How High We Go in the Dark(57)

00:48 Lately, when I turn on the accelerator in the lab, I feel more alive and loved and complete than when I’m with any other person on the planet except for you. It’s the only way I can feel like I haven’t completely lost my daughter. She believed she would be out there one day, in space, that her energy would dance among star dust. Maybe the hole in my head is a way for her to reach me.

I feel fine, I tell the reporters. Better than ever. Not that I would recommend this for anyone.

The fears outlined in the comment threads of various news websites are mostly laughable, but I have begun to wonder if the conspiracy theorists might have it somewhat right, if my life is counting down toward an end of days. One comment suggested that I’d be taken over by a heavenly entity and this would mark an age of enlightenment. The commenter ended with the word Namaste (just like that, in italics). Another said I would simply disappear, essentially be sucked into myself. For some reason, I imagined a cartoonish popping sound as the last cells of my body blink out of this reality.

What we know:

The size of the singularity is stable for now.

The singularity is located in my left temporal lobe.

Exotic particles have been ejected from the singularity.

The singularity has been consuming me subatomic particle by subatomic particle.

Theresa assures me that I’ll be okay and I want to believe this.

We do not know how to remove the singularity (yet) or if it might even disappear on its own.

When I’m in bed with Theresa draped over my body, I stare at the imperfections on the ceiling until my eyes lose focus and the specks in the stucco begin to swirl. I convince myself I can feel the pull of the singularity inside me; maybe a very small part of who I am has already changed because of it—become a man capable of truly loving his wife and son, capable of doing anything to speak to his daughter one last time, even if only to say I wish I could have done more. I get ready for work and stare at myself in the mirror. I look like any other average guy without a singularity in his head, the same samurai eyebrows, as my father used to call them, the same flat and broad nose that I’ve always hated. My grandmother used to pinch it when I was little, singing tall nose, tall nose! Theresa kisses me goodbye before she is off. I masturbate in the shower, eat a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, and drive to work—and through it all I imagine a synapse, a filament of my memory falling beyond the event horizon, floating in a dark expanse of space not unlike our own. I imagine Petal like a cosmic gossamer, drifting toward me.

My colleagues ask me how I’m feeling every day, and perhaps I’ll continue to tell them (and my wife) that I’m fine, even if one day I’ll know that I’m not. Maybe I’ll die alone years from now and after my body decays, the singularity will remain, a tiny doorway to the unknown resting in my coffin or urn. Before my body perishes, I’ll recite everything I know to be true: algorithms, relatives, names of pets, to discern what no longer resides in my mind. I am . . . I used to be . . . They are . . . This is . . . Would this possible future Bryan Yamato be loved? Respected? Or would he just be?

How are you feeling?, my colleagues would ask this Dr. Yamato. How many years will have passed? One, five, ten? I imagine my last words floating through the void. I wonder which shards of my life I’ll hold on to the longest—the singularity, the 49ers, gluten free, quantum, time? I’ll stare back at my colleagues, my wife, my son sitting beside my bed. Who knows how long I might live in this silence, the memory of my daughter fading. Who knows how long I’d live motionless, observing the world around me, contemplating the space and time Bryan Yoshio Iba Yamato has taken up in the universe. And who knows how long I’d remain alive before cell by cell I’d wither away to muscle to organ to bone to empty space, hoping the singularity either stops with me or swallows me whole, maybe even saves the entire world.

I stop off at the grocery store on my way to the lab to buy toilet paper and that bag of oranges Theresa always requests, even though they’re only good for one or two days before spoiling. I grab a few pieces of the fruit before climbing out of my car, toss them in a basket in the staff lounge. I enter the test chamber control room and wait as a table emerges from our modified MRI to scan the singularity. Theresa texts: Axel’s parent/teacher video conference is tonight. Do you want to hop on? Or are you busy? The other night, I watched a video of Petal in a school play, one of many I didn’t attend because of work. She played the sun. She always preferred celestial objects to people. She danced from the east with confident jazz hands and set in the west, closing her eyes as she swung the moon into the sky.

How are you feeling today?, a colleague asks. Her name is Sarah. She’s young and smart and ambitious and codes with the passion of a musician. There was a moment about seven years ago at a holiday party when we could have slept together. This was before the plague, before Theresa. A walk, she said. I live nearby, she said. But I decided to go home early for a change. I watched Mary Poppins with Petal and Peter, revised my assistant’s calculations, and spent the rest of the night in the basement, drinking boxed wine and developing the key processes that would eventually put a black hole in my head. I text Theresa back: I’ll be there. Of course. I love you. I turn to Sarah and tell her I’m doing okay. I feel fine for now. Let’s find some answers. I think: Let’s save my family. Let’s save all of us. I tell her: We may begin.





A Gallery a Century, a Cry a Millennium