How High We Go in the Dark(55)

“Did you see that researchers think they might have found a lead to a cure?” Theresa said. “It was on the news the other day. Some anonymous package with a vial left outside one of the leading labs with a note that read ‘A little help .’ They don’t know what to make of the substance. One researcher confirmed that it’s genetically related to the virus. They said it was glowing bright white.”

“And people in the Bible Belt are baking themselves in the sun, thinking they can pray it away, burn it away,” I said. “We’ve been promised a cure many times before.”

Theresa is a champion at throwing daggers with her eyes. She twirled the purple crystal pendant she wore on a silver chain around her neck. She’s worn it for as long as I’ve known her. I used to watch her play with that necklace when she was helping lead experiments in my lab, notice how it refracted light across the room, casting rainbows over the whiteboard.

“I’m doing this work because of everything that happened,” I said. The several rounds of drug trials that ended with me cremating my daughter, Petal, a few months after her grandmother died of cancer and my first wife, Cynthia, from experimental plague treatment complications. Sometimes I wonder about the real reason I made such an “error”—and think maybe I went to work one day and said fuck it to the sympathetic stares and the judgmental gossip over my getting remarried so soon, with our lab’s funding dwindling, my son treating me like it’s my fault the resident genius couldn’t save our own family. “I don’t expect you to understand what I went through.”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t,” Theresa said. She walked around the table, cleared away my dishes. “It’s not like everyone in the department doesn’t already think I jumped into bed with you so I could land a coveted spot in your lab. Not like I didn’t catch you crying in your office more times than I can count. Not like I wasn’t there to teach your classes when you needed the help.”

“I didn’t mean . . .” I could hear my preteen, goth son, Peter (now going by Axel), stirring in his room, probably wanting to come downstairs. But he knows not to barge in when we’re working on classified material.

“Does it hurt?” Theresa touched my head with her hands, as if she could somehow sense the gravitational pull, the Hawking radiation pulsing from my forehead that my colleagues were working to translate into usable energy and thrust.

“Not at all. It’s not going to affect me like that. I mean, no one really knows what it’ll do.”

We rechecked the data when we realized what had happened. As a physicist, I always wanted to uncover the secrets of the universe. But as a human being and intermittent father, I wanted my surviving child to live well into adulthood, a long, healthy life away from the plague and floods and record-breaking hurricanes. I even wanted my dipshit brother, Dennis, who seemed hell-bent on spending his entire life at that elegy hotel, to have a second chance after the loss of our mother.

“She’s fucking great, Bry,” he’d said the last time we talked. He was dating his only real friend, his coworker and floor mate Val. “I totally don’t deserve her.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” I said. “You should bring her out to Nevada sometime.”

“Well, you know how it is here. Gotta work off the discounts they gave me for Mom and Petal’s funeral services.”

“I told you I can pay for that,” I said. “It’s been a year since Mom’s memorial. You don’t have to be some kind of serf.”

“Nah, man. It’s cool. I mean, it’s my life, you know? And I have Val,” he said.

It was nice to know he had someone, and it was the least I could do to offer them a chance to start fresh. But what did fresh even mean? NASA wanted to reach the Kepler system. The military wanted to develop energy weapons in case we encountered unfriendlies out there. My interns had begun staring at me at work, mentally boring a hole in my skull, no doubt hoping to reveal what they envisioned as a tiny version of some wormhole they saw in a sci-fi flick with people zipping around the universe, parallel realities traversable by psychedelic cosmic tunnels. But I didn’t want anyone zipping around in my brain. I wanted to understand how this happened and how we might replicate it in the starship’s engine. And maybe a part of me wanted to know if somewhere inside my head, there’s a universe where Petal and Cynthia are still alive, asking me to come down to dinner.

Scan. Tests. Questions. Repeat.

Do you feel any differently? the government doctors asked.

I feel fine, really.

Of course, I imagined the parallel realities, what would happen to me if I told my colleagues and superiors the truth. I’d be fired and stripped of security clearance, locked in a government facility for hiding a program I’d built to disable accelerator safeguards. And not only that; I often dreamed of being enveloped by light. I stuffed PowerBars and family photos into a fanny pack as if I were planning a long walk into the universe.

People from other labs, other universities poked and prodded before the military classified everything to do with me as top secret. Then came the protesters who believed the hole would expand, tear me apart, and then tear apart the whole damn world. Our public relations guy, Gene, said that’s highly improbable. Then came those seeking deliverance, who had loved ones waiting on organ donor lists, who couldn’t afford the experimental drugs or new age retreats. Or those who were financially ruined because they’d been laid off or forced to shutter their businesses. They all held signs: WILL WORK ON EARTH 2! They wore respirator masks on the days when the wildfire smoke reached hazardous levels. They prayed and chanted, held each other’s hands. They believed what I’d done was their ticket out of all of this.