“Yeah, that,” I said.
We walked toward the corner and when we got there I grabbed the string of the tour badge around his neck and twisted it and choked him hard.
“What is dark matter?” I said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he coughed. “Nobody knows.”
I pulled the cord tighter.
“We can measure its effects,” he said. “We only know what it isn’t.”
“Well, work backwards, bitch! You know what it isn’t, so what is it?”
I pulled the cord tighter, and with my other hand I started pinching him in cutesy, creepy ways. Nothing that hurt, just things to scare him and make him think, Jesus, who is this guy? What else would he do?
“All right,” he whispered. “All right. I know what it is.”
That was more like it. I eased up on the cord a bit.
“If this is a trap, I swear to God, I will come back and kill you,” I said.
I was just bluffing. I didn’t want to kill this guy and go to jail for the rest of my life. I was curious about this one thing, but not that curious. Plus, if I killed him I’d never get to know what dark matter was, and it was kind of driving me crazy. Ninety percent of the universe, and we have no idea what it is? How are we supposed to sleep at night? Actually, maybe I was that curious!
“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 fucks! 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 fucking time like a normal fucking person?
I put the phone back in my pocket.
“Sorry about that,” I said.