Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  So we go.

  On the deck I say, “Where’s Keith?”

  “Putting the kids to bed.”

  Now the conversation will die. Over dinner we’d already talked through all the catching-up-with-you stuff, carefully avoided anything that would make either of us uncomfortable. Now we’re standing outside on the deck, just the two of us gazing out at the city, the bay, not looking at each other. I realize we had relied on Keith to keep the conversation going—Keith’s good-natured laughing at my jokes, his urging Julia to tell such and such an anecdote, his saying to the kids you’ll love this, his pulling all the different strings of the conversation together. The dinner conversation had been script-doctored by Keith on the fly, and he had stage-managed Julia and me and the kids so ably that I hadn’t even realized it. It was merciful of him to do it, he must’ve sensed what would happen if he didn’t intervene, but now I knew what would happen, and it was this: the exhausted silence between Julia and me.

  Standing outside on her deck, the bracing air sobering me a little, freshly amazed and humiliated by the magnificent view. I should be leaving. But I can’t leave without asking her about the blue envelopes. I look at Julia and feel the cigarettes and lottery ticket in my pocket again, and in a panic of awkwardness I just take them out.

  She looks startled.

  I’m an idiot.

  She doesn’t take them. She doesn’t even move.

  I put the lottery ticket and the cigarettes on the table between us.

  Like old times?

  “Jesus Christ.” Julia exhales. “I quit smoking fifteen years ago.”

  What did I expect? The cigarettes are radioactive with embarrassment now. And come on, a lottery ticket—look at this house. She needs money?

  I’m creepy. I’m a creep.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I say.

  “No…no,” says Julia.

  We stand there for a while.

  Julia says, “I hate to see you bro-ing down with him.”

  This I didn’t expect.

  After a second I say, “You’d rather Keith and I be tense?”

  Julia takes a few moments to choose how to phrase it and finally lands on, “Keith is friendly to everyone.”

  I feel the hammer of that. We stand there for a while again. Cold now. Well, I did come all the way out here. Might as well ask her now. Get it over with.

  “Hold on,” says Julia, and goes back inside.

  She’s gone longer than I expect.

  She comes back out with a lighter. Not a regular lighter but one of those long-range gas barbecue lighters the size of a curling iron.

  “I couldn’t even find any matches.” She laughs—laughs?—and opens the pack of cigarettes I gave her. She takes one out and lights it with the absurdly big lighter.

  She smokes for a while.

  I say, “I’m sorry I was ridiculous in there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In front of your kids,” I say. “Kind of drunk. Saying nonsense.”

  “The kids loved you. Keith too.”

  I look at her. Wait. She’s not just being polite. She’s smiling. Genuine.

  I misread every cue tonight, maybe. Understood nothing.

  “Ugh,” says Julia. “I can’t even finish this.”

  She stubs the cigarette out. Not even half smoked. Looks around for someplace to put it. Why doesn’t she flick it twenty feet away from her, like she used to? Um, because she’s not a nineteen-year-old idiot? Even still, it’s absurd what she does now: she actually puts the extinguished cigarette in her pocket.

  She shivers.

  “We should be going in,” she says.

  I turn to her and say, “So I looked myself up.”

  * * *

  —

  Of course she immediately knows what I mean.

  She doesn’t go in. She just stands there.

  “And?” she says tonelessly.

  I say, “Do you still have our envelopes?”

  Of course she knows what this means too.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Have you opened them?”

  She is invisibly pulling away. I see why, in her eyes—why’d I even mention it? What am I doing? Why am I really here? Look in her eyes now. Nice going, asshole! I had thought I’d made a fool of myself before, alienated everyone; it turned out, miraculously, that I hadn’t but now I truly have fucked up because now Julia is looking at me with something worse than disdain.

  The way she’s looking at me, what does it mean?

  “Can I see them?” I say.

  “Our envelopes?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to get them?”

  “Please.”

  She leaves the deck again. Goes back inside.

  I’m shaking. Why shaking? Because if the date Julia calculated twenty or so years ago matches what I calculated yesterday, then I really am dead somehow. It can’t be a fluke. Or this is the first time thanaton theory is wrong. But that’s even more unthinkable. I know thanaton theory backward and forward. For a thanaton prediction to be incorrect would be a whole different level of wrong, it wouldn’t even be one plus one equals three, it’d be one plus one equals every single thanaton in the universe exploding like a bomb.

  One plus one equals…I feel the idea coming back, the eschaton idea I’d had while driving here. Connecting to the broader ideas from my old papers in my condo last night in Chicago. Standing here on Julia’s deck, already Chicago feels like a lifetime ago. But those old calculations clicked with something else inside me. Something new is bubbling up.

  July 4, 1054.

  Cahokia, supernova…

  I’m a little dizzy.

  Let it come.

  I take out a cigarette.

  I try to light it with Julia’s lighter. Guess what: it’s literally the first cigarette I’ve ever tried to smoke in my life. Emphasis on tried. Because I can’t figure out how to light it. The breeze keeps blowing out the lighter. I end up sticking the singed cigarette in my own pocket.

