Dark Matter (12 page)

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “That if you aren't crazy or full of shit, then we just had the strangest conversation in human history.”

I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.

Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening—polarized and golden—that I can only describe as loss.

Robert Frost's gold that cannot stay.

Out in the kitchen, pots are banging, cabinets are opening and closing, and the scent of cooking meats drifts back down the hallway into the guest room with a smell that strikes me as suspiciously familiar.

I climb out of bed, stable on my feet for the first time all day, and head for the kitchen.

Bach is playing, red wine is open, and Daniela stands at the island, chopping an onion on the soapstone countertop in an apron and a pair of swimming goggles.

“Smells amazing,” I say.

“Would you mind stirring it?”

I walk over to the range and lift the lid off a deep pot.

The steam rising into my face takes me home.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Like a different man.”

“So…better?”

“Much.”

It's a traditional Spanish dish—a bean stew made with an assortment of native legumes and meats. Chorizo, pancetta, black sausage. Daniela cooks it once or twice a year, usually on my birthday, or when the snow flies on a weekend and we just feel like drinking wine and cooking together all day.

I stir the stew, replace the lid.

Daniela says, “It's a bean stew from—”

It slips out before I think to stop myself: “Your mother's recipe. Well, to be specific—
her
mother's mother.”

Daniela stops cutting.

She looks back at me.

“Put me to work,” I say.

“What else do you know about me?”

“Look, from my perspective, we've been together fifteen years. So I know almost everything.”

“And from mine, it was only two and a half months, and that was a lifetime ago. And yet you know this recipe was handed down through my family over several generations.”

For a moment, it becomes uncannily quiet in the kitchen.

Like the air between us carries a positive charge, humming on some frequency right at the edge of our perception.

She says finally, “If you want to help, I'm preparing toppings for the stew, and I could tell you what those are, but you probably already know.”

“Grated cheddar, cilantro, and sour cream?”

She gives the faintest smile and raises an eyebrow. “Like I said, you already know.”

We have dinner at the table beside the huge window with the candlelight reflecting in the glass and the city lights burning beyond—our local constellation.

The food is spectacular, Daniela is beautiful in the firelight, and I'm feeling grounded for the first time since I stumbled out of that lab.

At the end of dinner—our bowls empty, second wine bottle killed—she reaches across the glass table and touches my hand.

“I don't know what's happening to you, Jason, but I'm glad you found your way to me.”

I want to kiss her.

She took me in when I was lost.

When the world stopped making sense.

But I don't kiss her. I just squeeze her hand and say, “You have no idea what you've done for me.”

We clear the table, load the dishwasher, and tackle the remaining sink full of dishes.

I wash. She dries and puts away. Like an old married couple.

Apropos of nothing, I say, “Ryan Holder, huh?”

She stops wiping down the interior of the stockpot and looks at me.

“Do you have an opinion about that you'd like to share?”

“No, it's just—”

“What? He was your roommate, your friend. You don't approve?”

“He always had a thing for you.”

“Are we jealous?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, grow up. He's a beautiful man.”

She goes back to her drying.

“So how serious is it?” I ask.

“We've been out a few times. Nobody's leaving their toothbrushes at anyone's house yet.”

“Well, I think he'd like to. He seems pretty smitten.”

Daniela smirks. “How could he not be? I'm amazing.”

I lie in bed in the guest room with the window cracked so the city noise can put me under like a sound machine.

Staring out the tall window, I watch the sleeping city.

Last night, I set out to answer a simple question:
Where is Daniela?

And I found her—a successful artist, living alone.

We've never been married, never had a son.

Unless I'm the victim of the most elaborate prank of all time, the nature of Daniela's existence appears to support the revelation these last forty-eight hours have been building toward….

This is not my world.

Even as those five words cross my mind, I'm not exactly certain what they mean, or how to begin to consider their full weight.

So I say it again.

I try it on.

See how it fits.

This is not my world.

