Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

  It defines home.

  I remember thinking that the first time I made love to her fifteen years ago. Thinking that I’d found something I didn’t even know I’d been searching for.

  It holds even more true tonight as the hardwood floor groans softly beneath us and the moonlight steals between the break in the curtains just enough to light her face as her mouth opens and her head tilts back and she whispers, so urgently, my name.

  —

  We’re sweaty, our hearts racing in the silence.

  Daniela runs her fingers through my hair, and she’s staring at me in the dark the way I love.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Charlie was right.”

  “About?”

  “What he said on the walk home. It hasn’t been like this since Jason2 came here. You aren’t replaceable. Not even by you. I keep thinking about how we met. At that point in our lives, we could’ve crashed into anyone. But you showed up at that backyard party and saved me from that asshole. I know part of our story is the electricity of our connection, but the other part is equally miraculous. It’s the simple fact that you walked into my life at the exact moment you did. You instead of someone else. In some ways, isn’t that even more incredible than the connection itself? That we found each other at all?”

  “It’s remarkable.”

  “What I realized is that the same thing happened yesterday. Of all the versions of Jason, it was you who pulled that crazy stunt at the diner, which landed you in jail, which brought us safely together.”

  “So you’re saying it’s fate.”

  She smiles. “I think I’m saying we found each other, for a second time.”

  —

  We make love again and fall asleep.

  In the dead of night, she wakes me, whispers in my ear, “I don’t want you to leave.”

  I turn over onto my side and face her.

  Her eyes are wide open in the dark.

  My head hurts.

  My mouth is dry.

  I’m caught in that disorienting transition between inebriation and hangover, when the pleasure slowly morphs into pain.

  “What if we just kept driving?” she says.

  “To where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are we supposed to tell Charlie? He has friends. Maybe a girlfriend. We just tell him to forget all that? He’s finally happy at school.”

  “I know,” she says, “and I hate it, but yes, that’s what we tell him.”

  “Where we live, our friends, our jobs—those things define us.”

  “They’re not all that defines us. As long as I’m with you, I know exactly who I am.”

  “Daniela, I want nothing more than to be with you, but if I don’t do this thing tomorrow, you and Charlie will never be safe. And no matter what happens, you will still have me.”

  “I don’t want some other version of you. I want you.”

  —

  I wake in the dark to my pulse pounding in my head and my mouth bone-dry.

  Pulling on my jeans and shirt, I stagger down the hall.

  With no fire tonight, the sole source of illumination on the entire ground level is a timid nightlight plugged into an outlet above the kitchen counter.

  I take a glass from the cabinet and fill it at the tap.

  Drink it down.

  Fill it again.

  The central heating cuts off.

  I stand at the sink, sipping the cold well water.

  The cabin so quiet I can hear the floor popping as the wood fibers expand and contract in distant corners of the house.

  Through the window over the kitchen sink, I stare into the woods.

  I love that Daniela wants me, but I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know how to keep them safe.

  My head is spinning.

  A little ways beyond the Jeep, something catches my attention.

  A shadow moving across the snow.

  Adrenaline surges.

  I set the glass down, head to the front door, and step into my boots.

  On the porch, I button my shirt and walk into the trodden snow between the steps and the car.

  Then out past the Jeep.

  There.

  I see what caught my eye from the kitchen.

  As I approach, it’s still moving.

  Larger than I first thought.

  The size of a man.

  No.

  Jesus.

  It is a man.

  The path along which he’s dragged himself is plain to see by the streaks of blood that look black in the starlight.

  He’s groaning as he crawls in the direction of the front porch. He’s never going to make it.

  I reach him, kneel beside him.

  It’s me, right down to the coat and the Velocity Laboratories backpack and the ring of thread.

  He’s holding his stomach with one hand, which is covered in steaming blood, and he looks up at me with the most desperate eyes I’ve ever seen.

  I ask, “Who did this to you?”

  “One of us.”

  “How’d you find me here?”

  He coughs up a mist of blood. “Help me.”

  “How many of us are here?”

  “I think I’m dying.”

  I look around. It only takes me a second to lock on the pair of blood-tinged footprints moving away from this Jason toward the Jeep, and then on around the side of the cabin.

  The dying Jason is saying my name.

  Our name.

  Begging for my help.

  And I want to help him, but all I can think is—they found us.

  Somehow, they found us.

  He says, “Don’t let them hurt her.”

  I look back at the car.

  I didn’t notice at first, but now I see that all the tires have been slashed.

  Somewhere in the near distance, I hear footsteps in the snow.

  I scan the woods for movement, but the starlight doesn’t penetrate the denser forest farther out from the cabin.

  He says, “I’m not ready for this.”

  I look down into his eyes as my own panic builds. “If this is the end, be brave.”

  A gunshot shreds the silence.

