The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  Jeremy gave a weary smile. “Fire you? If I fired you, my bosses would fire me. And then they’d hire you back. Probably with a raise. In fact, they’d probably give you my job.”

  “I’d be terrible at your job. My first order of business would be to hire you back, so maybe it would all work out.”

  The coffee machine percolated. Brown liquid drained into the pot while Jeremy pulled a clean mug down from the cabinet. “So you’re sure you won’t go?”

  “I’m sure.” I’d seen what Robbins was proposing. It was ingenious in its own way, I had to admit. An application of the test that I’d never considered. But I wanted as far from it as I could get.

  “All right then,” he said. “I’ll pass that along.” Which wasn’t the same as letting it go. He poured himself a steaming mug, then leaned against the counter. When he spoke again, the boss part of him drained away—and he was just Jeremy, my old friend. “This guy Robbins is a real prick, do you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen him on TV.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know that, too.”

  * * *

  Hansen provided technicians for the procedure. I stayed clear of the contract talks, but it was obvious that Hansen was taking a nuanced approach to the situation, positioning itself as neutral expertise while trying to divest itself, as much as possible, of the messier ramifications that might come out of the test results. It would be a difficult tightrope to walk.

  Satvik was the primary liaison on the project—a duty that seemed to particularly weigh on him.

  Late one morning, I found him in his office. He sat hunched over a snarl of fiber optics, thin shoulders pulled up tight around his ears. Strapped to his forehead on a delicate pivot was a light and tiny camera. The flat-screen monitor next to him displayed the image in extreme close-up—wires thick as bridge support cables, fingers like tree trunks.

  “How’s the prep work going?”

  The soldering tool pulled back, and the image spun as he turned to look at me. “Almost time for the final smoke test,” he said.

  I saw my face on the monitor, huge and alien. “Smoke test?”

  He turned back toward the bridge cables again. “You start it up, hope you don’t see smoke.”

  “You gonna be ready for this?”

  “The box is ready. I’ll be ready. What about you?”

  “That’s the best part. I don’t need to be ready.”

  “More than you think,” he said. On the video feed, his soldering tool slipped deeper into the machine. “This is your test now. You might end up famous.”

  “What? How’s that?”

  “If things go wrong.” He bent closer to his work. “Or if things go right.”

  “I don’t want to be famous.”

  Satvik seemed to agree, nodding his head. “In that water, you would drown, my friend.”

  “Wait a second. What if I wanted to be famous?”

  He glanced at me. “It would go badly.”

  Blunt Satvik.

  I left him to his work.

  * * *

  A few weeks before the tests were going to occur, I got the call. I’d been expecting it. Robbins himself. The phone cool against the side of my head.

  “Are you sure we can’t get you to come?”

  His voice was different than I’d expected. Softer, more conversational. I’d only heard him on TV—his voice either booming from the pulpit or broadcast through the media bullhorn of various talking-head cable shows. Doctor turned pastor turned media figure. But this was a different Robbins. More subdued.

  I took a moment to answer, carefully considering the man on the other end of the line.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “Well, your presence will be sorely missed,” Robbins said. “Taking into account your role in the project, we would surely love to have you there. I think it would be a great benefit to the cause.”

  “I think your cause will get along fine without me.”

  “If the issue is monetary, I can assure you—”

  “It’s not.”

  There was a pause. “I understand,” he said. “You’re a busy man; I can respect that. All the same, I wanted to personally thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s a great thing you’ve accomplished. You must see that. Your work is going to save a lot of lives.”

  I was silent. The silence became a void—an area of negative pressure meant to draw me in. I pictured him as I’d seen him on TV. Tall, square-jawed. That certain variety of good-looking that some kind of men grow into, while others are busy growing old and plump. I pictured the phone next to his ear. I wondered if he was alone in an office somewhere, or if he had people around him. A whole team of lawyers, hanging on every word. He waited me out, and when I spoke again, so much time had elapsed that we both understood we were having a different conversation.

  “How did you get the mothers?” I asked.

  “They’re committed volunteers, each one. Special women, to be sure, who felt they were called for this important task.”

  “But where did you find them?”

  “We’re a large, national congregation, and we were able to find several volunteers from each trimester of pregnancy—though I don’t expect we’ll need more than the first one to prove the age at which a baby is ensouled. Our earliest mother is only a few weeks along. We had to turn some volunteers away.”

  Ensouled. The same word that he’d been using in the press releases. A word that put me on edge. “What makes you so sure that’s what you’re testing?”

  “Mr. Argus, how else might we define the difference between man and animal? If not the soul, then what?”

  While I stumbled for an answer, he went on, “Call it the spirit, if you will, or use another name, but it is unquestionable what your test has found. That thing that marks us out. A thing that the world’s religions have for so long told us was there.”

  I spoke the next words carefully. “And you’re fine with them taking the risk? The mothers, I mean.”

