Chapter OneDeformation Catalog
Here is what I remember most about the months I spent searching for dark matter: there are some things in the universe you can only find by looking away from them. It was how the professor who ran the lab greeted me on my first day, and I remember thinking, yes, of course, and the thought was a revelation because this was a time when nothing about the world made sense to me. Later, sitting at my desk at midnight or nodding my way through some incomprehensible explanation, I would repeat the words to myself, try to re-create that first frisson of—what? Joy, almost. Hope. The feeling that the universe itself was something I might take hold of if only I kept reaching. Even now, worlds away, the words have a certain magic to me.
I spent my days at the lab removing stars from vast pictures of the night sky. They were too bright, too loud. They hid the smaller changes we were looking for, the slight bending of light that would indicate the presence of dark matter. This was not my job, precisely. I was meant to be constructing the two-point correlation function for certain galaxy clusters. Every time I thought I understood what this meant, it became immediately clear I did not. So I sat at my desk for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, using my mouse to draw lopsided red circles around problematic stars. At the desk next to me, the other new research assistant was developing a computer program we could feed my cleaned data into. We had our own corner, three computer screens each, a nickname: the NASA girls. We were the only women in the lab.
Before beginning this job, we had emailed, proofread each other’s grant applications, discussed housing arrangements. I thought of us as friends until our first day, when two things became immediately clear—that for me a yearlong grant from NASA was an apex, and for her it was only a stepping-stone. She was the real thing, had the sort of brilliance I was only pretending to have. I think she understood this as well as I did, which I respected and resented. No matter how many times I told her to call me Raffi, she kept reverting to Raphaela, which was the name of my great-grandmother who’d died in the camps. Nobody called me that. She had dark, greasy hair that fell to her shoulders and a perfectly white center part. When she spoke, I would stare at the part and will her to run her fingers through her hair. She never did.
After staying at the lab each day as long as physically possible, I walked the twelve blocks back to the sprawling, decrepit house where I lived with most of a men’s intramural rugby team. The room I’d rented was up in the attic, half the price of anywhere else I’d found, with a single narrow window and sloping ceilings I crashed into once or twice each day.
Up there with me was a curly-haired rugby boy named Graham, who had a new injury each time I saw him: a split lip, ragged stitches beneath one eye, a wrist so swollen it hurt me to look at. He seemed too delicate for such a violent sport, but I knew violence was not proportional to mass, latent as it was in something as small as an atom. He’d grown up in northern Montana, close to where my great-aunt lived. This, along with his immediate and unflagging belief that my job at the lab meant I was a genius, created a warmth between us. We slipped into a strange domestic orbit, in spite of our utter lack of similarity, in spite of my boyfriend, Caleb, who was working at a start-up across the country, and the rugby boy’s girlfriend, Kay, whom I’d met briefly when she helped him move into the house. She’d worn cowboy
boots and a flannel, had the sort of walk that made boys whistle. Measured against her, I found myself lacking. This made it more satisfying when the rugby boy ignored her calls so we could finish dinner.
Our intimacy was not physical, or was no more physical than the way our shoulders tilted together as we watched terrible movies on the couch late at night, or the way he sometimes fell asleep with his head resting against my thigh. Our intimacy was two children playing house. The way he paid for our groceries with cash he’d stockpiled in his sock drawer from selling weed, waving off my gestures of refusal—though in reality I was perpetually a paycheck away from overdrawing my bank account. The way he had water boiling on the stove in the attic’s tiny kitchen when I got home from the lab, the way I tilted the cheap box of pasta into the water without a word. We ate straight from the pot, no matter what we cooked, so as not to create more dishes. Our intimacy was forks occasionally clinking into one another, flecks of pasta sauce staining our skin and clothes.
It was, above all else, the mutual willingness to see only the best in one another. It’s a shame you don’t want kids, Raffi, he said to me once. As if my DNA were so valuable that not passing it on was some kind of loss for the world.
I’d gotten the job at the lab by pretending I’d worked through all my difficulties with physics—a lie I still hovered on the edge of believing. The job was a doorway, a wormhole that would lead me to the life I wanted: acceptance to a PhD program, a prestigious postdoc, research papers and discoveries and the inner workings of the universe revealed. I’d emailed the professor who ran the lab during my last year of college and begged him to take a chance on me. True, my transcript was unimpressive, but what I lacked in pedigree and proof, I tried to make up for in conviction. Dear Professor, I wrote, then listed all the extra math courses I’d taken to give myself the necessary background for rigorous research. This, I told him, was what I wanted to do with my life, and I would put in whatever work was necessary. Even in spaces less public than emails, even in the dark corners of my brain that admitted no visitors, I held entirely to this rhetoric. Some part of me must have known that my conviction was a construction that had no capacity for flex, that unlike a skyscraper built to sway with the wind, any gust at all would be enough to cause collapse.
