Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  In the long run, they were right.

  But back then I had buzz. When Sapere Aude started up, Blattner and Hansen called me “the youngest and most notable scholar of thanatons,” which is what they wanted me to be. In retrospect, what they really wanted was an aggressively young face, someone who didn’t look like a classic nerd or a middle-aged duffer, someone who could explain this mind-blowing stuff on TV and at conferences. Back then I had mojo and knew how to talk about thanatons with authority, I knew how to make thanatons accessible—and even more importantly, I knew how to bullshit about them, too.

  I’d already been accepted in my first-choice physics doctoral program. I remember hanging out with Julia in my dorm, hemming and hawing on what to do. If I stayed in research, I said to her, maybe I could make new discoveries, push the field further. If I went to work for Sapere Aude, for all its flashiness, for all its financial upside, I’d fundamentally be a salesman.

  A few days later Julia told me she got her own job at Sapere Aude.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Julia said, “You know me.”

  That’s what the documentary got wrong. Julia didn’t follow me in.

  I followed her.

  I joined Sapere Aude, and school was out forever.

  * * *

  —

  Julia was different. Everyone else at Sapere Aude in the early days—both in sales and in research—they were all kind of like me, upper-middle-class strivers with an abrupt, confrontational, this-is-the-future-get-used-to-it attitude. Because after all, we were the future. Arrogant in a suburban way. It was only natural and expected that the universe should rearrange itself around us. (In time, of course, the universe did rearrange itself around us, but we didn’t have to be such dicks about it.)

  Julia had an affectionate semicontempt for us. She went to our college but she was also a “townie” and from the beginning seemed to have more poise, because, after all, this college town was her territory. When she was still in high school, Julia had already done her drinking at off-campus parties, had already stayed up all night in the dorms, had already done her drugs, already had her sex. College thrills were yesterday’s news.

  Julia smoked. My first kiss was with a girl who smoked, Hannah Rhee. A cold November day, eighth grade, on the bleachers by the empty football field. Hannah chewed gum and the combined taste of grungy cigarettes and cloying bubble gum was so distinctive I can taste it even now.

  I never smoked, but I liked the girls who did.

  When I first asked Julia out during my sophomore year, I was surprised she said yes. Maybe she surprised herself, too. Motivated by curiosity, probably. She was a business major. I was physics and philosophy but hung out with the artier crowd. Julia and I had zero friends in common, and what passed for scruffy charm in my clique was embarrassingly shabby in her more conventional circles. When I showed up for our first date on my bicycle, she said, “Oh, you poor thing.”

  But she was game. “Okay, yeah, you know what? We’ll do it on bikes.” Julia got hers out of the basement (she lived off campus with three other girls; I lived in a dorm all four years), but I was pretty sure that this was no longer a real date.

  The restaurant I had picked was a disaster. It was an oyster place and there was “live jazz” playing. We could barely talk.

  I shouted, “I wouldn’t have picked this place if I’d known they were playing jazz.”

  Julia said, “You don’t like jazz?”

  “I hate jazz.”

  “Good. If you did then this night really would be over.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Our food isn’t here yet.”

  “Fuck it.”

  That was when my date with Julia really began.

  We rode around our college town on our bikes in the dark. Some of the same roads Renard and I had biked down, years ago. Biking the streets at night was something Julia used to do in high school, she said, but she hadn’t done it in a long time. She gave me her local-kid’s tour: the houses of her childhood friends, the parks where she had played, her high school. We rode through downtown, which always seemed kind of empty, past the ominous-looking water plant, through the gardens next to the river.

  We stopped at a gas station. Julia bought cigarettes and a lottery ticket. She bought the ticket like it was a routine thing, reciting her numbers like she’d said them a million times. I had never seen anyone buy a lottery ticket before. It was the kind of thing poor people did. Julia turned to me and said, “Let’s buy a ticket together.” Probably at any other time I would’ve called buying a lottery ticket “a tax on stupidity” or something math-snotty like that. But this time I didn’t.

  I just said, “I’ve never bought a lottery ticket.”

  “Of course,” said Julia. “Deep down you’re already a millionaire.”

  At first I thought it was a compliment. It was anything but. In that gas station I thought maybe Julia meant I had the confidence of a millionaire. Or that I was already on the fast track to becoming a millionaire.

  It was only later that I realized her real meaning: that I habitually acted with all the entitlement, with the oblivious assurance, with the bland assumption of resources of a millionaire.

  It was pretty cutting, in retrospect.

  And a prologue.

  * * *

  —

  Julia and I ended up at a party that night. Later I found out she’d meant to go to the party all along. Probably she’d intended to cut me loose early. But somehow I hung on, or she let me hang on.

