The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  I got several feet across the roof before I fell to my knees, gasping. The in and out of air through my burning windpipe. I could feel the exact shape of my lungs.

  When I stood, the world swayed a bit, and I staggered to the edge of the building to look down. The reality of the situation struck home. I was on the roof of a burning warehouse. The roof was maybe twenty-five feet from the ground. Too far to jump, unless there was no other choice.

  Another explosion shook the structure beneath me, a deep rumble like a growl from a dragon. I thought of all the equipment below. Who knew what materials were burning? At least the electron microscopes were safe in the main building. And Point Machine’s frogs, the dozens and dozens of offices. The warehouse unit might be a loss, but Hansen would go on.

  I turned, and behind me smoke curled up from the open hatch through which I’d just climbed. The fire was growing.

  A third explosion shook the roof, like a baseball bat under my feet, and this time I went down. There came the sound of falling glass, and now smoke was billowing along the outside of the building, too, through shattered windows below. The heat grew. I rose to my feet and crossed toward the far side, feeling the tar under my shoes grow slick as it began to melt. A gentle sag began to form in the center of the rooftop, so I changed course, moving to the edge.

  In the distance, sirens warbled.

  The sag deepened. It was all happening too quickly. As I watched, the center of the roof seemed to slide down into itself, just a few feet wide at first, then growing—a black sinkhole through which shimmering heat and dark smoke rose—and I realized that waiting for the Fire Department might take longer than I had.

  I sprinted along the outside edge, trying to put distance between myself and the central part of the roof. And then I remembered the grounds shed. I’d seen the maintenance crews park the lawnmowers there—a small shed that abutted the warehouse in the very back.

  At the far back of the roof, I leaned over the edge.

  There.

  It was a silver rectangle below me. A slanted roofline. Still more than a full-story drop but survivable.

  I studied the drop. Adjusted expectations.

  Probably survivable.

  Beyond the rectangle was a cement pad, wooden pallets, dumpsters.

  I turned and scanned the rooftop, looking for anything I might use.

  The sirens warbled louder now, pulling onto the property. Flames lit up the sky through the broken windows below. The Fire Department would have no idea I was up here, and there was no way I was going to risk crossing the sagging roofline to approach the front of the building, where they might see me.

  This wasn’t just a fire; it was an inferno. A blazing oven. The heat baked up through my feet. Time was running short.

  I leaned over the edge of the roof.

  I studied the drop, looking for handholds—anything I might use to get myself a few precious feet closer to the ground.

  There was nothing.

  Sheer cinder-block wall on this side of the building.

  Light bloomed in the darkness behind me, and I turned my head. A new hole was forming in the roof near the front. The heat surged. I was out of time.

  I slid over the side of the wall and lowered my body out over the edge.

  I kicked out into nothingness.

  * * *

  The slant of the tin roof below is what saved me, transferring my momentum into circular spin.

  I struck feet first, legs slightly bent, and my knees buckled immediately. My butt slammed next as I rolled backward along the slope of the roof—then my shoulders and head, bouncing off the tin, and I saw stars as my feet came up and over, and I was tumbling backward into open air, with just enough light to see the stack of wooden pallets rising up to meet me. I hit hard—arms first, saving my skull—and then my right hip came down with a loud crack, splintering the wood, impact juddering along my entire body, knocking the wind from my lungs as I rolled and twisted and came to rest.

  * * *

  I baked in the glow of the fire.

  A cool hand on my forehead. I didn’t understand it.

  The sirens warbled louder. Above me, the flames rose to the heavens. The warehouse. What was I doing at the warehouse? My thoughts were jumbled. I remembered the parking lot. Satvik’s car. “Where is Satvik?”

  “Shhh” came the voice.

  “Where am I?”

  “Lie back.” It was a woman’s voice. “The paramedics are coming.”

  There was blood on her face. She was younger than me. Late twenties. She wore a gray rain slicker with a hood that partially covered her sandy blonde hair. An old scar neatly bisected her eyebrow. Another younger scar showed pink on her chin. Blood came from her nose, smeared across her cheek by the swipe of a hand. It dripped to her slicker.

  The heat was growing.

  She stood, grabbed me by my ankles, and pulled. I lifted my head as I felt the cement slide beneath my shoulders. She dragged me along, pulling me behind a dumpster, away from the heat, the roar of flames. She collapsed next to me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She gave no answer.

  She put her cool hand on my forehead again, and I saw she was missing two fingers. Her left pinky was missing from the second knuckle. Her ring finger was missing from the third. Old wounds, long ago healed.

  “Where is he?” I asked her. “Where’s Satvik?”

  “No good place,” she said.

  And the dizziness came again, and pain, like a white-hot knife to my temple, and the world went black.

  * * *

  “Hey!”

  I rolled over, lifting my head. Voice in the distance.

  “Hey you!”

  The voice came from a fireman rushing toward me. Big body. Young face.

