Reflections on the puddle of life

1. Any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity.

Take a room: four white walls, white ceiling, white floor. One strip light, dead centre: no shadows. A table placed, almost certainly, equidistant to each of the walls. On the table, one glass of water almost full. Either side of the table two chairs directly opposing each other. On one of the chairs, a girl. She sits awkwardly off-centre, hands cuffed behind her back. She is as pale as the walls and almost as featureless; were it not for the long dark hair, dark eyes, she would blend into the background, disappear.

Cue the door.

In walks a man: a lumbering behemoth, shaggy-bearded and bear-like. In his hand, a sheaf of papers. The door closes behind him with a loud metallic click! as the smart magnetic bolts slot into place, and then it is as it was, as if there was no door. The girl is as still as the walls; it is as though she is trying to disappear, but there is no hiding those dark eyes, two small black circles surrounded by white light, sucking you in. She doesn’t look up as the man shifts his bulk into the chair, the rims of his legs spilling over the side. Doesn’t move as he shuffles the sheaf of papers, sorting them into order as though there was an order. Doesn’t flinch as he brings his fat hammer hand slamming down onto the table so hard that everything in this blank empty room shudders with the violence of it; everything, that is, except her.

He says “I want to know everything.” She says nothing, just carries on staring at the wall. From this distance he can see only emptiness in her eyes. He bangs the table again: nothing. He sighs, leans back in the chair. “Have you nothing to say for yourself?” She turns her head, moving so slowly that, for the first time, he considers the possibility of pain, until she fixes him with those eyes: penetrating darkness. Then: nothing. It is as though she is moving in a different time. She blinks, slowly. Her breath falls in and out, slowly. Her mouth opens, slowly. She says, in a long slow whisper:

“Once you enter a singularity there’s no getting back out.”

*

2. A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, not even light.

Astrid lingers in the empty classroom listening to the sound of scattered movement falling in through the open door: shoes squeaking on a polished floor, papers rustling; voices more like distorted sounds, no words. She has been here since the night before, when she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She had broken in, slipped her bruised and grubby body into her chair, and stayed there. Now, as the morning light spills into the room, she is staring at the words scrawled on the blackboard in Professor Ryan’s barely legible text.

‘A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, not even light.

“No sh*t!” she says.

A face appears from behind the open door. “You Astrid?” the face says? She nods. “The Dean wants to see you.”

*

3. Any object entering a black hole will be torn apart by intense gravitational forces.

Mr. Yellow-eyes lies face down on the floor, a slow ooze of blood channelling into the spaces between the tiles. It is moments since the sounds of his breath rasped into nothing. Astrid steps carefully over the body taking care to avoid the blood; pulls her damp hair into a ponytail, fixes her make up in the mirror, adjusts her skirt and top. She looks down: the sink is full of dirty water. She empties it and washes her hands. There’s a mark on the mirror in the shape of a face which she wipes away, leaving a swirl of bubbles in its place like the swirl of stars spinning in a spiral galaxy. She thinks ‘at the centre of every galaxy is a black hole’ and smiles, though her eyes don’t mean it. Everywhere she turns she is reminded; even his blood is starting to form into a pool, like a gaping mouth. It eats into the white tiles around it spreading, dark and consuming. If she remains here too long she might suffer the same fate. It doesn’t occur to her that it may already be too late.

*

4. From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down.

“Come on Astrid, come out tonight.” Sarah pleads, wide eyed and as innocent as she can muster. Astrid doesn’t respond, instead pouring over her books. Sarah flops back onto her bed “Oh come on! You can’t study all the time.” she accuses.

“You don’t get it!” Astrid whispers, twisting the book in her hand “I’m flunking this class. If I flunk this class I flunk my degree. That’s it. End of life.”

“Surely it can’t be that bad?”

“It is that bad.” Astrid stops, her voice thickens in her throat. She puts her hands across her eyes as though to hold the tears in. Sarah puts her arms around her, stroking her hair like a mother would. Astrid pulls away “I’m sorry,” she says “it’s just that if I fail my parents will be so disappointed, and I’ll never be able to convince them that it wasn’t my fault. I owe them so much more than that, I mean they’ve never had anything, my Dad has worked a dead end job his whole life so that I could get this opportunity. I can’t just throw that away. So, I need to study, I need to make it make sense.”

“Wow! You are carrying a lot of baggage aren’t you?” Sarah sits down across from Astrid, moving the books around thoughtfully. Almost as suddenly she stops, becomes businesslike. “So, what are we going to do about it then?”

“We?”

“Yeah, you and me, ‘cos if you’re studying then I’ve got no one to go out with, and Sarah not going out equals Sarah becoming a nun and that ain’t gonna happen, okay? So, I’m asking you again, what are we going to do about it? ‘Cos this endless studying doesn’t seem to be helping.”

“I know, you’re right…but I don’t know what else to do.”

“Have you spoken to Professor Ryan?”

“Yeah, but he was no help at all. It all just…makes sense to him, so he doesn’t really understand why it doesn’t make sense to me.”

“What about one of the other teachers?”

“I don’t know, it kinda feels like going behind Professor Ryan’s back. That might make things worse.”

“Okay, what else then? There must be someone who can help you?”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“…well, I bumped into a guy from my class today, he said he might be able to help me but I’m not sure.”

“Which guy?”

“I don’t know his name. He’s tall, quiet, keeps to himself, dark hair, weird kind of yellowish eyes.”

