Brilliantly conceived and multilayered, Divining Light is a high-concept thriller that questions what it really means to be human
In Ted Kosmatka’s wildly original and genre-busting Divining Light, a groundbreaking new discovery changes the world forever.
Out of a job and struggling with depression and alcohol abuse after a breakdown, the brilliant quantum physicist Eric Angus is given a second chance after he’s hired on a probationary basis by an old friend who runs Hansen, a prestigious Boston-area research lab. Unable to find inspiration for a project, Eric stumbles upon the old equipment used for Feynman’s double-slit experiment and decides to re-create the test in order to see the results for himself.
Eric probes deeper into Feynman’s theory, with the help of fellow scientists Satish and Mi Chang. After extensive tests on frogs, dogs, chimps, working their way up every phylum, class, and order in the animal kingdom, Eric, and his team establish a link between conscious observation and an evolutionary trait that is distinctly human: the soul. Mass chaos ensues after they publish the results of their experiment, and Eric is bombarded by reporters angling for exclusive interviews and wanting to debate the varying implications. Questions arise when certain people appear to be “soulless,” and after Satish mysteriously disappears, Eric risks everything to answer them.
TED KOSMATKA set his sights early on being a writer. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steel worker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. After that he worked various lab jobs where friendships were born, and fire departments were called. (And where he learned the fine point of distinction between fire-resistant and fire-proof) Eventually, Ted finished college and worked in a research lab. Then came the final logical step: ditching all that to write video games in Seattle. Ted’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His novel THE FLICKER MEN was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best thrillers of the summer.
http://tedkosmatka.us/
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That night in my motel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. A clear glass bottle. Liquid burn.
The cap rolled away across the cheap carpet. I imagined calling Marie, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. The good one, the sane one. I imagined her voice on the other end. Hello? Hello?
There is numbness in my head, strange gravities, and the geologic accretion of things I could have said, not to worry, things are fine; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself outside the sliding glass window, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. It comes down steady, a cold drizzle that soaks my clothes.
Thunder advances from the east, as I stand in the dark, waiting for everything to be good again. In the distance, I see a shape in the motel parking lot. A figure standing in the rain with no reason to be there— gray rain- slicker shine, head cocked toward the motel.
The shape watches me, face a black pool. Then comes the sudden glare of a passing car, and when I look again, the rain slicker is gone. Or was never there.
The last of the vodka goes down my throat. I think of my mother then, that last time I saw her, and there is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I lose connection to my body, an angular shape cast in sodium lights— eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal. “It’s not for you,” my mother had said on that autumn day many years earlier.
My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness— the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else. It is a dream I have sometimes. That last time we spoke, when I was fifteen. She bears many names, most of them apocryphal. My mother looks across the table at me. She doesn’t smile, but I know she’s happy. I know she’s in one of her good moods, because I’m visiting.
She’s back home again— the very last time, before everything went so irredeemably wrong. She drinks tea. Cold, always. Two ice cubes. I drink hot cocoa, my hands wrapped around the warm mug. We sip while the ceiling fan paddles slowly at the air above our heads. “I’m in mourning,” she says. “Mourning what?” “The human race.” And the gears in my head shift, as I note the change of direction, one of these talks then. Like a rut, her mind keeps falling into— all tracks leading eventually back into the wilderness.
“The 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?” “It won’t be enough,” she says. “It is inevitable.” And maybe it is, I think. Maybe all of it is inevitable. Th is 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. “Your 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.
“Th e 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 way lines 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 more than we knew what to do with. When my father didn’t come back, it was me she woke first, barely getting the words out, collapsing in my bedroom. And I remember so little about that night, like it was part of somebody else’s story— but I remember the intake of air, her hitting the light switch, waking me— then it all pours out in words, everything, countless years of it. Lifetimes. A waterfall of words. A slow screaming that would not stop. Has never really stopped. And I remember the room. The color of the walls.
Almost photographic details combined with odd gaps of memory— things I should know but somehow can’t see. Old cracks in the drywall. I can see them clearly. The feel of the slick wooden banister as I float down the stairs, picture frames brushing my shoulder. I see a thin layer of dust on the chandelier in the foyer, but somehow my sister is missing— erased from these memories though she must have been there. Or perhaps that’s her, standing in the back, in the shadows.
And then the gravel scrapes my bare feet, and Mother can’t walk, collapsing on the sidewalk outside our house. I’m standing in the driveway while red lights spin silently. There are police, but none with faces. Just flashlights and badges and underwater words. Your father . . . And she couldn’t finish. Couldn’t get the words out. And nothing after that was ever really the same again. For any of us. But for my mother most of all.
Now she sips her tea again, and I see the happiness change to worry in her eyes. Those not-quite- hazel eyes that do not bear names well. “Are you okay, Eric?” I only nod and sip. “Are you sure?” she asks. Her father was a quarter Cherokee and looked it. She and I have this in common: we both look like our fathers. “Everything’s fine,” I say. She is tall and long- limbed. Her hair, once brown, is streaked with white.
She is now and always has been beautiful. If we resemble each other, it is in our eyes— not the color, for mine are blue- gray, but in the shape. Our hooded expression. Eyes protective of their secrets. She never drank. Not once, not ever. Not like my father. She’d tell you. She came from a long line of alcoholics— bad alcoholics, she’d say. Get in fights-and-go- to- jail alcoholics. Her own father and grandfather and brothers. Some of her cousins. So she understood it. Like Huntington’s or hemophilia— a taint of the blood winding its way down through the generations. And I wonder if that was a part of it.
The strange, alchemical familiarity that draws two people together. She and my father. Sometimes it is a thing as simple as the way you laugh. Or it’s a familiar hair color. Or the way you hold a Scotch glass, casually, fingers sprawled around the circumference of the glass’s rim, so the palm hovers above the cool brown liquid.
That sense you get when you meet someone new— that feeling of . . . We know each other. We’ve always known each other. Maybe that’s what drew her. Or maybe she just thought she could fix him. — And so Mother never drank, not once, thinking it would be enough to save her. She told me many times growing up that I shouldn’t drink either. Alcoholism on both sides of the family, she said, so I shouldn’t even try it. Shouldn’t risk that first swallow. “It’s not for you,” she said. But I did try it. Of course, I did. Not for you. And nothing had ever been more wrong.
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