The Flicker Men (35 page)

Mercy closed her eyes. As the minutes passed, I wasn't sure if she was sleeping. Her face was turned toward me, a smooth mask of repose. A perfectly angelic face. I wondered what she dreamed of. Her past? Dark angels, strange monsters?

I looked through the window as the ferry rocked in the waves. The wind was stronger this far out. The lights on the opposite shore were visible now. Another bayside town.

A few minutes later, her voice surprised me. “They're going to keep coming,” she said. “They're going to keep coming, and coming, and they'll hunt us down.”

The wind rattled the glass. I closed my eyes, and tried to clear my head. Exhaustion descended like a clinging fog. After a time, I slept.

 

45

There are truths you learn while sailing. You never want a smaller boat while out on the water. You never want a bigger boat while in a marina. Our own struggles were legendary—the
Regatta Marie
swinging wide as my father guided it into our slip.

Most people liked fair weather. Sunny days, light breezes. My father loved the storms. Driving rains.

There is talk among sailors about the one that gets you. The wave with your name. Like the old man who helped us tie our lines one day—and he intoned the story of the
Northern
, his first ship, lost when he was young. The seas were rough but manageable, he told us, until the big one hit. A broadside mountain, conceived in a gale a thousand miles away— and then crossed an ocean until it found him, rolled him, sheared off the mast. The wave with his name.

*   *   *

When a sailor goes missing, there are procedures that the Coast Guard follows. A specific checklist. Some ships go missing and wash up on shore. Other times, boats go straight to the bottom. Never to be seen again. Erased from the world.

The old video is too painful to watch.

A video of my father when he was a boy, running along the sand. Small and brown-haired and unrecognizable. Until he smiled. And in that smile you could see him.

It was that very same beach. The stones like pieces of shipwreck, unchanged, like they'd been there forever and would be there forever. Like my father had been a boy just yesterday, running in the sand with that wide, crooked grin. The video a time machine. And a lie. Because you couldn't go back.

That spark now gone from the world.

*   *   *

When my father went missing, the Coast Guard launched a search. They set up a perimeter, established a grid.

They finally made contact a hundred miles out. Both sails raised in the storm, drunk for days.

He was trying, I think. To lose himself. But the sea would not take him.

By then the cirrhosis was bad. His liver failing, as was his vision. A night drinking rubbing alcohol under a sink. “There are no blind sailors,” he told me.

And my mother secure behind the protective walls of her denial. “He's getting better,” she said while he sailed off alone.

There are things I can remember about that last day. The way his skin looked, sickly and blotched. Like a wax model. The doctors had told him that if he drank again he'd die, but some part of him must have suspected what was more probably true: He was dying already. And nothing could stop it. The cirrhosis already too far gone.

So he left for the day, heading to the office.

And later I'd hear fragments of the rest. Small dollops of information spread over the coming years.

I think she might have been okay if she hadn't been the one to find him. I think everything might have been different. It was just bad luck.

He'd left his briefcase at home, and when he didn't return, she'd decided to drive it to his office to drop it off. Or it was some strange premonition that guided her. And I've never been told all the details. Just bits and pieces. And one word—
gun
—repeated over and over.

She'd caught a glimpse of his car as she drove down Western Avenue. She could have driven right past, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she would have. There was no reason for her to glance in that direction unless it was to see the water. But her roll of the dice was that hundredth time, so instead of driving past, she looked out toward the water and saw his car parked near the sand. A parking lot with a view of the ocean.

*   *   *

The ferry bumped into the pier with a flurry of bow thrusters. I startled awake. “Come on,” Mercy said. She sat up straight and rubbed her eyes. “We need to go.”

The other riders were already rising to their feet. We followed the stragglers out the doors and down the ramp. We walked the sidewalks into the rain. I turned my face up to the sky.

*   *   *

It was raining when my mother parked next to his car in the sandy lot.

It was cold that day, a drizzly October, so perhaps my mother pulled her jacket collar up as she stepped out of the car. Perhaps she turned her face into the rain. I can see her walking around the back of his red Chevy Cavalier. Perhaps she was formulating what she was going to say. She'd tease him for being forgetful, or she'd ask why he was parked there near the sand.

I can see her reaching for his door, her fingers curling slightly in anticipation of the handle. And then I see no more.

It was a passerby in another car who finally stopped and helped a few minutes later. An old dockworker who pulled my mother from where she stood screaming in the middle of the street. She'd tried to stop other cars, but they swerved away, wanting no part.

The police found him in the front seat, gun in his lap. The note read only,
It was the wave with my name.

*   *   *

As we walked into the town, we found most of the businesses already closed for the night. Another tourist district at the edge of the water.

Farther down the street, I spotted a hotel, but when I pointed to it, she said, “Not that one.”

“Why?”

“Not the first one we come to.”

A bit farther out, another hotel sign glowed red in the rain.
VACANCY. CABLE TV.

We paid with cash.

“Ice maker's at the end of the hall.”

The room was clean and no frills. A floral pattern on the blankets. I turned the heat up as far as it would go. The double beds were soft.

I slept like the dead.

*   *   *

When I woke in the morning, Mercy was already up and dressed, sitting at the tiny round table in the corner. She had coffee and a doughnut put aside for me.

“Continental breakfast,” she said. “I was afraid you would miss it.”

I noticed a small plastic bag on the bed.

“Toothbrush and toothpaste,” she said. “A razor. They sell them at the little store just up the road.”

*   *   *

She put the news on the TV—the steady drone of international politics. The Koreas. The stock market. The upcoming election.