  I looked around, and the woman was gone.

  “You okay?” the big man asked as he kneeled beside me.

  I said nothing at first. Finally, I mumbled, “My head.”

  “Are you burned?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I rose to my feet and let him guide me around the other side of the building.

  A dozen firemen fought the blaze. Two fire trucks crouched at a safe distance in the parking lot, hoses snaking across wet, steaming pavement, their water lines drenching the structure. The red spinning lights made everything move. I saw another night, years earlier outside my house. Red lights. Police without faces and underwater words.

  Other than the fire trucks, mine was the only vehicle in the lot. Something was missing, but I couldn’t place it.

  I glanced back at the warehouse, and the flames were twenty feet high now, roaring out of the top of the roof.

  “Are you burned?” The fireman asked again.

  I looked down at myself, and that’s when I noticed my shirtsleeve was blackened. The edges of the sleeve a jagged snarl of burned fabric.

  “Oh,” I said. The world spun with the lights. I sat.

  The man turned, shouting over his shoulder, “Hey, let’s get some help over here!”

  23

  A light shone in my eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  It was a Fire Department medic. I had the feeling he’d asked me that a few times already, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Eric Argus,” I said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  The question didn’t register as words. Just sounds without meaning. I tried to concentrate.

  “Do you have any pain?” The face loomed closer. He was pale, with a round face and a thick goatee. His skin a craterscape of old acne pits.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Do you think you can stand?”

  “I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong.”

  “How old are you?”

  I thought for a moment. The number wouldn’t come. “Twenty-eight,” I said. “Or maybe twenty-nine.”

  “You have a concussion.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong wit
h me.” I tried to get up.

  “You’re not fine.” The hand stopped me again.

  “Where’s my friend?”

  “Who?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I looked around. The burning warehouse. I tried to make sense of it. Something horrible had happened.

  “Twenty-eight or twenty-nine,” I told him.

  * * *

  The next memory was the ambulance.

  Stethoscopes hung from the wall above my head.

  The sirens blared, a steady warble I’d heard a hundred times, though never from the inside.

  I was on my back, looking up at the ceiling, feeling the movement of the vehicle through space. When the ambulance took a corner, the stethoscopes swung out from the wall like gravity shifting off the vertical—silver dollars at the end of thin black tubing. They swayed in unison, hovering over my face as the ambulance rounded a corner, the slow dance of stethoscopes. It was a phenomenon. I bore witness.

  The third time it happened, the medic swayed, too, nearly losing his balance. “Hey!” He shouted to the driver. “Take it easy. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  * * *

  It was happening this way:

  Or had already happened. Or would happen. The sound of sirens. A jumbled memory that did not cohere. Satvik’s car in the lot. The heat of the fire.

  There were stethoscopes. I saw them clearly as they swung in synchrony.

  I tried to sit up.

  “You’re awake.” The paramedic’s face was round and pale and cratered. An alien moon. Phobos. Deimos.

  The moon spoke. “Just relax, we’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  “The hospital.”

  “Is Satvik going, too?”

  “Who?”

  “Satvik.”

  The stethoscopes swung out over my face again, as a long arm braced itself against the side of the ambulance. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the moon said.

  * * *

  The dream.

  My mother, in her blue-white gown.

  “Every time there’s been a jump in brain size, it’s been correlated with fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field.” She’s animated, speaking quickly, trying to get it all out. “The poles flip, and right now South America is in the hot spot.”

  The sound of running water filters in from the kitchen. The bang of pots and pans as my sister tries to take control of the chaos. Light streams through the windows. The place cluttered; it is our first time here in weeks. Medication bottles litter the table.

  “That’s not how it works,” I tell her. My polymath mother. “You know that. You must know that.”

  “But if I’m right and direct feeding of mitochondria will lengthen the life span by even fifty percent, what would be the implications for the world?”

  I backtrack, trying to follow the train of thought, but there’s no path to find. It’s her wilderness, and I cannot follow her there.

  “I’m going to try to market the weight loss part of this, but not the age-defying part, because the government would step in. Einstein is wrong. I just need you to help me prove it. I’ve thought about it since yesterday, and light and time are hooked together. If light can be slowed passing through an atmosphere, then it should be able to speed up, too. Newton said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If we are able to prove that time is separate from light, then it means that the speed of light can be broken. A photon uses all its energy for motion, so it experiences no time and has no mass, right? A black hole is mass only, no time, no motion, so there has to be some phenomenon that is time only, with no mass and no motion and—”

  “Mom.”

  “And they don’t want people living to be two hundred or three hundred years old. I’d end up in jail if they found out that it worked.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “I lost ten pounds and my hair turned brown. I found a way to force-feed mitochondria. Look, my hair is almost brown. Two ingredients. Calcium and folic acid.”

  “Mom, stop.”

  But she doesn’t stop. Can’t stop. Any more than any of us can stop being what we are.