When I wasn’t pretending to be an astrophysicist or a housewife, I was hanging around a sculptor named Britt, pretending to be an artist. I’d come across her work in a gallery I’d wandered into on one of my first days in the city and recognized her name—we’d gone to the same high school, lived down the street from one another, though we hadn’t been friends. Coincidences in those months felt imperative. My work, after all, was tracking the ways in which seemingly random alignments were proof of invisible, underlying structure. I asked the gallery owner for Britt’s business card, sent an email before I could convince myself not to. I think we might have gone to the same school, I wrote. I came across one of your sculptures, the one where the girl is breaking open her rib cage and inside there’s a whole galaxy. I can’t stop thinking about it.
We met at a coffee shop that served their lattes deconstructed on wooden boards: a shot glass of espresso, a tiny pitcher of steamed milk, a vial of lavender or hibiscus or cardamom essence. So you’re a physicist, Britt said. That’s cool. She had half her head shaved, the other half long. Graceful tattooed lines crisscrossed one arm. For an instant, I considered telling her how deeply miserable physics made me, as if I could tie us together with a confession.
You’re an artist, I said, instead. That’s cooler. I wish I were creative like that.
It’s not like physics, she said. If you want to do it, you can just do it. Come by my studio sometime, I’ll show you. She was the kind of person who was perfectly at ease in every situation. She could’ve been sitting naked in the middle of the freeway and the cars would’ve been the ones to feel out of place. I would’ve done anything to spend more time with her except ask.
And then there were the days I didn’t go to the lab or Britt’s studio, the days I spent lying in bed, the weight of all the bones in my body insurmountable. My personal gravity had become erratic. I hadn’t figured out the formulae that would let me predict its rhythms, so I woke each morning with a sense of foreboding and waited to see how difficult it would be to lift myself from the bed. I was getting heavier as the months at the lab passed. Not larger, just denser. More tightly held to the ground, so that remaining upright required a tremendous effort. I began to look longingly at sidewalks while walking the twelve blocks to the lab, imagining what a relief it would be to stretch my body out on the ground and sleep.
I called Caleb on one of these walks, who said, I’m at work, are you okay? I described my fluctuating gravity. What are you talking about, Raffi? Isn’t Earth’s gravity a constant? And shouldn’t you be at the lab?
It’s the dark matter, I said. Inside me.
I think you should talk to a therapist, he said, not for the first time. But I’ve gotta go, I have a design that needs to be filed by noon.
Caleb and I had met the fall of my sophomore year, during a period I remember as a brief flicker of light. For once, my physics and math classes were going well. Understanding them made me feel invincible. On the weekends, I went with friends to the campus dive bar, where a library card could function as a fake ID, and temporarily became a person who could go out on Sunday and show up for Monday classes with their work done. A girl that boys like Caleb bought drinks for at bars. By the spring, this illusion of competence had dissolved—I couldn’t understand anything, I was failing to prove to myself whatever it was I needed to prove—and some part of me was convinced Caleb never forgave me for that initial well-being, the way it had tricked him into thinking
I was someone who knew how to be happy in life.
At the studio with Britt I tried to sculpt my heaviness, but it only looked like a lump of clay. I imagined asking her how to sculpt a black hole, the deepest gravity, exhaustion that eats whole days. I imagined her hands on top of mine, crushing the clay until it was dense enough to warp the weave of spacetime. In theory, any mass could become a black hole, if it was compressed tightly enough. In theory, inside a black hole space might flow like time, and time might stretch like space, and the law of causality might become mere suggestion.
Across the room from me, Britt was kneeling next to a statue of a horse so lifelike I kept startling at the sight of it. A girl was draped across the horse’s back, her body melting into the animal’s body. Britt was using a tiny scalpel to carve detail into one of the horse’s hooves. She was wearing overalls with a sports bra and no shoes, though the floor was littered with scraps of clay and plaster. She had her bottom lip pinned under an incisor, hair plaited down one side of her head in a messy braid. I pictured myself wearing the same clothes, tried to bite my lip identically. I had read studies that showed forcing a smile could induce happiness. Maybe if I could mimic Britt’s expression, I would feel whatever it was that she was feeling. But no matter how I arranged my lips, all I felt was tired. I was moving my mouth in weird ways when she looked over. She quirked an eyebrow, held my gaze for two heartbeats that I heard in my ears, then turned back to her work with a half smile. I looked down at my hands. I’d squashed my black hole; the clay was squeezing out from between my fingers. It was an improvement.
At the lab, I was left largely to my own devices, and I wondered if my bewilderment was perceptible, measurable in my endless red circles. I had thought nobody understood dark matter, that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we did not know, but it turned out that other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs
that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other peoples’ confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. Once, at the lab, I called dark matter hypothetical, and the professor said, I might be biased but I think hypothetical is a little much. We can measure its effect, we can detect it astrophysically, we just haven’t identified it in the lab yet. After that, I tried to avoid calling dark matter anything at all.