I sat up, and my clothes stuck to me. Everything hurt. My shirt still stiff and coarse, pleated into the shape I'd slept it into. My skin was raw. I wanted a shower and a shave.

“We'll need new clothes,” I told her.

She nodded. “There's a shop up the street. A rental car company, too. The sooner we leave, the better.”

“We're renting a car?”

“Unless you know how to steal one.”

I climbed to my feet and crossed the room to my coffee. It was hot and good. I drank it down. The doughnut I couldn't make myself eat.

“When they catch us, they'll kill us,” she said.

When
, she had said. Not
if.

“So what do we do? We can't just sit here and do nothing.”

“We go to the other hide, like Vickers said.”

“How far is it?”

“Far enough. Two days' drive. We meet up with her and decide what to do.”

“And if she's not there?”

“She'll be there.”

 

46

We drove west and west, through two states, and into the night. We took turns driving, eating up the miles. The rise and fall of the hills like the waves of some impossible sea. The hypnotic thrum of the engine carried us to dawn.

The plains brought heat and an endless expanse. The doldrums. Horse latitudes.

We ate at a Denny's outside Topeka, and then six hours' sleep at a Super 8 just off the highway.

We hit the badlands at midday. Bright sun shining down. Here the land became alien. As bare and inhospitable as the surface of the moon. The badlands, full of gullies and arid hills. Land that would not level. We drove west for hours more, and then we went south.

*   *   *

“Vickers,” I prompted her.

The sun had gone down, and the world was now defined by what I could see in the headlights. The dotted white line spooled out in front of us and then disappeared behind us again.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you believe what she says about Brighton? What he is?”

“You saw them. Make up your own mind.”

She leaned her face against the passenger window, watching the night.

“And the cascade?” I asked.

“The what?”

“Matryoshka dolls, nested universes. Finite volume but an infinite surface area.”

“I don't know physics. Vickers had a different story for me.”

“What story?”

“The story of an island,” she said. “The most beautiful place you could imagine, unchanging, until one day rats came to its shores.”

“Rats?” I asked.

She nodded. “Never mind how they got there. But the point was they got there. These rats were different from the other animals and disrupted the harmony if left unchecked. They had to be controlled, do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“So those in charge of the island tried to control the rats, but the rats were too fast. Traps were attempted, but the rats were too smart. So it was decided that predators would be introduced to prey on the rats. And so it came to pass that snakes were released on the island. Big venomous snakes that could kill the rats with a single bite. What do you think happened?”

“The snakes didn't control the rats.”

She nodded. “The snakes slithered deep into the heart of the island and did what snakes do, and so now the island had two vermin upon it. Did the keepers of the island stop there?”

“I guess no.”

“No, they did not. And a new beast was brought in to solve the problem. The sly mongoose. Faster than a snake. Smarter than a rat. They shipped them in and set them loose, and what do you think happened?”

“They didn't kill the snakes.”

“Oh, they killed some. The slowest, the weakest. A war was waged. But over time, the mongooses became their own problem, as big as the rats and snakes. And many snakes died, and many mongoose, too, as all around them the rats scurried. And so after that the laws were changed—an unbreakable decree for all time. No more mongooses. No more outsiders. The age of miracles was ended. Nothing new would be added to the island. The curators of the island washed their hands and said, ‘What will be will be.'”

“And Brighton is a snake?”

“The snakes are snakes. I was speaking of an island.”

I drove in silence for a long time. “What does the snake want?”

“Who can know the wants of a snake.”

“And what of the mongooses?”

“All dead now.”

“And the rats, what do they want?”

“The rats want what rats everywhere want,” she said. She turned her face to the sun. “Just to survive.”

*   *   *

The heat of the day came on. Mercy offered to drive, but I waved that off. “Sleep,” I told her. “I'll be fine.”

At a rest stop, we drank from the water fountain and used the bathroom. We found our place on the map.
You are here.
Low hills hemmed us in on two sides. My eyes in the mirror were tired.
Three hours
, I told myself. In three more hours, I'd let myself rest. I tried my phone, hoping to get the map working, but it was still glitched from the water. The phone turned on, which was promising, but none of the icons worked. I'd heard that bagging the phone in rice did the trick sometimes, but since I had no rice, I tossed the phone onto the dashboard, figuring the sun might dry it out. I thought of Joy.

Mercy slept as I drove.

The land here defied scale. Defied description. The bad lands. The broken lands. Bright red walls rose up in the distance and then fell away. Stone shaped by wind into the flow of a wave. There were no mountains but only strange tables upon which the land resumed. Places where the arid floor of the Earth rose vertically for a hundred feet into the sky, as if God himself couldn't decide at which level the ground should rest.

The road snaked its way through the lowlands between these plateaus—a single traversable ribbon wending its way through the upheaval. Here and there, the road became a bridge, passing over deep crevasses. Other times the road seemed to be in the crevasses themselves as canyon walls rose up around us. It was a landscape in revolt. I wondered what it must have been like here for the first settlers. How many people reached this place and found there was no way forward, the heat of the sun baking down, and no way back.

The heat muddled my thinking. Or maybe it was the need for sleep.

I drove with the accelerator pressed as hard as I dared, but when I looked again, our speed had dropped to fifty. I pressed on, speeding up again, but every time I looked, the speedometer wouldn't stay still. I'd lost control of it somewhere. As I'd lost control of my life.

In the backseat, Mercy made a noise, then lay quiet, sleeping again. So quiet that I looked back, checking her breath. The steady rise and fall, like the land around us.

I turned back to watch the road. The winding gray ribbon.

Minutes later, my chin jerked, and I was suddenly awake—the car straddling the lanes, my speed above ninety. I slowed to seventy and shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs.