The Flicker Men (5 page)

“I didn't realize you were still on probation, too.”

“I actually hired in the week after you.”

“Ah, so I have seniority. Good to know.”

She smiled. “I'm hoping to stay on once my probation ends.”

“Then I'm sure you will.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “At least my research is cheap. I bought the acoustical software before I came here, so now it's only me and my ears that they're paying for. I'm a small investment. Can I entice you in for coffee?”

“I should be going, but another time.”

“I understand.” She extended her hand. “Another time then. Thank you for the ride.”

I was about to turn and leave, but her voice stopped me. “You know, I heard them talking about you.”

I turned. “Who?”

“Men from the front office. It's a strange thing, being blind. Sometimes people think you're deaf, too. Or perhaps being blind makes you invisible. Am I invisible to you?”

The question caught me off guard. There was something in her expression. A deviousness to her smile. “No,” I said. I wondered if she knew she was beautiful. She must know.

“Most people are good talkers,” she said. “But I've cultivated a facility for the opposite. Jeremy said you were brilliant.”

“He said that?”

“I have a question before you go.”

“Okay.”

She brought her hand up to find my cheek. “Why are the brilliant ones always so fucked up?”

Her hand was cool on my skin. It was the first time I'd been touched in a long time.

“You need to be careful,” she said. “I can smell the alcohol on you some mornings. And if I can smell it, so can others.”

“I'll be fine,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. “Somehow I don't think you will.”

 

7

Satvik stood in front of the diagram I'd drawn on my marker board.

He was silent as he considered the scribblings. At one point, his hand went to his ear, tugging at the earlobe. I didn't want to prompt him. I was interested in his unadulterated opinion.

“Okay, what is it?” he asked finally. It was already late, and many of the other researchers had gone home for the day.

“The wave-particle duality of light.” I said.

I'd spent most of the day drawing and going over checklists in my head. Part of it was just overcoming inertia, building myself up to actually do it. The other part, maybe, was finding a path to believe it all again. Can you half believe something? No, that wasn't quite right. This was quantum mechanics. The better question: can you both believe in something and not?

Satvik stepped closer to the marker board.

“Wave-particle duality,” he said slowly under his breath. He turned to me, gesturing at the diagram. “And these lines over here?”

“This is the wave part,” I said. “Fire a photon stream through two adjacent slits, and the competing waves create an image on the phosphorescent screen. The frequencies of the waves zero-sum each other in a set pattern, and a characteristic image is captured there.” I pointed to the drawing. “Do you see?”

“I think so. The photons act as the waves.”

“Yes, and as the waves pass through the slits, one wave front becomes two, the ripples overlap, and you get the interference pattern.

“I see.”

“But there's a way to produce a totally different result. A totally different image. If you put a detector at the two slits”—I began drawing another picture below the first—“then it changes everything. When the detectors are in place, a kind of translation occurs, from the conjectural to the absolute—and when you look at the results, you realize that somewhere between the gun and the screen, light has stopped behaving like a wave and started behaving as a particle series.”

I continued, “So instead of an interference pattern, you get two distinct clusters of phosphorescence where the particles pass straight through the slits and contact the screen without impacting each other.”

“This uses the same gun?”

“Yes, the same photon gun. The same two slits. But a different result.”

“I remember now,” Satvik said. “I believe there was a chapter on this in grad school.”

“In grad school, I
taught
this. All those probabilistic implications. And I watched the students' faces. The ones who understood what it meant. I could see it in their expressions, the pain of believing something that can't be true.”

“This is already a famous experiment, though. You are planning to replicate?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? It has already been replicated many times; no journal will publish.”

“I know. I've read papers on the phenomenon; I've given class lectures on the details; I understand it mathematically. Hell, most of my earlier research at QSR is based on the assumptions that came out of this experiment. Everything else in quantum mechanics builds from this, but I've never actually
seen
it with my eyes. That's why.”

“It is science.” Satvik shrugged. “It's been done already, so you don't need to see it.”

“I think I do need to,” I said. “Just this once.”

*   *   *

The next few weeks passed in a blur. Satvik helped me with my project, and I helped him with his. We worked mornings in his lab. Evenings we spent in North building, room 271, setting up the equipment for the experiment. The phosphorescent plate was a problem—then the alignment of the thermionic gun. In a way, it felt like we were partners, almost, Satvik and I. And it was a good feeling. After working so long by myself, it was good to be able to talk to someone.