Another evening, the professor stood behind me, watching me circle stars. Don’t feel pressured to do all the data cleaning yourself, he said. We have undergrads who help with that sort of thing. I told him I didn’t mind, that I enjoyed working with the raw data, that I found the pictures of the sky inspiring. I had no idea what I was saying, but he smiled. I know exactly what you mean, he said.
I had time before I had to present my research. I had time in which anything might happen.
When I felt particularly despairing about my work at the lab, I let Graham and the rugby boys drag me out to the nearest bar. Anytime my glass of beer started to empty, they filled it from the pitchers in the center of the table. Soon my head was buoyant, though the rest of me stayed earthbound. This had always been the sort of belonging I’d found easiest to come by, not one of the boys, but not exactly a girl either. When someone from another table tried to talk with me, the rugby boys puffed their chests out and chased him away, tripping over one another to defend me. Fuck off, they said, Raffi doesn’t go home with strangers, she’s not like that.
What was I like? I wondered. How could these boys—these drunk and happy people I barely knew—have the answer? I felt I ought to be annoyed but instead was grateful. I was too tired to talk, too tired to pretend to be anything. Whoever the rugby boys thought I was, they seemed to like her. I tried to imagine what Britt would think if she were here, but she would never be here. I let the rugby boys take turns piggybacking me home.
Caleb and I were communicating mostly via email, a fact that I didn’t let myself interrogate too closely. Often, by the time he left work it was late enough on the East Coast that I could plausibly have been sleeping. Caleb’s emails told me about the marathon he was training for, about the office dog who had his own line of raincoats. My emails were mostly run-on sentences about how I would never understand anything and what was the point of trying so hard. I often regretted these emails once I’d sent them.
You’re doing this to yourself, he wrote back once. Why are you so determined to do something that clearly makes you miserable?
Dear Caleb, I wrote. It was late in the afternoon on a Saturday, and I was lying in my bed, a twin-size mattress on the floor, staring at the peeling paint on the ceiling. I had been half asleep, listening to the clatter of the rugby boys doing who-knew-what downstairs, when his email arrived. Now I felt an electric current of energy run through me, propelling me into a sitting position amidst the blankets.
Dear Caleb, what could be more worth making oneself miserable over than understanding the whole universe?
Dear Caleb, I want to be able to control everything, particularly time.
Dear Caleb, I need to prove to myself that I’m capable of anything if I work hard enough.
Dear Caleb, maybe I’m incapable of being happy, but what does that matter if I can be a genius instead?
Dear Caleb, why does genius always belong to men?
Dear Caleb, maybe if I understand dark matter and the night sky I will also understand how to get out of bed in the morning.
Dear Caleb, dear Caleb. I deleted all my answers, electricity draining out of me. I lay back down. I didn’t respond.
I loved Caleb like a part of my own body, not something I’d compose odes to, but
difficult to imagine life without. I felt certain of two things: he wouldn’t leave me—if he was going to, he already would have—and he loved only certain parts of me. Maybe it is more accurate to say I loved him like my left hand, without which it would be difficult to tie my shoes or chop an onion. But I would still be able to make circles around stars.
The days I woke to find myself weightless were rare enough that I wished I could hoard them, bind them like atoms into some new molecule—an effortless week, a bearable life. Since I couldn’t, I tried to shield them from any interference that might cause collapse. So when I woke one morning hours before my alarm with my mind so crisp and clear that a part of me wanted to head straight to the lab, I ignored the urge. Instead, I texted Britt, the only person I trusted not to ruin it. Breakfast? I asked. When I arrived at the diner nearby, she was sitting in a corner booth, hands wrapped around an enormous mug. She’d dyed her hair magenta since I’d seen her last.
You’re vibrant this morning, she said, and I thought of Caleb, saying to me on a good day: You’re luminous, I love you when you’re like this. How all I could hear was the inverse.
Tell me about your sculpture, I said. I keep seeing it, but I never want to interrupt your work to ask. I was talking too fast. I stole her cup of coffee and took a sip to stop myself.
She told me about rescuing a horse from an auction when she was a kid. It was a ridiculous thing to do, she said, her family already living below the poverty line. Britt’s face went soft as she spoke. I think we overlook the importance of nonhuman relationships, she said. The grief I felt when she died, I’ve never felt a grief like that for a human. It was as though she was a part of me, like the boundaries of what I considered to be myself had expanded, or even dissolved. That’s the feeling I’m trying to capture in the piece.
She wanted to hear about my work in return, and I told her how some invisible thing was changing the behavior of galaxies, ...
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