The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  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.

  She stayed up late and told us bedtime tales—that line between truth and fantasy a constantly moving boundary. Stories of science, and things that might have been science, if the world were a different place.

  My sister and I both loved her more than we knew what to do with.

  When my father didn’t come back, it was me she woke first, barely getting the words out, collapsing in my bedroom. And I remember so little about that night, like it was part of somebody else’s story—but I remember the intake of air, her hitting the light switch, waking me—then it all pours out in words, everything, countless years of it. Lifetimes. A waterfall of words. A slow screaming that would not stop. Has never really stopped.

  And I remember the room. The color of the walls. Almost photographic details combined with odd gaps of memory—things I should know but somehow can’t see. Old cracks in the drywall. I can see them clearly. The feel of the slick wooden banister as I float down the stairs, picture frames brushing my shoulder. I see a thin layer of dust on the chandelier in the foyer, but somehow my sister is missing—erased from these memories, though she must have been there. Or perhaps that’s her, standing in the back, in the shadows.

  And then the gravel scrapes my bare feet, and Mother can’t walk, collapsing on the sidewalk outside our house. I’m standing in the driveway while red lights spin silently. There are police, but none with faces. Just flashlights and badges and underwater words.

  Your father …

  And she couldn’t finish. Couldn’t get the words out.

  And nothing after that was ever really the same again. For any of us. But for my mother most of all.

  Now she sips her tea again, and I see the happiness change to worry in her eyes. Those not-quite-hazel eyes that do not bear names well.

  “Are you okay, Eric?”

  I only nod and sip.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  Her father was a quarter Cherokee and looked it. She and I have this in common: we both look like our fathers.

  “Everything’s fine,” I say.

  She is tall and long-limbed. Her hair, once brown, is streaked with white. She is now and always has been beautiful.

  If we resemble each other, it is in our eyes—not the color, for mine are blue-gray, but in the shape. Our hooded expression. Eyes protective of their secrets.

  She never drank. Not once, not ever. Not like my father.

  She’d tell you.

  She came from a long line of alcoholics—bad alcoholics, she’d say. Get-in-fights-and-go-to-jail alcoholics. Her own father and grandfather and brothers. Some of her cousins. So she understood it. Like Huntington’s or hemophilia—a taint of the blood winding its way down through the generations. And I wonder if that was a part of it. The strange, alchemical familiarity that draws two people together. She and my father.

  Sometimes it is a thing as simple as the way you laugh. Or it’s a familiar hair color. Or the way you hold a Scotch glass, casually, fingers sprawled around the circumference of the glass’s rim, so the palm hovers above the cool brown liquid. That sense you get when you meet someone new—that feeling of … We know each other. We’ve always known each other.

  Maybe that’s what drew her. Or maybe she just thought she could fix him.

  And so Mother never drank, not once, thinking it would be enough to save her.

  She told me many times growing up that I shouldn’t drink either. Alcoholism on both sides of the family, she said, so I shouldn’t even try it. Shouldn’t risk that first swallow.

  “It’s not for you,” she said.

  But I did try it. Of course, I did.

  Not for you.

  And nothing had ever been more wrong.

  5

  Sounds of the lab.

  Satvik said, “Yesterday in my car I was talking to my daughter, five years old, and she says, ‘Daddy, please don’t talk.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I am praying. I need you to be quiet.’ So I ask her what she is praying about, and she said, ‘My friend borrowed my glitter ChapStick, and I am praying she remembers to bring it back.’”

  Satvik was trying not to smile. We were in his office, eating lunch across his desk—the one surface of the room not covered in file folders or books or electronic parts. Light streamed through the windows.

  He continued, “I told her, well, maybe she is like me and she forgets. But my daughter says, ‘No, it has been more than one week now.’”

  This amused Satvik greatly—the talk of ChapStick and the prayers of children. He spooned another bite of rice and red peppers into his mouth. This was the simple and searing conflagration that passed for his lunch.

  “I’m tired of eating in your cluttered office,” I said. “We should try something different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Act like normal human adults. Visit a restaurant.”

  “A restaurant? You insult me. I am a simple man trying to save for my daughter’s college.” Satvik spread his hands in mock outrage. “Do you think I am born with golden spoon?”