We traded stories to pass the time. Satvik talked of his problems. They were the problems good men sometimes have when they've lived good lives. He talked about helping his daughter with her homework and worrying about paying for her college. He talked of his family
Backhome
—saying it fast that way,
Backhome
, so you heard the proper noun. He talked of the fields and the bugs and the monsoon and the ruined crops. “It is going to be a bad year for sugarcane,” he told me, as if we were farmers instead of researchers. And I could imagine it easily, him standing at the edge of a field. Like it had only been an accident that he'd ended up in this place, this life. He talked about his mother's advancing years. He talked of his brothers and his sisters and his nieces, and I came to understand the weight of responsibility he felt.

“You never talk of yourself,” he observed at one point.

“There's not much to say.”

He dismissed that with a wave of a hand. “Everyone has things to say,” he said. “But you keep quiet. You are alone here?”

“What do you mean?”

“No family? You live alone?”

“Yeah.”

“So there is only this place.” He gestured around him. “Only work. People forget they are going to die someday. There's more to life than career and paycheck.” Bending over the gate arrays, soldering tool in hand, he changed the subject. “I talk too much; you must be sick of my voice.”

“Not at all.”

“You have been a big help with my work. How can I ever repay you, my friend?”

“Money is fine,” I told him. “I prefer large bills.”

“You see? Paycheck.” He tsked me softly and bent closer to his work.

I wanted to tell him of my life.

I wanted to tell him of my work at QSR, and that some things you learn, you wish you could unlearn. I wanted to tell him that memory has gravity and madness a color; that all guns have names, and it is the same name. I wanted to tell him I understood about his tobacco; that I'd been married once, and it hadn't worked out; that I used to talk softly to my father's grave; that it was a long time since I'd really been okay.

But I didn't tell him any of those things. Instead, I talked about the experiment. That I could do.

“It started a half century ago as a thought experiment,” I told him. “It was about proving the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Physicists felt quantum mechanics couldn't be the whole story because the analytics takes too many liberties with reality. There was still that impossible incongruity: the photoelectric effect showed light to be particulate—an array of discontinuous quanta; Young's results said waves. But only one could be right. Later, of course, when technology caught up to theory, it turned out the experimental results followed the math. The math says you can either know the position of an electron or the momentum, but never both.”

“I see.”

“You've heard of the tunneling effect?” I asked.

“In electronic systems, there is something called tunneling leakage.”

“It rises out of the same principle.”

“And relates to this?”

“The math, it turns out, isn't metaphor at all. The math is dead serious. It's not screwing around.”

Satvik frowned as he went back to his soldering. “One should strive to know the world accurately.” A few minutes later, while making careful adjustments to his field gates, he traded his story for mine.

“There once was a guru who brought four princes into the forest,” he told me. “They were hunting birds.”

“Birds,” I said, tracking his change of subject.

“Yes, and up in the trees, they see one, a beautiful bird with bright feathers. The first prince said, ‘I will shoot the bird,' and he pulled back on his arrow and shot into the trees. But his accuracy failed him, and the arrow missed. Then the second prince tried to shoot, and he, too, missed. Then the third prince. Finally, the fourth prince shot high into the trees, and this time the arrow struck and the beautiful bird fell dead. The guru looked at the first three princes and said, ‘Where were you aiming?'

“‘At the bird.'

“‘At the bird.'

“‘At the bird.'

“The guru looked at the fourth prince, ‘And you?'

“‘At the bird's eye.'”

 

8

Once the equipment was set up, the alignment was the last hurdle to be cleared. The electron gun had to be aimed so the electron was just as likely to go through either slit. The equipment filled most of the room—an assortment of electronics and screens and wires. A mad scientist's chamber if ever there was one.

In the mornings, in the motel room, I talked to the mirror, made promises to gunmetal eyes. And by some miracle did not drink.

There were pills in my suitcase—a half-finished prescription to ease the shakes. But I'd never liked how they made my head feel. I popped two pills in my mouth.

One day became two. Two became three. Three became five. Then I hadn't had a drink in a week. The ravening thirst was still there, just under my skin. My hands still shook in the morning as I gripped the cool porcelain. But I did not drink.

I have a project
, I told myself.
I have a project
.

It was enough.

At the lab, the work continued. When the last piece of equipment was positioned, I stood back and surveyed the whole setup, heart beating in my chest, standing at the edge of some great universal truth. I was about to be witness to something few people in the history of the world had seen.

When the first satellite was launched toward deep space in 1977, it carried a special golden record. The record held diagrams and mathematical formulas. It carried the image of a fetus, the calibration of a circle, and a single page from Newton's
System of the World.
It carried the units of our mathematical system because mathematics, we're told, is the universal language. I've always felt that golden record should have carried a diagram of this experiment, the Feynman double-slit.

Because this experiment is more fundamental than math. It is what lives under the math. It tells of reality itself.

Richard Feynman said this about the slit experiment: “It has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In truth, it contains only mystery.”