The Flicker Men Read Online Free Page B

direction, one of these talks then. Like a rut her mind keeps falling into—all tracks leading eventually back into the wilderness.
    â€œThe 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?”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œYour 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.
    â€œThe 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