  And then he regaled me with the tragedy of his nephews, both raised in New York on American food. “They are both taller than six feet,” he said, shaking his head. “Much too big. My sister must buy new shoes all the time. In my family back home, nobody is that tall. Not one person. But here, same family, they are six feet.”

 
; “And American food’s to blame?”

  “You eat the cow, you look like the cow.” He took the last bite of his meal and winced, sucking air through his teeth. He closed the plastic lid on his bowl.

  “Those peppers too hot?” I asked. The possibility intrigued me. I’d seen him eat food that would have melted my fillings.

  “No,” he said. “When I eat on the tobacco side, it stings me bad.”

  When we finished packing up the last of our lunchtime mess, I told him I wasn’t going to be hired after my probationary period.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  His face grew serious. “You are certain you are to be fired?”

  Blunt Satvik. Fired. A word I hadn’t used, but accurate, in the only way that mattered. Soon I’d be unemployed. Unemployable. My career over. I tried to imagine that moment, and my stomach clenched into a fist. Shame and dread. The moment when it would all come crashing down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fired.”

  “Well, if you are certain, then don’t worry about it.” He leaned across his desk and clapped me on the shoulder. “Sometimes the boat just sinks, my friend.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Did you just tell me that you win some and you lose some?”

  Satvik considered this. “Yes,” he said. “Except I did not mention the win part.”

  * * *

  It was during my fifth week at the lab that I found the box from Docent.

  It started as an automated e-mail from the Transport Department saying there were some crates I might be interested in. Crates labeled PHYSICS, sitting on the loading dock.

  I found them on the far loading bay, huddled together as if for warmth. Four wooden boxes of different sizes. I got out the crowbar and opened them one by one. Three of the boxes held only weights, scales, and glassware. But the fourth box was different. Larger, heavier.

  What have we here? I said to myself. I blew the dust off the top and pried the lid open. The crowbar slipped from my hand and clanged to the floor. I stared into the fourth box for a long time.

  It took me a minute to convince myself that it might be what I thought it was.

  Very quickly, I closed the box, hammered the lid down, and went to the transport computer. The paper trail started with a company called Ingral in New York. Ingral had been bought by Docent, and now Docent had been bought by Hansen. The box had been in storage the whole time, gradually moving between trophic levels of the corporate food web. Who owned it before Ingral was anyone’s guess. The box might have been sealed for ten years. Maybe longer. Its original provenance lost to time.

  I clicked the PROPERTY RECEIVED button next to the transport number and typed my name into the space provided. My finger hesitated over the keyboard. I hit RETURN.

  With that, the box was mine.

  * * *

  I tracked down a hand dolly and with some difficulty managed to wheel the crate outside, then across the parking lot to the main building, where the freight elevator took me to the second floor. The box took up a good portion of my office. Later that day, I scouted for lab space in the adjunct buildings and, after touring several possibilities on the first floor of North building, settled for a chamber on the second floor along the back, room 271. It was a medium-sized space with no windows and bare walls—its only true mark of distinction a patch of darkened floor tiles, marred by some earlier experiment gone horribly wrong. I signed the paperwork and was handed the new key card.

  Later that day, I was drawing on my marker board when Satvik walked into my office. “What is this?”

  “This,” I said, gesturing to the board, “is my project.”

  Gone was the old, half-finished formula, erased with the single swipe of my hand. The new diagram was as simple as I could make it, but it still took up most of the board.

  Satvik’s eyes narrowed as he studied the scrawl. “You have a project now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Congratulations!” His smile beamed. He grabbed my hand and shook. “How did this wonderful thing happen?”

  “Save the congratulations,” I told him. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “What is it?” He was looking at the board again.

  “You ever hear of the Feynman double-slit?” I said.

  “Physics? That is not my area, but I have heard of Young’s double-slit.”

  “It’s the same thing, only instead of light it uses a stream of electrons.” I put my hand on the box that was still resting on the hand dolly. “And a detector. I found it in the crate, along with a thermionic gun.”

  Satvik looked at the box. “Gun?”

  “A thermionic gun. An electron gun. It’s part of a replication trial.”

  “You are going to use this gun?”

