Dark Matter: My Reality and the Paths Not Taken

I just finished reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It’d been on my TBR list for a while and I picked it as a replacement book when someone in my book club announced that she would not be reading the book I originally picked due to its trigger warnings (Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter, which I still fully plan to read). It's officially our highest rated book so far, and this can be a tough crowd.

I read the book in like 3 days mainly due to a book club deadline but it was so fast paced and fascinating that I didn’t want to put it down. At so many points I wanted to stop and talk about it with husband. I love and hate when that happens, especially if I know there’s a TV or movie adaptation that I don’t want to spoil. Sometimes I’ll read a book that I think he’d enjoy and tell him about it, sometimes I read a book that I think he’d like the movie of but wouldn’t read and I tell him about it, sometimes I read a book and then we watch the adaptation and I tell him what’s different and why the book was so obviously better (because he loves that).

Husband, now’s your cue to go read something else until you either read the book or we finish the series.

For real. Go. Major spoilers.

The basic premise of the story is that the infinite multiverse is real and accessible through a mysterious drug and a Schrödinger-style box that another version of the protagonist created. Which is interesting, and of course it addresses the differences between branched realities and how our choices can play out, but that’s not what I loved. What I loved was that the book was, at its core, a love story about an ordinary man who gets separated from his wife and child and is desperate to get back to them. I already think about how my life would have turned out had I made different choices: if I chose a different college, if I studied a different major, if I stayed in a different city, if I had different jobs, if I stayed with any of my boyfriends. But this book got me thinking more specifically about this reality and what makes it totally and uniquely mine. Would I know if husband was swapped out for some other version that branched years ago, or while we were newly dating, or before we met? Would he know if some other version of me was swapped out?

More on that later.

Dark Matter Synopsis

The protagonist, Jason, a college physics professor, husband, and father, is abducted on his walk home after going to a celebration for an old college roommate who had just won a very prestigious award. The abductor knows a lot about Jason, personal details and habits that only those closest to him could know. He injects Jason with something, then himself, and they both pass out. When Jason wakes up, he’s strapped to a gurney in a bunker being greeted by strangers as if he’s an old friend. Desperate to get back to his family, Jason tries to play along until he can form a plan.

His terrible plan is escaping and running away. He goes right back to his house like an idiot, but it’s decorated more like a wealthy bachelor pad than a family home. In a display cabinet is the prestigious award his old roommate won, but it’s Jason’s name etched on it and is dated ten years earlier. The only sign of his wife is the expensive-looking art signed with her maiden name. Obviously the bunker people track him down, but he escapes again. He googles his wife’s maiden name and finds out that she’s opening an art show. So he goes. Like a desperate, desperate idiot.

Fortunately by now he’s started to catch on that this might not be his world. When he talks to his wife, he uncovers that, from her perspective, they did date but the pregnancy that led them to start a family was terminated. They broke up to pursue careers in art and science and have clearly been very successful. Now, she’s sort of dating his old college roommate, who seems to be pissed at Jason. Maybe jealous for winning that award years ago. The old roommate asks Jason “how the compound worked out” and, of course, Jason has no idea what he means, which the old roommate takes to mean that Jason used his compound uncredited.

All of this is so bizarre to Jason. He was on track to pursue something incredible, previously impossible, until the pregnancy early in his relationship with his wife. They decided to get married and be a family, even though they both knew that it would mean letting their promising careers in art and science fizzle. Which they did. Though there was some jealousy watching their friends and former colleagues achieve greatness and win awards, they never once regretted their choice. They were happy. It’s ordinary but it’s theirs and they love it.

What I love about this part of the book is that it doesn’t take the It’s A Wonderful Life approach to get the protagonist to realize how good of a life he has. He despairs the moment he understands what’s happened to him and realizes the challenge of returning to his own world. He would never have traded lives with this other version of himself, a version who broke up with his girlfriend to pursue his science, who somehow created a way to connect their worlds, who then abducted him in his own reality to take his place and live the life he didn’t choose, but only after obtaining the fame and glory, and only after skipping the hard work of making a relationship and raising a kid.

I’d want to kill him, too.

