Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

“You’re looking at me like you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I said.

  I didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. I just had to get away from her and the smell of the Sbarro. The bathroom smelled of musty piss, even worse than the restaurant. But anything was better than sitting at the table with Julia right now. I looked at myself in the mirror.

  What was I doing? What kind of life was I living?

  What did I want?

  To tell the truth, after Julia had left for Bloomington, living alone was a liberation. Unshackled from her, that whole week I hung out with friends in a way that I hadn’t for years. Conversations when Julia wasn’t around were deeper, funnier, more interesting. When’s the last time Julia and I had a genuine conversation about something that I was interested in? When’s the last time she said the least thing that interested me? Was I an asshole to be saying this? Fine, I’ll be that asshole: Julia was boring. And even worse, boring in a defiant way, as if she resented people who were interesting.

  When we got to Cahokia it turned out Julia was right. It was just a bunch of hills. It was raining and we were miserable. It was dispiriting to see how this ancient city was situated, the remains of what used to be this amazing Aztec-like metropolis reduced to a few hills, squeezed between interstates like a trash dump.

  Depressing.

  It was raining too hard to hike to the top of Monks Mound, the hundred-foot-tall earthwork that was the main feature of Cahokia. So Julia and I found shelter in the interpretive center.

  Once inside, we both tried to salvage the mood. Valiant attempt. We strolled around, looking at the exhibits.

  “Huh,” I said. “It says here that the part of the Mississippi floodplain that we’re in is called the American Bottom.”

  “I’ll flood your American bottom,” said Julia.

  “Ha ha. Bloomington has corrupted you.”

  “Mmmm, I’ve learned all kinds of tricks.”

  “I knew there was another man.”

  “Yeah, I give him a sponge bath every other day.”

  They were weak jokes. We were courtesy chuckling for each other, we both knew it. But we were trying at least. Julia’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and took the call—walking away, motioning for me to go on without her, that she’d be with me in a minute.

  An act of mercy. She knew that cell phones gave me twinges of nausea. Or maybe it was an excuse to escape me for a little bit.

  I went on. I glanced backward and saw Julia talking rapidly into the phone, her eyes flicking over to me. Venting about me to some friend? That was fine. I’d browse the exhibits alone.

  Late in Cahokia’s history, the elites who lived on Monks Mound built a barrier around the hill and its surrounding grand plaza, shutting themselves up in a walled neighborhood. Nobody knows why. Or maybe the elite weren’t shutting the commoners out; maybe the sick and contagious were being shut in. In any case, not long after that, the grand plaza began to deteriorate. Garbage was dumped there. The plaza and Monks Mound, once the holy of holies, became a deserted junkyard. Even the sacred wood poles, once so carefully positioned to correspond with the movements of the stars, were torn down.

  Nobody knows why.

  After that, city planning reverted to Cahokia’s original patterns. Cahokians stopped building houses on the strict north-south grid, returning to the loose open courtyard floorplans of their ancestors. Archaeologists found old arrowheads and tools from Cahokia’s beginnings mixed in the debris of its late period, evidence that latter-day Cahokians sought out and cherished these artifacts as nostalgic objects, the shards of the good old days. The old citywide theatrical spectacles, with their feasting and hallucinogens and incalculable human sacrifices, were over. Half of the population moved away, quickly. The monumental urban center became untouchable. The remaining Cahokians decentralized to spread-out districts, performing their own modest rituals. In time, even that petered out. By 1400 the city was abandoned.

  Nobody knows why.

  I found Julia again. She was sitting on a bench, fiddling with her phone, not interested in the exhibits or anything.

  I don’t know why I found this so irritating.

  “Hey, the rain’s stopped. Let’s go climb to the top of Monks Mound.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll stay in here.”

  “We’ve come all the way out here. Let’s do it together.”

  “I don’t want to climb up all those muddy stairs. You go.”

  “I don’t want to go alone.”

  “Well, don’t, then.”

  “Julia.”

  “I’m tired. My stomach hurts.”

  “That calzone, right?”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Come on.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. I know that look.”

  “What look?”

  “Just go.”

  “If you want to make some specific complaint, then make it. What you’re doing right now is just throwing vague shit at me about looks and then not substantiating any of it with an argument.”

  “Substantiating any of it with an argument—listen to yourself.”

  “How about addressing my point, and not the way I express it?”

  “Because I’m a terrible person. You’re right.”

  “Now you’re high-roading me.”

  “You always do this. Like we’re debating. Great, you’re a better debater. You win the fucking argument.”

  “I’m going.”

  I left Julia in the interpretive center and started climbing the mound. What were we even fighting about? Why were we fighting?

  Cahokia felt leaden to me. Distressing. Wrong.

