Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

  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.

  “Mr. Dessen?”

  I jerk awake.

  “Hi. Sorry to startle you.”

  A doctor is staring down at me—a short, green-eyed redhead in a white lab coat holding a cup of coffee in one hand, a tablet in the other.

  I sit up.

  It’s day outside the window next to my bed, and for five seconds, I have absolutely no idea where I am.

  Through the glass: low clouds blanket the city, cutting off the skyline above one thousand feet. From this vantage point, I can see the lake and two miles of Chicago neighborhoods filling the space in between, everything muted under a somber, midwestern gray.

  “Mr. Dessen, do you know where you are?”

  “Mercy Hospital.”

  “That’s right. You walked into the ER last night, pretty disoriented. One of my colleagues, Dr. Randolph, admitted you, and when he left this morning, he handed your chart over to me. I’m Julianne Springer.”

  I glance down at the IV in my wrist and trace the line up to the bag hanging over me on a metal stand.

  “What are you giving me?” I ask.

  “Just old-fashioned H2O. You were very dehydrated. How are you feeling now?”

  I run a quick self-diagnostic.

  Queasy.

  Head pounding.

  Inside of my mouth like cotton.

  I point through the window. “Like that,” I say. “Weirdly hungover.”

  Beyond the physical discomfort, I register a crushing sense of emptiness, like it’s raining directly on my soul.

  Like I’ve been hollowed out.

  “I have your MRI results,” she says, waking her tablet. “Your scan came back normal. There was some shallow bruising, but nothing serious. Your tox screen results are far more illuminating. We found traces of alcohol, in line with what you reported to Dr. Randolph, but also something else.”

  “What?”

  “Ketamine.”

  “Not familiar with it.”

  “It’s a surgical anesthetic. One of its side effects is short-term amnesia. Could explain some of your disorientation. The tox screen also showed something I’ve never seen before. A psychoactive compound. Really weird cocktail.” She sips her coffee. “I have to ask—you didn’t take these drugs yourself?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Last night, you gave Dr. Randolph your wife’s name and a couple of phone numbers.”

  “Her cell and our landline.”

  “I’ve been trying to track her down all morning, but her mobile number belongs to a guy named Ralph, and your landline just keeps going to voicem
ail.”

  “Can you read her number back to me?”

  Springer reads off Daniela’s cell-phone number.

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Hundred percent.” As she looks back at the tablet, I ask, “Could these drugs you found in my system cause long-term altered states?”

  “You mean delusions? Hallucinations?”

  “Exactly.”

  “To be honest, I don’t know what this psychochemical is, which means I can’t say with any certainty what effect it might have had on your nervous system.”

  “So it could still be affecting me?”

  “Again, I don’t know what its half-life is, or how long it takes your body to expel it. But you don’t strike me as being under the influence of anything at the moment.”

  Memories of the night before are regenerating.

  I see myself walking naked and at gunpoint into an abandoned building.

  The injection in my neck.

  In my leg.

  Pieces of a strange conversation with a man wearing a geisha mask.

  A room filled with old generators and moonlight.

  And while the thought of last night carries the emotional weight of a real memory, it has the fantasy lining of a dream, or a nightmare.

  What was done to me inside that old building?

  Springer pulls a chair over and takes a seat beside my bed. In proximity, I can see freckles covering her face like a sprinkling of pale sand.

  “Let’s talk about what you said to Dr. Randolph. He wrote down…” She sighs. “Apologies, his handwriting is atrocious. ‘Patient reports: It was my house but it wasn’t my house.’ You also said that you got the cuts and bruises on your face because people were chasing you, but when asked why they were chasing you, you couldn’t provide an answer.” She looks up from the screen. “You’re a professor?”

  “Correct.”

  “At…”

  “Lakemont College.”

  “Here’s the thing, Jason. While you were sleeping, and after we couldn’t find any trace of your wife—”

  “What do you mean you couldn’t find any trace of her?”

  “Her name is Daniela Dessen, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thirty-nine years old?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We couldn’t find anyone with that name and age in all of Chicago.”

  That levels me. I look away from Springer, back out the window. It’s so gray that even the time of day is masked. Morning, noon, evening—it’s impossible to determine. Fine droplets of rain cling to the other side of the glass.

  At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of—this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head. I liked it much better when I thought everything was being caused by a brain tumor. That, at least, was an explanation.

  “Jason, we took the liberty of looking you up. Your name. Profession. Everything we could find. I want you to answer me very carefully. Do you really believe you’re a physics professor at Lakemont College?”

  “I don’t believe it. It’s what I am.”

  “We trolled the faculty webpages for science departments in every university and college in Chicago. Including Lakemont. You weren’t listed as a professor on any of them.”

  “That’s impossible. I’ve been teaching there since—”

  “Let me finish, because we did find some information about you.” She types something on her tablet. “Jason Ashley Dessen, born 1973 in Denison, Iowa, to Randall and Ellie Dessen. Says here that your mother passed when you were eight. How? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “She had an underlying heart condition, caught a bad strain of the flu, which turned into pneumonia.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” She continues reading. “Bachelor’s degree from University of Chicago, 1995. PhD from same university, 2002. So far so good?”