  “We have a whole staff of doctors attending, and medical experts have already determined that the procedure carries no more risk than amniocentesis. The diode inserted into the amniotic fluid will be no larger than a needle.”

  “It sounds like you have everything worked out.”

  “Every precaution is being taken.”

  “One thing I never understood about this, though … a fetus’s eyes are closed.”

  “I prefer the word baby,” he said, voice gone tight.

  I thought about the way my view of Satvik changed when I’d first heard him speak. I heard change now, in the voice on the phone. A slight shift in the temperature of the words. I was becoming something different to this man on the other end of the line.

  “A baby’s eyelids are very thin,” he continued. “And the diode is very bright. We have no doubt they’ll be able to sense it. Then we have merely to note wavefunction collapse, and we’ll finally have the proof we need to change the law and put a stop to the plague of abortions that has swept across this land.”

  I put the phone facedown on my desk. Looked at it. Plague of abortions.

  There were men like him in science, too—ones who thought they had all the answers. Dogma, on either side of an issue, has always seemed dangerous to me. I picked up the phone again. It seemed to weigh more than it had just a few moments earlier. “So it is as simple as that?”

  “Of course it is. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not?”

  I stayed silent.

  He continued, “In a just society, our rights end where the next person’s begin. All would agree. But where is that beginning? When does it start? There’s been no answer. Now we’ll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue?”

  “There’ll be a few, I suspect.” />
  “Ah, but you see, now the science will be on our side. This will change everything. We’re all possessed of the same miracle. A consciousness unique to humanity. I sense that you don’t like me very much.”

  “I like you fine. But there’s an old saying, ‘Never trust a man with only one book.’”

  “One book is all a man needs if it’s the right book.”

  “That’s the problem though, isn’t it? Everybody thinks their book’s the right one. Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if wavefunction collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magic moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “I am.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. But I guess now we find out.”

  PART II

  All great truths begin as Blasphemies.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  16

  When I was a boy, there were two things my father liked to do. Sail and drink. He’d met my mother in college, when they were both juniors and poor as dirt. She was still a chemistry major, he economics. The story of their meeting was family lore.

  “The foundations of economics are genetic,” he told her, when she finally deigned speak to him in the park outside the university library. He’d noticed the helix on the cover of the book she carried.

  Later she would talk about the day he proposed, their senior year: a walk on the beach and in the distance, heeled over in the bay, a white sailboat like a breaching whale. They watched it for an hour, and my father told her, “Someday I’ll have one.” He might have been telling her that he’d be president someday. Or an astronaut.

  My father graduated, and while my mother switched sciences, he went to work for the biggest corporation that would hire him. The world was a machine into which hours were invested, and out of which money flowed. He was good at his job, and soon there were cars and a house and a baby and then another—and my mother later talked about those years often. The way scholars might talk of a lost golden age. Untrue in its parts, but true as a whole. For no golden age is truly golden. But for my mother, reality was always abstract art—a pattern of color on canvas, a collection of brushstrokes.

  And maybe there was this truth: it was golden enough.

  I was seven years old when he first took me out on the bay. My father’s boat was a thirty-six-foot Catalina. The Regatta Marie, a medium-sized cruiser that carried four hundred square feet of sail. His work had by then made millions for his employer, and there were bonuses paid, promotions, partnerships. I never understood any of it. I understood only that my father was good at what he did. Special somehow. Gifted.

  For seven days the Regatta Marie was our whole world, sailing up the rocky coast, just the two of us. The wind blew from the south, and the ship heeled, sprinting into the waves, sails snapping like prayer flags. We kept the shore in sight that first trip. At night, we got out the binoculars and watched the city lights twinkle in the blackness.

  The next day, my father shouted in joy at the spray, while the harness held me in place, and the chop disintegrated against the hull in a million shiny droplets. He clung to the helm, soaked to the skin—one leg steadied against the side of the cockpit as the boat heaved along on its side. We ate soup cooked on cantilevered pots—cold saltwater sluicing periodically across the starboard windows. From the safety of my harness I watched my father in his element.

  He was drinking almost every day by then, but the water kept him honest. He never drank beyond the harbor if he had passengers aboard. “Too dangerous,” he’d say. Because even he understood the sea wasn’t to be trifled with.

  After that summer sail, school started for me, and my father started going out alone, each time venturing farther and farther out. His first blue water solo voyage, I checked over his supply list, written on a large yellow legal pad.

  • Check lines

  • Buy new halyards

  • Check through hulls for rot

  • Set sail Sept 6th

  • Don’t die

  Later, when I was twelve, I checked his lists again, looking for that last item, and it wasn’t there. Somewhere along the line, it had fallen off the list.

  Since he never drank when he drove or worked or sailed with crew, he did all these things less often as time went by. Our excursions beyond the harbor grew fewer. And then there was that last time. That last time we ventured out into deep water.