  It wasn’t a college party. None of Julia’s friends from campus were there. At school, I’d see Julia hanging out with the rich kids, the athletes, the model-level girls, but this party was different. These were Julia’s townie friends. Some of them were much older, like pushing thirty. Men with mustaches. The music wasn’t carefully curated as it was at the parties I went to, parties thrown by the indie rockers who hung around the campus radio station. This was unironic classic rock and bad metal. Some guys were burning a couch in the back yard, stripped to their boxer briefs. The stink of bad weed floated around. The music blasted, embarrassing and trashy. I was dressed wrong. Too college. Didn’t belong there. Dudes looked like they wanted to kill me. Contempt. Probably my imagination. Probably nobody noticed me at all. Julia separated herself from me, was talking to some other friends, hadn’t invited me into the conversation. Where was I supposed to go? Was this even a date anymore? I was ridiculous. A puppy tagging along, not taking the hint. In over my head. Shirtless guys shouting back and forth. They were my age; they already had jobs. I felt like a child. Wait, here was a real child: a literal kid who looked like she was twelve years old “manning” the keg. What? Now I was in the kitchen talking to a tattooed woman in a ratty pink tank top. She was drinking a beer and I had a Coke, and she was bored to death of me. She said something about her husband, about her baby. But she couldn’t be more than twenty-one. A baby at twenty-one! A different world. I had nothing to say to her, to anyone. The elaborate system of ironic references I had honed with my friends was obnoxious here.

  Out of strained politeness, the too-young mother had asked me what I did. I said where I went to school and she snorted, “of course,” and when she asked what I studied, there was no reason to lie. She was obviously looking for a way out of the conversation, but then a grizzled metalhead who was at least twenty-eight, rooting through the refrigerator, said, “You study what?” and when I repeated, “thanatons,” he said, “Let me get you a beer—I gotta ask you something,” and when I said I didn’t drink he responded, “Good idea, professor, gotta save those brain cells.” If the young mother had called me “professor,” it would’ve sounded contemptuous, but this guy—I suspected him to be the type, and I was right—was one of those intellectual metalheads, an autodidact who preferred metal in part because of its complex
time signatures, its mathematical virtuosity. In another life, he’d be sitting next to me in a physics seminar and not working in some stockroom. Anyway, he had earnest questions about thanatons.

  So I explained thanatons to the metal guy. The young mother hung around, looking irritated. But she didn’t get up and leave, either, like I expected she would, like I kind of wanted her to. The metalhead—his name was Carl—and I sat at the kitchen table and I explained to Carl, with pen and paper, how Stettinger had discovered the existence of thanatons and deduced their properties. Carl was no fool, either. He asked good questions, even some questions scientists didn’t have answers for at the time—thanatons were still a young field with no practical applications yet. At that point, all anyone knew was that Stettinger had discovered bizarre subatomic particles that were intimately connected with human death.

  I didn’t know where Julia had gone off to. Assumed she’d ditched me. Fine, I’d make my own way back home. I don’t know how long I had been talking to Carl, maybe forty-five minutes, when I heard a noise behind me.

  I turned.

  Julia, smoking. Her eyes on me. As though she had been standing behind me for a long time. Looking at me almost as if puzzled, a different way than she had before.

  * * *

  —

  Somehow that date with Julia led to another date. Then another date. When I asked her later why she kept going out with me, even though we seemed so mismatched at first, Julia said it was because I actually asked her out on dates instead of just calling her up to “hang out.” She said, in a way that was hard to read, “You wooed me.”

  But it was something else, too. The way Julia’s expression changed when she watched me explaining thanatons to Carl. Like she saw something capable in me.

  Those first few weeks felt like a miracle. Julia was out of my league, or at least I thought so. I convinced myself I had to savor everything I could before the clock ran out, before she wised up to the fact that I was beneath her. I developed rituals to keep it going. On my way to meet her, I’d always pick up cigarettes and a lottery ticket with her lucky numbers. I liked it particularly, the seventh or eighth time, when Julia just took the cigarettes and lottery ticket without even saying thanks. Accepted them as routine. We were a couple.

  Julia was a small-time drug dealer. Weed and ecstasy, occasionally cocaine. That’s why we went to that party on our first date; she was picking up her supply. The clueless kids in the dorms were too scared to buy drugs from a real townie, but they’d readily buy from the pretty girl in Econ.

  When Julia was dealing, she was all business. She never used. Getting high was part of her high school experience, that was kid shit. Now she had a car. She was paying her own tuition. That’s why Julia had said “Oh, you poor thing” when I showed up for our date on a bicycle. I was always short of money because I didn’t work, I just studied. Julia was already running a business, essentially.

  Always pointing herself upward. Always dressed fashionably while other girls were still stomping around campus in their comfort sweatpants. I started dressing differently too. Everyone else at our university was still acting like children. Julia and I were adults, or on our way. Or so we thought.

  We weren’t really.

  * * *

  —

  When I was an undergraduate I didn’t really think about Renard. About the weird things we used to do on that very campus. I never visited the dorm that Renard and I had stayed in.

  There was a reason for that.