  But a thousand years ago, this was the most interesting place in the world. I tried imagining Cahokia back then. Like I was the high priest climbing his holy mountain, gazing around as I ascended at the floodplain filled with a bustling city of twenty thousand people, crowded with thatched wood houses hung with colorful mats, painted poles decorated with animal pelts, baskets of food probably, feathers I guess, and I was accompanied maybe by people tattooed and painted and jeweled, a sacred procession…

  I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t imagine it. What did I really know about the Cahokians? Just a bunch of clich’s I picked up from pop culture that probably had nothing to do with what really happened here, to the actual people who lived here. My mind kept circling back to Julia, who was still moping in the interpretive center.

  How many more years of her are you willing to endure?

  The American Bottom.

  When I reached the top, the clouds had cleared a bit, and I was surprised how far I could see. St. Louis across the Mississippi, even the Gateway Arch. Nobody else was at the top of the mound.

  Enchanted hill.

  King and princess.

  I felt it then. Just for a moment. Akin to what I had been feeling with computers, but somehow the opposite. The echo of some long-ago deep calculation, some gigantic math that had happened right here. For a moment the calculation’s immense divot in space-time almost felt real, as monumental as the great earthwork I was standing on. Like I was in the center of some vast invisible thing.

  Now you are in Cahokia.

  Then the feeling was gone. I looked around at the horizon, at the skyline of St. Louis, the Arch.

  I felt different.

  Clear.

  * * *

  —

  When I was in kindergarten, I visited St. Louis with my parents for a wedding. When I saw the Gateway Arch for the first time, a jokey uncle tried to tell me that it was actually half of a complete circle and that there was another arch buried underground—the more interesting half, he said. The buried half wasn’t smooth like the aboveground arch
, he said, it was crowded with ancient carvings both inside and out, it was a tunnel that burrowed down so you could touch the roots of the earth and then climb back up and out.

  I had believed him, for an afternoon.

  Of course, there’s nothing buried underground. Everything is on the surface. The arch isn’t a ring. If it was, someone had lopped off the more interesting half.

  I drove Julia back to Bloomington.

  Then I broke up with her in a Starbucks.

  “Stupid,” Julia had sobbed. “You’re so, so stupid.”

  * * *

  —

  The announcement crackles over the speaker when I’m still in the cramped airplane bathroom.

  Back to your seats.

  I come out. Everyone back to your seats, seatbelts on, laptops off and stowed. Trays in the upright and locked position. Final approach, etc.

  Relief. I feel the laptops getting turned off, one by one. With each deactivated device my insides untwist a little more. I breathe a little easier. I make my way down the aisle, say excuse me again. Sandwich myself back into my seat. Settle in. Close my eyes.

  I had texted Julia from O’Hare before I got on the plane. Hadn’t heard back then. My phone still off now.

  When I land, when I turn my phone back on, what will I find?

  I’m hurtling out of the sky, straight at her, at hundreds of miles per hour.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the bearded hippyish professor at physics camp talking about quantum fluctuation. About how a particle and its antiparticle simultaneously emerge out of the vacuum and then almost instantly find and annihilate each other.

  But sometimes, one particle escapes.

  Say the particle and antiparticle have their simultaneous births near a black hole. Nothing that gets sucked into a black hole can ever come out again. The borderline, the point of no return, is called the black hole’s event horizon.

  But suppose a particle-antiparticle pair spawns right on that event horizon.

  One particle gets sucked into the black hole. The other particle in the pair escapes.

  It’s free.

  Stephen Hawking theorized about it in the 1970s. In this way, he said, a black hole actually could be said to produce particles. In the long run, though, this phenomenon costs the black hole energy. If there’s nothing else around for the black hole to feed on, this emission of “Hawking radiation” would eventually drain the black hole of all its energy, and the black hole would vanish.

  The bearded professor snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  “The black hole would just disappear?” I said.

  “Yes. Simply evaporate,” said the professor.

  “And what would happen to everything inside the black hole?”

  “Nobody knows,” said the professor.

  Julia had fallen beyond the event horizon.

  I was free.

  Until Julia’s black hole evaporated and somebody new emerged from it.

  I never expected my antiparticle to have a Julia shape.

  Her.

  * * *

  —

  It had happened when I was visiting my old university.

  This was three years ago. Just after Sapere Aude had been renamed Dare to Know—that is, when the company was wobbling, but before it completely went to the dogs.

  I had come to do an assessment.

  I hadn’t been back to campus in forever. I wasn’t prepared for how the place would make me feel. I walked the familiar woodsy quad, which had changed over the years, of course—some new buildings and new sidewalks, but still recognizable. But it wasn’t solely the physical landscape I was walking through. It was the psychic landscape too, the superimposition of the various lives I had lived here—not only my four years of college but also my junior high physics camp even longer ago. The early ghosts of Renard and me hanging out near the library over here, the later ghosts of Julia and me walking hand in hand over there, the physics nerds setting off rockets, the indie rockers putting on an outdoor concert, the FARGs striding in a tight group across the quad…a whole cast of characters squirmed up from the bottom of my memory and crowded around me, waving for attention as I stood alone on the lawn.