A soft knock at my door startles me out of a dream.

“Come in.”

Daniela enters, climbs into bed beside me.

I sit up, ask, “Everything okay?”

“I can't sleep.”

“What's wrong?”

She kisses me, and it isn't like kissing my wife of fifteen years, it's like kissing my wife fifteen years ago for the first time.

Pure energy and collision.

As I'm on top of her, my hands running up the inside of her thighs, driving the satin chemise over her bare hips, I stop.

She says, breathless, “Why are you stopping?”

And I almost say,
I can't do this, you're not my wife,
but that isn't even true.

This
is
Daniela, the only human being in this insane world who has helped me, and, yes, maybe I am trying to justify it, but I'm so turned around, upside down, terrified, desperate, that I don't just want it, I need this, and I think she does too.

I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.

Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.

She isn't the mother of my son, she isn't my wife, we haven't made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not just the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of matter—same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste….

It isn't married-people lovemaking that follows.

We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.

Moments after, sweaty and shaky, we lie intertwined and gazing out at the lights of our city.

Daniela's heart is banging away in her chest, and I can feel the
bump-bump
of it against my side, decelerating now.

Slower.

Slower.

“Everything okay?” she whispers. “I can hear the wheels turning up there.”

“I don't know what I would've done if I hadn't found you.”

“Well, you did. And whatever's happening, I'm here for you. You know that, right?”

She runs her fingers across my hands.

They stop at the piece of thread tied around my ring finger.

“What's this?” she asks.

“Proof,” I say.

“Proof?”

“That I'm not crazy.”

It becomes quiet again.

I'm not sure of the time, but it's definitely past two in the morning.

The bars will be closed now.

The streets as quiet and subdued as they get with the exception of snowstorm nights.

The air creeping through the crack in the window is the coldest of the season.

It trickles across our sweat-glazed bodies.

“I need to get back to my house,” I say.

“Your place in Logan Square?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“I apparently have a home office. I want to get on the computer, see exactly what I've been working on. Maybe I'll find papers, notes, something that will shed some light on what's happening to me.”

“I can drive you over first thing in the morning.”

“You probably shouldn't.”

“Why?”

“Might not be safe.”

“Why wouldn't it—”

Out in the living room, a loud bang rattles the door, like someone pounding on it with their fist. The way I imagine cops knock.

I ask, “Who the hell is that at this hour?”

Daniela climbs out of bed and walks naked out of the room.

It takes me a minute to find my boxer shorts in the twisted-up comforter, and by the time I pull them on, Daniela is emerging from her bedroom in a terrycloth robe.

We head out into the living room.

The pounding on the door continues as Daniela approaches.

“Don't open it,” I whisper.

“Obviously.”

As she leans into the peephole, the phone rings.

We both startle.

Daniela crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.

I glance through the peephole, see a man standing in the hallway, his back to the door.

He's on a cell phone.

Daniela answers, “Hello?”

The man is dressed in black—Doc Martens, jeans, a leather jacket.

Daniela says into the phone, “Who is this?”

I move toward her and point to the door, mouthing,
It's him?

She nods.

“What does he want?”

She points at me.

Now I can hear the man's voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker on her cordless.

She says into the phone, “I don't know what you're talking about. It's just me here, and I live alone, and I'm not letting a strange man into my home at two in the—”

The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.

He aims it at both of us, and as he kicks the door closed I smell old and recent cigarette smoke wafting into the loft.

“You're here for me,” I say. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”

He's an inch or two shorter than I am, but sturdier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don't see me as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way a machine might.

My mouth has gone dry.

There's a strange distance between what's happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but I feel paralyzed by the suddenness of the man's presence.

“I'll go with you,” I say. “Just—”

His aim shifts slightly away from me and up.

Daniela says, “Wait, no—”

She's cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.

A fine, red mist blinds me for half a second, and Daniela sits on the sofa, a hole dead center between her big, dark eyes.

