But the Flickering Man was somehow smiling.
I didn’t want the Flickering Man to get me. I knew that if he touched me it would be bad. But he was closing in so fast, way too fast. My heart was up in my throat and I was trapped as the Flickering Man rushed in, his face blank and yet leering—and then he was too close, the Flickering Man reached out—
I switched off the computer.
At once the screen went black. I sat there in the dark, in my basement, the afterimage of the game blinking in my retinas, my heart pounding, disconnected flashings wheeling through the darkness all around me as the snow rushed and tumbled outside, and I felt something prickling and electric in that darkness.
It was a long time before I played the game again.
The Flickering Man never reappeared.
There was nothing.
* * *
—
Renard was nothing now.
A nothing that felt strange. Like trying to pick something up and realizing your hand isn’t there, that your hand is made of nothing. Or looking for the Flickering Man and not finding him, even though you could’ve sworn you’d seen him before, and then wondering if you ever saw him in the first place, if there was really just nothing.
But even nothing isn’t nothing.
I had first heard that phrase at physics camp. The instructor that day was a hippyish middle-aged guy—bearded, ponytailed, I-don’t-give-a-fuck jogging shorts, T-shirt—and he was giving us his simplified overview of quantum fluctuation, how, according to quantum theory, even a vacuum isn’t really a vacuum but a seething soup of possible energy, and how that seemingly empty space is in fact filled with continuously appearing and disappearing “virtual particle pairs”—electron-positron, quark-antiquark, particle and antiparticle—two opposite particles that simultaneously pop out of the vacuum but then immediately crash back together, annihilating each other. That is, the unfloutable law of “energy cannot be created or destroyed” can be flouted, as long as it’s only a tiny amount of energy and only for a tiny amount of time.
It was an adequate explanation for eighth graders, although of course the real physics isn’t so simple. I remember the instructor drawing diagrams on the whiteboard, of the particle and its antiparticle being born together, wandering away from each other, finding each other again, erasing each other. As if they’d never been there.
Here’s the diagram from my old notebook:
Renard raised his hand and speculated that maybe the whole universe came from such a process—maybe first there was nothing, but then some Heisenbergian uncertainty between whether there was nothing or something allowed a universe-starting particle and its antiparticle to arise from that nothing. And in the brief borrowed time before those primordial particles crashed back together, before the laws of physics and probability turned a sharp eye to their unauthorized existence, maybe the complications of the particle and antiparticle’s interrelationship gave rise to other structures between them, flowering into matter, energy, life, intelligence—but all on borrowed time, because once those two particles found each other again, they’d cancel each other out, and in doing so cancel out everything else, erasing the universe they had created between them.
When I told Julia about this she said, “It’s like you’re expecting me to think it’s poetic and romantic.”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s kind of poetic,” I said. “Right?”
“Eh,” she said.
“Do you understand it?”
“Of course I understand it,” said Julia. “I just don’t get a science boner over it. Christ, what kind of girls did you used to go out with?”
* * *
—
No tow truck. After all this time.
What’s taking them so long?
The pencil is shaking in my fingers.
Too cold. It was a lark to begin with, looking up my own death date. I thought I’d have the self-control to stop calculating before I got too close, to halt the algorithm. But now I’m so close to the answer, the answer that is coming in from the cold. The answer is coming to my outstretched hand, even though maybe I have half changed my mind, even though I don’t want to know anymore, so take your hand back, I don’t want it, but I do, I can’t help myself, I keep going, keep calculating, the momentum sweeps me along—
Car flashes past. Too close. Slush splatters across the windshield.
One last multiplication.
I grasp it. I have it.
I’m finished.
Wait.
No.
I check it again.
I’m dead.
* * *
—
I had died twenty-three minutes ago.
LOOK UP
I’m alive.
But the algorithm can’t be wrong.
Never a single recorded mistake. Headquarters keeps the books rigorously up to date. A new edition every year to account for the eddies and irregularities in the thanaton continuum. Never off—not even by a minute. That’s the guarantee.
But I’m alive.
I’m dead.
The tow truck arrives.
Through the flying snow and the red-and-white blinking of my emergency flashers, I see two guys approaching my car. Wait, am I a ghost? Is this what the afterlife is—you just linger in whatever spot you happen to have died in? Will I haunt this grim stretch of toll road forever?
A knock on the window. “Sir?”
I look at the two guys. Sixty-year-old man, maybe eighteen-year-old son. Family business.
I roll down the window.
The father is talking to me as if nothing is out of the ordinary. “If you want us to tow you out of there, you’re gonna need to exit your vehicle.” I open the door, stumble out. Father and son help me to their truck.
Cold, windy, wet.
So I’m alive, then. Not a ghost.
The condescension you get from a tow truck driver. As if to say: if you weren’t so incompetent with your vehicle, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Now I’m in the back of the tow truck cab, like a child. They’re talking back and forth, ignoring me. My car hooked up to the winch. Pulling me out. Rough night, says the dad over his shoulder, you wouldn’t believe how many calls. Son watching his father. Learning. Never had anything like that with my boys. Like they’d want to become me.
Still feel outside my body.
But I’m in it.
Dead.
* * *
—
“What do you mean you can’t take the boys this weekend?”
“Something’s come up.”
“You could’ve told me earlier.”
“We only switched it a few hours ago, Erin.”
“Well, it’s not that easy. Now I have to rearrange everything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s like you don’t even want to see the boys.”
“Oh, don’t do that. Not now.”
“When are we supposed to talk about it? It’s not like—”
“This isn’t about that.”
“They need a father.”
“Don’t turn this around on me. You’re the one who was so eager to get rid of them this weekend.”
“Jesus! I need a life, too, every once in a while. The least you can do—”
“The least I could do. Incredible.”
“Oh, so you want to talk about money again? You really want to have that discussion?”
“They don’t want to come. They’re embarrassed of me.”
“Your self-pity. I can’t take it.”
“They each have their own bedroom at your house. Why would they want to share a pull-out at my place?”
“Because they want to see their father?”
“I get patronized by them.”
“I’m the one who has to
check their homework every day, who takes them to the doctor—”
“You fought for that. Now you’ve got it.”
“A weekend. I’m asking for you to cooperate on a weekend.”
“I’m dead.”
“What?”
“I’m a dead man. I died two hours ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Erin, do you want our sons staying with a dead man?”
“Are you drunk?”
“I am drunk. But I’m dead too.”
“You’ve really lost it.”
* * *
—
I buy a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
I had enough money on hand for that, at least. After the tow truck drops me off at my condo, I go straight to the computer. Buy the ticket. Clean out my savings account while I’m at it, transfer everything to checking. Endure the jolt, jolt, jolt of internet nausea until I can’t. Print out my boarding pass, then shut the computer down. Quickly.
The swarming jagged feeling drains away. Relief.
Enough money for a little while.
Or maybe it needs to last forever?
Maybe a drunk driver was fated to crash into me at that moment? Maybe I was scheduled to be killed instantly at 7:06 p.m., but somehow the drunk driver zoomed past me and my death failed to occur, maybe I somehow missed out on my allotted time to die so now I’ve slipped outside the thanaton system, maybe thanatons don’t even recognize me anymore, maybe I’m immortal, maybe I’m drunk?
Another ten-dollar bottle of wine! In this little condo that I always hated, that always meant defeat. I don’t belong here. Off-white walls in every room, grimy. Never got around to painting them. This place has my stuff but it’s not my stuff. Been here going on five years but I’ve always pretended like I’m just passing through so I don’t even know anyone in this building. Maybe I should introduce myself tonight? Knock knock knock. Hello! You don’t know me, but c’mon, you kind of know me. Here’s something you don’t know: I’m dead!
Packing. What do I pack? Every single piece of clothing I own is garbage, half of it doesn’t even fit. Clear it out! Dead man’s clothes. Buy something else tomorrow. The ticket’s for tomorrow? Sure it is, just bought it. That must’ve cost a pretty penny! It did!
But I can’t stay in Chicago for one more day.
Stumbling from room to room. Never had a happy hour here. Never? No, never! At the front door, my soaked shoes, the gray ice melted, muddy. Snow swirls outside. Spent enough of my life in this dirty cold. Time to go.
That life is over.
End of the world.
Now that’s something I haven’t thought about in a while.
Eschatons. Yeah, yeah, blast from the past…Open up the storage closet, haul out the old boxes. Haven’t opened these boxes for years. Just drunk enough to now. Haven’t been opened since marrying Erin. Boxes full of papers, boxes silently following me from apartment to house to condo. Waiting for me to remember them. To be opened by a dead man.
Dead for three hours now.
Boxes full of college shit. Pathetic, right? Drunk middle-aged man pawing through college debris, old thesis papers, blue book examinations full of scrawled calculations…Haven’t done math at this level in years. I open a blue book, try to decipher what I was doing. Used to be a fucking artist at this. Now it’s almost incomprehensible. Makes me think, why should I be afraid of death? Clearly I’ve already died many times. The version of me that could do this math—he’s long dead. How many other versions of me have come and gone since then who are also dead now? All these equations, symbols, numbers, how was I ever smart enough to find that error in Stettinger’s derivations? I dig in the papers, find my published article in Physical Review Letters. Always thought I’d follow up with something huge.
But I did follow up with something huge.
Just now.
The books are supposed to be free of error.
But there is an error. Me.
I’m alive. I’m dead.
Drink up! Eschatons, yeah, yeah. That’s what my second act was going to be. I had put myself on the map by finding the error in Stettinger’s derivation. So what would my next trick be?
Right here: eschaton calculations, pages and pages of them.
