Dark Matter (7 page)

Or—is it more plausible that a tumor in my brain has turned my world upside down?

That it's been growing silently inside my skull for months or years and is finally wreaking havoc on my cognitive processes, skewing my perception of everything.

The idea hits me with the force of conviction.

What else could have crashed through me with such debilitating speed?

What else could make me lose touch with my identity and reality in a matter of hours, calling into question everything I thought I knew?

I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Finally, I step outside into the grass.

No more voices.

No more footsteps.

No shadows.

No car engines.

The night feels sturdy and real again.

I already know where I'm headed next.

Chicago Mercy is a ten-block trek from my house, and I limp into the harsh light of the ER at 4:05 a.m.

I hate hospitals.

I watched my mother die in one.

Charlie spent the first weeks of his life in a NICU.

The waiting room is practically empty. Aside from me, there's a night construction worker clutching his arm in a bloody bandage, and a distressed-looking family of three, the father holding a red-faced, wailing baby.

The woman at the front desk looks up from her paperwork, surprisingly bright-eyed considering the hour.

Asks through the Plexiglas, “How can I help you?”

I haven't thought of what to say, how to even begin to explain my needs.

When I don't answer right away, she says, “Have you been in an accident?”

“No.”

“You have cuts all over your face.”

“I'm not well,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“I think I need to talk to someone.”

“Are you homeless?”

“No.”

“Where's your family?”

“I don't know.”

She looks me up and down—a fast, professional appraisal.

“Your name, sir?”

“Jason.”

“One moment.”

Rising from her chair, she disappears around the corner.

Thirty seconds later, there's a buzzing sound as the door beside her station unlocks and opens.

The nurse smiles. “Come on back.”

She leads me to a patient room.

“Someone will be right with you.”

As the door closes after her, I take a seat on the examination table and shut my eyes against the glare of the lights. I have never been so tired in my life.

My chin dips.

I straighten.

I almost fell asleep sitting up.

The door opens.

A portly young doctor walks in carrying a clipboard. He's trailed by a different nurse—a bottle blonde in blue scrubs who wears four-in-the-morning exhaustion like a millstone around her neck.

“It's Jason?” the doctor asks without offering his hand or attempting to fake his way through the graveyard-shift indifference.

I nod.

“Last name?”

I'm hesitant to give him my full name, but then again, maybe that's just the brain tumor talking, or whatever has gone wrong inside my head.

“Dessen.”

I spell it for him as he scribbles on what I presume to be an intake form.

“I'm Dr. Randolph, attending physician. What brings you into the ER tonight?”

“I think something is wrong with my mind. Like a tumor or something.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Things aren't like they should be.”

“Okay. Could you elaborate?”

“I…all right, this is going to sound crazy. Just know that I realize that.”

He glances up from the clipboard.

“My house isn't my house.”

“I'm not following.”

“It's just what I said. My house isn't my house. My family isn't there. Everything's much…nicer. It's all been renovated and—”

“But it's still your address?”

“Right.”

“So you're saying the inside is different, but the outside is the same?” He says it like he's speaking to a child.

“Yeah.”

“Jason, how did you get the cuts on your face? The mud on your clothes?”

“People were chasing me.”

I shouldn't have told him that, but I'm too tired to filter. I must sound absolutely insane.

“Chasing you.”

“Yes.”

“Who was chasing you?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you know
why
they were chasing you?”

“Because…it's complicated.”

His appraising, skeptical look is far more subtle and trained than the front-desk nurse's. I almost miss it.

“Have you taken any drugs or alcohol tonight?” he asks.

“Some wine earlier, then whisky, but that was hours ago.”

“Again, I'm sorry—it's been a very long shift—but what makes you think something is wrong with your mind?”

“Because the last eight hours of my life don't make sense. It all feels real, but it can't possibly be.”

“Have you suffered a recent head injury?”

“No. Well. I mean, I think someone hit me in the back of the head. It's painful to the touch.”

“Who hit you?”

“I'm not sure. I'm not really sure of anything right now.”

“Okay. Do you use drugs? Now or in the past?”

“I smoke weed a couple times a year. But not lately.”

The doctor turns to the nurse. “I'm going to have Barbara draw some blood.”

He drops the clipboard on a table and plucks a penlight from the front pocket of his lab coat.

“Mind if I examine you?”

“No.”

Randolph moves in until our faces are inches apart, close enough for me to smell the stale coffee on his breath, to see the recent razor nick across his chin. He shines the light straight into my right eye. For a moment, there's nothing but a point of brilliance in the center of my field of vision, which momentarily burns away the rest of the world.

“Jason, are you having any thoughts of hurting yourself?”

“I'm not suicidal.”

The light hits my left eye.

“Have you had any prior psychiatric hospitalizations?”

“No.”

He gently takes my wrist in his soft, cool hands, measures my pulse rate.

“What do you do for a living?” he asks.

“I teach at Lakemont College.”

“Married?”

“Yes.” I instinctively reach down to touch my wedding band.

Gone.

Jesus.

The nurse begins to roll up the left sleeve of my shirt.

“What's your wife's name?” the doctor asks.

“Daniela.”

“You two on good terms?”

“Yes.”

“Don't you think she's wondering where you are? I feel like we should call her.”

“I tried.”

“When?”

“An hour ago, at my house. Someone else answered. It was a wrong number.”

“Maybe you misdialed.”

“I know my wife's phone number.”

The nurse asks, “We okay with needles, Mr. Dessen?”

“Yes.”

As she sterilizes the underside of my arm, she says, “Dr. Randolph, look.” She touches the needle mark from several hours ago when Leighton drew my blood.

