula in three weeks.”

His expression shifted. “Just this?” He studied the dozen symbols laid out in a line. “Are you making progress?”

“I don't know how to finish it,” I said. “I can't find the solution. It's a dead end.”

“There's nothing else? No other research that you're pursuing?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He turned toward me. That sad look back again.

“I shouldn't be here,” I told him. “I'm wasting your money.”

“Eric—”

“No.” I shook my head again.

He was quiet for a long while, staring at the formula like so many tea leaves. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “R&D is a tax write-off. You should at least stay and finish out your contract.”

I looked down at the mess I'd made—the papers scattered across the floor.

He continued, “That gives you another three months of salary before you face review. We can carry you that long. After that, we can write you up a letter of recommendation. There are other labs. Maybe you'll land somewhere else.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, though we both knew it wasn't true. It was the nature of last chances. Nothing came after.

He turned to go. “I'm sorry, Eric.”

 

4

That night in my motel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. A clear glass bottle. Liquid burn.

The cap rolled away across the cheap carpet.

I imagined calling Marie, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. The good one, the sane one. I imagined her voice on the other end.

Hello? Hello?

This numbness in my head, strange gravities, and the geologic accretion of things I could have said,
not to worry, things are fine
; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself outside the sliding glass window, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. It comes down steady, a cold drizzle that soaks my clothes.

Thunder advances from the east, as I stand in the dark, waiting for everything to be good again.

In the distance, I see a shape in the motel parking lot. A figure standing in the rain with no reason to be there—gray rain-slicker shine, head cocked toward the motel. The shape watches me, face a black pool. Then comes the sudden glare of a passing car, and when I look again, the rain slicker is gone. Or was never there.

The last of the vodka goes down my throat.

I think of my mother then, that last time I saw her, and there is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I lose connection to my body, an angular shape cast in sodium lights—eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.

“It's not for you,” my mother had said on that autumn day many years earlier.

My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness—the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else.

*   *   *

It is a dream I have sometimes. That last time we spoke, when I was fifteen.

She bears many names, most of them apocryphal.

My mother looks across the table at me. She doesn't smile, but I know she's happy. I know she's in one of her good moods, because I'm visiting.

She's back home again—the very last time, before everything went so irredeemably wrong. She drinks tea. Cold, always. Two ice cubes. I drink hot cocoa, my hands wrapped around the warm mug. We sip while the ceiling fan paddles slowly at the air above our heads.

“I'm in mourning,” she says.

“Mourning what?”

“The human race.”

And the gears in my head shift, as I note the change of direction, one of these talks then. Like a rut her mind keeps falling into—all tracks leading eventually back into the wilderness.

“The Y chromosome of our species is degrading,” she says. “Within a few hundred thousand years, it'll be whittled away to nothing.” Her eyes travel the room, never resting on one thing for more than a few moments.

I play along. “What about natural selection? Wouldn't that weed out the bad ones?”

“It won't be enough,” she says. “It is inevitable.”

And maybe it is
, I think.
Maybe all of it is inevitable. This room. This day. My mother sitting across from me with restless eyes and her shirt buttoned wrong.

Light slants through the windows of the dayroom. Outside the leaves are blowing across the yard, accumulating against the stone wall that Porter put up to keep the neighbor's corgi out of the rose garden.

Porter is her boyfriend, though she will never call him that. “My Gillian,” he calls her, and he loves her like that was what he was made for. But I think he reminds her too much of my father, which is both the reason he is around and the reason he can come no closer.

“Your sister is getting married,” she says.

And it makes sense suddenly, our earlier conversation. Because I knew, of course, of my sister's engagement. I just didn't know my mother knew. Her active eyes come to rest on me, waiting for a response.

My mother's eyes are called hazel on her drivers' license—but hazel is the catchall color. Hazel is the color you call eyes that aren't blue or green or brown. Even black eyes are called brown, but you can't tell someone they have black eyes. I've done that, and sometimes people get offended, even though most
Homo sapiens
have this eye color. It is the normal eye color for our species across most of the world. Jet black. Like chips of obsidian. But my mother's eyes are not the normal color. Nor are they the blue or green or hazel in which the DMV transacts its licenses. My mother's eyes are the exact shade of insanity. I know that because I've seen it only once in my life, and it was in her eyes.

“The Earth's magnetic field fluctuates,” she tells me. “Right now South America is under a hot spot. Those beautiful auroras are just charged particles passing into the visual spectrum. I saw them once on your father's boat, sailing north of the cape.”

I smile and nod, and it is always like this. She is too preoccupied with the hidden to ever speak long on the mundane. Her internal waylines run toward obscured truths, the deep mysteries. “The magnetic field is weakening, but we're safe here.” She sips her tea again. She is happy.

This is her magic trick. She manages to look happy or sad or angry using only a glance. It is a talent she passed on to me, communicating this way—like a secret language we shared through which words were not necessary.

Earlier that school year, a teacher told me that I should try smiling, and I thought,
Do I really not smile
?
Not ever
?

Like my mother, even then.

When she finally earned her degree, it was in immunology, after halting runs at chemistry, astronomy, genetics. Her drive as intense as it was quixotic. I was nine when she graduated, and, looking back, there had already been signs. Strange beliefs. Things that would later seem obvious.

Hers was a fierce and impractical love. And it was both this fierceness and impracticality that built such loyalty in her children, for she was quite obviously damaged beyond all hope of repair—yet there was greatness in her still, a profundity. Deep water, tidal forces.