Nobody could say I wasn’t ambitious.
I’d even tried explaining it to metalhead Carl, at that party when I thought Julia had ditched me—“What I’m really interested in is the next level”—but why had I been telling Carl, who’d never understand? It was the kind of topic that, when I brought it up in seminar, it got me mocked, whatever, I’ll tell Carl—“if we can detect thanatons then why can’t we detect the thanaton of thanatons?”
What’s that, said Carl.
Well, if thanatons derive their trajectory from human death, then if we’re really clever with the math, why can’t we trace those trajectories and discover where all of those trajectories must terminate—that is, when all thanatons cease to exist—which logically would be when the final human being dies? We’d find the end-of-the-world particle, I said, the thanaton of thanatons. The eschaton.
Uh-huh, said Carl.
It’s a theoretical particle for now, I said.
Uh-huh, said Carl.
It hasn’t been detected yet.
Uh-huh.
But it must exist.
Uh-huh.
Carl wasn’t buying my pitch. Neither did the physics community. Eschatons? Please. People still only even barely tolerated the idea of thanatons; they were accepted only piecemeal, grudgingly. Like every other paradigm shift, thanatons didn’t feel right to the establishment. That’s not how subatomic particles are supposed to act, that’s not what they’re supposed to do. But Stettinger had anticipated their objections, had built thanaton theory too solidly to be dismissed. So when the experimental confirmations began rolling in, the physics community had to change their tune. Now Stettinger was no longer a crackpot, he was a new Planck, a new Bohr…
But speculation beyond thanatons? Forget it. Searching for the thanaton of thanatons, the eschaton—that was crank territory. But weren’t thanatons similarly dismissed at first? I said to my advisor. Yeah, yeah, my advisor had replied wearily, but I’m telling you, stuff it, there’s no career in it, you’ll be swimming upstream all your life. Look, he added with a burst of impatience, just find a solid, modest project with a professor who knows how to position you. Thanatons, sure. Hot field. But for chrissakes don’t get weird. Eschatons! Don’t even say it.
To be fair, my advisor was right. If eschatons really existed, then nearly thirty years later, somebody must’ve detected them by now.
Right?
Julia and I used to talk about it. My academic ambitions. Getting back in the game. Put in a few more years at Sapere Aude, sock away sufficient fuck-you money, eventually go back to school. Or even fund my own research, who knows?
But I stopped keeping up with the scientific journals. Fell out of touch with my old professors, my old peers. Julia and I traveled. Threw parties. So many friends, or what I called friends—actually, just the people you happen to know in your twenties, whom you stop talking to once you move out of the city or have kids.
I turn the page. More calculations, deriving formulas, speculating. Grasping for something new.
Used to excite me so much.
* * *
—
What’s this equation here?
Clunky. Streamline it. Drop these extraneous terms. Confine other terms to a place where they won’t blow up the rest of the derivation. Use this newer method, shuffle them aside. I’ve invented a few workarounds over my career, some shortcuts. Grinding through these equations for the past two decades or so, calculating hundreds of death dates, you get intimate with the math. But I hadn’t looked under the hood like this, tracing how the equations actual
ly work, in forever.
Wait: something’s opening up.
Some lines of an old side derivation here look like nonsense. Of course: I’d been trying to force the equation to do something it couldn’t. Misstated the whole problem. But what if I throw away a few assumptions? Like: what if thanatons themselves aren’t stable but have their own life cycle…I begin writing in the extra pages of the blue book, reframing the problem, slotting all the vectors into new positions. If the thanaton is unstable, four new sets of equations open up. I’m scrawling fast. There could be a path to the eschaton in it. Four stages in the thanaton’s life cycle: starting out strong but undetectable, then in each stage growing weaker and thus more observable, from the age of gods to aristocrats to mere men to the edge of chaos, until thanatons are weak and fragile enough to be detected…The theorist at the undergraduate dinner party saying, I heard all the thanatons just appeared recently. Like they were called into existence, somehow. My dismissal: I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
Maybe we were both wrong.
More results keep flowing. Everything’s falling into place elegantly, the way true things tend to do. As if the eschaton is right around the corner, as if there’s a hidden garden that had always been there but I had just overlooked it—maybe everybody had?
Weightless. Freeing feeling. As though I’ve been trapped in an impossible maze for years. As though I’d just discovered an ax that could magically smash through the walls, could clear my own path out…
Or not.
Dead end. The new approach doesn’t work. Old roadblocks reappear, just dressed up in different terms. If my hypothesis was true, all the thanatons would’ve died out by now. And the thanaton is a fundamental particle. If thanatons ever died out, the universe itself would collapse.
The momentary flush of discovery fades. Stupid idea. Amateur hour. Come on, what’d I expect? As if I’d discover anything new from tipsily reviewing my undergraduate research from nearly thirty years ago? As if I knew what I was doing then!
Dare to Know Page 10
