Dark Matter (9 page)

I am only allowed to solve this problem.

When the elevator doors open to the hospital lobby, I shoulder past two men in cheap suits and wet overcoats. They look like cops, and as they step into the elevator car and our eyes meet, I wonder if they're heading up to see me.

I move past a waiting area, toward the automatic doors. Since I wasn't on a secured ward, slipping out was much easier than I expected. I simply got dressed, waited for the hallway to clear, and cruised past the nurses' station without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow.

As I approach the exit, I keep waiting for alarms to sound, for someone to shout my name, for guards to chase me through the lobby.

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.

V
ILLAGE
T
AP
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.