One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(3)

“Come to my office,” he said. “I have a little desk upstairs where I’m working it out for my Ph.D. I haven’t told anyone yet because I don’t want anyone to steal my work.”

I promised I wouldn’t steal anything at all, and he walked over to a door with a little dull-gold knob off the main hallway. “Follow me upstairs,” he said. I followed him, even though I wouldn’t really call it upstairs—it was just a few stairs, like the number they put at the entrance to a library to make it look fancy. Maybe to this guy it felt like a full-size staircase.

At the top of the stairs was a small room with no windows and no decorations or anything, not even a poster of the moon: just a couple of desks with computers, some papers, empty cups and crumpled wrappers. At first I was disappointed. But then I realized that’s how you know it’s a serious place—just for scientists, and guys like me.

“This one is my coworker’s desk,” he said, pointing to the one at the other end of the room. “He’s not coming in today, though. He’s working on cosmic interference. He’s on a dead end but doesn’t know it yet, ha.”

The scientist closed the door behind us. I noticed he didn’t look scared anymore. Now he seemed kind of happy, or something. His eyes darted around the room, and he started pacing in little back-and-forth steps, like halfway between pacing and just shifting his weight from foot to foot. It was actually kind of cute. I could imagine being his mom and loving him a lot, if that makes sense.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We only know what dark matter is from the gravitational field around other objects, right? Okay. We know that certain galaxies have different weights with regard to the light they emit. And people have tried to measure the light with different … Okay. Wait. Let me start another different way. We all know what black holes are, right? Actually, that’s not the best … Wait. Maybe … Okay.”

The way he kept starting and stopping made it hard to know when I should pay very close attention and when I should just let him ramble on and rest up my brain for the important parts. And then, right in the middle of a part that did sound important, my phone started buzzing in my pocket.

“One second,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said quickly.

“I’ll just pick it up to put it on silent,” I said. “I won’t even look at who it is.”

I went to turn the ringer off, but it’s basically impossible to pick up your phone when it’s buzzing and literally not even look at who it is, and also I knew if I didn’t look, it would probably just distract me even more, since I’d be wondering who it was the whole time, and I needed to focus all my concentration on the scientist. So I looked.

Well, wouldn’t you know it: all the friends I had asked earlier if they wanted to come to the planetarium with me—oh, now they’re interested. “You still going?” “Hey, man, just got up.” “Sounds fun, when?” Lazy f*cks! Too late, I’ve been here for over an hour! I really couldn’t believe these guys. Didn’t they realize how much interesting shit there was to see and do in this world if you just woke up at a normal f*cking time like a normal f*cking person?

I put the phone back in my pocket.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“No problem, no problem,” said the scientist. “So, okay. Do you know what a quasar is? We know that quasars are a paradox because they emit great amounts of energy despite being close enough to a black hole to be swallowed up by it. Right? Okay. So …”

All of a sudden another thought jumped into my mind, and I couldn’t tell if I was just being paranoid or what—but it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it was possible that all my friends went to the same party the night before without telling me, and that’s why they all woke up so late and then all texted me at the same time.

“Uh-huh, wow, whoa, that’s crazy,” I said, while I thought about whether I should give them the benefit of the doubt and still make plans to meet up with them later, or whether I should hold off on making plans until I could find a way to prove definitively whether or not they had all f*cked me over, in which case I would still meet up with them but only to tell them to go f*ck themselves. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though, because I had gotten pretty excited to see the looks on their faces when I told them about dark matter and about how nobody in the world knew what it was except the scientist and us.

Also, to be honest, it would be bad timing for me to lose all my friends today of all days because it was Sunday, and Sunday nights always made me a little lonely for some reason. It always seemed to be windier on Sunday nights, too—maybe the scientist knew something about why that was. In any case, the point was that on Sundays especially, I really would prefer not to be alone, even though I knew deep down that it was probably better to be alone than to be with fake friends.

“Uh-huh, wow, whoa, that’s crazy,” I kept saying to the scientist on a loop as I tried to figure out if there was anything at all in the middle—for example, which friends might have convinced the other friends to leave me out and which friends might have just gone along with the peer pressure, and so which ones I might possibly be able to forgive, even if I had to tell the others to go f*ck themselves for all time.

Just when I was finally close to a pretty good theory, I noticed that the scientist wasn’t saying anything anymore. He was just standing there, staring at me with that same smile from before, only not so smug anymore, like now it was really tender and scared, even though the weird part is that if I had to draw the smile, I would have drawn the exact same smile as the smug one—but I could somehow tell it was different even though it looked the same. And also, I noticed both his eyes had clogged up. “You’re the only other person in the world who knows,” he said. Then one tear fell down from one eye and then the other. “I can’t believe I’m not alone with this anymore.”