  Movement out in the darkness. Looking down into the forest below the deck, someone’s moving. Somebody’s down there. Maybe somebody taking a walk? No, the trees are too dense, why would you walk down there? Someone chasing after their loose dog? No, they’re moving too slowly. In a hoodie…Some kid slipping out of the house and getting high on his own?

  Not a hoodie.

  Not a kid.

  Someone in a cloak. A ragged man.

  Looking straight up at me.

  Then gone.

  “Were you just trying to smoke a cigarette?”

  Julia, out on the deck again.

  I’m still off-balance from what I’ve just seen. “Yes.”

  “Since when do you smoke?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  A moment goes by.

  “I couldn’t even manage it now,” I say.

  “What? Why?”

  “I couldn’t light it. The lighter kept going out.”

  Julia laughs.

  I say, “How do you make it light?”

  “You suck in while you’re lighting it.”

  “Oh.” I think about it. “Why does that work?”

  “You’re the physics major.”

  This is the old Julia; this is the old me.

  Good old times.

  She has both blue envelopes. So she did keep them. Not at the bottom of some box in the attic, either. She must’ve known exactly where they were.

  Did Keith know about them, too?

  Was Julia expecting me to ask for them tonight?

  In the forest below there are two ragged men now. Someone else in my peripheral vision. Does Julia see them too? They’re in the tr
ees, hidden. They’re waiting. Waiting for me to leave?

  Julia tries to give me my envelope.

  I don’t take it.

  I know those men.

  Julia looks impatient. “So take it if you want it.”

  I recognize those men around the house from Minneapolis.

  “Why do you want it anyway?”

  My heart is in my throat. “What?”

  “You said you’d already looked yourself up. Then you already know when you’ll…you know.”

  She’s still holding my envelope out to me. Why are Minneapolis people skulking around outside Julia’s house? I look again.

  Now they’re gone.

  I don’t take it. “Um. You open it.”

  Irritated now. “Um. I don’t want to know when you’ll die.”

  “Please.”

  Julia frowns.

  But she does it. She opens my envelope. She unfolds the paper inside. One last multiplication to go. Just like me, she’d left that final step undone. Didn’t go all the way. She takes out her phone, turns it on. Does the arithmetic on the calculator app.

  She stops.

  She calculates it again.

  Stops again.

  She stares at me.

  * * *

  —

  What had I expected? I think, as I drive away from Julia’s house.

  Julia had looked at me like a dead man. Knowing I was dead. Or quasidead. Dead as far as the thanatons were concerned. Well, whatever death stuff was on me, she wanted it away from her house. Away from her kids. Away from Keith. Out of her world.

  “So it’s true,” she said.

  “So what is true?”

  She didn’t say. She just said:

  “You should go.”

  Not frightened. But looking at me like I was a ghost. Maybe she’d glimpsed the ragged men around the house, too. Were they there for me? Had the ragged men been there, waiting for me to come? Would they depart with me, too?

  I said, “Okay, so. I’ll see you later.”

  Julia said, “I don’t think so.”

  The finality of it.

  I said, “Is this it?”

  Julia just stood there. Cigarettes and the lottery ticket on the deck table. They won’t be touched again. Everything I touch is death. My gifts are death. I am death. The real end of us.

  She said, “Please go.”

  No sympathy for a dead man.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, have a nice life, Julia. You have a beautiful family. Perfect son. Two perfect daughters.”

  Julia said, “Three daughters.”

  For a second I didn’t know what she meant.

  She stood there, arms wrapped around herself, the hollow look she had at her wedding, when she—

  Then I knew.

  Julia said, “You remember when we broke up?”

  It flooded my brain.

  “I think, deep down, you knew.”

  I didn’t want her to say any more.

  “I still think about it. I was actually convincing myself to be excited about it. I wasn’t sure so I didn’t tell you. Then you broke up with me. So I went ahead and got the test. It was positive. But I thought, there was no way I was going yoke myself to your miserable shit for the rest of my life.”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “I was twenty-five years old. I didn’t know anything. I was too scared to take care of it properly. So that day I ran five miles, as hard as I could. And I ran five more the next day. And I ran even harder the day after that. It probably didn’t change anything, maybe it would’ve happened anyway, but do you want to know how it feels to have a miscarriage into a toilet?”

  I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I don’t know.

  “There’s a little bloody dead creature floating there. I could’ve held her in my hand. I should’ve. I don’t know if it was a girl or a boy. I thought of her as a girl. Then I couldn’t stand to look at her anymore and I flushed her down.”

  I saw Julia’s own blue envelope on the table. It was open.

  I saw the letter I had written to her.

  Destroyer of worlds.

  I said, “I wish I could have met her.”

  “Just go,” said Julia.

  * * *

  —

  Keep it together. Drive straight. You’re drunk. Just get back to your hotel.

