The Flicker Men (15 page)

“What possible reason would any of my followers have for doing that?”

“The experiment,” I said. “These kinds of threats have been coming in for the last month or so. Some worse than that.”

He gestured to one of the two chairs facing his desk. “Please, sit.”

I sank into plush red leather. Like sliding into a sports car. The chair probably cost a month's salary. “In the interviews you gave, you said there was a failure in the mechanism of the test.” I said.

“Yes.”

“There was no failure, was there?”

“Is that what you came here for, a confession? Do you really need one? You saw the videos that were leaked.”

“I saw them.”

“Along with the rest of the world.
Failure
is the word we used when describing the experiment, but there's another word for it, of course—
disaster
. The truth is, I wish I'd never heard of your little box. It's caused nothing but trouble.”

“So maybe one of your followers decided to take that out on Satvik. Or maybe you did.”

Robbins laughed. “Why on earth would I do that? What would I have to gain?”

I shrugged. “You didn't like what the box had to say.”

“Well, you're right in that regard, but there's nothing to be done about it now. The cat's out of the bag, so to speak. And your technician friend disappearing won't put it back in. Truth is, if anything does happen to your friend, it will only draw attention to this whole sad episode, which otherwise is best soon forgotten. I'd much prefer to just close the book on this.”

I remembered the last time he'd spoken to me of books. This wasn't the confident, headstrong Robbins whom I'd spoken to on the phone months ago. This man was humbled. In retreat. Things had changed.

“You told me all you needed was one book, if it was the right one.”

His professional smile faded. “Sometimes, the creator denies us answers in order that we might better demonstrate faith. Or so we must suppose.”

“An interesting supposition.”

“And yet it is the one we are left with. Sometimes, though, in my darkest hours, I wonder if we aren't the unknowing beneficiaries of some kind of a joke.”

The cool, professional smile was totally gone now. Cracks had appeared in the skin near the corners of his eyes, which were puffy, as if he hadn't slept.

“This isn't a joke,” I said. “My friend is missing.”

“I even wonder, from time to time, if
joke
is too kind a word. Maybe
trick
is a better word. In a lot of ways, I have you to thank for the soul-searching I've found myself so distracted by this past month.”

“Me to thank?”

“After the experiment, I had a crisis of conscience,” he said. “I wondered, why would God create children who have no souls? What possible purpose could there be? And there is this question which has kept me awake some nights: what would such children grow into?”

It was a question I'd been trying hard not to think about. The same question, perhaps, that had kept Satvik out on the road.

“I didn't come here to discuss theology with you.”

He waved that off dismissively. “Everything is theology, or nothing is. Tell me, do you think it is odd that free will is a focus of both religion and physics?”

When I didn't answer, Robbins leaned back in his chair. “This is a Montese,” he said, gesturing to the painting that hung on the wall opposite his desk. On the wide canvas was painted a scene in reds and browns, a girl sitting on the lip of a stone well, a great cathedral rising in the background. From the top of the steeple, a crucifix cast a long shadow across the town. The painting was beautiful. The girl, haunting and sad.

“Eighteenth century,” Robbins said. “The artist killed himself at age twenty-eight. That's part of why his paintings are so valuable; there aren't many of them. Being creative can be hazardous, which is one reason I've stayed away from the arts; but what of the ultimate creator? I wonder. Why is it, when men ponder divine motivations … why do they always assume that God was sane?”

At first I assumed the question was rhetorical, but he waited for an answer. I had none to give. There were no answers, not to any of this.

“So perhaps it's foolish to question why our creator does anything,” he went on. “Perhaps there is no underlying logic to it. Maybe the ancient Eastern philosophers were asking the right questions all along. Not
why
. But only
what is
. What is beneath the glossy patina? Can anything in this world be truly relied upon? Even atoms are an evanescent haze—emptiness stacked upon emptiness which we've somehow all willed ourselves to believe in.”

It wasn't what I expected. He was drifting, so I brought him back. “In regard to Satvik, there must be something you can do.”

His eyes snapped to attention. “Like what?”

“Talk to your congregation.”

Robbins laughed. A deep, baritone that went on and on. “So you think if some member of my congregation
was
involved, they'd simply turn themselves in because I said so?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

“Churches are made in our image as sure as we are made in God's. From a church, the congregation takes what teachings as suits them, and they leave the rest. For a member of the flock to be so … extreme in their views, it makes me suspect that there's not much I could say one way or another to sway that person's mind. What does your employer say about your missing friend?”

“They're taking a wait-and-see attitude.”

“Well, perhaps they know their business.” He paused, and his brown eyes searched my face. I could see him come to a decision. “Still,” he said. “It couldn't hurt, what you're suggesting. A sermon on the evils of taking the law into our own hands? That sort of thing?”

“It'd be a nice start,” I said. I decided to play a hunch. “Is the security new or have you always been this paranoid?”

A joyless smile crept to his lips. “The security is new. As is the guard out in the courtyard.” He gestured toward the French doors, but if there was anyone out among the trees and bushes, they were hidden.

“Why the sudden interest in security?”

“Circumstances change. The world moves on.”

“Oh?”

“We stare into that little box you made, and we collapse the wave. What is true at one scale is often reflected in another. Even fame, it seems, follows the rules of quantum mechanics. The eye of the public changes what it observes.”

“So you're getting your own letters.”

“Let's just say that all attention isn't good.” The smile faded. “These are the costs we face to live in pursuit of the big questions.”

“Speaking of questions,” I began—and here I paused, choosing my words. There was only one more card to play. I watched him closely. “Have you heard of a man named Brighton?”

