Dark Matter(9)

And then, as fast as it hit me, it passes.

Another needle stabs into my leg.

As I cry out, he tosses both syringes over the edge. “Let’s go.”

“What did you give me?”

“Get up!”

I use the railing to pull myself up. My knee is bleeding from the fall. My head is still bleeding. I’m cold, dirty, and wet, my teeth chattering so hard it feels like they might break.

We go down, the flimsy steelwork trembling with our weight. At the bottom, we move off the last step and walk down a row of old generators.

From the floor, this room seems even more immense.

At the midpoint, he stops and shines his flashlight on a duffel bag nestled against one of the generators.

“New clothes. Hurry up.”

“New clothes? I don’t—”

“You don’t have to understand. You just have to get dressed.”

Through all the fear, I register a tremor of hope. Is he going to spare me? Why else would he be making me get dressed? Do I have a shot at surviving this?

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Hurry up. You don’t have much time left.”

I squat by the duffel bag.

“Clean yourself up first.”

There’s a towel on top, which I use to wipe the mud off my feet, the blood off my knee and face. I pull on a pair of boxer shorts and jeans that fit perfectly. Whatever he injected me with, I think I can feel it in my fingers now—a loss of dexterity as I fumble with the buttons on a plaid shirt. My feet slide effortlessly into a pair of expensive leather slip-ons. They fit as comfortably as the jeans.

I’m not cold anymore. It’s like there’s a core of heat in the center of my chest, radiating out through my arms and legs.

“The jacket too.”

I lift a black leather jacket from the bottom of the bag, push my arms through the sleeves.

“Perfect,” he says. “Now, have a seat.”

I ease down against the iron base of the generator. It’s a massive piece of machinery the size of a locomotive engine.

He sits across from me, the gun trained casually in my direction.

Moonlight is filling this place, refracting off the broken windows high above and sending a scatter of light that strikes— Tangles of cable.

Gears.

Pipes.

Levers and pulleys.

Instrumentation panels covered with cracked gauges and controls.

Technology from another age.

I ask, “What happens now?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

He waves my question away.

A weird calm settles over me. A misplaced sense of peace.

“Did you bring me here to kill me?” I ask.

“I did not.”

I feel so comfortable leaning against the old machine, like I’m sinking into it.

“But you let me believe it.”

“There was no other way.”

“No other way to what?”

“To get you here.”

“And why are we here?”

But he just shakes his head as he snakes his left hand up under the geisha mask and scratches.

I feel strange.

Like I’m simultaneously watching a movie and acting in it.

An irresistible drowsiness lowers onto my shoulders.

My head dips.

“Just let it take you,” he says.

But I don’t. I fight it, thinking how unsettlingly fast his tenor has changed. He’s like a different man, and the disconnect between who he is in this moment and the violence he showed just minutes ago should terrify me. I shouldn’t be this calm, but my body is humming too peacefully.

I feel intensely serene and deep and distant.

He says to me, almost like a confession, “It’s been a long road. I can’t quite believe I’m sitting here actually looking at you. Talking to you. I know you don’t understand, but there’s so much I want to ask.”

“About what?”

“What it’s like to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitates, then: “How do you feel about your place in the world, Jason?”

I say slowly, deliberately, “That’s an interesting question considering the night you’ve put me through.”

“Are you happy in your life?”

In the shadow of this moment, my life is achingly beautiful.

“I have an amazing family. A fulfilling job. We’re comfortable. Nobody’s sick.”

My tongue feels thick. My words are beginning to sound slurred.

“But?”

I say, “My life is great. It’s just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been.”

“You killed your ambition, didn’t you?”

“It died of natural causes. Of neglect.”

“And do you know exactly how that happened? Was there a moment when—?”

“My son. I was twenty-seven years old, and Daniela and I had been together a few months. She told me she was pregnant. We were having fun, but it wasn’t love. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. We definitely weren’t looking to start a family.”

“But you did.”

“When you’re a scientist, your late twenties are so critical. If you don’t publish something big by thirty, they put you out to pasture.”