  I nodded. “Feynman claimed every situation in quantum mechanics can be explained by saying, ‘You remember the case of the experiment with two holes? It’s the same thing.’” I patted the box, “This is that thing.”

  “Why are you doing this project?”

  “I want to see what Feynman saw.”

  6

  Autumn comes quick to the East Coast. It is a different animal out here, where the trees take on every color of the spectrum, and the wind has teeth. As a boy, before the moves and the special schools, I’d spent an autumn evening camped out in the woods behind my grandparents’ house. Lying on my back in the tall grass, staring up at the leaves as they drifted past my field of vision.

  There is a moment, climbing a tree, when you know you should climb no higher. A winnowing of branches the farther you go, like the choices in life.

  It was the smell that brought it back so strong—the smell of fall—as I walked to the parking lot. Joy stood near the roadway, waiting for her cab.

  The wind gusted, making the trees dance. She turned her collar against the wind, oblivious to the autumn beauty around her. For a moment, I felt pity for that. To live in New England and not see the leaves.

  I climbed into my rental. I idled. No cab passed through the gates. No cab followed the winding drive. I backed out and then shifted into drive. I was about to pull away but at the last second spun the wheel and pulled up to the turnaround.

  I rolled down the side window. “Is there a problem with your ride?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think there might be.”

  “Do you need a lift home?”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.” She paused. Then, “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  I pulled the handle, and the door swung open. She climbed in. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry if it’s a bit of a drive.”

  “It’s fine. I wasn’t doing much anyway.”

  “Left at the gate,” she said.

  The truth was, it felt good to be useful. It made me feel normal in a way that I hadn’t in a while. So much of my life was out of control, but this I could do—provide a ride to someone who needed it. She guided me by stops. She didn’t use the street names, but she counted the intersections, guiding me to the highway, the blind leading the blind. The miles rolled by.

  Boston, a city that hasn’t forgotten itself. A city outside of time. Crumbling brick and stylish concrete. Road names that existed before the Redcoats invaded. It is easy to lose yourself, to imagine yourself lost, while winding through the chaotic streets. Outside the city proper, there is stone everywhere, and trees—soft pine and colorful deciduous. I saw a map in my head, Cape Cod jutting into the Atlantic. The cape is a curl of land positioned so perfectly to protect Boston that it seems a thing designed. If not by man, then by God. God wanted a city where Boston sits.

  The houses, I know, are expensive beyond all reason. It is a place that defies farming. Scratch the earth, and a rock will leap out and hit you. People build stone walls around their properties so they’ll have someplace to put the stones.

  At her apartment, I pulled to a stop in a small parking lot. I walked her to her door, li
ke this was a date. Standing next to her, I noticed she was only a few inches shorter than me, long and lean, and we were at the door, her empty blue eyes focused on something far away until she looked at me, looked, and I could swear for a moment that she saw me.

  Then her eyes glided past my shoulder, focused again on some vista only she could see.

  “I’m renting now,” she said. “Once my probationary period is over, I’ll probably buy a condo closer to work.”

  “I didn’t realize you were still on probation, too.”

  “I actually hired in the week after you.”

  “Ah, so I have seniority. Good to know.”

  She smiled. “I’m hoping to stay on once my probation ends.”

  “Then I’m sure you will.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “At least my research is cheap. I bought the acoustical software before I came here, so now it’s only me and my ears that they’re paying for. I’m a small investment. Can I entice you in for coffee?”

  “I should be going, but another time.”

  “I understand.” She extended her hand. “Another time then. Thank you for the ride.”

  I was about to turn and leave, but her voice stopped me. “You know, I heard them talking about you.”

  I turned. “Who?”

  “Men from the front office. It’s a strange thing, being blind. Sometimes people think you’re deaf, too. Or perhaps being blind makes you invisible. Am I invisible to you?”

  The question caught me off guard. There was something in her expression. A deviousness to her smile. “No,” I said. I wondered if she knew she was beautiful. She must know.

  “Most people are good talkers,” she said. “But I’ve cultivated a facility for the opposite. Jeremy said you were brilliant.”

  “He said that?”

  “I have a question before you go.”

  “Okay.”

  She brought her hand up to find my cheek. “Why are the brilliant ones always so fucked up?”

  Her hand was cool on my skin. It was the first time I’d been touched in a long time.