  I had informed an assistant provost she’d die in thirty-six years (she was pleasantly surprised) and I had just walked out of her office. My Books of the Dead had already been picked up by courier. I was unencumbered and it was a warm April afternoon. I was breathing in deeply the fresh-cut grass, the awakening flowers. I felt buoyed by the spring air.

  Then I saw Julia.

  Wait.

  Not Julia.

  Of course it wasn’t Julia. But from behind, this girl could’ve been Julia, the way Julia had looked when we were in college. Same red hair. Same pale skin. Same body type, a little younger and scrappier. But dressed differently. Julia’s fashion sense had been urbane and chic but this college student was punkish, artfully ragged, verging on goth. She stood out among the colorless schlubs the same way Julia did.

  Don’t judge me—or go ahead, judge me.

  I followed her.

  Back then, Erin and I were in the middle of our divorce. This is what I did with my free time on the road, anyway—even during the marriage—instead of taking in the local sights, or buying souvenirs for the boys, or just hanging around my hotel room…well, why not? Once the ink was dry on the divorce papers, I promised myself I would really go hog wild.

  I did not.

  After this girl, I never touched anyone again.

  The girl from three years ago. My antiparticle.

  Her.

  * * *

  —

  She crossed the quad and left the campus. I kept after her, trying not to be obvious. Could I pull it off? Could she tell I was following her? Why was she leaving campus anyway? Maybe this woman was a girl and wasn’t actually in college yet. If so, call the whole thing off. There are limits.

  I saw her enter what looked like a restaurant. No, a bar.

  Okay. So not a high schooler. Old enough to drink at least.

  I went in too.

  * * *

  —

  The bar was mostly empty. She bought a shot of something and went to a booth in the back. She took out some books and began studying. I settled in at a table not far away. I glimpsed her face. Okay, she didn’t look exactly like Julia. They shared the same derisive curl of the lips, the same severe eyebrows. But with Julia you felt a sharpness, an intelligence animating her features. This student had the necessary meanness but her eyes were flat, obvious.

  I went through with it anyway.

  I caught her eye and I held it. After a second, she looked away but now it was on.

  Here’s the mistake I used to make: thinking that nobody wants to be approached. That if I struck up a conversation with a stranger they would always see it as some kind of invasion.

  In reality, though, people are bored with themselves. People don’t even know what they want. So when they encounter someone who wants something definite, who wants them, they feel their own lack and eventually let your strong want guide their weak want, and they end up aligning their want with yours. Especially if you’re offering something more interesting than just going home alone again, watching TV, and waiting to die—occasionally, they bite.

  Not every time. But keep trying. Walk up to the line and see if they’ll follow you.

  That’s sales.

  “Jesus, I could be your daughter,” she said at the end of our conversation. “Okay, pick me up at nine.”

  For the sake of self-respect, or modesty, can we skip that conversation, can we even skip most of the actual date? Most of her conversation was obvious lies. So was mine. Did she owe me the truth? Nope. She was doing this for a lark, too.

  “What’s your name?” I said.
<
br />   She said something that sounded like “Zoozy.”

  “Your name is Suzy?”

  “No. It’s, um, X-U-U-Z-I. Xuuzi.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jesus fucking Christ. Xuuzi? Nobody is named Xuuzi. She even said “Xuuzi” in a scornful way, like she couldn’t even bother to lie convincingly. I was already regretting this. Maybe it would be better if I ditched Xuuzi, whose name was definitely not Xuuzi. She wasn’t some second coming of Julia, she was just a random chick who kinda-sorta reminded me of a kinda-sorta Julia. Her voice was wrong. The way she moved was wrong. Her smell was wrong. Seven-eighths Julia. Why did I start this up?

  Her abrasive flirting irritated me.

  “Is that what you do—hang out on campuses and molest girls half your age?”

  “You know what, I’ll let you go.”

  “No, don’t. What are you doing here?”

  “I had a meeting with an assistant provost.”

  “Do you even have a job?”

  “I work for Dare to Know.”

  “No way! Can you tell me when I’ll die?”

  “It’d cost you.”

  “Like I’d really want to know. What kind of person wants to know when they’ll die?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Do you know when you’ll die?”

  “We’re not allowed to know, actually.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just the rule.”

  “Isn’t it weird, selling something you can’t buy?”

  “Like I’d really want to know. What kind of person wants to know when they’ll die?”

  “Ha ha. But you know what, you are weird. You’re good-looking but there’s something weird about you.”

  “Weird bad? Weird good?”

  “Are you into weird shit?”

  At that point in the conversation I had almost lost interest in her. I was embarrassed and slightly disgusted with myself—especially since she kept bringing up our age difference in her needling way—but when she said that phrase, Are you into weird shit, something about the way she said it, the way she widened her eyes, the way she ducked her chin—she was suddenly pure Julia.