reading

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part II

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part III

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Follow Penguin

I sat in the rain with a gun.

A wave climbed the pebbly beach, washing over my foot, filling my pants with grit and sand. All along the shore, dark slabs of rock jutted from the surf, sharp as broken teeth. I shivered as I came back to myself and for the first time realized my suit jacket was missing. Also my left shoe, brown leather, size twelve. I looked for the shoe, scanning the rocky shoreline, but saw only sand and frothy, sliding water.

I took another pull from the bottle and tried to loosen my tie. Since I had a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other—and since I was unwilling to surrender either to the waves—loosening my tie was difficult. I used the gun hand, working the knot with a finger looped through the trigger guard, cold steel brushing my throat. I felt the muzzle under my chin—fingers numb and awkward, curling past the trigger.

It would be so easy.

I wondered if people had died this way—drunk, armed, loosening their ties. I imagined it was common among certain occupations.

Then the tie opened, and I hadn’t shot myself. I took a drink from the bottle as reward.

Another wave rumbled in. If I stayed here long enough, the tide would roll over me, drown me, and pull me out to sea. This place was nothing like the dunes of Indiana, where Lake Michigan caresses the shoreline. Here in Gloucester, the water hates the land.

As a child, I’d come to this beach and wondered where all the boulders came from. Huge, dark stones like pieces of shipwreck. Did the tides carry them in? Now I knew better. The boulders, of course, were here all along—buried in soft soils. They are left-behind things. They are what remains when the ocean subtracts everything else.

Thirty yards up the beach, near the road, there is a monument—a list of names. Fishermen. Gloucestermen. The ones who did not come back.

This is Gloucester, a place with a history of losing itself to the ocean.

The wind gusted.

I told myself I’d brought the gun for protection, but sitting here in the dark sand, I no longer believed it. I was beyond fooling myself.

It was my father’s gun, a .357. It had not been fired for seventeen years, five months, four days. The math came quickly. Even drunk, the math came quickly. Always my most resilient talent.

My sister, Marie, had called it a good thing, this new place that was also an old place.

A new start, she’d said over the phone. Away from what happened in Indianapolis. You can do your work again. You can continue your research.

Yeah, I’d said. A lie she seemed to believe.

You’re not going to call me, are you?

Of course I’ll call. A lie she didn’t.

There was a pause.

I mean it, Eric, call me. If anything goes wrong.

Farther up the beach, a white-winged tern leaped into the air and hung stationary against the wind, frozen like a snapshot, before it wheeled and lifted into the sky and was gone.

I turned my face away from the ocean and took another burning swig. I drank until I couldn’t remember which hand held the gun and which the bottle. I drank until they were the same.

1

During the second week, we unpacked the microscopes. Satvik used a crowbar while I used a claw hammer. The crates were heavy, wooden, hermetically sealed—shipped in from some now-defunct research laboratory in Pennsylvania.

The sun beat down on the lab’s loading dock, and it was nearly as hot today as it was cold the week before. Perspiration dripped from my forehead.

I swung my arm, and the claw hammer bit into the pale wood. I swung again. It was satisfying work.

Satvik smiled, straight white teeth in a straight dark face. “Your head is leaking.”

“Melting,” I countered.

“In India,” he said, “this is sweater weather.”

Satvik slid the crowbar into the gash I made, and pressed. I’d known him for three days, and already I was his friend. Together we committed violence on the crates until they yielded.

The industry was consolidating, and the Pennsylvania lab was just the latest victim. Their equipment came cheap, bought in bulk, shipped in by the pallet load. Here at Hansen, it was like a holiday for scientists. We opened our boxes. We ogled our new toys. We wondered, vaguely, how we had come to deserve this.

For some, like Satvik, the answer was complicated and rooted in achievement. Hansen was more than just another Massachusetts think tank after all, and Satvik had beaten out a dozen other scientists to work here. He’d given presentations and written up projects that important people liked. He’d impressed someone.

For me it was simpler.

For me this was a second chance given by a friend. A last chance.

We cracked open the final wooden crate, and Satvik peered inside. He peeled out layer after layer of foam packing material, making a pile on the floor. It was a big crate, but inside we found only a small assortment of Nalgene volumetric flasks, maybe three pounds weight. It was somebody’s idea of a joke—somebody at the now-defunct lab making a statement of opinion about their now-defunct job.

