A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  “Well, I wish I could remember a few more things about it all, but there isn’t any point. I told you everything I could remember that day we bumped into each other outside the Pfister.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The dead children.”

  “Dead children all over the place. A whole tower of them …” He grimaced and flapped a hand in front of his face. “Don’t remind me. It was always so hard, trying to keep that picture out of my head. It’s funny, now that I think about it. What I thought I’d get after I gave up being a criminal and went into the anti-criminal business actually came to me. Peace, you know? My whole life, I never even thought it existed, I thought it was some kind of rumor they fed to suckers, and after I started to turn into an old guy, and stopped breaking into warehouses and hotel rooms—actual peace!”

  “Let’s buy dinner for this here old pussycat,” Olson said.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  As if he had not heard this exchange, Jason Boatman slumped in his chair and stared down at his lap, where his hands cupped his glass on the curve of his belly like a begging bowl. In the now-darkening air, the scant hair skimmed back over his pale scalp looked silver.

  “Hold on. I used to be tremendously worried about this one weird experience I had,” Boatman said, speaking to his hands, his glass, and his belly. “Not always, but off and on. There was something really terrible in it.”

  He looked at us without raising his head. “My name for this thing was … well, what I called it …” He shook his head, raised his glass, lowered it without drinking. Then he shook his head again. A strange, trembling spirit had moved into him, changing his features, stopping his tongue.

  “What did you call it, this thing?” I asked.

  The trembling spirit shifted its eyes to me, gulped a mouthful of its drink, and once again became Jason Boatman. He said, “The dark matter.”

  “Dark matter? The scientific thing, the invisible stuff?”

  “No, not that.” Boatman squirmed in his chair and looked slowly around the room, seeming to reassure himself that his little pots and his six-inch row of compact discs were in the proper places. “I can’t exactly be sure of anything when it comes to this, uh, topic. It’s something that happened to me on Lake Michigan, and then later on the shore. Somewhere, I for sure never knew where. It wasn’t just that it was weird, it was way beyond that.”

  He turned to me. “This experience came from the same place as the tower of dead kids, but from further back in that place—the end of it, the bottom, where everything, everything we know about or care about dribbles away and nothing means anything anymore. That’s what threw me. I saw that nothing meant any more than anything else.”

  Boats swung his head to Don. “It was about you. You and Mallon. You know how much I wanted what you got. I would have done anything to have Spencer pick me. This one night when I was in Milwaukee, it felt like I could almost, no, that I really could have a second chance. Would you like to hear what happened? Lee, this came from the meadow, I’m sure of that. It took a lot longer to get here, that’s all.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “What I got wasn’t all that easy to live with,” Don said. “Just so you know.”

  “Shut up and listen,” Boats commanded.

  | The Dark Matter |

  The first thing you had to understand, Boats said, was that his relationship to Lake Michigan wasn’t like most people’s. For Boats, the lake was all bound up with his father, and not in a good way. Lake Michigan was where his father went to work, while his wife and son stayed behind in Madison—it was one of the things that took his dad away from him. Plenty of nights, Charles Boatman called to say he was too tired to make the drive back home, he was just going to crash in his shop. Sometimes, his dad was drunk when he made those calls, drunk and high both, the old man was a real swinger. Sometimes, when Boats answered the phone, he could hear music and laughter drifting behind his father’s slurred voice. Naturally, from time to time Jason was permitted to come to Milwaukee and hang out in the boathouses his father was renting, and that was usually a special time. Away from Shirley, his dad got a lot more relaxed, and he could be fun to mess around with. The problem was, apart from building boats and selling them to rich people, messing around was about the only thing Charlie Boatman actually cared about. So Lake Michigan stood for his father’s absence but also the wild, careless stuff the old man got up to when he was on its shores.

