The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  It could have been like that. I could imagine it.

  Satvik’s trunk full of equipment. Like a stone around his neck. A burden he carried. Perhaps he was tired of all the testing. Tired of the reports. Tired of chasing things that couldn’t possibly exist: those who walked among us but weren’t us. His phone rang on the seat next to him. He was tired of that, too. He ignored the call.

  Now there was only the wind and the dark and the white lines of the highway.

  I tried to believe in the idea of it.

  Satvik cutting loose. Stepping back.

  Perhaps he wanted his gate arrays, with their logical simplicity. Or he was tired of the questions that had no answers. Or it may have been the boy who had done it. The final straw. The boy from New York; the one who’d tracked him down.

  One of them knew.

  Thirty miles later, the ringtone came again. Satvik checked the number. Another call from the lab—the light from his phone casting a green-white glow across the front seat of the car. He wanted to answer. And not to answer. He just needed time, he decided. A few days. Space to clear his head. In a few days, it would all make more sense. He felt it intuitively, the way he felt when his gate arrays weren’t right and he wasn’t sure why. Sometimes the harder you looked, the less you saw. He was too close to the problem. He took his phone and tossed it out the window onto the highway. An impulsive choice for a man who had never been impulsive, but he felt better immediately. Better than he had in weeks. Better than he had since before he’d seen Robbins’s press conference.

  He drove on, leaving his phone behind as mile stacked upon mile. He’d buy a new phone later, once he’d had a few days to rest.

  It might have been as simple as that.

  Or he could have been on the road, trunk full of equipment, as a car came up behind him.

  A dark stretch of highway.

  Satvik continued on at fifty-five miles per hour, as the other car approached.

  Three men inside. The same men who’d written letters to the lab. They were angry. Disturbed.

  As the car behind him sped to pass, a gun came out, unseen. Satvik was listening to the radio, thinking of home. He’d been too many days away. He would call his wife tonight, he’d promised himself. Call the first moment he could. He’d accidently let his cell battery run low, and once it was charged, he’d found he had no reception. It was the edge of nowhere, wilderness on both sides.

  He was done with the road. Done searching for a bottom when there was no bottom to see.

  The car sped alongside.

  He was reaching for the knob on the radio when out of the corner of his eye he saw it: the barrel coming up and out of the other vehicle as it passed.

  And Satvik’s face went slack for a single instant before the trigger was pulled.

  The blast lit up the space between the cars, and Satvik’s vehicle continued on for several hundred feet as if nothing had happened before drifting to the right, onto the shoulder, never slowing. His car hit the berm at fifty-five miles per hour, continuing to drift, now pulling harder, until the slope of the grass fell away steeply into a deep woods, and the car rocketed downward, out of sight, into the trees and wilds below, and was gone. The darkness was an envelope that sealed up behind him.

  It could have been like that.

  Or it could have been that he’d lost his phone, like Jeremy said. Or he’d lost his charger.

  He might have been in New Jersey or New York. Or across town in Boston. In a motel room no different from this one.

  21

  “I’m here to see Mr. Robbins.”

  The receptionist smiled. “Do you have an appointment?”

  She was young and bubbly, with very straight, very white teeth, and her whole being seemed to give off an air of neat precision. Even her hair was exact—not a strand out of place.

  I almost hated to disappoint her. “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s booked for the day. You’ll have to make an appointment. We usually schedule a few weeks in advance.”

  “I need to see him now,” I told her. “I’ve driven a long way.”

  Her smile never wavered. “Unfortunately, that’s not going to be possible.”

  The room we were in might have been the reception area of the oval office. The carpet was lush and blue. Paintings graced the walls. The vaulted ceiling rose to the sky. No fewer than five people currently sat waiting in the plushly appointed surroundings for their chance to spend time with the great man.

  “He’s in there?” I asked. I took a step toward the ornate double doors just behind her.

  “I’m afraid he won’t be able to see you.”

  I’d considered just walking past her and opening the doors, but something about her lack of concern and the retention of her gleaming, confident smile made me suspect I’d find myself facedown on the lush blue carpeting if I tried to touch those doors without permission.

  Perhaps paratroopers would descend on me from the vaunted heights. Or perhaps she’d lay me out herself.

  I decided diplomacy was in order. “My name is Eric Argus, and—”

  “Oh, I know who you are.”

  That stopped me. Her smile still hadn’t budged.

  I glanced around the room. All eyes were watching me now. Time to take a different tack.

  “What if you told him I was here, and then he could decide for himself if I needed an appointment?”

  “He only takes meetings scheduled in—”

  “I drove two hours. Please, it’ll take two seconds to ask.”

  The slightest crack appeared in her armor. A moment’s hesitation. I pressed the gap. “If he learns that I was here, and he wasn’t told…”

  Her smile dropped by a micrometer at the left corner of her mouth.

  “Please,” I said. “Two seconds.”

  She stared at me for what seemed like a very long time and then reached across to her intercom. There was a click of a button. “Sir,” she spoke into the intercom, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but Eric Argus is here. He doesn’t have an appointment.”