“The frog is in the well,” Satvik said, one of his many opaque expressions.

“It certainly is,” I said.

I had cause to come East again. I had cause not to. Both had everything, and nothing, to do with the gun.

The sign is the first thing a person sees when driving up on the property: HANSEN RESEARCH, in bold blue letters, tastefully offset from the road and surrounded by an array of carefully assembled shrubbery. A hundred feet beyond the sign are the gates, decorative and black, left open during business hours. From this entrance, you can’t see the building at all, which in the real estate sector surrounding Boston speaks not just of money but money. Everything out here is expensive, elbow room most of all.

The lab complex is tucked into a stony hillside about an hour upcoast of the city. It is a private, quiet place, shaded by trees. The main office building is beautiful—two stories of reflective aluminum spread over the approximate dimensions of a football field. What isn’t aluminum is matte black steel. It looks like art, or like what art might look like if translated into an architectural structure built to house the world’s best scientific minds. A small, brick-paved turnaround curves up to the main entrance, but the front parking lot is merely ornamental—a rudimentary asphalt pad for visitors and the uninitiated. The driveway continues around the building, where the real parking, the parking for the researchers, is in the back. Several smaller adjunct buildings stand at the far end of the lot. These are the out-labs, buildings north and south. The tech facilities and lab spaces. Beyond there, standing off by itself like a big gray battleship, is W building, the old warehouse unit.

That first morning, I parked my rental car in front of the main office and walked inside.

“May I help you?”

“They’re expecting me,” I told the receptionist.

“Your name?”

“Eric Argus.”

The receptionist smiled. “Please take a seat.”

I sank into a leather cushion. There were exactly three chairs and a nice, complicated painting, done in reds and blues. The painting could have doubled as a technical schematic of some kind, all lines and angles, suggestive of some hidden order. The exact sort of thing an engineer might pick if charged with the task of decorating a lobby. Two minutes later, a familiar face rounded the corner, and I stood.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s been too long.” Jeremy shook my hand and pulled me into a quick back-clap. “How the hell are you?”

“I’ve been worse,” I said. Which was the truth.

He hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. Not quite as skinny. His unruly blond hair now tamed into a business cut. But still that same easy way about him. That same easy smile.

“And you?” I asked.

“This place is keeping me busy, I’ll say that. More than a hundred and fifty researchers now and growing all the time.”

He walked me back to his office. We sat. And then came the offer, like this was just business—like we were just two men in suits. But I could see it in his eyes, that sad way he looked at me, my old friend.

He slid a folded sheet of paper across the broad desk. I unfolded it. Forced myself to make sense of the numbers.

“It’s too generous,” I said, sliding the paper back to him.

“We’re getting you cheap at that price.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not.”

“Your work at QSR more than justifies it. We can set you up with high-scale integration, parallel cores, whatever you like.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gray file folder. He placed the folded sheet of paper inside. “You can pick up where you left off.”

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Just let us know what you need. Considering your patents and your past work—”

I cut him off. “I can’t do that anymore.”

“Can’t?”

“Won’t.”

That stopped him. He leaned back in his leather chair. “I’d heard that rumor,” he said finally. He appraised me from across his desk. “I’d hoped it wasn’t true.”

I shook my head.

“Why?”

“I’m just done with it.”

“Then you’re right,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“If you feel I came here under false pretenses—” I began climbing to my feet.

“No, no.” He held up his hand. “The offer is still good. That’s a solid offer. Sit down.”

I sank back into the chair.

“We can carry you for four months,” he said. “We hire the researcher, not the research. Probationary employees get four months to produce. That’s our system here.”

“What would I be doing?”

“We pride ourselves on our independence; so you can choose whatever research you like, so long as it has scientific merit.”

“Whatever I like?”

“Yes.”

“Who decides merit?”

“Peer review, ultimately, in the publications, assuming your work gets that far. But before that, you have to get past our review board here. Probationary hiring is at the recruiting manager’s discretion, but after four months, it’s not up to me anymore. I have bosses, too; so you have to have something to show for it. Something publishable or on its way. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Four months.

“This can be a new start for you,” he said, and I knew that he’d already talked to Marie. I wondered when she’d called him.

I mean it, Eric, call me. If anything goes wrong.

“You did some great work at QSR,” he said. “I followed your publications; hell, we all did. But considering the circumstances under which you left …”

I nodded again. The inevitable moment.