Jason spends a lot of time visiting other versions of Chicago, trying to get back to the one in which an impostor (he calls him Jason2) has taken his life, sleeps with his wife, and is father to his son. In an infinite multiverse, it’s like looking for a single grain of sand on planet Earth. Some of the worlds are grim: nuclear fallout, widespread disease, crime and poverty, climate disasters. Some of the worlds show a Chicago as if certain choices had been made differently: he and his wife terminated the pregnancy and broke up to pursue their fields, or they stayed together and had more kids. But some of the worlds are eerily similar: nearly everything is the same except for subtle clues, like he drives a different color car or the photo on the mantle when he peers inside the window of his house is from a different vacation.

Which makes him question in an infinite multiverse, what made his world his. In some of these eerily similar Chicagos, what makes his wife not really his wife? Or his son not really his son? Some of them are so close that he’s tempted to just live in one of them, but he knows that would mean giving up on ever finding his actual wife and son, and giving in to letting Jason2 imposter his way through the rest of his life.

The part I related to the most was the chapter from his wife’s perspective in which she notices the ways in which Jason2 is different (without, of course, knowing anything had happened). She noticed a difference immediately, as soon as he came home that night, and then each day after: the way he did the dishes, how he didn’t drink as much, his morning routine, the things he talked about, and, most telling, the way he looked at her and touched her and held her and fucked her was like he hadn’t spent the last 15 years doing it. All these little things that she’d noticed and known but probably never voiced or acknowledged about her husband were at the top of her mind, like they were newly dating again.

My Reality

Putting myself in the protagonist’s shoes (not that I’m a genius physicist or anything, just someone who’s pretty pleased to have ended up with their spouse), I wondered what it is that makes husband my husband? What makes him mine in an infinite multiverse full of infinite husbands who have made different major and minor choices? It’s an impossible question to ask but spouses know things about their partner that no one else could ever. This is the most vulnerable part of being in a relationship like that: they know things about you. Like, really know. I could use code words with my best friend without discussing beforehand and she’d know if I needed rescuing. Same with husband: if I called him and said my mom was in town and I’d be staying with her for a few days, he’d track me down. But more subtly, if he used phrases we haven’t used in a while, which actually happened twice this week, would I know it’s an alternate version of him?

I don't know what this is but it does sum up our relationship pretty well.

There are some things that feel like things only I know, or at least things that I probably notice more than others.

• How he gets into storytelling mode when he’s driving. He’ll sit behind a car going 10 MPH slower than the rest of traffic while chatting. I’m pretty sure this only happens when I’m in the passenger seat, not anyone else.
• The way he said “babe?” from the other room once, with a mix of concern and urgency and chastising. After I immediately went over to him he told me we would not be placing wine bottles on top of the rack where they could easily fall off.
• The other way we say “babe!” to each other. Even though lots of friends were around for the origin of that inflection, I’m pretty sure none of them picked up on it the way we did.
• Our many, many inside jokes and references (no surprise as we’ve been together 15 years). I keep saying that someday the only words we’ll speak to each other will be movie quotes. It would be real hard for an imposter to keep up.
• How we both liked the tin of Old Bay seasoning so much that we bought it just because it was in a nice, vintage-looking tin. And then we talked about how sad it is that tins aren’t a thing anymore.
• How if I give an answer in a certain way he’ll keep asking more questions to get the same answer. Like, “can I get you a glass of wine?” Sure. “Can I open the good bottle?” Sure. “Can you say any other words?” Sure.
• The way he taps his fingers on the steering wheel or shifter (back in the manual days) when he’s annoyed. And the way he insists he’s not annoyed.
• The way he performs for others, even people we know well, even sometimes his best friends. I wonder if they notice.
• How the first thing he does when he comes inside the house is check his phone.
• How we are very open about our bodily functions (as I type this he’s texting me about having pooped in a Beverly Hills Whole Foods bathroom).
• The way he looks at schnauzers now (and sometimes all dogs) compared to when Argo was still alive.
• How he talks about cats, rats, and rabbits now compared to even just a few years ago.
• The way he insists he's awake enough to watch a movie, falls asleep, then wakes back up if I pause it and insists again that he's awake, and then falls asleep again.
• How he does "sack of potatoes" with our friend's kid.

Husband found a dog on vacation.