  The intercom was silent for eight full seconds during which the receptionist never took her eyes off me. Just when I began to think there would be no response, there was a crackle, then, “Send him in.”

  She hit another button, and the double doors swung open. Her smile was back at full force. “You may step inside.”

  I felt the glare of the other patrons as I walked past. I was that guy in traffic who zooms by the line of cars, only to merge at the front.

  Robbins sat at his desk facing two men seated across from him. The two men turned. Sharks in suits.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Robbins said to the sharks. They nodded and rose to leave. “And close the doors behind you, if you would.”

  The doors closed with a whisper. What followed was the silence of a bank vault.

  “Eric Argus,” Robbins declared triumphantly when we were alone. “How many times did I try to get you to see me?”

  He was smaller than I expected, less polished and perfect without the TV makeup, but otherwise the same man I’d come to envisage from the cable shows. “Twice, I think.”

  “And now here you are, out of the blue, when it can do me not the slightest worldly good. I’m a busy man, Mr. Argus. To what do I owe this honor?” His face was cool and expressionless. He hadn’t asked me to sit. Perhaps I wouldn’t be staying long enough to warrant it. His office was as enormous as it was opulent—decorated to within an inch of its life. There were several overstuffed chairs, paintings on the walls, a single formal bookcase of serious-looking leather tomes. Behind him, French doors looked out into a small, closed courtyard.

  I decided to get right to the point. “I was hoping that you might have information about a friend of mine.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Who?”

  “Satvik Pashankar. The tech who worked with you on the box.”

  “Oh, I think I remember him. Satvik was his name, you
say? I haven’t heard from him. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he’s missing.”

  “Missing.” For the first time, his face registered emotion or some facsimile of it. “When did our friend go missing?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Sometimes people need to get away. I expect he’ll turn up.”

  I looked at him closely. I wanted the truth from him, even if he didn’t speak it, but either he was very good, or he really didn’t know anything about Satvik. I decided the direct approach would be best.

  I pulled the folded piece of paper from my back pocket and tossed it down on his desk. The paper sat there for a moment before he reached for it.

  “We’ve been getting these at the lab,” I said. “Some of your followers perhaps.”

  He unfolded the paper. He looked at what was written. His wide-set brown eyes lifted to my face. He folded the paper again and slid it back across the desk toward me.

  “What possible reason would any of my followers have for doing that?”

  “The experiment,” I said. “These kinds of threats have been coming in for the last month or so. Some worse than that.”

  He gestured to one of the two chairs facing his desk. “Please, sit.”

  I sank into plush red leather. Like sliding into a sports car. The chair probably cost a month’s salary. “In the interviews you gave, you said there was a failure in the mechanism of the test.” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “There was no failure, was there?”

  “Is that what you came here for, a confession? Do you really need one? You saw the videos that were leaked.”

  “I saw them.”

  “Along with the rest of the world. Failure is the word we used when describing the experiment, but there’s another word for it, of course—disaster. The truth is, I wish I’d never heard of your little box. It’s caused nothing but trouble.”

  “So maybe one of your followers decided to take that out on Satvik. Or maybe you did.”

  Robbins laughed. “Why on earth would I do that? What would I have to gain?”

  I shrugged. “You didn’t like what the box had to say.”

  “Well, you’re right in that regard, but there’s nothing to be done about it now. The cat’s out of the bag, so to speak. And your technician friend disappearing won’t put it back in. Truth is, if anything does happen to your friend, it will only draw attention to this whole sad episode, which otherwise is best soon forgotten. I’d much prefer to just close the book on this.”

  I remembered the last time he’d spoken to me of books. This wasn’t the confident, headstrong Robbins whom I’d spoken to on the phone months ago. This man was humbled. In retreat. Things had changed.

  “You told me all you needed was one book, if it was the right one.”

  His professional smile faded. “Sometimes, the creator denies us answers in order that we might better demonstrate faith. Or so we must suppose.”

  “An interesting supposition.”

  “And yet it is the one we are left with. Sometimes, though, in my darkest hours, I wonder if we aren’t the unknowing beneficiaries of some kind of a joke.”

  The cool, professional smile was totally gone now. Cracks had appeared in the skin near the corners of his eyes, which were puffy, as if he hadn’t slept.

  “This isn’t a joke,” I said. “My friend is missing.”

  “I even wonder, from time to time, if joke is too kind a word. Maybe trick is a better word. In a lot of ways, I have you to thank for the soul-searching I’ve found myself so distracted by this past month.”

  “Me to thank?”

  “After the experiment, I had a crisis of conscience,” he said. “I wondered, why would God create children who have no souls? What possible purpose could there be? And there is this question which has kept me awake some nights: what would such children grow into?”

  It was a question I’d been trying hard not to think about. The same question, perhaps, that had kept Satvik out on the road.

  “I didn’t come here to discuss theology with you.”

  He waved that off dismissively. “Everything is theology, or nothing is. Tell me, do you think it is odd that free will is a focus of both religion and physics?”

  When I didn’t answer, Robbins leaned back in his chair. “This is a Montese,” he said, gesturing to the painting that hung on the wall opposite his desk. On the wide canvas was painted a scene in reds and browns, a girl sitting on the lip of a stone well, a great cathedral rising in the background. From the top of the steeple, a crucifix cast a long shadow across the town. The painting was beautiful. The girl, haunting and sad.