  And the lake was different all by itself, Boats thought. It didn’t look like Lake Mendota or Lake Monona, the ones he grew up with—no, it looked like another species of thing altogether. Lake Michigan looked like an ocean. From the campus side of Lake Mendota you could see the fancy houses across from it, but Lake Michigan didn’t look like it even had an opposite side. The thing just stretched on and on, mile after mile of moving water, starting out as a kind of pale green near the shoreline and getting deeper and deeper into a cold, flat blue the farther you went. Way out, Lake Michigan stopped pretending to be a nice, friendly body of water like Mendota or Random Lake, and showed you its real face, brutal, without any feelings at all beyond a blunt insistence. I am, I am, I am. That’s what the lake told you when you got far enough out to lose any sight of shore. I am, I am, I am. You’re not, you’re not, you’re not. If you didn’t pay attention to that, you were a goner, you didn’t have a chance.

  There was a kid in Milwaukee who died of exposure out in a sailboat on Lake Michigan overnight in spring, 1958, 1959, Boats remembered his dad talking to him about it, telling him to act smart and never get caught like that kid. Only guess what. The same damn thing almost happened to Boats Boatman at the age of eleven, a couple of months after his dad, Charlie Boatman, broke the news that he was in love with this girl, Brandi Brubaker, so he was going to live with her from now on and would be coming back to Madison only now and then. That was quite the message. It had quite the effect. Shirley stayed pissed off and drunk for a couple of years, and little Boats bobbed up and down in the backwash.

  One night he did a really dumb-ass thing, got out on the road and stuck out his thumb. God took pity on fools yet again and got him to the east side of Milwaukee in two quick, easy rides. Trouble was, Boats didn’t know exactly where his father’s boathouses and workshops were located, so he started looking for them miles to the north, around the lakefront marinas in Milwaukee itself, instead of in Cudahy, which wasn’t so fancy. Eleven-year-old Boats had just supposed if he got to where the boats were, he’d either see his father’s sheds and boathouses or ask somebody where they were. Everybody knew Charlie Boatman, didn’t they? Hey, the guy was the life of the party, and a first-class boatbuilder, too. Except, Boats couldn’t find anyone who knew his dad. It started to get dark, and hunger was beginning to make him desperate. He decided to “borrow” a little boat from a dock somewhere, sail it out into the lake, and move along the shoreline until the familiar huddle of buildings came into view. He mooched along the side of the big lake for miles—going the wrong way, it turned out—and eventually came across a Sunfish tied up at a private dock at the foot of a great bluff with a tall flight of stone steps.

  Boats jogged out onto the dock, untied the little boat, ran up the sail, and quickly caught a mild breeze that puffed him out into the deep water. After that, everything went wrong. Although the boy was a good sailor, he went out too far and lost the shoreline in the gathering dusk. For a time, the lights of the city told him roughly where he was, but after a couple of hours of aimless drifting, tacking he knew not where, he began to imagine that he saw small bright lights twinkling at him on all sides. A fog came in. He knew he was far out on the lake, but had no idea of how far he had sailed. Like an idiot, he had neglected to bring a compass. Eventually he reefed the sail, lay down on the uncomfortable bottom of the boat, and passed out from anxiety and exhaustion. Cold and hunger whittled him away, slice by slice. Every time he awakened, he hallucinated. It seemed to him that he had been locked at night within a great department st
ore, and as the Sunfish floated him down its handsome aisles, he tore shirts and sweaters, lamps and serving trays, colanders and cook pots from its shelves.

  At ten the following morning, the ship that saved his vanishing life came hallooing out of the dense fog, following the circular, tracerlike beam of a searchlight and broadcasting resonant alarms he had failed to hear until the rescue craft bore down upon him. A harbor patrol officer climbed down into the little sailboat, wrapped him in a fog-colored blanket, and handed him up to his partner, who said, “You little shithead, I hope you appreciate how lucky you are.”

  Two nights in the hospital, and the feeling of having had his strength somehow drained from him in a viscous stream, like oil from a car. His father bellowed; his mother took the Badger Bus to Milwaukee and brought him home on the flip-flop. He did appreciate the extent of his good luck: the family who lived in the mansion above the bluff with its carved steps down to their dock pitied him his ordeal and did not bring charges for the theft of their sailboat. When asked about the motives for all he had done, he always replied, “I just wanted to see my dad again, I guess.”