  I nod.

  “Awarded the Pavia Prize in 2004, and the same year, Science magazine honored your work with a cover story, calling it the ‘breakthrough of the year.’ Guest lecturer at Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley.” She looks up, meets my bewildered gaze, and then turns the tablet around so I can see that she’s reading from the Wikipedia page of Jason A. Dessen.

  My sinus rhythm on the heart monitor I’m attached to has become noticeably faster.

  Springer says, “You haven’t published any new papers or accepted any teaching positions since 2005, when you took on the role of chief science officer with Velocity Laboratories, a jet propulsion lab. It says finally that a missing-persons report was filed on your behalf eight months ago by your brother, and that you haven’t been seen publicly in over a year.”

  This rocks me so deeply I can barely draw breath.

  My blood pressure triggers some kind of alarm on the heart monitor, which begins to emit a grating beep.

  A heavyset nurse appears in the doorway.

  “We’re fine,” Springer says. “Could you shut that thing up?”

  The nurse walks to the monitor, silences the alarm.

  When he’s gone, the doctor reaches over the railing and touches my hand.

  “I want to help you, Jason. I can see that you’re terrified. I don’t know what’s happened to you, and I get the feeling you don’t know either.”

  The wind coming in off the lake is strong enough to blow the rain sideways. I watch as the droplets streak across the glass and blur the world beyond into an impressionistic cityscape of gray, punctuated by the glow of distant taillights, distant headlights.

  Springer says, “I’ve called the police. They’re sending a detective over to take a statement from you and begin trying to get to the bottom of what happened last night. That’s the first thing we’re doing. Now, I’ve struck out trying to get in touch with Daniela, but I have been able to locate contact information for your brother, Michael, in Iowa City. I’d like to have your permission to call him and let him know that you’re here, and to discuss your condition with him.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t spoken to my brother in two years.

  “I’m not sure if I want you to call him,” I say.

  “Fair enough, but to be clear, under HIPAA, if in my judgment a patient of mine is unable to agree or object to a disclosure due to incapacity or emergency circumstances, I am authorized to decide whether disclosing your information to a family member or friend is in your best interest. I do believe that your current mental state qualifies as incapacity, and I think consulting with someone who knows you and your history is in your best interest. So I will be calling Michael.”

  She glances down at the floor, as if she doesn’t want to tell me whatever’s coming next.

  “Third thing, last thing,” she says. “We need the guidance of a psychiatrist to get a handle on your condition. I’m having you transferred over to Chicago-Read, which is a mental-health center a little further up on the North Side.”

  “Look, I admit that I don’t have a firm grasp on exactly what’s happening, but I’m not crazy. I’d be happy to talk to a psychiatrist. In fact, I’d welcome the opportunity. But I’m not volunteering to be committed, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It’s not what I’m asking. With all due respect, Jason, you don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s called an M1 hold, and by law, if I think you’re a threat to yourself or others, I can order a seventy-two-hour involuntary commitment. Look, this is the best thing for you. You’re in no condition—”

  “I walked into this hospital under my own steam, because I wanted to find out what was wrong with me.”

  “And that was the right choice, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do: find out why you’re having this break with reality, and set you up with the treatment you need to make a full recovery.”

  I watch my blood pressure rising on the monitor.

/>   I don’t want to set off the alarm again.

  Closing my eyes, I breathe in.

  Let it out.

  Take another shot of oxygen.

  My levels recede.

  I say, “So you’re going to put me in a rubber room, no belt, no sharp objects, and medicate me into a stupor?”

  “It’s not like that. You came into this hospital because you wanted to get better, right? Well, this is the first step. I need you to trust me.”

  Springer rises from the chair and drags it back across the room under the television. “Just keep resting, Jason. Police will be here soon, and then we’ll get you moved over to Chicago-Read this evening.”

  I watch her go, the threat of unraveling right on top of me, pressing down.

  What if all the pieces of belief and memory that comprise who I am—my profession, Daniela, my son—are nothing but a tragic misfiring in that gray matter between my ears? Will I keep fighting to be the man I think I am? Or will I disown him and everything he loves, and step into the skin of the person this world would like for me to be?

  And if I have lost my mind, what then?

  What if everything I know is wrong?

  No. Stop.

  I am not losing my mind.

  There were drugs in my blood from last night and bruises on my body. My key opened the door to that house that wasn’t mine. I don’t have a brain tumor. There’s a mark from a wedding band on my ring finger. I am in this hospital room right now, and all of this is actually happening.

  I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.

  I am only allowed to solve this problem.

  —

  When the elevator doors open to the hospital lobby, I shoulder past two men in cheap suits and wet overcoats. They look like cops, and as they step into the elevator car and our eyes meet, I wonder if they’re heading up to see me.

  I move past a waiting area, toward the automatic doors. Since I wasn’t on a secured ward, slipping out was much easier than I expected. I simply got dressed, waited for the hallway to clear, and cruised past the nurses’ station without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow.

  As I approach the exit, I keep waiting for alarms to sound, for someone to shout my name, for guards to chase me through the lobby.