  Where’s the hotel? No idea. This isn’t your city, you don’t know the way. Your phone knows where the hotel is. Just put the address in, listen to it. As sick as it makes you.

  I had always wanted a daughter.

  My phone isn’t even speaking directions at me. I must’ve fat-fingered the settings. It’s babbling in some language I’ve never heard—a guttural tongue, like the phone is reciting a thousand ancient foreign names, or relentlessly counting down in some exotic number system.

  What would you have named her?

  Would she have looked like you?

  Or Julia?

  Or someone who almost looked like Julia, but except her eyes?

  Like maybe she’d have your eyes?

  The phone stops talking. I glance: it’s almost out of batteries. Wait, and my headlights aren’t on! I’m driving without headlights? Turn them on!

  A ragged man stands by the side of the road.

  Swerve. Almost hit him. Heart in throat. Keep driving. Who the hell was that? Look at dashboard. Car almost out of gas. How? That can’t be, I had a full tank when I drove it off the rental lot this afternoon. And yet this car is almost out of gas.

  You and Julia and your daughter. Living in Bloomington together. We would have figured it out.

  Rearview mirror: another ragged man.

  Keep going.

  Stop at the gas station. Put my credit card in the pump.

  Declined.

  What? Try again.

  Declined. Different card.

  Declined.

  Holy shit.

  Debit card then.

  None of my cards work.

  What is happening?

  We are going to die, she had said. What is your name? I had said. I was never even named, she had said. And where did she come from, who was Xuuzi really? A bloody ghost climbing out of a toilet, growing larger, slithering out into the world. Then hunting me down. You’re a piece of shit. Nice car, Daddy. I’m the other woman.

  Beep beep beep. How will you pay?

  Fuck. How much cash do I have?

  Less than twenty dollars.

  A ragged man is standing just outside the range of the gas station lights.

  Watching me.

  Get back in the car. Breathe. How do I get back to my hotel? Can’t trust phone’s guidance. Phone wants to kill you. Figure it out on your own. Never had a sense of direction but must try now. The look in Julia’s eyes. Not contempt. Something else. Wine buzz gone. Panicked sober now. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. None of my credit cards work, I have less than twenty dollars, so how will I even pay for my hotel room?

  How drunk am I?

  Had Julia been waiting to tell me about our baby?

  How often had Julia read my letter to her? Had she only opened my envelope tonight? Or had she read my letter before?

  Julia at her wedding, watching those children dance.

  Dream come true.

  I have to go to the bathroom again.

  From the pump, I spot a ragged man standing at the gas station’s restroom door. Watching me.

  Oh no.

  Get out of here. Key in the ignition. Turn it.

  How far? Just go.

  Go go go.

  Julia had said, Just go. Looking at me like she didn’t even know me. But Julia did know me. I had never really known Julia. I had never seriously tried. And when Julia didn’t
act like the Julia in my head anymore—I threw her away.

  You will never see her again.

  My bladder’s really bursting. Pull off onto the shoulder, anywhere. Here is fine. Park the car on the side of a hill. Blunder out into the darkness, staggering. How long have I been driving? Where am I?

  Pissing off the side of the hill.

  Eschaton calculations crowd through my brain again. Push them out of your mind. Focus: figure out the timing with Julia. Is it possible, what she said? Right before I broke up with her we had been apart for about two weeks. When would she begin to show, if she was pregnant? When would she start to feel sick? She was sick at Cahokia, don’t you remember? Shit. Shit shit shit. You idiot. Idiot. It’s possible she had been as much as ten weeks along. How old would our daughter be now? Like, twenty-five years old. Don’t even think about it. If she hadn’t miscarried, would she have gotten an abortion? Probably. Get everything associated with that dickhead out of me right now.

  Antiperson.

  Create an antiperson.

  Stop thinking about her. Getting high with Xuuzi on the hotel bed. Particle, antiparticle, eschaton, anti-eschaton, king, princess, me, Xuuzi—

  I finish pissing.

  Someone is behind me.

  I turn around.

  Nobody there.

  Zip. Wipe hands. Get in the car.

  Drive.

  There’s a ragged man coming out onto the road, in the rearview mirror. Keep driving. Don’t look back. Minneapolis, years ago, the ragged men hanging around the hotel. I know when they show up. When the gates of the chthonic crack open. It’s happening now. Everything is coming together. Somebody somewhere is finishing a set of steps. Somebody somewhere is snapping off a rat’s head. Eschaton equations multiply in my brain, waiting for me to touch them, to work with them. To do the math makes the math come true. The paradigm shift is coming, the next leap forward.

  The equations line up, one leading to the next, spelling it out.

  What is the eschaton?

  The eschaton reveals itself when thanaton theory fails.

  When does thanaton theory fail?

  7:06 p.m. Last night. Outside Chicago. When I spun off the road. When I became dead and alive. For me alone the calculations blow up. For me alone there is division by zero, irreconcilable infinities, a rip in the fabric of thanatons.