“When did this happen?” he asks.

“I don't know.” Probably best not to mention the lab I think I just escaped from.

“You don't remember someone sticking a needle in your arm?”

“No.”

Randolph nods to the nurse, and she warns me, “Little pinch coming.”

He asks, “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

“I don't know where it is.”

He grabs the clipboard. “Give me your wife's name again. And phone number. We'll try to reach her for you.”

I spell Daniela's name and rattle off her cell number and our home number as my blood rushes into a plastic vial.

“You're going to scan my head?” I ask. “See what's going on?”

“Absolutely.”

They give me a private room on the eighth floor.

I tidy up my face in the bathroom, kick off my shoes, and climb into bed.

Sleep tugs, but the scientist in my brain won't power down.

I can't stop thinking.

Formulating hypotheses and dismantling them.

Struggling to wrap logic around everything that's happened.

In this moment, I have no way of knowing what's real and what isn't. I can't even be sure that I was ever married.

No. Wait.

I raise my left hand and study my ring finger.

The ring is gone, but the proof of its existence lingers as a faint indentation around the base of my finger. It was there. It left a mark. That means someone took it.

I touch the indentation, acknowledging both the horror and the comfort of what it represents—the last vestige of
my
reality.

I wonder—

What will happen when this last physical trace of my marriage is gone?

When there's no anchor?

As the skies above Chicago inch toward dawn—a hopeless, cloud-ridden purple—I lose myself to sleep.

Daniela's hands are deep in the warm, soapy water when she hears the front door slam shut. She stops scrubbing the saucepan she's been attacking for the last half minute and looks up from the sink, glancing back over her shoulder as footsteps approach.

Jason appears in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room, grinning—as her mother would say—like a fool.

Turning her attention back to the dishes, Daniela says, “There's a plate for you in the fridge.”

In the steamed reflection of the window above the sink, she watches her husband set the canvas grocery bag on the island and move toward her.

His arms slide around her waist.

She says, half jokingly, “If you think a couple pints of ice cream are going to get you out of this, I don't know what to tell you.”

He presses up against her and whispers in her ear, his breath fiery with the remnants of whatever whisky he's been drinking, “Life's short. Don't be mad. It's a waste of time.”

“How did forty-five minutes turn into almost three hours?”

“The same way one drink turns into two, which turns into three, and on it goes. I feel terrible.”

His lips on the back of her neck put a delicate shiver down her spine.

She says, “You're not getting out of this.”

Now he kisses the side of her neck. It's been a while since he touched her like this.

His hands glide into the water.

He interlaces their fingers.

“You should eat something,” she says. “I'll warm up your plate.”

She tries to step past him on her way to the fridge, but he blocks her path.

Facing him now, she stares up into his eyes, and maybe it's because they've both been drinking, but there's an intensity in the air between them, as if every molecule has been charged.

He says, “My God, I've missed you.”

“Exactly how much did you drink to—?”

He kisses her out of nowhere, backing her up against the cabinets, the counter digging into her back as he runs his hands over her hips and pulls her shirt out of her jeans, his hands on her skin now, as hot as an oven range.

She pushes him back toward the island.

“Jesus, Jason.”

Now she studies him in the low light of the kitchen, trying to figure out this energy he's swaggered back into their home with.

“Something happened while you were out,” she says.

“Nothing happened, other than I lost track of time.”

“So you didn't chat up some young thing at Ryan's party who made you feel twenty-five again? And now you're back here with a hard-on, pretending—”

He laughs. Beautifully.

“What?” she says.

“That's what you think is going on here?” He takes a step toward her. “When I left the bar, my mind was elsewhere. I wasn't thinking. I stepped out into traffic and this cab nearly splattered me all over the pavement. Scared the hell out of me. I don't know how to explain it, but ever since that moment—in the grocery store, walking home, standing here in our kitchen—I have felt so alive. Like I see my life with force and clarity for once. All the things I have to be grateful for. You. Charlie.”

She feels her anger toward him beginning to melt.

He says, “It's like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country. I'm rambling now.”

Daniela goes to him and cups his face in her hands and kisses him.

Then she takes his hand and leads him upstairs.

The hallway is dark, and she can't think of the last time her husband did something to make her heart pound like this.

At Charlie's room, she stops for a moment and leans her ear against the closed door, logs the muffled noise of music blaring through headphones.

“All clear,” she whispers.

They move down the creaky hallway as softly as they can.

In their bedroom, Daniela locks the door and opens the top drawer of her dresser, searching for a candle to light, but Jason has no time for it.

He pulls her over to the bed and drags her down onto the mattress, and then he's on top of her, kissing her, his hands moving under her clothes, roaming her body.

She feels wetness on her cheek, her lips.

Tears.

His.

Holding his face between her hands, she asks, “Why are you crying?”

“I felt like I'd lost you.”

“You have me, Jason,” she says. “I'm right here, baby. You have me.”

As he undresses her in the darkness of their bedroom, she has never wanted anyone so desperately. The anger is gone. The wine-sleepiness has vanished. He has taken her back to the first time they made love, in her Bucktown loft with the downtown glowing through the giant windows that she'd cracked open so the crisp October air could trickle in, carrying with it the late-night noise of people stumbling home from bars and distant sirens and the engine of the massive city at rest—not completely shut down, never off, just a comforting, baseline idle.

As she comes, she fights not to cry out in their bedroom, but she can't contain it, and neither can Jason.

Not tonight.

Because something is different; something is better.

They haven't been
unhappy
these last few years, quite the opposite. But it's been a long, long time since she felt that sense of giddy love that effervesces in the pit of your stomach and spectacularly upends the world.