Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

Standing happy and slightly drunk in my kitchen, I’m unaware that tonight is the end of all of this. The end of everything I know, everything I love.

It’s a strange thing, being the parent of a teenager. One thing to raise a little boy, another entirely when a person on the brink of adulthood looks to you for wisdom.

The older I get, the less I understand.

The end of everything I know, everything I love.

F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

He wheels the gurney to the door but stops in the threshold, glancing back at me through his face shield. “It’s really good to see you again, brother. Feels like Mission Control when Apollo Thirteen returned. We’re all real proud of you.”

what does that mean?

during a routine interior locality audit, discovered Dr. Dessen lying unconscious on the floor of the hangar.

so he travelled timelines?

We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN

Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.

“And poof,” Leighton says. “You’re gone. Until…” He fires up another file. “Three and a half days ago.” I see myself stagger out of the box and crash to the floor, almost like I was pushed out. More time elapses, and then I watch the hazmat team appear and hoist me onto a gurney. I can’t get over how entirely surreal it feels to be viewing a playback of the exact moment when the nightmare that is now my life began.

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that’s true? What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space?

“You asked me to build a drug that would temporarily alter the functioning of brain chemistry in three Brodmann areas of the prefrontal cortex. It took me four years. At least you paid me well.”

Because that man was me. This other Jason, the one who built the box—he did this to me.

I am hardwired to love and protect that woman.

“Why would I seek out a world like that?” “Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works.”

All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.

If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?

There’s something horribly lonely about a place that’s almost home.

Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.