What this book does is make the protagonist extremely aware of the paths not taken. [Spoilers here] He confronts them time after time in the search for his world and the impacts of having made other choices is thrown in his face. It’s not that other media about multiverses don’t do this, it’s that it’s not always this deeply personal. Most other media shows world-wide differences like an Earth that solved climate change or coexists with aliens, or they show the butterfly effect of one tiny decision having massive implications for the rest of humanity. The other worlds in Dark Matter show just one part of one city, focusing on one family in one house. He watches his wife die many times. Helps her die once, even. Sometimes his son was never born. Sometimes he had more kids.

My Roads Not Taken

What about my other paths not taken? I’ve long said that I’d watch the movie of my different life choices but I wouldn’t visit or live in those worlds. If I had to choose just one part of my life to be happy in, I’d choose to be happy with my partner. I would much rather be excited to go home and to connect with another person on such a deep level than to have a fulfilling or high influence career, or to travel to all the countries, or to have wealth and comfort. So anything that would jeopardize not meeting husband when I did is a hard no.

That said, I do often think about how my life would have turned out had I made different choices. Sometimes I do this just to remind myself how so many things had to happen exactly the way they did for my life to be what it is. Any tiny thing could have derailed my path. Like, if you think about all of the things that had to happen just so you could be born, it’s mind boggling. Even considering all the decisions I’ve made over just my life, or just my adult life, means an infinite number of branches. In some of my alternate realities, I don’t think it would have been impossible for husband and I to still find each other. If I’d chosen to go to Berkeley instead of San Diego I could have run into him when he was visiting family or through someone he went to high school with. Or he could have decided to move back after college for some job or some girl. Or I could have gone through the EATM program, then gotten a job at the Safari Park where we actually did meet (or SeaWorld, where he also worked). It would make me really happy to watch those movies and see us still end up together in these other worlds. In an infinite multiverse, these are realities for other versions of us. I love that.

Husband bet me he would stay awake for whatever we were watching.

And in yet other worlds, there are versions of me that stayed with the people I’d seriously dated. I doubt many of them would have been happy worlds. Marrying my high school boyfriend would most likely have ended in tragedy. I can’t decide if he would have stayed so enamored with me that he’d have willingly gone along with my plans (not have kids, move away from our hometown) or if we’d have ultimately broken up due to those differences. Maybe he would have avoided becoming an addict or maybe he was destined and we’d have broken up anyway, or he still would have died. Maybe he would have become a lawyer like he planned. Maybe we’d have had kids before I decided I didn’t want to. Maybe I’d have been happy or maybe I’d have always wondered what else was out there.

Marrying my college boyfriend would also likely have been a disaster. By the end of that relationship we had very little in common and it made me wonder what we’d had in common to begin with. Years after we broke up I realized that we both felt we should be together for external reasons, not because we actually wanted to be together (I was the girl you bring home but not the girl he wanted, and I thought I needed to stay with him because I'd slept with him). If that didn’t eventually cause a divorce, money and career ambitions might have. Or maybe he’d have been well off enough for me to have a low-paying job I enjoyed. Or maybe he’d have never learned to manage his finances and we’d have had money problems (and a keeping up with the Jones lifestyle). Maybe we’d have spent our entire relationship arguing over kids and me being sterilized. Maybe the final straw would have been my Celiac disease diagnosis.

Or what if I went to Berkeley instead of San Diego? Would I have stuck with writing? Navigated the recession better? Met some Berkley guy? What if I moved back home after graduation and got stuck? What if I didn’t and I never got Chloe? Would I have been a professional writer in whatever capacity and never gotten my masters or gone to Africa?

Or what if I went to EATM and didn’t pursue writing at all? Would I have been unemployed for a long time? Had a series of low paying jobs? Moved to Los Angeles and work in showbiz? Or would I have ended up in San Diego anyway? Would I have gotten my masters anyway?

Dark Matter illustrated that if you’re really happy with your life circumstances, or even just one really important part like your spouse and your kids, any other version of that reality won’t be enough, no matter how good it might seem otherwise. Jason couldn’t accept any other version of his wife and son that wasn’t uniquely his, no matter how close they were and no matter how fantastic his life could have been without them. Meanwhile, Jason2 was a famous, award-winning, wealthy physicist who did the impossible, but still yearned for the what if about making a family with his ex-girlfriend. I can’t say I don’t wish certain parts of my life were different (I’ve lamented about them here often enough), but I wouldn’t want to risk ending up with someone else. It’s impossible to imagine how someone else could feel like home more than husband does.