Dark Matter(20)
“Who hit you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not really sure of anything right now.”
“Okay. Do you use drugs? Now or in the past?”
“I smoke weed a couple times a year. But not lately.”
The doctor turns to the nurse. “I’m going to have Barbara draw some blood.”
He drops the clipboard on a table and plucks a penlight from the front pocket of his lab coat.
“Mind if I examine you?”
“No.”
Randolph moves in until our faces are inches apart, close enough for me to smell the stale coffee on his breath, to see the recent razor nick across his chin. He shines the light straight into my right eye. For a moment, there’s nothing but a point of brilliance in the center of my field of vision, which momentarily burns away the rest of the world.
“Jason, are you having any thoughts of hurting yourself?”
“I’m not suicidal.”
The light hits my left eye.
“Have you had any prior psychiatric hospitalizations?”
“No.”
He gently takes my wrist in his soft, cool hands, measures my pulse rate.
“What do you do for a living?” he asks.
“I teach at Lakemont College.”
“Married?”
“Yes.” I instinctively reach down to touch my wedding band.
Gone.
Jesus.
The nurse begins to roll up the left sleeve of my shirt.
“What’s your wife’s name?” the doctor asks.
“Daniela.”
“You two on good terms?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you think she’s wondering where you are? I feel like we should call her.”
“I tried.”
“When?”
“An hour ago, at my house. Someone else answered. It was a wrong number.”
“Maybe you misdialed.”
“I know my wife’s phone number.”
The nurse asks, “We okay with needles, Mr. Dessen?”
“Yes.”
As she sterilizes the underside of my arm, she says, “Dr. Randolph, look.” She touches the needle mark from several hours ago when Leighton drew my blood.
“When did this happen?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” Probably best not to mention the lab I think I just escaped from.
“You don’t remember someone sticking a needle in your arm?”
“No.”
Randolph nods to the nurse, and she warns me, “Little pinch coming.”
He asks, “Do you have your cell phone with you?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
He grabs the clipboard. “Give me your wife’s name again. And phone number. We’ll try to reach her for you.”
I spell Daniela’s name and rattle off her cell number and our home number as my blood rushes into a plastic vial.
“You’re going to scan my head?” I ask. “See what’s going on?”
“Absolutely.”
—
They give me a private room on the eighth floor.
I tidy up my face in the bathroom, kick off my shoes, and climb into bed.
Sleep tugs, but the scientist in my brain won’t power down.
I can’t stop thinking.
Formulating hypotheses and dismantling them.
Struggling to wrap logic around everything that’s happened.
In this moment, I have no way of knowing what’s real and what isn’t. I can’t even be sure that I was ever married.
No. Wait.
I raise my left hand and study my ring finger.
The ring is gone, but the proof of its existence lingers as a faint indentation around the base of my finger. It was there. It left a mark. That means someone took it.
I touch the indentation, acknowledging both the horror and the comfort of what it represents—the last vestige of my reality.
I wonder—
What will happen when this last physical trace of my marriage is gone?
When there’s no anchor?
As the skies above Chicago inch toward dawn—a hopeless, cloud-ridden purple—I lose myself to sleep.
Daniela’s hands are deep in the warm, soapy water when she hears the front door slam shut. She stops scrubbing the saucepan she’s been attacking for the last half minute and looks up from the sink, glancing back over her shoulder as footsteps approach.
Jason appears in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room, grinning—as her mother would say—like a fool.
Turning her attention back to the dishes, Daniela says, “There’s a plate for you in the fridge.”
In the steamed reflection of the window above the sink, she watches her husband set the canvas grocery bag on the island and move toward her.
His arms slide around her waist.
She says, half jokingly, “If you think a couple pints of ice cream are going to get you out of this, I don’t know what to tell you.”
He presses up against her and whispers in her ear, his breath fiery with the remnants of whatever whisky he’s been drinking, “Life’s short. Don’t be mad. It’s a waste of time.”
“How did forty-five minutes turn into almost three hours?”