The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka Page A

man needs if it’s the right book.”
    â€œThat’s the problem though, isn’t it? Everybody thinks their book’s the right one. Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWhat if wavefunction collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magic moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”
    â€œThat’s not going to happen.”
    â€œYou sound sure.”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œMaybe,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. But I guess now we find out.”

 
    PART II
    All great truths begin as Blasphemies.
    â€”GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

 
    16
    When I was a boy, there were two things my father liked to do. Sail and drink. He’d met my mother in college, when they were both juniors and poor as dirt. She was still a chemistry major, he economics. The story of their meeting was family lore.
    â€œThe foundations of economics are genetic,” he told her, when she finally deigned speak to him in the park outside the university library. He’d noticed the helix on the cover of the book she carried.
    Later she would talk about the day he proposed, their senior year: a walk on the beach and in the distance, heeled over in the bay, a white sailboat like a breaching whale. They watched it for an hour, and my father told her, “Someday I’ll have one.” He might have been telling her that he’d be president someday. Or an astronaut.
    My father graduated, and while my mother switched sciences, he went to work for the biggest corporation that would hire him. The world was a machine into which hours were invested, and out of which money flowed. He was good at his job, and soon there were cars and a house and a baby and then another—and my mother later talked about those years often. The way scholars might talk of a lost golden age. Untrue in its parts, but true as a whole. For no golden age is truly golden. But for my mother, reality was always abstract art—a pattern of color on canvas, a collection of brushstrokes.
    And maybe there was this truth: it was golden enough.
    I was seven years old when he first took me out on the bay. My father’s boat was a thirty-six-foot Catalina. The Regatta Marie , a medium-sized cruiser that carried four hundred square feet of sail. His work had by then made millions for his employer, and there were bonuses paid, promotions, partnerships. I never understood any of it. I understood only that my father was good at what he did. Special somehow. Gifted.
    For seven days the Regatta Marie was our whole world, sailing up the rocky coast, just the two of us. The wind blew from the south, and the ship heeled, sprinting into the waves, sails snapping like prayer flags. We kept the shore in sight that first trip. At night, we got out the binoculars and watched the city lights twinkle in the blackness.
    The next day, my father shouted in joy at the spray, while the harness held me in place, and the chop disintegrated against the hull in a million shiny droplets. He clung to the helm, soaked to the skin—one leg steadied against the side of the cockpit as the boat heaved along on its side. We ate soup cooked on cantilevered pots—cold saltwater sluicing periodically across the starboard windows. From the safety of my harness I watched my father in his element.
    He was drinking almost every day by then, but the water kept him honest. He never drank beyond the harbor if he had passengers aboard. “Too dangerous,” he’d say. Because even he understood the sea wasn’t to be trifled with.
    After that summer sail, school started for me, and my father started going out alone, each time venturing farther and farther out. His first blue water solo voyage, I checked over his supply list, written on a large yellow legal pad.
    â€¢ Check lines
    â€¢ Buy new halyards
    â€¢ Check through hulls for rot
    â€¢ Set sail Sept 6th
    â€¢