Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

  Soon I’m outside in the rain, and it feels like early evening, the bustle of traffic supporting something in the neighborhood of six p.m.

  I hurry down the steps, hit the sidewalk, and don’t slow my pace until I’ve reached the next block.

  I glance over my shoulder.

  There’s no one following me, at least as far as I can tell.

  Just a sea of umbrellas.

  I’m getting wet.

  I have no idea where I’m going.

  At a bank, I step off the sidewalk and take shelter under the entrance overhang. Leaning against a limestone column, I watch people move past as rain drills down on the pavement.

  I dig my money clip out of my slacks. Last night’s cab fare made a sizeable dent in my measly treasury. I’m down to $182, and my credit cards are worthless.

  Home is out of the question, but there’s a cheap hotel in my neighborhood a few blocks from my brownstone, and it’s just gross enough to make me think I could possibly afford a room there.

  I step back out into the rain.

  It’s getting darker by the minute.

  Colder.

  Without a coat or jacket, I’m soaked to my skin within two blocks.

  —

  The Days Inn occupies the building across the street from Village Tap. Only it doesn’t. The canopy is the wrong color, and the entire façade looks bizarrely upmarket. These are luxury apartments. I even see a doorman standing on the curb under an umbrella, trying to hail a cab for a woman in a black trench coat.

  Am I on the right street?

  I cast a glance back to my corner bar.

  VILLAGE TAP should be blinking neon in the front window, but instead there’s a heavy wooden panel with brass lettering attached to a pole that’s swinging over the entrance, creaking in the wind.

  I continue walking, faster now, the rain driving into my eyes.

  Past—

  Rowdy taverns.

  Restaurants poised to receive the dinner rush—sparkling wineglasses and silverware quickly arranged on white linen tablecloths as servers memorize the specials.

  A coffee shop I don’t recognize bursting with the jangle of an espresso machine grinding fresh beans.

  Daniela’s and my favorite Italian place looking exactly as it should, and reminding me that I haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours.

  But I keep walking.

  Until I’m wet through to my socks.

  Until I’m shivering uncontrollably.

  Until night has dropped and I’m standing outside a three-story hotel with bars on the windows and an obnoxiously large sign above the entrance:

  HOTEL ROYALE

  I step inside, dripping a puddle on the cracked checkerboard floor.

  It isn’t what I expected. Not seedy or dirty in the lurid sense of the word. Just forgotten. Past prime. The way I remember my great-grandparents’ living room in their teetering Iowa farmhouse. As if the worn furniture has been here for a thousand years, frozen in time while the rest of the world marched on. The air carries the scent of must, and big-band music plays quietly through a hidden sound system. Something from the 1940s.

  At the front desk, the old, tuxedoed clerk doesn’t bat an eye at my sodden state. Just takes $95 in damp cash and hands me a key to a room on the third floor.

  The elevator car is cramped, and I stare at my distorted features in the bronze doors as the car labors, noisily and with all the grace of a fat man climbing stairs, to the third floor.

  Halfway down a dim corridor, scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, I locate my room number and wrestle the old-school lock open with the key.

  It isn’t much.

  A single bed with a flimsy metal frame and a lumpy mattress.

  A bathroom the size of a closet.

  A dresser.

  A cathode-ray television.

  And a chair next to a window, where something glows on the other side of the glass.

  Stepping around the foot of the bed, I sweep the curtain back and peer outside, finding myself at eye level with the top of the hotel sign and close enough to see the rain falling through the green neon light.

  Down on the sidewalk below, I glimpse a man leaning against a streetlamp post, smoke curling up into the rain, the ash of his cigarette glowing and fading in the darkness under his hat.

  Is he waiting there for me?

  Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I go to the door and check the deadbolt and hook the chain.

  Then I kick off my shoes, strip down, and dry myself off with the bathroom’s only towel.

  The best thing about the room is the ancient cast-iron radiator that stands under the window. I crank it up to high and hold my hands in the jetties of heat.

  I drape my wet clothes across the back of the chair and push it close to the radiator.

  In the bedside table drawer, I find a Gideon Bible and a sprawling Chicago Metro phone book.

  Stretching out across the creaky bed, I thumb to the D’s and begin searching for my last name.

  I quickly locate my listing.

  Jason A. Dessen.

  Correct address.

  Correct number.

  I lift the phone receiver off the bedside table and call my landline.

  It rings four times, and then I hear my voice: “Hi, you’ve reached Jason, well, except not really, because I’m not actually here to take your call. This is a recording. You know what to do.”

  I hang up before the beep.

  That isn’t our home voicemail message.

  I feel insanity stalking me again, threatening to curl me up fetal and shatter me into a million pieces.

  But I shut it down, returning to my new mantra.

  I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.

  I am only allowed to solve this problem.