  “Eighteenth century,” Robbins said. “The artist killed himself at age twenty-eight. That’s part of why his paintings are so valuable; there aren’t many of them. Being creative can be hazardous, which is one reason I’ve stayed away from the arts; but what of the ultimate creator? I wonder. Why is it, when men ponder divine motivations … why do they always assume that God was sane?”

  At first I assumed the question was rhetorical, but he waited for an answer. I had none to give. There were no answers, not to any of this.

  “So perhaps it’s foolish to question why our creator does anything,” he went on. “Perhaps there is no underlying logic to it. Maybe the ancient Eastern philosophers were asking the right questions all along. Not why. But only what is. What is beneath the glossy patina? Can anything in this world be truly relied upon? Even atoms are an evanescent haze—emptiness stacked upon emptiness which we’ve somehow all willed ourselves to believe in.”

  It wasn’t what I expected. He was drifting, so I brought him back. “In regard to Satvik, there must be something you can do.”

  His eyes snapped to attention. “Like what?”

  “Talk to your congregation.”

  Robbins laughed. A deep, baritone that went on and on. “So you think if some member of my congregation was involved, they’d simply turn themselves in because I said so?”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged.

  “Churches are made in our image as sure as we are made in God’s. From a church, the congregation takes what teachings as suits them, and they leave the rest. For a member of the flock to be so … extreme in their views, it makes me suspect that there’s not much I could say one way or another to sway that person’s mind. What does your employer say about your missing friend?”

  “They’re taking a wait-and-see attitude.”

  “Well, perhaps they know their business.” He paused, and his brown eyes searched my face. I could see him come to a decision. “Still,” he said. “It couldn’t hurt, what you’re suggesting. A sermon on the evils of taking the law into our own hands? That sort of thing?”

  “It’d be a nice start,” I said. I decided to play a hunch. “Is the security new or have you always been this paranoid?”

  A joyless smile crept to his lips. “The security is new. As is the guard out in the courtyard.” He gestured toward the French doors, but if there was anyone out among the trees and bushes, they were hidden.

  “Why the sudden interest in security?”

  “Circumstances change. The world moves on.”

  “Oh?”

  “We stare into that little box you made, and we collapse the wave. What is true at one scale is often reflected in another. Even fame, it seems, follows the rules of quantum mechanics. The eye of the public changes what it observes.”

  “So you’re getting your own letters.”

  “Let’s just say that all attention isn’t good.” The smile faded. “These are the costs we face to live in pursuit of the big questions.”

  “Speaking of questions,” I began—and here I paused, choosing my words. There was only one more card to play. I watched him closely. “Have you heard of a man named Brighton?”

  His face froze at the mention of the name—just a momentary lapse, so subtle that I could almost pretend I hadn’t seen it. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Never hea
rd of him.”

  I stared him down. It was the first thing he’d said that I didn’t believe.

  “Before you ran your experiment,” I said, “I talked with this Brighton, and he seemed to know more than he should have. He seemed to know that you were going to find something unexpected.”

  He watched me and said nothing.

  “So how did he know?” I prompted him. “Who is this Brighton to you?”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  I could see the lie all over his face. I pushed again, “How could anyone know what you were going to find?”

  “Perhaps it was a guess. Or maybe you misinterpreted him.”

  “Maybe,” I said, though I didn’t believe it for a second.

  “If someone had known,” he said, “I wish to God they would have warned me. I could have avoided the news conferences.”

  Unexpectedly, Robbins rose to his feet. For a moment, I thought he was going to bring our little meeting to a close, but instead he turned and stepped toward the French doors. He didn’t open them but stood in the pie-shaped slice of sun that arced through the glass. He looked out through the windows, arms crossed.

  With his back to me, he spoke. “You know, until recently, I’ve never sought to avoid what was difficult. I’ve always sought to apply rigor to my beliefs,” he said. “This is why your test was so alluring. I thought it was the answer.”

  “The answer to what?”

  “The oldest question of all. Maybe the only one that matters. Are we this body? I’ve made myself an expert on disparate subjects that would not, in some men, comfortably occupy the same mind, and I have done these things, I now realize, because my faith is weak. I can say that now. I can admit it.” I saw his eyes move to my accidental reflection in the glass. “As a boy, did you ever wonder how life arose?”

  “I was a math kid.”

  “In medical school, I learned the endocrine and circulatory systems—all the valves and levers of the organism—and I saw no meaning there, no purpose, other than the purposeless functioning of cells in service to their own continuation. Ordered into a complex architecture, certainly, but without any evidence of spirit. There was no light in the husk.” He nodded to himself slowly, as if he were reliving some particularly dark part of his life. “And what was true on that scale is true of the world. Just as all cells come from preexisting cells, you can look at the larger universe and see an endless unbroken chain of events, linking back toward some original first cause—Aristotle’s theorized unmoved mover. Is there any meaning to life, any overarching purpose to it? I look around me, and I ask, where is God in all this—the cause without cause? Is he even necessary?”