The Flicker Men (40 page)

“Folders. Two manila folders. They were locked in the safety box in the closet. Also a small duffel bag.”

She disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back, she had the folders and bag.

“These them?”

“Yeah.”

She slid a printed sheet across the counter. “Sign here. You got ID?”

I opened my wallet and showed her my license. She copied down the number.

I signed the printed sheet, and she handed over the folders. They were nearly weightless. She set the duffel on the counter with a thump.

“I'm surprised they're still here,” I said.

“You're lucky. Anything we find, we keep for thirty days.”

“What happens then?”

She shrugged. “Employee perk. First come, first serve.”

Behind me, the automatic doors swooshed open as a family came in. A mother, father, boy, and girl. I imagined they were vacationers, here for the ocean.

“Is there anything else you need?” The desk clerk asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I want to rent another room.”

*   *   *

I shifted the transmission into park.

The wind was blowing in from the ocean, streaming ghostly lines of sand across the lot.

I opened the paper bag in the seat beside me and popped the seal. I spun the cap off the bottle and smelled the burn.

Good bourbon. Ninety proof.

Music played from my car radio, a soft melody, a woman's voice. I imagined my life different. I imagined that I could stop here. Not take the first drink.

My hands trembled.

It had been three months.

I looked at the folders on the seat beside me, my father's gun resting on top.

Would I drink again?

The folders knew.

The first sip brought tears to my eyes. Then I upended the bottle and drank deep. I tried to have a vision. I thought of Satvik.

Do they know they're different? I had asked him.

One of them
, he'd said.
One of them knew.

When the bottle was half-empty, I looked down at the gun.

I imagined what a .357 round could do to a skull—lay it open wide and deep. Reveal that place where self resides—expose it to the air where it would evaporate like liquid nitrogen, sizzling, steaming, gone. A gun could be many things, including a vehicle to return you to the implicate.

I reached for the first folder.

My hands were steady as I opened it and pulled out the paper. My shakes had faded with the first deep drink—nerves lubricated at last. I was never more myself than after the first drink. By the end of the bottle, I'd be someone else.

I unfolded the paper. I looked at the detector results—and, in so doing, finally collapsed the probability wave of the experiment I'd run all those months ago. As I'd now always been meant to do.

When I opened the second folder, the image was there. I stared at what was on the paper, two shaded bands—a now familiar pattern of dark and light.

Though of course, the results had been there all along.

*   *   *

I grabbed the gun and the bottle and stepped out into the wind.

The smell of the ocean assailed me as I trekked down toward the smooth sand. There were no signs of people here—all wiped away by wind and rain. The sky was dark and brooding.

I walked a crooked path down to the waterline, avoiding some of the biggest rocks. It was midtide, and the waves were low and regular, pushing skirts of gray froth up the beach. The sand was nearly flat here, so the waves lost energy over huge distances. Above me, a white-winged tern pinwheeled in the sky.

There were different names for what had happened. Different acronyms were applied. SUDS, or SUNDS, or other similar variations of an alphabet soup meant to rein it in, make it seem more comprehensible. As if to give it a name was to understand it. In reality, the terms applied were just descriptive. Mass psychogenic illness was another label used. Other people applied a more religious term.

What was known for sure was that people died. All over the world, over the course of the same day. They did not wake. By the millions. Others collapsed in the streets. Others—the youngest and healthiest—drowned themselves. Bus drivers and nurses and teachers and accountants. Bankers in Italy and farmers in India. By the tens of thousands, around the world, they walked into oceans, or lakes, or rivers, and they did not rise.

All across the planet a small but statistically significant percentage of the population took their final breath. Statisticians still argued over the statistical bump—the number of extra deaths that occurred that day.

One other statistical bump existed, I knew, but hadn't yet been noticed. Not yet. None were scientists.

If it's random, why none of us?
I'd asked Satvik.

If they're part of the indeterminate system, why become scientists?

And there was another thing I knew.

The researchers who tried to replicate Satvik's work would fail to do so. They wouldn't find the ones who couldn't collapse the wave. The ones who walked among us but weren't us. They would not find what Satvik had found. That evidence was gone. Just another experiment that failed to replicate.

I approached the waterline and followed a wave for a dozen yards as it retreated, draining back into sea, and then I planted my feet and crouched low against the wind, watching the ocean.

Mercy was dead. Though it had taken weeks to find the proof. Web sites dedicated to putting names to the faces of those who died. People without IDs. Jane Does. Another victim of SUDS. The police had found her body, washed up on shore.

I thought of what Vickers had told me. They see nothing because there is nothing inside them from which a vantage can be obtained. Mercy had been one of the fated all along. Fated to what? To fight against Brighton? In some ways, she hadn't existed at all. Not really.

The next wave surged toward me, washing over my feet, shooting past me and up the beach, leaving me standing in a foot of water. The water here had always been cold.

I took a drink from my bottle and pulled the gun from my sweater pocket. The gun was heavy and black. It said
RUGER
along the side in small, raised letters. I'd been carrying it, in one form or other, since that day it was used, in the same parking spot where my car was now parked.

I thought of my father and the ocean. The wave with your name.

I imagined sailing out past sight of land. There, blue water, where it was all one thing.

The wind picked up; I swayed on my feet. I waited for the next wave, and when it came, I strode out deeper, up to my knees. I looked down at the gun, heavy in my hand.

A view to the implicate.

I threw the gun as far as it would go.