  “And that’s still the only way I can explain it,” Boatman said. “But the second time I went out on Lake Michigan in a stolen boat, I wasn’t planning to surprise my dad. I thought I was going to have a reunion with you, Dilly, and Spencer Mallon. I thought I was going to get a second chance!”

  He stood up. “If you’re going to buy me dinner, let’s go now. I’m hungry, and there’s a little place I like on Williamson Street called Jolly Bob’s. Caribbean food, and we can get a little exercise if we walk there.”

  Jolly Bob’s, I remembered as we passed through its front door, was the very place that had made me add “bad ethnic restaurants” to the list of establishments that sprouted up in areas like this. The graduate-student waitress beside the desk grinned at our approach, and I had the disconcerting notion that she had read my mind. Still smiling, she led us to a table at the back of the restaurant.

  Boatman gestured for us two to sit facing the large window and the entertainment of the crowded patio.

  “Can I get you guys some drinks? This looks like a thirsty group to me.”

  We had amused her because she had smelled alcohol on our breath. She thought we were three comical old lushes meandering through our sunset years. We took our chairs, and the window behind Jason Boatman turned him into a dark silhouette.

  “Just water for me, please,” I said. “But pour some vodka in it.”

  Brightly, making a show of acquiescent submission that in no way implied that she had found any humor in this performance, the waitress tilted her face to Boatman.

  “A Purple Meanie,” he said.

  “What?” asked Don.

  “It’s what you drink here,” Boats said. “Fruit drinks. They’re really nice. I like the Painkiller, too.”

  “Thank you, kind sir,” said the waitress. She thought we were idiots, one and all.

  I said, “If that’s what you drink in Jolly Bob’s, I’ll change my order and have the same as my friend. A Purple Meanie. Can you do that?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Her smile grew a little fixed.

  “Same thing here, then,” Don said. “Except I’d like a Painkiller.”

  “I’ll be right back with your menus,” she said, and spun away.

  “At least you didn’t handcuff her by the wrist and demand to know her name,” I said.

  “Around me, don’t even mention handcuffs,” Boats said.

  “I have come a long way,” Olson said. He turned to the stark shadow Boats had become. “As soon as I got to Chicago, I called Lee and asked if he’d meet me at Mike Ditka’s place. So this was my first day out, and I came on a little too strong with our waitress. She was one pretty woman. Come to think of it, so’s this kid.”

  “You know what I realized just the other day?” Boats asked. “Everybody young is beautiful.” That his face was still only half visible made his pronouncement sound oracular.

  “Nice thought. And true, besides.”

  The young woman returned with drinks and menus, and a little while later, we ordered conch fritters, fried catfish, coconut shrimp, and jerk pork.

  “Now that we’re settled and all is well, Jason, maybe you could tell us about the second time you stole a boat and went out on Lake Michigan. Why did you imagine you were going to see Mallon and Don? Were you drunk?”

  “Nope. Though back in those days, my drinking sometimes got out of hand. Not this night, though. I was staying at the Pfister, working there, too, but this night I thought I’d just walk down to the lakefront after dinner. It was summer, so the days were long, and we still had about an hour of light. I walked up Wisconsin Avenue from the Pfister, went past the War Memorial and through the parking lot, and turned toward a marina I could see off in the distance. Even before I got there, something funny happened to me.”

  Jason Boatman’s voice, almost that of the young man he had been, floated out from his indistinct form. Particular features became truly visible only when he turned to look at one of his listeners, or when he leaned forward. I thought he almost looked as though he were wearing a shroud and tried to suppress the unhappy image.

  | The Dark Matter, II |

  Voices seemed to come to him from out on the water, Boats said, as though an ocean liner had anchored just out of sight, and all the passengers were out on the decks, whooping it up. Definitely the noise of a big crowd, definitely the noise of a party. Some things you can’t mistake. It was all wrong, though; it was impossible. Sound carries over water, everyone knows that, although not that far. He could not see this ship, so it would have to be at least a mile out on the water. At that distance he might hear some noise, faintly, but it would hardly be so distinct. Voices threaded through the uproar, and he could almost make out individual words. One high-pitched female voice was screaming with laughter, and a man with a resonant tenor repeated the same thing over and over. It sounded like an order, a command. Everyone else jabbered and gibbered, some at the top of their lungs. The scream of laughter flared out, as if the liner had drifted much nearer. Boats heard the man with a ringing tenor voice pronounce the words “I need what you need” before his voice retreated back out onto the water.