I start toward her, screaming, but every molecule in my body seizes, muscles clenching uncontrollably with stunning agony, and I crash down through the coffee table, shaking and grunting in broken glass and telling myself this isn't happening.

The smoking man lifts my useless arms behind my back and binds my wrists together cruciform with a zip tie.

Then I hear a tearing sound.

He pats a piece of duct tape over my mouth and sits behind me in the leather chair.

I'm screaming through the tape, pleading for this not to be happening, but it is, and there's nothing I can do to change it.

I hear the man's voice behind me—calm and occupying a higher register than I would've imagined.

“Hey, I'm here…No, why don't you come around back…Exactly. Where the recycling and Dumpsters are. The back gate and rear door to the building are both open…Two should be fine. We're in pretty good shape up here, but you know, let's not linger…Yep…Yep…Okay, sounds good.”

The excruciating effect of what I assume was a Taser is finally relenting, but I'm too weak to move.

From my vantage point, all I can see are the lower half of Daniela's legs. I watch a line of blood run down her right ankle, across the top of her foot, between her toes, and begin to puddle on the floor.

I hear the man's phone buzz.

He answers, “Hey, baby…I know, I just didn't want to wake you…Yeah, something came up…I don't know, might be morning. How about I take you to breakfast at the Golden Apple whenever I wrap up?” He laughs. “Okay. Love you too. Sweet dreams.”

My eyes sheet over with tears.

I shout through the tape, shout until my throat burns, thinking maybe he'll shoot me or knock me unconscious, anything to stop the exquisite pain of this moment.

But it doesn't seem to bother him at all.

He just sits there quietly, letting me rage and scream.

Daniela sits in the bleachers under the scoreboard, above the ivy-covered outfield wall. It's Saturday afternoon, the last home game of the regular season, and she's with Jason and Charlie, watching the Cubs get their asses kicked in their sold-out ballpark.

The warm autumn day is cloudless.

Windless.

Timeless.

The air redolent of—

Roasted peanuts.

Popcorn.

Plastic cups filled to the brim with beer.

Daniela finds the roar of the crowd strangely comforting, and they're far enough back from home plate to notice a delay between swing and bat-crack—speed of light versus speed of sound—when a player sends a pitch sailing beyond the wall.

They used to come to games when Charlie was a boy, but it's been eons since their last visit to Wrigley Field. When Jason suggested the idea yesterday, she didn't think Charlie would be up for it, but it must be scratching some nostalgic itch in their son's psyche, because he actually wanted to come, and now he seems relaxed and happy. They're all happy, a trio of near-perfect contentment in the sun, eating Chicago-style hot dogs, watching the players run around on the bright grass.

As Daniela sits wedged between the two most important men in her life, buzzed off her lukewarm beer, it occurs to her that the feel of this afternoon is somehow different. Unsure if it's Charlie or Jason or her. Charlie is in the moment, not checking his phone every five seconds. And Jason looks as happy as she's seen him in years.
Weightless
is the word that comes to mind. His smile seems wider, brighter, more freely given.

And he can't keep his hands off her.

Then again, maybe the difference is her.

Maybe it's this beer and the crystalline quality of the autumn light and the communal energy of the crowd.

Which is all to say maybe it's just being alive at a baseball game on a fall day in the heart of her city.

Charlie has plans after the game, so they drop him at a friend's house in Logan Square, stop at the brownstone to change clothes, and then head out into the evening, just the two of them—downtown-bound, no itinerary, no specific destination.

A Saturday-night ramble.

Cruising in heavy evening traffic down Lakeshore Drive, Daniela looks across the center console of the decade-old Suburban, says, “I think I know what I want to do first.”

Thirty minutes later, they're in a gondola car on a Ferris wheel strung with lights.

Rising slowly above the spectacle of Navy Pier, Daniela watches the elegant skyline of their city as Jason holds her tight.

At the apex of their single revolution—one hundred and fifty feet above the carnival—Daniela feels Jason touch her chin and turn her face toward his.