He was silent, looking at me. “I’m going out on a limb for you,” he said. “But you’ve got to promise me.”

That was the closest he’d come to mentioning it. The thing people were so careful about.

I looked away. His office suited him, I decided. Not too large, but bright and comfortable. The window over his shoulder looked out on the front parking pad, where I saw my rental parked. A Notre Dame engineering diploma graced one wall. Only his desk was pretentious—a teak monstrosity large enough to land aircraft on—but I knew it was inherited. His father’s old desk. I’d seen it once when we were still in college nearly a decade ago. A lifetime ago. Back when we still thought we’d be nothing like our fathers.

“Can you promise me?” he said.

I knew what he was asking. I met his eyes.

Silence.

And he was quiet for a long time after that, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Weighing our friendship against the odds this would come back to bite him.

“All right,” he said finally. He closed the folder. “Welcome to Hansen Research. You start tomorrow.”

2

There are days I don’t drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my motel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says RUGER along the side in small, raised letters. It tastes like pennies and ashes. I look into the mirror across from the bed and tell myself, If you drink today, you’re going to kill yourself. I look into my own blue-gray eyes and see that I mean it.

Those are the days I don’t drink.

There is a rhythm to working in a research laboratory. Through the glass doors by 7:30, nodding to the other early arrivals; then you sit in your office until 8:00, pondering this fundamental truth: even shit coffee—even mud-thick, brackish, walkin’-out-the-pot shit coffee—is better than no coffee at all.

I like to be the one who makes the first pot in the morning. Swing open the cabinet doors in the coffee room, pop the tin cylinder, and take a deep breath, letting the smell of grounds fill my lungs. It is better than drinking the coffee, that smell.

There are days when I feel everything is an imposition—eating, speaking, walking out of the motel room in the morning. Everything is effort. I exist mostly in my head. It comes and goes, this crushing need, and I work hard not to let it show, because the truth is that it’s not how you feel that matters. It’s how you act. It’s your behavior. As long as your intelligence is intact, you can make cognitive evaluations of what is appropriate. You can force the day-to-day.

And I want to keep this job; so I do force it. I want to get along. I want to be productive again. I want to make Marie proud of me.

Working at a research lab isn’t like a normal job. There are peculiar rhythms, strange hours—special allowances are made for the creatives.

Two Chinese guys are the ringleaders of lunchtime basketball. They pulled me into a game my first week. “You look like you can play” was what they said.

One is tall, one is short. The tall one was raised in Ohio and has no accent. He is called Point Machine. The short one has no real idea of the rules of basketball and for this reason is the best defensive player. His fouls leave marks, and that becomes the meta game—the game within the game—to see how much abuse I can take without calling it. This is the real reason I play. I drive to the hoop and get hacked down. I drive again. The smack of skin on skin. Welts take the shape of handprints.

One player, a Norwegian named Ostlund, is six foot eight. I marvel at the sheer size of him. He can’t run or jump or move at all, really, but his big body clogs up the lane, huge arms swatting down any jump shot made within his personal zone of asphalt real estate. We play four-on-four, or five-on-five, depending on who is free for lunch. At thirty-one, I’m a few years younger than most of them, a few inches taller—except for Ostlund, who is a head taller than everyone. Trash is talked in an assortment of accents.

“My grandmama shoots better than you.”

“Was that a shot or a pass? I couldn’t tell.”

“Ostlund, don’t hit your head on the rim.”

Some researchers go to restaurants on lunch hour. Others play computer games in their offices. Still others work through lunch—forget to eat for days. Satvik is one of those. I play basketball because it feels like punishment.

The atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system—you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you’ve got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent. Friendships with new hires can be fleeting.

Satvik works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he explained.

I watched him toggle the focus, and the image on the screen shifted. I’d used an SEM in grad school, but this one was newer, better. As close to magic as I’d ever seen.

A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it’s like looking at another world. What had been a flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex.

Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography—you’re up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at the Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you’ve been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you’re falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you’re going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never hit the ground—like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, without ever reaching the other side. That’s an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.

I zoomed in to 14,000X once, like God’s eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.

Satvik and I both had offices on the second floor of the main building, a few doors down from each other.