  Experimental physics—hell, all of science—is about solving problems. However, you can’t solve them all at once. There’s always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.

  The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you’ve put in the work, and if you’re lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable. Like stepping slowly back from a photomontage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.

  I have to separate myself from the fear, the paranoia, the terror, and simply attack this problem as if I were in a lab—one small question at a time.

  Build some dry ground to stand on.

  The overarching question that plagues me in this moment: What has happened to me? There’s no way to answer that. Not yet. I have vague suspicions of course, but suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn’t lead to truth.

  Why weren’t Daniela and Charlie at our house last night? Why did it seem as though I live alone?

  No, that’s still too big, too complex. Narrow the field of data.

  Where are Daniela and Charlie?

  Better but reduce it further. Daniela will know where my son is.

  So this is where I’ll start: Where is Daniela?

  The sketches I saw last night on the walls of the house that isn’t my house—they were created by Daniela Vargas. She had signed them using her maiden name. Why?

  I hold my ring finger up to the neon light coming in through the window.

  The mark of my wedding band is gone.

  Was it ever there?

  I tear off a piece of loose thread from the curtain and tie it around my ring finger as a physical link to the world and the life I know.

  Then I return to the phone book and thumb through to the V’s, stopping at the only entry for Daniela Vargas. I rip out the entire page and dial her number.

  The familiarity of her voice on the recording moves me, even while the message itself leaves me deeply unsettled.

  “You’ve reached Daniela. I’m away painting. Leave a message. Ciao.”

  —

  Within an hour, my
clothes are warm and nearly dry. I wash up, get dressed, and take the stairwell down to the lobby.

  Out on the street, the wind is blowing, but the rain has relented.

  The smoking man by the streetlamp is gone.

  I’m light-headed with hunger.

  I pass a half-dozen restaurants before I find one that won’t clean out my funds—a bright, grimy pizza joint that sells enormous, deep-dish slices. There’s nowhere to sit inside, so I stand on the sidewalk, stuffing my face and wondering if this pizza is as life-changing as I think it is, or if I’m too ravenous to be discerning.

  Daniela’s address is in Bucktown. I’m down to $75 and change, so I could hail a cab, but I feel like walking.

  The pedestrian and traffic levels point toward Friday night, and the air carries a commensurate energy.

  I head east to find my wife.

  —

  Daniela’s building is yellow-brick with a façade covered in climbing ivy that’s turning russet with the recent cold. The buzzer system is an old-fashioned brass panel, and I find her maiden name second up from the bottom of the first column.

  I press the buzzer three times, but she doesn’t answer.

  Through the tall windowpanes that frame the door, I see a woman in an evening gown and overcoat, her stilettoes clicking down the hallway as she approaches. I retreat from the window and turn away as the door swings open.

  She’s on a cell, and by the whiff of alcohol attendant with her passing, I get the feeling she already has an enthusiastic head start on the evening. She doesn’t notice me as she charges down the steps.

  I catch the edge of the door before it closes and take the stairwell to the fourth floor.

  Daniela’s door is at the end of the hall.

  I knock and wait.

  No answer.

  I head back down to the lobby, wondering if I should just wait here for her to return. But what if she’s out of town? What would she think if she came back to her apartment to find me loitering outside her building like some stalker?

  As I approach the main entrance, my eyes pass over a bulletin board covered in flyers announcing everything from gallery openings to book readings and poetry slams.

  The largest notice taped to the center of the board catches my attention. It’s a poster actually, advertising a show by Daniela Vargas at a gallery called Oomph.

  I stop, scan for the opening date.

  Friday, October 2.

  Tonight.

  —

  Back down on the street, it’s raining again.

  I flag a cab.

  The gallery is a dozen blocks away, and I feel the tensile strength of my nerves hit the ceiling as we roll down Damen Avenue, a parking lot of cabs in the crest of the evening’s wavelength.

  I abandon my ride and join the hipster-heavy crowd marching through the freezing drizzle.

  Oomph is an old packing-plant-turned-art-gallery, and the line to get inside runs halfway down the block.

  A miserable, shivering forty-five minutes later, I’m finally out of the rain and paying my $15 admission fee and being whisked with a group of ten people into an anteroom with Daniela’s first and last name in gigantic, graffiti-style letters on the encircling wall.

  During our fifteen years together, I’ve attended plenty of exhibits and openings with Daniela, but I’ve never experienced anything like this.

  A slim, bearded man emerges from a hidden door in the wall.

  The lights dim.

  He says, “I’m Steve Konkoly, the producer of what you’re about to see.” He rips a plastic produce bag off a dispenser by the door. “Phones go in the bag. You get them back on the other side.”

  The bag of accumulating phones makes the rounds.