They have the car all to themselves.

Even up here, the night air is sweetened with the scent of funnel cakes and cotton candy.

The laughter of children riding on the carousel.

A woman screaming with joy at a hole-in-one on the miniature golf course far below.

Jason's intensity shreds through all of it.

When he kisses her, she can feel his heart through his windbreaker, jackhammering in his chest.

They have dinner in the city at a nicer restaurant than they can afford and spend the entire time talking like they haven't talked in years.

Not about people or remember-whens, but ideas.

They kill a bottle of Tempranillo.

Order another.

Thinking maybe they'll spend the night in the city.

It's been a long time since Daniela has seen her husband this passionate, this sure of himself.

He's a man on fire, in love with his life again.

Halfway through their second bottle of wine, he catches her looking out the window, asks, “What are you thinking about?”

“That's a dangerous question.”

“I'm aware.”

“I'm thinking about you.”

“What about me?”

“It feels like you're trying to sleep with me.” She laughs. “What I mean is, it feels like you're trying when you don't have to be trying. We're an old married couple, and I feel like you're, um…”

“Romancing you?”

“Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. At all. It's amazing. I guess I just don't see where it's all coming from. Are you okay? Is something wrong, and you're not telling me?”

“I'm fine.”

“So this is all because you almost got hit by a cab two nights ago?”

He says, “I don't know if it was my life flashing before my eyes or what, but when I came home, everything felt different. More real. You especially. Even right now, it's like I'm seeing you for the first time, and I have this nervous ache in my stomach. I think about you every second. I think about all the choices we've made that created this moment. Us sitting here together at this beautiful table. Then I think of all the possible events that could have stopped this moment from ever happening, and it all feels, I don't know…”

“What?”

“So fragile.” Now he becomes thoughtful for a moment. He says finally, “It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches into a new world. After the baseball game today, we went to Navy Pier and then came here for dinner, right? But that's only one version of what happened. In a different reality, instead of the pier, we went to the symphony. In one, we stayed home. In another still, we got into a fatal wreck on Lakeshore Drive and never made it anywhere.”

“But those other realities don't really exist.”

“Actually, they're just as real as the one you and I are experiencing at this moment.”

“How is that possible?”

“It's a mystery. But there are clues. Most astrophysicists believe that the force holding stars and galaxies together—the thing that makes our whole universe
work
—comes from a theoretical substance we can't measure or observe directly. Something they call dark matter. And this dark matter makes up most of the known universe.”

“But what is it exactly?”

“No one's really sure. Physicists have been trying to construct new theories to explain its origin and what it is. We know it has gravity, like ordinary matter, but it must be made of something completely new.”

“A new form of matter.”

“Exactly. Some string theorists think it might be a clue to the existence of the multiverse.”

She looks thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “So all these other realities…where are they?”

“Imagine you're a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you'd have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you're a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”

Daniela leans back in her chair and takes a sip of wine. “So all these other thousands of ponds are all around us, right at this moment—but we just can't see them?”

“Exactly.”

Jason used to talk like this all the time. Would keep her up late into the night positing wild theories, sometimes trying things out, most of the time just trying to impress her.

It worked then.

It's working now.

She looks away for a moment, staring through the window beside their table, watching the water glide past as the light from the surrounding buildings swirls in a kind of perpetual shimmer across the blown-glass surface of the river.

She finally looks back at him over the rim of her wineglass, their eyes connecting, the candlelight quivering between them.

She says, “In one of those ponds out there, do you think there's another version of you that stuck with the research? Who made good on all the plans you had in your twenties, before life got in the way?”

He smiles. “It's crossed my mind.”

“And there's maybe a version of me that's a famous artist? That traded all this for that?”

Jason leans forward, pushing their plates out of the way so he can hold both of her hands across the table.

“If there are a million ponds out there, with versions of you and me living similar and different lives, there's none better than right here, right now. I'm more sure of that than anything in the world.”