Satvik was short and thin, somewhere in his forties. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His narrow features were balanced in such a way that he could have been alleged the heir to any number of nations: Mexico or Libya or Greece or Sicily—until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick, and you could not imagine him being anything else.

The first time I met Satvik, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then said, “Ah, a new face in the halls. How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” And that’s how the word was used—research—like it was a location. A destination that could be arrived at. We were standing in the main hall outside the library. He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.

It was Satvik who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “You must be sure of it,” he said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”

I watched him work. He filled the SEM’s reservoir—icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down the cylinder to drip on the tile floor.

Liquid nitrogen doesn’t have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand, and they’ll bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you—like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you’re wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir of the SEM, the nitrogen could spill down inside the glove and be trapped against your skin. “And if that happens,” Satvik said while he poured, “it will hurt you bad.”

Satvik was the first to ask my area of research.

“I’m not sure,” I told him.

“How can you not be sure? You are here, so it must be something.”

“I’m still working on it.”

He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change—his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I’d become something different to him.

“Ah,” he said. “I know who you are now; they talked about you. You are the one from Stanford.”

“That was eight years ago.”

“You wrote that famous paper on decoherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”

Satvik was blunt, apparently.

“I wouldn’t call it a breakdown.”

He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”

“I’m done with it.”

His brow creased. “Done? But you did important work.”

I shook my head. “After a while, quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview.”

“What does this mean?”

“The more research I did, the less I believed.”

“In quantum mechanics?”

“No,” I said. “In the world.”

3

There are days I don’t drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father’s .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.

But there are also days I do drink. Those are the days I wake up sick. I walk into the bathroom and puke into the toilet, needing a drink so bad my hands are shaking. The bile comes up—a heaving, muscular convulsion as I pour myself into the porcelain basin. My stomach empties in long spasms while my skull throbs, and my legs tremble, and the need grows into a ravening monster.

When I can stand, I look in the bathroom mirror and splash water on my face. I say nothing to myself. There is nothing I would believe.

It is vodka on these mornings. Vodka because vodka has no smell.

I pour it into an old coffee thermos.

A sip to calm the shakes. A few sips to get me moving.

It is a balancing act. Not too much, or it could be noticed. Not too little, or the shakes remain. Like a chemical reaction, I seek equilibrium. Enough to get by, to get level, as I walk through the front entrance of the lab.

I take the stairs up to my office. If Satvik knows, he says nothing.

Satvik studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Mather’s Field-gated Array. The array’s internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Like evolution in a box. The most efficient circuits were identified by automated program and worked as a template for subsequent iteration. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There’s lots of modeling.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked.

Satvik was a genius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. He’d chosen electrical engineering because he liked the math. After that, Harvard and patents and job offers. All described to me in his matter-of-fact tone, like of course it had happened that way, anybody could do it. “There is no smart,” he said. “There is only trying hard.”

And he seemed to believe it.

Myself, I wasn’t so sure.

Other researchers would come by to see the field-gated arrays set up around his workstation like some self-organizing digital art. The word elegant came up again and again—highest praise from those for whom mathematics was a first language. He stood crouching over his work, concentrating for hours. And that was part of it. His ability to focus. To just sit there and do the work.

“I am a simple farmer,” he liked to say when someone complimented his research. “I like to challenge the dirt.”

Satvik had endless expressions. When relaxed, he let himself lapse into broken English. Sometimes, after spending the morning with him, I’d fall into the pattern of his speech, talking his broken English back at him, an efficient pidgin that I came to respect for its streamlined efficiency and ability to convey nuance.

“I went to dentist yesterday,” Satvik told me. “She says I have good teeth. I tell her, ‘Forty-two years old, and it is my first time at dentist.’ And she could not believe.”

“You’ve never been to the dentist?” I said.

“No, never.”

“How is that possible?”

“Until I am in twelfth grade in my village back home, I did not know there was a special doctor for teeth. Since then, I never went because I had no need. The dentist says I have good teeth, no cavities, but I have stain on my back molars on the left side where I chew tobacco.”

“You chew.” I tried to picture Satvik hawking a plug like a baseball player, but the image wouldn’t come.

“I am ashamed. None of my brothers chew tobacco. Out of my family, I am the only one. I started years ago on the farm. Now I try to stop.” Satvik spread his hands in exasperation. “But I cannot. I told my wife I stopped two months ago, but I started again, and I have not told her.” His eyes grew sad. “I am a bad person.”

Satvik’s brow furrowed. “You are laughing,” he said. “Why are you laughing?”

Hansen was a gravity well in the tech industry—a constantly expanding force of nature, always buying out other labs, buying equipment, absorbing the competition

Hansen labs only hired the best, without regard to national origin. It was the kind of place where you’d walk into the coffee room and find a Nigerian speaking German to an Iranian. Speaking German because they both spoke it better than English, the other language they had in common. Hansen was always hungry for talent.

The Boston lab was just one of Hansen’s locations, but we had the largest storage facility, which meant that much of the surplus lab equipment ended up shipped to us. We opened boxes. We sorted through supplies. If we needed anything for our research, we signed for it, and it was ours. It was the antithesis of most corporate bureaucracy, where red tape was the order of the day.

Most mornings I spent with Satvik. We’d stand side by side at his lab bench, talking and keeping busy. I helped him with his gate arrays. He talked of his daughter while he worked. Lunch I spent on basketball.

Sometimes after basketball, as a distraction, I’d drop by Point Machine’s lab in the North building to see what he was up to. He worked with organics, searching for chemical alternatives that wouldn’t cause birth defects in amphibians. He tested water samples for cadmium, mercury, arsenic.

Point Machine was a kind of shaman. He studied the gene expression patterns of amphioxus; he read the future in deformities. The kind of research my mother would have liked—equal parts alarm and conspiracy.

“Unless something is done,” he said, “most amphibians will go extinct.” He had aquariums filled with salamanders and frogs—frogs with too many legs, with tails, with no arms. Monsters. They hopped or swam or dragged themselves along, Chernobyl nightmares in long glass jars.

Next to his lab was the office of a woman named Joy. Like me, she was new to the lab, but it wasn’t clear when she’d started, exactly. The others only seemed to know her first name. Sometimes Joy would hear us talking, and she’d swing by, delicate hand sliding along the wall—tall and beautiful and blind. Did acoustical research of some kind. She had long hair and high cheekbones—eyes so clear and blue and perfect that I didn’t even realize at first.

“It’s okay,” she said to one researcher’s stammering apology. “I get that a lot.” She never wore dark glasses, never used a white cane. “Detached retinas,” she explained. “I was three. It’s nothing to me.”

“How do you find your room?” It was Satvik who asked it. Blunt Satvik.

“Who needs eyes when you have ears and memory? The blind are good at counting steps. Besides, you shouldn’t trust your eyes.” She smiled. “Nothing is what it seems.”

In the afternoons, back in the main building, I tried to work.

Alone in my office, I stared at the marker board. The great empty expanse of it. I picked up the marker, closed my eyes. Nothing is what it seems.

I wrote from memory, the formula spooling out of my left hand with practiced ease. A series of letters and numbers, like the archaic runes of some forgotten sorcery—a shape I could see in my head. The work from QSR. I stopped. When I looked at what I’d written, I threw the marker against the wall. The stack of notes on my desk shifted and fell to the floor.

Jeremy came by later that night.

He stood in the doorway, cup of coffee in his hand. He saw the papers scattered across the floor, the formula scrawled across the marker board.

“Math is merely metaphor,” his voice drifted from the doorway. “Isn’t that what you always used to say?”

“Ah, the self-assuredness of youth. So rich in simple declarations.”

“You have nothing to declare?”

“I’ve lost the stomach.”

He patted his own stomach. “What you’ve lost, I’ve gained, eh?”

That raised a smile from me. He wasn’t a pound overweight; he simply no longer looked like he was starving. “Isn’t that just like us,” I said, “giving ourselves primacy. Maybe we’re the metaphor.”

He held out his coffee cup in mock salute. “You always were the smart one.”

“The crazy one, you mean.”

He shook his head. “No, Stuart was the crazy one. But you were the one to watch. We all knew it. Before you came along, I’d never seen a student get into an argument with a professor.”

“That was forever ago.”

“But you won the argument.”

“Funny, but I don’t remember it like that.”

“Oh, you won, all right, if you think about it.” He sipped his coffee. “It just took you a few years.”

Jeremy walked farther into the room, careful not to step on the papers. “Do you still talk to Stuart?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Too bad,” he said. “You partnered on some interesting work.”

Which was one way to put it. It was also Jeremy’s way of bringing up his reason for dropping in. Work. “I got a visit from one of the review board members today,” he said. “He asked about your progress.”

“Already?”

“It’s been a few weeks. The board is just staying on top of things, curious how you’re adjusting.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d look in on you, so here I am. Looking in.” He gestured toward the formula on the marker board. “It’s good to see you working on something.”

“It’s not work,” I said.

“These things take time.”

Honesty welled up. There was no point in lying. To myself or him. A rising bubble in my chest, and just like that, it burst: “Time is what I’m wasting here,” I said. “Your time. This lab’s time.”

“It’s fine, Eric,” he said. “It’ll come.”

“I don’t think it will.”

“We have researchers on staff who don’t have a third of your citings. You belong here. The first few weeks can be the toughest.”

“It’s not like before. I’m not like before.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No, I’ve accomplished nothing.” I gestured at the board. “One unfinished formula in three weeks.”

His expression shifted. “Just this?” He studied the dozen symbols laid out in a line. “Are you making progress?”

“I don’t know how to finish it,” I said. “I can’t find the solution. It’s a dead end.”

“There’s nothing else? No other research that you’re pursuing?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He turned toward me. That sad look back again.

“I shouldn’t be here,” I told him. “I’m wasting your money.”

“Eric—”

“No.” I shook my head again.

He was quiet for a long while, staring at the formula like so many tea leaves. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “R&D is a tax write-off. You should at least stay and finish out your contract.”

I looked down at the mess I’d made—the papers scattered across the floor.

He continued, “That gives you another three months of salary before you face review. We can carry you that long. After that, we can write you up a letter of recommendation. There are other labs. Maybe you’ll land somewhere else.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, though we both knew it wasn’t true. It was the nature of last chances. Nothing came after.

He turned to go. “I’m sorry, Eric.”

4

That night in my motel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. A clear glass bottle. Liquid burn.

The cap rolled away across the cheap carpet.

I imagined calling Marie, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. The good one, the sane one. I imagined her voice on the other end.

Hello? Hello?

This numbness in my head, strange gravities, and the geologic accretion of things I could have said, not to worry, things are fine; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself outside the sliding glass window, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. It comes down steady, a cold drizzle that soaks my clothes.

Thunder advances from the east, as I stand in the dark, waiting for everything to be good again.

In the distance, I see a shape in the motel parking lot. A figure standing in the rain with no reason to be there—gray rain-slicker shine, head cocked toward the motel. The shape watches me, face a black pool. Then comes the sudden glare of a passing car, and when I look again, the rain slicker is gone. Or was never there.

The last of the vodka goes down my throat.

I think of my mother then, that last time I saw her, and there is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I lose connection to my body, an angular shape cast in sodium lights—eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.

“It’s not for you,” my mother had said on that autumn day many years earlier.

My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness—the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else.

It is a dream I have sometimes. That last time we spoke, when I was fifteen.

She bears many names, most of them apocryphal.

My mother looks across the table at me. She doesn’t smile, but I know she’s happy. I know she’s in one of her good moods, because I’m visiting.

She’s back home again—the very last time, before everything went so irredeemably wrong. She drinks tea. Cold, always. Two ice cubes. I drink hot cocoa, my hands wrapped around the warm mug. We sip while the ceiling fan paddles slowly at the air above our heads.

“I’m in mourning,” she says.

“Mourning what?”

“The human race.”

And the gears in my head shift, as I note the change of direction, one of these talks then. Like a rut her mind keeps falling into—all tracks leading eventually back into the wilderness.

“The Y chromosome of our species is degrading,” she says. “Within a few hundred thousand years, it’ll be whittled away to nothing.” Her eyes travel the room, never resting on one thing for more than a few moments.

I play along. “What about natural selection? Wouldn’t that weed out the bad ones?”

“It won’t be enough,” she says. “It is inevitable.”

And maybe it is, I think. Maybe all of it is inevitable. This room. This day. My mother sitting across from me with restless eyes and her shirt buttoned wrong.

Light slants through the windows of the dayroom. Outside the leaves are blowing across the yard, accumulating against the stone wall that Porter put up to keep the neighbor’s corgi out of the rose garden.

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.

Ted Kosmatka

THE FLICKER MEN

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Contents

THE FLICKER MEN

THE BEGINNING

Part I

1

2

3

4