  “A word about the next ten minutes of your life. The artist asks that you set aside your intellectual processing and make an effort to experience her installation emotionally. Welcome to ‘Entanglement.’ ”

  Konkoly takes the bag of phones and opens the door.

  I’m the last one through.

  For a moment, our group is bunched up in a dark, confined space that turns pitch-black as the echo of the slammed door reveals a vast, warehouse-like room.

  My attention is drawn skyward as points of light fade in above us.

  Stars.

  They look startlingly real, each containing a smoldering quality.

  Some are close, some are distant, and every now and then one streaks through the void.

  I see what lies ahead.

  Someone in our group mutters, “Oh my God.”

  It’s a labyrinth built of Plexiglas, which by some visual effect appears to stretch on infinitely under the universe of stars.

  Ripples of light travel through the panels.

  Our group shuffles forward.

  There are five entrances to the labyrinth, and I stand at the nexus of all of them, watching the others drift ahead on their separate paths.

  A low-level sound that has been there all along catches my attention—it’s not music so much as white noise, like television static, hissing over a deep, sustained tone.

  I choose a path, and as I enter the labyrinth, the transparency vanishes.

  The Plexiglas is engulfed in near-blinding light, even under my feet.

  One minute in, some of the panels begin to show looped imagery.

  Birth—child screaming, mother weeping with joy.

  A condemned man kicking and twisting at the end of a noose.

  A snowstorm.

  The ocean.

  A desert landscape scrolling past.

  I continue along my path.

  Into dead ends.

  Around blind curves.

  The imagery appearing with greater frequency, on faster loops.

  The crumpled remains of a car crash.

  A couple in the throes of passionate sex.

  The point of view of a patient rolling down a hospital corridor on a gurney with nurses and doctors looking down.

  The cross.

  The Buddha.

  The pentagram.

  The peace sign.

  A nuclear detonation.

  The lights go out.

  The stars return.

  I can see through the Plexiglas again, only now there’s some kind of digital filter overlaid on the transparency—static and swarming insects and falling snow.

  It makes the others in the labyrinth look like silhouettes moving through a vast wasteland.

  And despite the confusion and fear of the last twenty-four hours, or perhaps precisely because of all I’ve experienced, what I’m witnessing in this moment breaks through and hits me hard.

  While I can see the others in the labyrinth, it doesn’t feel like we’re in the same room, or even the same space.

  They seem worlds apart and lost in their own vectors.

  I’m struck for a fleeting moment by the overwhelming sense of loss.

  Not grief or pain, but something more primal.

  A realization and the terror that follows it—terror of the limitless indifference surrounding us.

  I don’t know if that’s the intended takeaway from Daniela’s installation, but it’s certainly mine.

  We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

  At the labyrinth’s exit, there’s one last loop—a man and a woman each hold the tiny hand of their child as they run together up a grassy hill under a clear, blue sky—with the following words slowly materializing on the panel—

  Nothing exists.

  All is a dream.

  God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

  Nothing exists save empty space—and you….

  And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought.

  MARK TW
AIN

  I step into another anteroom, where the rest of my group huddles around the plastic bag, retrieving their phones.

  On through, into a large, well-lit gallery with glossy hardwood floors, art-adorned walls, a violin trio…and a woman in a stunning black dress, standing on a riser, addressing the crowd.

  It takes me a full five seconds to realize this is Daniela.

  She’s radiant, holding a glass of red wine in one hand and gesturing with the other.

  “—just the most amazing night, and I’m so grateful to all of you for coming out to support my new project. It means the world.”

  Daniela raises her wineglass.

  “¡Salud!”

  The crowd responds in turn, and as everyone drinks, I move toward her.

  In proximity, she’s electric, so sparkling with life that I have to restrain myself from calling out to her. This is Daniela with an energy like the first time we met fifteen years ago, before years of life—the normalcy, the elation, the depression, the compromise—transformed her into the woman who now shares my bed: amazing mother, amazing wife, but fighting always against the whispers of what might have been.

  My Daniela carries a weight and a distance in her eyes that scare me sometimes.

  This Daniela is an inch off the ground.

  I’m now standing less than ten feet away, my heart thumping, wondering if she’ll spot me, and then—

  Eye contact.

  Hers go wide and her mouth opens, and I can’t tell if she’s horrified or delighted or just surprised to see my face.

  She pushes through the crowd, throws her arms around my neck, and pulls me in tight with, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you came. Is everything all right? I’d heard you left the country for a while or were missing or something.”

  I’m not sure how to respond to that, so I just say, “Well, here I am.”

  Daniela hasn’t worn perfume in years, but she’s wearing it tonight, and she smells like Daniela without me, like Daniela before our separate scents merged into us.

  I don’t want to let go—I need her touch—but she pulls away.

  I ask, “Where’s Charlie?”

  “Who?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  Something torques inside of me.

  “Jason?”