The Flicker Men (18 page)

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 wrapped 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.

“Just the way it is.” From her weighty tone, she might have been addressing one of the deeper mysteries of the universe. How are two particles entangled? That's just the way it is.

“The point of a hospital is to arrive sick and leave well,” I said. “From a marketing standpoint, wheeling patients out doesn't inspire confidence.”

The nurse mumbled something under her breath and left me in the wheelchair near the front doors. I checked my phone and saw a half dozen voice messages that I wasn't in the mood to listen to. I turned the phone off.

Jeremy's car pulled up a few minutes later.

“Jesus, Eric” were his first words. His face a dull red. I'd never seen him so worked up. “We're gonna find out who did this.”

I climbed into his car and shut the door. He spoke quickly, filling me in on everything that had been happening. His words came in a steady stream—he'd already talked to the cops, already been on the phone with the insurance and the fire marshal and had been in meetings with the big bosses. “We're hiring a new security contractor for the lab,” he said. “Twenty-four seven. This shouldn't have happened. We should have had better security after that first threat came in.”

He had already connected the two events in his mind. The threatening letters and the fire. And why wouldn't he? It seemed an easy leap to make.

He asked about the call from the lab, so I told him the whole story from front to back.

“You actually jumped from the roof?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head. “The police report had said that, but I thought maybe there'd been some confusion. That's two stories up.”

“Only one story to the roof of the shed.”

“And this woman, the one who pulled you away from the fire, you'd never seen her before?”

For some reason, my mind flashed to the rain slicker and another night a few months back. A shape in the parking lot outside my motel. “I don't know,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“And you never actually saw Satvik? Just his car?” Same questions as the cops. I felt my heart sink.

“Just his car,” I said. “So I take it that means he hasn't shown up?” I'd been hoping Jeremy was holding out on me, saving the good news for last. But even before he answered, I realized there was no good news.

“I haven't heard from him,” he said.

“What about his wife?”

“As far as I know, no one has heard from him.”

Jeremy drove in silence after that. His last words sank in slowly. If Jeremy hadn't been worried about Satvik before, he was worried now.

*   *   *

As we neared the city, Jeremy asked, “So where am I taking you? I forgot to even ask.”

“Homeward,” I said, and then I gave him directions.

Several miles ticked by in silence. As the car neared the turn-in, I saw the flamingos.

“You're still living in this shithole?”

“I like it.”

“You like this place.” He didn't look convinced. “The rats don't like this place.”

“I keep my costs low.”

“Why the hell am I paying you so much then?”

“I wondered that myself.”

Jeremy pulled into the half-empty lot and parked.

I looked up at the door of my room—second story at the far end, near the stairs, but when I reached for the handle of the car door, I hesitated. I didn't feel like getting out, facing that room alone.

Jeremy seemed to sense this. “And what about you?” he said.

“What about me?”

“The fire. How are you dealing with all this?”

“I'm fine.” I knew what he meant, though. What he was asking underneath it all. Would I snap like in Indianapolis, drink too much, do something crazy?

“You know, it wasn't supposed to be like this,” he said. He stared out through the windshield. “It was supposed to be easy, like old times. Instead, they burned a building down.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. And I meant it. I'd brought it all down on him. The questions. The attention. I thought of snowy roads. The feel of ice under spinning wheels.

He looked over at me. “That's not what I meant. You've nothing to be sorry about. You should take some time off. As much as you want.”

“I don't need—”

“Paid leave,” he interrupted me. “At least a week or two. Maybe longer. That reminds me.” He reached in the backseat and grabbed a small stack of papers and envelopes. “I took the liberty of cleaning your mail slot for you.” He handed me the stack of mail.

I looked down at the stack of papers in my hands. Junk mail. Newsletters. Various envelopes.

“That paid leave is an order, by the way. Came from the top down. Just a few weeks, until we can get our hands around this.”

I nodded. A few weeks. That could mean a couple of different things. I wondered if he regretted hiring me yet.

“What did your sister say when you called her?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said. Which wasn't a lie. Suddenly, the car was too confining. I reached for the handle and pushed the door open. “Thanks for the ride.”

He gave me a look. “You didn't call her, did you?”

“I didn't want to worry her.”

“You should call her,” he said. He turned the ignition and started the car. “She already worries.”

 

25

My sister. So like me, yet not like me.

It's amazing sometimes the things you lose. Other memories stay, like a burr caught in your mind. The sound the furnace makes when it kicks on in a darkened house. It's a feeling you get—like a trance, family sleeping down the hall—and it's like everything at that moment is right, and always will be—one random moment when everything is good.

And other memories, too. The mirror in your parent's bedroom, constructed of foot-wide rectangles glued to the wall, and when you look it is a broken boy looking back. A child of edges, a dozen discrete boxes, all slightly out of alignment, and you can move your feet slightly to adjust the angle at which you're viewed, so that your face is neatly in one mirror and your shoulder in another and your arms another, a complete compartmentalization of your being.

And another memory: Sitting up at night by the window, waiting for your father to walk through the door. Your mother coming in. “What's wrong?”

And having no words to explain it. Just inarticulate fear. The worry that someday your father might not return.

But Mother never worried. Never remembered the bad times.

Her memory was of her own making. Like a superpower. A flex. And she could believe whatever she needed. Like an eye dilating the shape of reality—controlling her memories the way that some Tibetan monks could control their heartbeats. Yet she could say things that would stop you in your tracks—startle with their insight. “Osteoporosis is adaptive,” she declared one afternoon. “Life expectancy drops for each inch above six feet. As you age, osteoporosis shortens the distance that your circulatory system travels and thus helps the ailing heart.”

Years later I'd look that up and find nothing in the literature. Her own idea.

She invented words. They spilled off her tongue like golden coinage. Words that should be. Words like
circulous. Sarcasmic. Englatiate.

“
Englatiate?
” I asked.

“To encase your enemies in ice,” she explained.

And I could only nod. Of course.

And another one, after the teachers gave her my test results. She reached out and touched my hair. “My smart boy. My
mathemagician
.”

My sister would only shake her head. The good one. The sane one.

In the motel room, I picked up the phone. Dialed the numbers—all but the last one. My finger hovered over the button.

It's late
, I told myself. Marie was probably already in bed. And what would I tell her? After everything that had happened in Indy, would she even believe it?

I could hear her question—her voice rising higher, “What do you mean a building burned? Eric, what did you
do
?”

What did I do?

I tried imagining what I might say to that. I put the phone down.

*   *   *

The file was hidden midway through the stack of papers and envelopes that Jeremy had brought me. He probably hadn't even noticed it—just grabbed it with the rest of the mail in my box.

The file was thin. A beige folder. I recognized the sloppy handwriting scrawled across the face of the folder:
That info you asked for on Brighton.

It was from Point Machine. I'd actually forgotten. Had it only been days ago that I'd asked him to find out what he could?

Inside was a note, along with a few pages of photocopy.

—Eric

I couldn't find much, but I made some calls and pulled some favors, and this is all I could pin down.

The short answer: Brighton's a ghost. No d.o.b. No last known address. The name doesn't start showing up in databases until '92, and that's only in regard to incorporation documents. A consulting company called Ingram. Buy and sell, a corporate investment group, just like he said. But a lot more funded than you might expect. Nothing particularly interesting, other than one thing, and this I had to dig for. They're the controlling officers of the Discovery Prize. You might have heard of it? Sorry I couldn't find more.

I'd heard of it all right. Ingram was one of several groups that offered prize money to researchers who answered long-standing problems in math and science. Like the XPRIZE in aeronautics and the Millennium Prize in math, the Discovery Prize and its ilk were considered a way to drive innovation.

I turned the page, and there was a list of rules and criteria. A hundred thousand dollars paid out to a wide variety of research subjects. Mostly physics and computer science. Three winners in the last seven years. On the next page was a tally of names who had won. Below that was a census of research subjects that had been under consideration. Unease crept up my spine.

*   *   *

Sometimes after returning from a day sailing with my father, I'd find my mother in the dining room, writing on her paper. Her paper, she called it, like a singular thing, though it seemed always to grow, and the subject to change.