  I guided the ship by pointing. “There!” I shouted. “Let’s go there!” Pointing to a bit of blue no different from all the other bits of blue, the rise and fall of dark waves, and I handled the ropes while we tacked, and the great sail above us shifted as he steered into a beam reach. The canvas filled and the lines creaked, while the whole large and mysterious machine leaned over on its side, and we were off.

  The ocean is vast. A tiny vessel against the expanse of a world. And he loved that point where you couldn’t see land anymore. Seventeen miles on a clear day. Sometimes sixteen or fourteen or ten, depending on the weather. He’d stare out over the horizon. “There,” he’d say. And I’d look. And I’d see he was right. There was no land. Only the ocean. And no point going farther. Beyond here, everything was the same. The ocean was one thing. And the ship would rise and fall like breathing. A spaceship in the darkness as we moved across the waves.

  When the wind comes from the east, the storms can sneak up on you. Catch you unaware. The way life can catch you unaware.

  * * *

  I watched the unnamed marina in the distance as the airport shuttle rounded the curve. I looked past Point Machine’s shoulder while he dozed, black hair against the glass. I could see the sailboats and the masts swaying. The highway curved again as we approached the city, driving parallel to the water. Buildings loomed. I nudged him. “We’re almost at the hotel.” But he did not wake.

  I looked out through the glass at the small slice of ocean. Never forgetting the water was cold and the water was deep, and the things you love most can hurt you.

  I could smell the salt when I climbed off the shuttle. Point Machine and I grabbed our bags as we stood beneath the front awning of the conclave hotel, a plush Ramada not far from the water. We decided to make a pass through the commons before checking in.

  Already, the crowds were gathering.

  “Quite a turnout,” Point Machine said.

  I switched the strap of my duffle bag to my other shoulder. “Now I remember why I don’t come to these.”

  The trip was mandatory, a decree handed down from bosses whom even Jeremy was afraid to disappoint. I’d refused to help with Robbins, so this was the alternative. The lesser of two evils. Still, I’d dragged my feet until higher-ups were invoked. In the end, I did it for Jeremy. “They want a representative from Hansen to attend,” he told me. “Preferably someone high-profile, and right now, that’s you guys. Satvik is already committed elsewhere.”

  That “elsewhere,” of course, being Robbins.

  So when the date arrived, I’d packed my bags and met Point Machine at the airport.

  In truth, it was the last place I wanted to be. Three days earlier, the first threatening letter had arrived at the lab. The police were called.

  When I’d asked, Jeremy said only, “You don’t want to read it.”

  Eventually, he showed me the xeroxed copy. Ten words in black magic marker. Enough to remind me that the world was a dangerous place.

  Marble gave way to thick carpet as we entered the central commons, weaving our way through the flow of bodies, and I was struck by the aural wave of a hundred simultaneous conversations. It had been a long time since I’d been to one of these, but you never really forget them. The milling crowds, both postgrad and undergrad. The never-grads and PhDs. The science bloggers rubbing shoulders with editors.

  In the best cases, it brought future collaborat
ors together. Forged new systems of understanding the world. I thought of the famous 1961 conclave where Feynman met Dirac. Just two men sitting across the table from each other.

  In the worst cases, these things could be cliquish and exclusionary—but still with one silver lining. Always, for those so inclined, it was a great excuse to drink. I’d packed my prescription of nalmefene and popped two pills before I got on the plane.

  We found the check-in desk. After a short wait in line behind a group of German-speaking researchers, we showed our identification to the staff and received name tags and small plastic lanyards, along with plastic bags stuffed with conference literature. We leafed briefly through our new provisions. Somewhere in the little booklet, I knew, would be a short description of our experiment, along with dozens of other studies that were being highlighted. We’d managed to avoid having to give an actual talk, but only because I’d put my foot down. Still, that didn’t stop other researchers from discussing the experiment. Point Machine’s name tag used his real name. I turned mine around so that it faced my chest.

  After stowing our luggage in our rooms, we headed down to the main floor armed only with our booklets. I scanned the map for the most vital piece of information.

  “This way,” I said.

  Three minutes and two asked questions later, we found the hospitality suite, a rather elaborate affair, now crowded with all forms of attendees. A cheese spread competed for space with brownies on a narrow table along one wall. We grabbed our complimentary juices and then, able to put it off no longer, headed for the talks.

  The first talk was on quantum crystal dynamics. The speaker lectured eloquently on the crystalline substructure of carbon. The talk droned on. I glanced at Point Machine.

  “I pick the next one,” he said. And did. Hidden phylogenetic substructure among endangered amphibians.

  This one had slides and so was far superior. We watched the researcher wave at the screen with a long pointer. She spoke quickly in that perfect, accentless Midwestern of news anchors and people from Ohio: “Molecular analysis was performed on specimens sampled from across a wide range of threatened habitat.”