  “Most of the universe is missing,” she says. “Scientists know this, so they invented dark matter, but dark matter is a cheat.” And now I see anger rising up in her, genuine outrage in those hazel eyes. “It’s like assigning lethals to your Punnett squares to make the numbers come out right.” Her arms flail. “The gene frequencies don’t make sense, so you invent lethals to explain why the math doesn’t follow. All that missing heritability.”

  I reach for her hand across the table.

  “Dark matter is just a way to equal your equal signs,” she says. “A hack. A fix.” She leans forward. “Black magic.”

  “Mom, I miss you.”

  * * *

  I startled awake, feeling my gorge rise. My head hurt. The room spun around me. A hospital room. I saw the doctor enter. I saw him smile.

  I opened my eyes. There was no doctor.

  No room. I was just confused.

  The stethoscopes swayed. I was still in the ambulance. I felt it come to a stop.

  “Am I here?”

  The moon only shines down on me and says nothing.

  * * *

  “I washed my hair in calcium and folic acid.”

  She’s across the table from me but a million miles away. My sister is behind her, watching us.

  “The wet nurse of Tutankhamen was named Maia,” my mother says. “That’s no coincidence. The Mayans built pyramids, too. I want you to take two petri dishes and put eucalyptus in one to see if it kills the bacteria. This could work, Eric.”

  She talks more, and I let the words wash over me like a river. A babbling brook. White noise. Pyramids. Folic acid.

  “When your father gets back, we’re going sailing again. Your father will take us out past the cape.”

  I nod at her. I hold her hand.

  Eventually, I stand, Marie tugging on my elbow.

  “It’s time to go,” my sister says, but my mother’s eyes are on me.

  “Don’t forget the eucalyptus. With that West Nile out there, this could save a lot of lives. Do you hear me, Eric?”

  “I have to go, Mom.”

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “I don’t like living here alone,” she says, and her eyes are suddenly clear and sharp, and that is the worst thing. Worse than all the other things. “I want him to come home.”

  * * *

  The bang of doors. A judder across my backbone as the gurney crosses the threshold.

  Ceiling lights roll past. I’m in a white hallway.

  A man with a beard leans over me, and the penlight shines in my eyes. An emergency room doctor. “Pupils dilating normally,” he said. “No bleeding.” He looked down at me with a reassuring smile. “And how are we doing, sir? Any pain?”

  “My head,” I told him.

  The hall opened up to a nursing station. “Put him in number six,” someone called out.

  The bed wheeled in a new direction. There was suddenly a curtain on one side, a wall on the other. The bed stopped. “Here we are,” one of the nurses said. A television monitor hung from the ceiling.

  “I think you have a concussion,” the doctor said.

  I thought of Satvik. Without me, he would have been working on his circuits. I thought of his daughter’s ChapStick.

  “How old are you?” The doctor asked.

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Birthday?”

  “January ninth.”

  “What day is today?”

  “Saturday.” The answers came quickly.

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought of Satvik again, his car parked in the lot. “I really don’t know.”

  * * *

  They started fluids and took X-rays. “You’re lucky,” the doctor said as he wrappe
d my hand in white gauze. “These burns will hurt, but it’s mostly first degree, so you should heal without much scarring. The big risk is infection, so keep it clean and take your antibiotics.”

  “Did anyone else come in?” I asked.

  The doctor looked down at me as he noted something on my chart. “It’s been a busy day.”

  “No, I mean from the same fire. Did any other ambulances come in from the fire?”

  “No,” he said. “Just you.”

  24

  They kept me in the hospital overnight for observation. A raft of pain drugs, along with a prescription for more.

  The next morning, two stone-faced detectives came by and grilled me on the previous night’s events, so I told the entire story while they recorded the conversation. They never used the word arson but mentioned that the fire was officially suspicious—at least until the fire investigators finished their evaluation.

  “They burned it down,” I told them.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever called me from the lab.” I told them about the call. I told them about the explosion, and the ladder, and jumping from the roof. I told them about the woman.

  They perked up. “Did you know this woman?”

  “I’d never seen her before.”

  “Describe her.”

  They wrote it all down and then shifted into questions about Satvik. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much. After five minutes, they seemed to have what they needed. “You’ve been very helpful. We’ll be in touch.”

  My burned hand throbbed. My head pounded. I still felt slow, like my thoughts were coming single file, and the ones in front couldn’t get out of the way. It was all jumbled.

  Jeremy called shortly before visiting hours. He wanted to drive up right away, but I made him wait until the doctor gave me the all clear. “I’m going to need a ride out of here,” I told him. Approximately a million feet of red tape later, the doctor signed off, and I was allowed to go.

  A nurse wheeled me down to the front entrance, and when I complained, she said, “Sorry, hospital policy.”

  “What is?”

  “We wheel you in; it means we wheel you out.”

  “Why would that be a policy?” I asked.