  It came from behind the cabin, near the lake.

  I race back through the snow, past the Jeep, sprinting toward the front porch, trying to process what’s happening.

  From inside the cabin, Daniela calls my name.

  I climb the steps.

  Crash through the front door.

  Daniela is coming down the hallway, wrapped in a blanket and backlit by the light spilling out of the master bedroom.

  My son approaches from the kitchen.

  I lock the front door behind me as Daniela and Charlie converge in the foyer.

  She asks, “Was that a gunshot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “They found us.”

  “Who?”

  “I did.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “We have to leave right now. Both of you head to our bedroom, get dressed, start getting our things together. I’m going to make sure the back door is locked, then I’ll join you.”

  They head down the hallway.

  The front door is secure.

  The only other way into the house is through the French doors that lead from the screened-in porch into the living room.

  I move through the kitchen.

  Daniela and Charlie will be looking to me to tell them what’s next.

  And I have no idea.

  We can’t take the car.

  We’ll have to leave on foot.

  As I reach the living room, my thoughts come in a raging stream of consciousness.

  What do we need to bring with us?

  Phones.

  Money.

  Where’s our money?

  In an envelope in the bottom dresser drawer of our bedroom.

  What else do we need?


  What can we not forget?

  How many versions of me tracked us here?

  Am I going to die tonight?

  By my own hand?

  I feel my way through the darkness, past the sleeper sofa, to the French doors. As I reach down to test the handles, I realize—it shouldn’t be this cold in here.

  Unless these doors were recently opened.

  As in a few seconds ago.

  They’re locked now, and I don’t remember locking them.

  Through the glass panes, I can see something on the patio, but it’s too dark to make out any detail. I think it’s moving.

  I need to get back to my family.

  As I turn away from the French doors, a shadow rises from behind the sofa.

  My heart stops.

  A lamp blinks on.

  I see myself standing ten feet away, one hand on the light switch, the other pointing a gun at me.

  He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

  His hands are covered in blood.

  Coming around the sofa with the gun aimed at my face, he says quietly, “Take your clothes off.”

  The slash across his face identifies him.

  I glance behind me through the French doors.

  The lamplight illuminates just enough of the patio for me to see a pile of clothes—Timberlands and a peacoat—and another Jason lying on his side, his head in a pool of blood, throat laid open.

  He says, “I won’t tell you again.”

  I start undoing the buttons of my shirt.

  “We know each other,” I say.

  “Obviously.”

  “No, that cut on your face. We had beers together two nights ago.”

  I watch that piece of information land, but it doesn’t derail him like I’d hoped.

  He says, “That doesn’t change what has to happen. This is the end, brother. You’d do the same and you know it.”

  “I wouldn’t, actually. I thought so at first, but I wouldn’t.”

  I slide my arms out of the sleeves, toss him the shirt.

  I know what he’s planning: dress himself in my clothes. Go to Daniela pretending to be me. He’ll have to reopen the slash across his face to make it look like a fresh wound.

  I say, “I had a plan to protect her.”

  “Yeah, I read it. I’m not sacrificing myself so someone else can be with my wife and son. Jeans too.”

  I unbutton them, thinking, I misjudged. We’re not all the same.

  “How many of us have you murdered tonight?” I ask.

  “Four. I’ll kill a thousand of you if that’s what it takes.”

  As I pull off the jeans, one leg at a time, I say, “Something happened to you in the box, in those worlds you mentioned. What turned you into this?”

  “Maybe you don’t want them back badly enough. And if that’s the case, you don’t deserve them any—”

  I throw the jeans at his face and rush him.

  Wrapping my arms around Jason’s thighs, I lift with everything I’ve got and run him straight into the wall, crushing the air out of his lungs.

  The gun hits the floor.

  I kick it into the kitchen as Jason crumples and drive my knee into his face.

  I hear bone crunch.

  Grabbing his head, I bring my knee back for another blow, but he sweeps my left leg out from under me.

  I slam into the hardwood floor, the back of my head hitting so hard I see bursts of light, and then he’s on top of me, blood dripping off his ruined face, one hand squeezing my throat.

  When he hits me, I feel my cheek fracture in a supernova of pain below my left eye.

  He hits me again.

  I blink through a sheet of tears and blood, and the next time I can see clearly, he’s holding a knife in the hand he was hitting me with.

  Gunshot.

  My ears ringing.

  A small black hole through his sternum and blood spilling out of it and down the center of his chest. The knife drops from his hands onto the floor beside me. I watch him put a finger in the hole and try to plug it, but the blood won’t be stopped.

  He takes a wet, ragged breath and looks up at the man who shot him.

  I crane my neck too, just enough to see another Jason aiming a gun at him. This one is clean-shaven, and he’s wearing the black leather jacket that Daniela gave me ten years ago for our anniversary.

