One More Thing (2 page)

On the day of the race, the tortoise and hare met for the first time in five years at the starting line, and shared a brief, private conversation as their whole world watched.

“Good luck, hare,” said the tortoise, as casual as ever. “Whoa! You know what’s funny—do that again—huh, from this angle you look like a duck. Now you look like a hare again. Funny. Anyway, good luck, hare!”

“And good luck to you, tortoise,” whispered the hare, leaning in close. “And just so you know—nobody knows this, and if you tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it—but I’m not really a hare. I’m a rabbit.”

This wasn’t true—the hare just said it to fuck with him.

“On your mark, get set,
GO
!”

There was a loud bang, and the tortoise and hare both took off from the starting line.

Never, in the history of competition—athletic or otherwise, human or otherwise, mythical or otherwise—has anyone ever kicked anyone’s ass by the order of magnitude that the hare kicked the ass of that goddamn fucking tortoise that afternoon.

Within seconds, the hare was in the lead by hundreds of yards. Within minutes, the hare had taken the lead by more than a mile. The tortoise crawled on, slow and steady, but as he became anxious at having lost sight of his competitor and panicked over what he seemed to have done to his legacy, he started speeding up: less slow, less steady. But it hardly mattered. Before long—less
than twenty minutes after the seven-mile race had begun—word worked its way back to the beginning of the race that the hare had not only won the contest, and had not only recorded a time that was a personal best, but had also set world records not only for all hares but also for leporids and indeed for all mammals under twenty pounds. When news reached the tortoise, still essentially under the banner of the starting line, he fainted. “Oh, now
he’s
napping?! Isn’t
that
rich,” heckled a nearby goat, drunk on radish wine.

Those who didn’t know the context—who hadn’t heard about the first race—never realized what was so important about this one. “A tortoise raced a hare, and the hare won? Okay.” They didn’t understand the story, so they didn’t repeat it, and it never became known. But those who were there for both contests knew what was so special about what they had witnessed: slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.

Dark Matter

“And that’s the puzzling thing about dark matter,” said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. “It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!”

People on the tour chuckled politely, like
Wow, isn’t that a fun fact?

But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face:

This motherfucker knew
exactly
what dark matter was
.

“So as you look up at the skies tonight, I hope you have a little more perspective, knowing more about what we know—and
don’t
know—about our vast and magical …” etcetera etcetera.

Everyone clapped and the tour guide smiled that smug smile I mentioned before and waved goodbye without opening his fingers like the huge fat nerd that he was. Everyone else on the tour headed back to their cars, but I kind of sidled up to the scientist with quite a little fake smile of my own.

Two can play this game, fatso.

“Pretty interesting tour you gave there,” I said. “Lotta interesting facts.”

“I’m glad you had a good time!” he said with that smug smile again.

“Oh, I did, I did,” I lied. “In fact, I’d like to ask you something about Saturn.” I gestured to a dark corner of the hallway.

“Sure,” he said, still smiling at me and ignoring my pointing. “What would you like to know?”

“Over there, over there,” I said to the fat fuck, pointing to the dark corner. “Past by where the coats are. There’s a diorama of Saturn that I think is all fucked up. The rings and stuff. Come here. I want your
expert
opinion.”

“I can’t imagine they would have gotten the rings of Saturn wrong,” he said. “Oh, unless maybe you mean the mural at the entrance? The one for tots?”

“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.

“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 fucked me over, in which case I would still meet up with them but only to tell them to go fuck 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 fuck 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.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nope, he was still alone, so I nodded and walked up to him and shook his hand—a really big handshake, like in a “congratulations” type of way, and when that didn’t feel like enough, I gave him a hug right around his fat, nice neck. Then that felt like maybe borderline too much—the handshake and the hug combined—so I gave him one of those solid “and that’s
that
” nods and left.

I did end up seeing my so-called friends that night. Get this: they told me they
had
gone to a party without me, but they said they knew it was going to be bad and that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, which is why they didn’t invite me. It was a little bit shady, but I was tired of thinking about this so I just decided to let it go. I told them about the planetarium tour and about how no one knows what dark matter is, not even the scientist, which they thought was interesting, and then I did an impression of the scientist giving the tour, which they thought was hysterical. I felt a little bad because in my impression I gave the scientist a lisp, which he didn’t have in real life, but that was the part that made my friends laugh the hardest, so, who knows. One of
my friends said, “You know, he actually sounds kind of sweet,” which made me feel better because that was how I felt about him in my head while I was doing the impression! Even though I was making him sound like a dork, I still thought of him as kind of sweet. And also, he had lied about no one knowing what dark matter is, when he really did know, so he wasn’t exactly an angel himself. And I knew he would never find out about my impression, so it wouldn’t hurt him. And if he ever does find out about it, through some invention he makes or something, I hope he’ll just forgive me, the same way I forgave my friends.