His face froze at the mention of the name—just a momentary lapse, so subtle that I could almost pretend I hadn't seen it. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Never heard of him.”

I stared him down. It was the first thing he'd said that I didn't believe.

“Before you ran your experiment,” I said, “I talked with this Brighton, and he seemed to know more than he should have. He seemed to know that you were going to find something unexpected.”

He watched me and said nothing.

“So how did he know?” I prompted him. “Who is this Brighton to you?”

“I don't know anyone by that name.”

I could see the lie all over his face. I pushed again, “How could anyone know what you were going to find?”

“Perhaps it was a guess. Or maybe you misinterpreted him.”

“Maybe,” I said, though I didn't believe it for a second.

“If someone
had
known,” he said, “I wish to God they would have warned me. I could have avoided the news conferences.”

Unexpectedly, Robbins rose to his feet. For a moment, I thought he was going to bring our little meeting to a close, but instead he turned and stepped toward the French doors. He didn't open them but stood in the pie-shaped slice of sun that arced through the glass. He looked out through the windows, arms crossed.

With his back to me, he spoke. “You know, until recently, I've never sought to avoid what was difficult. I've always sought to apply rigor to my beliefs,” he said. “This is why your test was so alluring. I thought it was the answer.”

“The answer to what?”

“The oldest question of all. Maybe the only one that matters. Are we this body? I've made myself an expert on disparate subjects that would not, in some men, comfortably occupy the same mind, and I have done these things, I now realize, because my faith is weak. I can say that now. I can admit it.” I saw his eyes move to my accidental reflection in the glass. “As a boy, did you ever wonder how life arose?”

“I was a math kid.”

“In medical school, I learned the endocrine and circulatory systems—all the valves and levers of the organism—and I saw no meaning there, no purpose, other than the purposeless functioning of cells in service to their own continuation. Ordered into a complex architecture, certainly, but without any evidence of spirit. There was no light in the husk.” He nodded to himself slowly, as if he were reliving some particularly dark part of his life. “And what was true on that scale is true of the world. Just as all cells come from preexisting cells, you can look at the larger universe and see an endless unbroken chain of events, linking back toward some original first cause—Aristotle's theorized unmoved mover. Is there any meaning to life, any overarching purpose to it? I look around me, and I ask, where is God in all this—the cause without cause? Is he even necessary?”

“You're talking religion, not science.”

Again his eyes found mine in the reflected glass. “There was a scientist, Steven Weinberg, who famously said, ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.'”

“I'm familiar with the quote.”

“Don't you see that this is what your test has given us.”

“And what is that?”

“The light in the husk,” he said. “The point of it all. It has been there the whole time.”

He turned away from the window and stepped back to his desk. He sank into his leather chair. “Did you know I was a twin?” he asked. “No? It's true.”

I tried to picture a world with two of him.

As if reading my mind, he said, “My brother died at birth.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“As a boy in Catholic school, I wondered how ensoulification might have worked in our case, as my brother and I were of one body. Did that body have one soul that split? Or, for that brief time when we were one, were there two souls contained in the armature of that single blastocyst, which by their presence
caused
the divide that cleaved two bodies? Twinning is a mistake, of that there is no doubt, but of which kind? Perhaps the presence of two souls is the
cause
of twinning, not a by-product. Or perhaps there was merely one soul between us, my brother and I. Did I get it, or did he? Or did we share a soul together?”

And it began to make sense then, the demons that drove him. The kind of childhood that might shape a man such as him. Doctor become pastor become whatever he was now, sitting in front of me.

“And what of the people who have no soul at all?” he continued. “Like the Calvinists believe, saved and unsaved, preordained before you are ever born. Maybe they had the truth of it.”

“I didn't take you for a Calvinist.”

“I never was one.” He said. “I'm reminded of other times in my life when I have pondered the differences which divide us. Where do killers come from? I've looked into eyes of men and seen no remorse, no repentance, no thought at all for the lives of others. Who can look into the face of our fellow man and not question if there might be those among us who lack some spark of humanity?”

“So will that be your next experiment?” I asked. “A test for sociopaths?”

“In trying to arrogate to ourselves that privilege which is only God's to wield, we invite disaster.”

“What privilege is that?”

“True sight, of course—into the nature of a man's conscience or its lack thereof.” His expression darkened. “I'm not interested in further experiments. You aren't the only one who's lost people.”

It took a moment, but those words struck with the force of a freight train. “Who did you lose?”

By his expression, I knew he'd said something that he hadn't intended to. He smiled slowly but remained silent.

“Why did you lie about Brighton?”

“I told you, I don't know anyone by that name.”

As I looked at him, it struck me. “So that's who the guards are for.”

He chuckled softly. If his eyes looked tired before, they now looked exhausted. “Some mysteries we chase. Others we flee from. How did non-life beget life? Are we the tissue or the spark? And the final mystery. The one we all will one day learn the answer to.”

“And what's that?”

“Where does the light go the moment after death? It's not an answer I want to find out just yet.”

“Nor I.”

“In order to believe in God, Mr. Argus, you must also believe in the devil. Ask yourself, which one is likelier to seek you out? I was an unbeliever at certain points in my life. It is the ultimate irony, that by meeting the devil, one can be brought around to God.”

His hand shifted under his desk. A slight movement. “But sometimes,” he said, “I wish I could go back to not believing.”

A moment later the doors opened. I realized then that he'd hit a security button. With that, our meeting was adjourned. “I'll make your little sermon for you, as you requested,” he said. “But now it's time for you to go.” Four large men came in. Two bald heads, two crew cuts.