  The party ended; the liner sailed on; whatever the explanation, the sound of many voices abruptly vanished into silence.

  I need what you need?

  He walked on. The marina seemed a great distance away. The aural hallucination, if that was what it had been, troubled him. He settled on the explanation that the wind, or some strange property of the water, had managed to blow voices ten or fifteen miles across the lake. He had heard a party on a ferry, not an ocean liner, and the people at the party were having fun while losing their minds. That happened at a lot of parties, but, now that he had time to think about it, this one had sounded almost hellish. Really disorderly, and a little demonic. He was glad he was not out on that ferry.

  Now he had reached the narrow, far end of the enormous parking lot behind the art museum. A series of gardens lay before him, leading to a greensward with a duck pond. Beyond that lay the marina, a complex series of long curving piers shaped like breakwaters and studded with hundreds of pleasure boats, some with thin, upright masts, some more massive, broader, wearing wheelhouses like stiff white hats. The boats bobbed before a breeze he could not feel. To his right, Lake Michigan sent in roll after roll of ruffles and foam sparkling with the light that glinted, far out in the deeper blue, on its massive hide. Boats stepped over the low concrete barrier at the end of the parking lot and planted one sneaker-clad foot on the springy grass.

  An uproar of voices bloomed in the air to his right, a woman screamed with hysterical, dangerous laughter. A tenor voice like a trumpet rang out, I need what you need.

  He froze, and the sounds vanished. His thief’s protective instinct told him to go back to the hotel, pack his bags, and get out of this city.

  He placed his right foot on
the grass. Jason Boatman was not going to be spooked by a trick of sound over water. The look of the big marina pleased him. It reminded him of his dad, a little, in a nice way: Charles Boatman sailboats were beautifully made, each one (Boats now understood) a work of art, like a guitar handcrafted from mahogany and walnut, every gleaming inch of it the product of assured and careful labor. It would be a kick to spot a couple of them bobbing beside the dock at that undoubtedly private marina. Why not have a look?

  At the same time, a fearful instinct within him told him to return to the hotel, check out, and get on the first train leaving the downtown station. Isn’t that weird? Some bizarre snatches of sound come off the water, and he almost let this phenomenon drive him away.

  Everybody is made of two people, you know, the guy who says no and the one who says yes, the one who says, Oh, Jesus, don’t you go in there/You can’t ever touch that stuff, and the get-along, riskier lad who says, It’ll work out fine/Come on, a little wouldn’t hurt. Boats generally sided with the second guy, though maybe four or five times the other one had kept him from walking into what might as well have been quicksand. His long career on the dark side of the law had reinforced a conviction held in his youth, that you jump into no situation without being at least 80 percent sure you will be able to jump out again. Play the odds, and don’t get greedy about your chances.

  This time, though, because he was putting nothing at stake, he had nothing to lose. Some odd noises had managed to awaken Mr. C’mon-let’s-get-outta-here, and the guy’s anxiety was in overdrive. It didn’t make sense. Boats decided to override these hysterical warning signals and figure them out, if he could, later.

  It was true, however, that the blaring trumpet-like voice and the screaming laughter rolling out of that hubbub had unsettled him, almost as though these horrible party noises reminded him of something his more cautious and perhaps wiser self had wrapped up and shoved to the back of a cupboard. For a second, for less than that, something else, another element, an odor, put his confidence in check: ozone and wet granite, yet a smell suggestive of vast strange places, a whiff of electricity flowing through the darkness of deep space, a whiff of rotting flesh …