 

Epilogue

I cross into my office and glance out the window. A new warehouse is being built in the same spot as the old, but an executive decision was made not to call it W building. That name has been retired, like an old pro jersey. So the new building will be labeled
X
on the site maps, and the administration hopes it will be luckier.

I've been back at work for three weeks, getting back in the groove. A one-month chip from AA sits on my desk. A month without drinking. Point Machine and I shoot baskets at lunch some days.

He's returned to his frogs and seems happier now. The events of the past few months have fallen into the background. The fire gave management a new perspective on security; armed guards now serve at the gate. And many a research lab has questioned the wisdom of pursuing a line of inquiry likely to inspire people to burn down your buildings.
A chilling effect
is the term sometimes used when discussing the future of research in quantum consciousness. But the work will go on.

I'd wanted to see what Feynman saw.

I'd seen that and more.

On some days I walk into Point Machine's lab, and I help him with his aquariums. I talk to my sister twice a week on the phone, and one afternoon a thought occurred to me.

If we fashion our own worlds, what would mine look like? It might look like this.

In the hospital, Jeremy had explained how Satvik was found. Dead in a car accident. I'd missed the funeral.

Joy's room is vacant. Her work space empty.

The first day back at the lab, I'd stood in her room and looked for pieces of her personality. I found a book in braille. A music chart.

When I asked Jeremy where she'd gone, he said, “She didn't leave a two-week notice.”

“Did she give a reason?”

“Nothing. I'd hoped you might know more than me. I know you two were close.”

“Not as close as you'd think.”

The unspoken possibility: She was one of the syndrome. One of those who died. Though her apartment had been searched and turned up nothing. No body had ever surfaced.

Jeremy didn't ask what I was working on right away. He took a few days. Showed remarkable restraint. Or maybe he was half-afraid of what the answer might be. When he finally did ask, cup of coffee in his hand as he stood in the doorway to my office, I said only, “Quantum mechanics.”

“Meaning what?”

“I'm continuing the research I was doing before I came here.”

He did his best not to let it show. He hid his smile behind the coffee mug. It was the thing he'd hired me for, all those months ago. The thing I'd been afraid to do.

Point Machine showed more surprise when I told him over lunch.

“Why would you do that?”

I thought of the frog in the well. The more you study quantum mechanics, the less you believe.

You are laughing. Why are you laughing?

And that was the key. That's why it was different now.

I believed in the world. But I knew it wasn't the only one.

*   *   *

After lunch, I went up to my office. I stared at the marker board.

I began to write out the formula. The same formula as before. The one I couldn't finish. The one that had driven me away, back to Boston, to this cold place by the water.

From my left hand, the symbols unspooled across the white expanse. Their inescapable logic, assembling a structure like a tower. Higher and higher. There was a beauty in the foundations I laid.

My marker slowed. I was coming to the point where I'd stopped before. Where the known ends and a wilderness begins.

I stared at the board, and this time was different.

A subtle change, and I saw a way forward.

Narrow at first. Like a light under a door.

There was a moment then when I could almost imagine myself in the hospital, in pajamas, scrawling on walls with a black magic marker.

But I pushed the thought away and stared at the board.

And then I knew just what to do. I saw it so clearly, the way it would go, the shining trail that would lead me out from the darkness.

I began to write.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aczel, Amir.
The Jesuit and the Skull.
2007.

Bohm, David.
Quantum Theory.
1951.

Bohr, Niels.
Niel's Bohr's Philosophy of Physics.
1987.

Bostrom, Nick. “The Simulation Argument.”
Philisophical Quarterly
53 (2003).

Feynman, Richard.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
YouTube.

Heisenburg, Werner.
Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution of Modern Science.
2007.

Hughs, R. I. G.
The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
1992.

Kirmani, A., T. Hutchison, J. Davis, and R. Raskar. “Looking Around the Corner Using Transient Imaging.” Computer Vision, 2009, IEEE 12th International Conference.

Meadows, Kenneth.
Shamanic Experience.
1991.

Ottaviani, Jim, and Leland Myrick.
Feynman.
2011.

Peitgen, Heinz-Otto, Hartmut J
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rgens, and Dietmar Saupe.
Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science.
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Plato. B. Jowett, trans.
The Complete Works of Plato.
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Pribram, Karl H.
Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing.
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Raskar, Ramesh. “Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a Trillion Frames per Second.” TED Talks. 2012.

Talbot, Michael.
The Holographic Universe.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'd like to acknowledge all the scientists, mathematicians, cosmologists, and philosophers who have worked hard to push forward the limits of human understanding. If at any point in this story the science is right, the credit is theirs. If at any point in this story the science is wrong, the fault is my own.

I'd also like to thank my family, who put up with me while I second-guessed myself for two years while writing this book.

I'd like to thank my editor, Michael Signorelli, who went above and beyond the call of duty on this, holding up a lamp for me when I was totally lost in the darkness. This book probably never would have been finished without you. You helped me find the real story in the story. I'd like to thank my agent, Seth Fishman, who is more than just an agent, and without whom I wouldn't have had a novel career in the first place. I'd like to thank Stella Tan, Gillian Blake, Steve Rubin, Brooke Parsons, Christopher O'Connell, and the entire Holt team.

I'd like to thank my mother and my father. I count myself very blessed to be your son. Better parents I could never have asked for. I'd also like to thank Richard Feynman.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all my old lab buddies and fellow microscope jockies, you know who you are.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR