The Flicker Men Read Online Free Page A

before . I’m not like before.”
    â€œYou’re being too hard on yourself.”
    â€œNo, 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?”
    â€œI don’t know how to finish it,” I said. “I can’t find the solution. It’s a dead end.”
    â€œThere’s nothing else? No other research that you’re pursuing?”
    I shook my head. “Nothing.”
    He turned toward me. That sad look back again.
    â€œI shouldn’t be here,” I told him. “I’m wasting your money.”
    â€œEric—”
    â€œNo.” 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.”
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œI’m in mourning,” she says.
    â€œMourning what?”
    â€œThe human race.”
    And the gears in my head shift, as I note the change of