  * * *

  —

  Renard and I would sneak out of our dorm at night. Nothing was secured back then. It was summer and the campus was skeleton staffed. We weren’t yet in the era of electronic surveillance systems and ubiquitous cameras. In 1987, if you did something under the cover of night and got away with it, you’d really gotten away with it.

  Renard and I got away with a lot.

  We crept out of our room after midnight and explored the hidden parts of campus. We figured out how to get on the roof of the chemistry building, and from there we could open the windows into professors’ offices that were seemingly abandoned for the summer. The art building, full of junked sculptures and installations and bulky kilns and pottery equipment, had an agreeably disorderly air during the day, but at night was full of menacing silhouettes. Steam tunnels made a labyrinth underneath the campus, and from there you could access the basement of the physics building and even get close to the disused particle accelerator.

  I was terrified of being caught. But exploring was too exhilarating to resist. Even when Renard and I got in over our heads, like when some adjunct professor working late into the night was walking down the desolate linoleum hallway after buying a snack from the vending machine, passing us as we hid behind a door holding our breath, our hearts exploding, it almost felt like a real-life version of the video game Renard played so obsessively, with its ruined house full of endless stairs and secret doors and traps and spiders and snakes. Like maybe a real-life Flickering Man was wandering around late nights too, waiting for us to find him.

  One night Renard and I found our way into the college’s auditorium. We climbed onto the stage and looked out onto the rows of dark, empty seats. Backstage were heaps of old sets and props and a queer half-sized door that led down rough wooden steps into what looked like a costume storage room. I couldn’t quite tell what was down there because it was so dark.

  I flicked the light switch. Nothing.

  A scratching noise came from that darkness.

  “Go down there,” Renard said.

  The way he said it was unexpectedly abrupt. In the darkness the figure of Renard suddenly seemed ominous, almost threatening. He was the kind of nerd who worked out, who had muscles, though not the kind of all-around muscles you get from actually playing a sport but a kind of specific unnatural definition that I guessed came from working out exclusively with machines. The combination of Renard’s weirdly muscled physique and his pimply nerd face always looked jarring to me. Maybe it was physical intimidation that compelled me to go down the stairs, or the brutal edge of authority in Renard’s voice—anyway, I obeyed him.

  Only once I was at the bottom of the stairs did I feel alarmed.

  I looked up at the square of light, with Renard’s shadow in it.

  I couldn’t see his face.

  A scuttling noise around me. Now I was truly freaked out. For the first time I thought, why am I down here? Why did I obey Renard? But this was a thrill, too. Everything around me felt sharp, alive, hyperreal. The dim racks of fancy dresses and pirate costumes and soldier uniforms and a hundred other theatrical outfits packed in tight rows to my left and right looked like a fascinating maze. The stinging smell of mothballs went to my head as the scuttling got louder, and I braced for a rat to run over my foot, for tiny jaws to bite my ankle, but nothing did. When Renard said, “Keep going, go further,” I actually wanted to keep going, deeper into the labyrinth of costumes. I pushed through the walls of silk shirts and fur coats and gangster suits until I was in the middle of it, until I couldn’t see the light from the top of the stairs anymore, or Renard, although I knew he was still up there. I was surrounded and packed in tight on all sides by the costumes, and I stood very still, and the scuttling in the darkness came closer, and the thought came to me, with a kind of pleasure, that this is what death is like; death will be exactly like this.

  * * *

  —

  It became a regular thing. Renard and I would be exploring the midnight campus and then suddenly he would order me, in a rough way, to do something.

  I would always do it.

  Sometimes Renard would command me to do something dangerous, like walk along the edge of the roof of the chemistry building, where one false step would’ve made me fall five stories and probably killed me. Sometimes he’d dare me to do something subtly destructive, like sneak into a professor’s office to remove
the forty-fifth page out of every book on his shelves. Or something jokey, like replace the hand soap in a public bathroom with mayonnaise.

  I liked these night missions. I could almost sense the atmosphere charging up just before Renard gave the order. The thrill being that, according to some unspoken rule, there was no way of getting out of it. I had to do it.

  That was the fun.

  We didn’t overanalyze why we did this. I didn’t follow Renard’s orders at any other time. But when I accepted Renard’s special dares, there was almost a kind of solemnity, and for those few minutes it felt like we were in a separate reality, each one of our completed missions feeling like another step in a long, complicated ritual that was somehow touching our vast and invisible and evil thing. That through our actions, inch by inch, we were bringing something new into the world.

  One night Renard said, “Have you ever been to Cahokia?”

  * * *

  —

  Get back in the car. Fast as you can. Out of the howling blizzard.

  Slam the door.

  Jesus, it’s cold. So cold. Cold cold cold.

  Still no tow truck. Rub hands together. Don’t feel a thing. Blow on them. That piss in the freezing cold wasn’t worth it. Why didn’t you just piss in the car? It’s not like you’ll ever drive it again. It’s wrecked.