  On his left hand, a gold wedding band gleams.

  My ring.

  Jason2 pulls the trigger again, and the next bullet shears off the side of my attacker’s skull.

  He topples.

  I turn over and sit up slowly.

  Spitting blood.

  My face on fire.

  Jason2 aims the gun at me.

  He’s going to pull the trigger.

  I actually see my death coming, and I have no words, just a fleeting image of me as a child on my grandparents’ farm in western Iowa. A warm spring day. A massive sky. Cornfields. I’m dribbling a soccer ball through the backyard toward my brother, who’s guarding the “goal”—a space between two maple trees.

  I think, Why this last memory on the brink of my death? Was I the most happy in that moment? The most purely myself?

  “Stop it!”

  Daniela is standing in the kitchen nook, dressed now.

  She looks at Jason2.

  She looks at me.

  At the Jason with a bullet through his head.

  The Jason on the screened-in porch with his throat cut.

  And somehow, without so much as a tremor in her voice, she manages to ask, “Where is my husband?”

  Jason2 looks momentarily thrown.

  I wipe the blood out of my eyes. “Right here.”

  “What did we do tonight?” she asks.

  “We danced to bad country music, came home, and made love.” I look at the man who stole my life. “You’re the one who kidnapped me?”

  He looks at Daniela.

  “She knows everything,” I say. “There’s no point in lying.”

  Daniela asks, “How could you do this to me? To our family?”

  Charlie appears beside his mother, taking in the horror all around us.

  Jason2 looks at her.

  Then at Charlie.

  Jason2 is only six or seven feet away, but I’m sitting on the floor.

  I couldn’t reach him before he pulled the trigger.

  I think, Get him talking.

  “How’d you find us?” I ask.

  “Charlie’s cell has a find-my-phone app.”

  Charlie says, “I only turned it on for one text late last night. I didn’t want Angela to think I’d blown her off.”

  I look at Jason2. “And the other Jasons?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they followed me here.”

  “How many?”

  “I have no idea.” He turns to Daniela. “I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could’ve been. That’s why—”

  “Then you should’ve stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance.”

  “Then I wouldn’t have built the box.”

  “And that would be so terrible, why? Look around. Has your life’s work caused anything but pain?”

  He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”

  Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”

  So slowly, I transfer my weight onto my feet.

  But he catches me, says, “Don’t even.”

  “You going to kill me in front of them?” I ask. “Really?”

  “You had such enormous dreams,” he says to me. “You could’ve stayed in my world, in the life I built, and actually lived them.”

  “Oh, is that how you justify wh
at you did?”

  “I know how your mind works. The horror you face every day walking to the train to go teach, thinking, Is this really it? Maybe you’re brave enough to admit it. Maybe you’re not.”

  I say, “You don’t get to—”

  “Actually, I do get to judge you, Jason, because I am you. Maybe we branched into different worlds fifteen years ago, but we’re wired the same. You weren’t born to teach undergrad physics. To watch people like Ryan Holder win the acclaim that should’ve been yours. There is nothing you can’t do. I know, because I’ve done it all. Look at what I built. I could wake up in your brownstone every morning and look myself in the mirror because I achieved everything I ever wanted. Can you say the same? What have you done?”

  “I made a life with them.”

  “I handed you, handed both of us, what everyone secretly wants. The chance to live two lives. Our best two lives.”

  “I don’t want two lives. I want them.”

  I look at Daniela. I look at my son.

  Daniela says to Jason2, “And I want him. Please. Let us have our life. You don’t have to do this.”

  His face hardens.

  His eyes narrow.

  He moves toward me.

  Charlie screams, “No!”

  The gun is inches from my face.

  I stare up into my doppelgänger’s eyes, ask, “So you kill me and then what? What does it get you? It won’t make her want you.”

  His hand is trembling.

  Charlie starts toward Jason2.

  “Don’t you touch him.”

  “Stay put, son.” I stare down the barrel of the gun. “You’ve lost, Jason.”

  Charlie is still coming, Daniela trying to hold him back, but he rips his arm away.

  As Charlie closes in, Jason2’s eyes cut away from me for a split second.

  I slap the gun out of his hand, grab the knife off the floor, and bury it in his stomach, the blade sliding in with almost no resistance.

  Standing, I jerk the knife out, and as Jason2 falls into me, grasping my shoulders, I stick him again with the blade.

  Over and over and over.

  So much blood pouring through his shirt and onto my hands, and the rusted smell of it filling the room.

  He’s clutching me, the knife still embedded in his gut.

  I think about him with Daniela as I twist the blade and rip it out and shove him away from me.

  He teeters.

  Grimacing.

  Holding his stomach.

  Blood leaking through his fingers.

  His legs fail him.

  He sits, and then, with a groan, stretches out on his side and lets his head rest against the floor.