“Yellowish eyes? So, Mr. Yellow-eyes offered to help you huh, and we’re sat here on a Saturday night not going out because you’re too scared to take him up on his offer?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Astrid gives Sarah a wry grin “He’s a bit strange.”

“But you’re only gonna study together, right? It’s not like he asked you out on a date or anything.”

“I guess so.”

“I tell you what. Let’s you and me go out tonight, and tomorrow we’ll find Mr. Yellow-eyes together, you’ll take him up on his offer and I’ll hang around the library while you study, you know, just keep an eye on things. That way, everyone’s a winner right? And you seriously need to get out; I’ve never known anyone before in such dire need of fun! So? How about it?” Sarah pushes her pleading eyes in front of Astrid. Astrid smiles, defeated. Perhaps he could help her.

“Okay.”

*

5. A black hole has no hair

Laughter spreads across the room in waves: nervous, uncertain laughter. Heads turn, eyes search eyes, questioning. At the front of the room Professor Ryan waits, wearing a faint smile that says he’s been here all too many times before. Astrid turns with the crowd smiling to the guy on her right, turns to her left. Stops. The guy on her left isn’t smiling, turning like the rest. He is staring straight ahead, pen poised over lines of neat, regular text, waiting like Professor Ryan, unsmiling. Astrid stops smiling. His focus is intense, she can feel it emanating from him like a strange force, something undiscovered. It is like this every class; he is so quiet that she often forgets he is there at all.

“No, it wasn’t a joke,” Professor Ryan starts, the class switching from disturbed to attentive at the prompting of his voice. “the maxim ‘a black hole has no hair’ was first uttered in the 1970’s as an expression of the culminated works of Werner Israel, Roy Kerr, Stephen Hawking, and finally David Robinson the result of which was the discovery that black holes possess no other qualities than mass, charge and angular momentum. Black holes are what is known is an information sink anything which falls into a black hole is destroyed, the information is lost and the black hole unaffected. However…”

The guy to Astrid’s left carefully transcribes the Professor’s words into that careful text, line on line faithfully reproduced. His quiet industry puts her to shame and so she too begins writing leaning, unknowingly, a little to her left. Occasionally she casts a glance in his direction, he is unchanged; never once does he turn his attention from the Professor or his books. The bell rings. He packs away quickly and leaves, turning only once. In that one turn he looks Astrid directly in the eyes, a long, penetrating look then, just as quickly, he is gone. Astrid lingers, packing away slowly, the burn of that look still tender on the inside. She wonders about him: he doesn’t seem to have any friends, she never sees him out and about, he seems to exist only in this class. ‘What a strange boy’ she thinks and smiles, realising how much she sounded like her mother. She is about leave when Professor Ryan says “Astrid, can I see you for a moment?”

*

6. A black hole cannot be viewed directly because light cannot escape it.

Something cold and hard is pressed against her face, she tries to look at it but sees only her own eye, curved and distorted, reflected back. She is bent face down over a dirty sink filled with dirty water in a bathroom she doesn’t recognise. She moves her head, the reflection changes: Mr. Yellow-eyes, his face twisted in ugly pleasure. He is f**king her over the sink. He is pressing her down with the weight of his body, one hand groping deep inside her top, the fingers of the other knotted into her hair like a cowboy breaking in a wild pony. And he’s riding in rhythm with the beat of the pounding in her head, which is the beat of the music bleeding through from somewhere outside this room. Somewhere where other people are dancing, and here she is dancing to the wet slap of his thighs against hers, with each beat her face is pressed harder, harder into the mirror. He sees her watching, smiles with those yellow eyes and grimaced teeth, pumps her harder. She tries to scream, he pushes her face down into the dirty water. Then there is only sensation and darkness. She holds her breath and closes her eyes, thinks, ‘it is ironic’. That even though he is raping her, even though she may be circumventing the edge of her own death, she still behaves as though her life is something in which a future is a real possibility.

*

7. The Event Horizon is the boundary within which the black hole's escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.

“I can help you,” he says.

*

8. A black hole distorts the images of background stars and galaxies.

Astrid is crying in the hallway. In her hand she holds a screwed up piece of paper, her head is ringing with Professor Ryan’s words “…if you don’t knuckle down you will fail this class…” She imagines her parents’ faces, closed and disappointed. She knows what they will think, that she’d gone off the rails, she didn’t care anymore, she was too busy having fun, going out and getting drunk, to think about the future. She’d said “I’m really trying; I just don’t get it, it’s too hard.” All he could say was “study, study hard girl.” He didn’t understand, she was already studying all the hours she could; it just wasn’t sinking in.

Footsteps close by. Astrid quickly wipes her eyes, scratching her face with the screwed up paper. She turns towards the wall and waits for them to pass. A shadow moves across hers. Stops.

She turns: it is the guy from her class. He is tall, she hadn’t noticed before. Slim, but muscular. There is a black mark, a tattoo perhaps, on his wrist. He smiles, but his eyes don’t mean it. There is something strange about the way he looks at her, as though she is a puzzle, or an equation, and he is calculating her solution. The only remarkable thing about him is his eyes, pale and luminous; in this light she could swear that they were yellow.

“Is something wrong?”

His words drop, and spin into their shared shadow.

*

9. Only objects in close proximity to a black hole are affected by the breakdown of spacetime.

Already Sarah is dancing with a group of men; Astrid stands alone in a dark corner wishing she hadn’t come, knowing she will be going home alone. In the darkness she feels invisible, everywhere around her there are bodies lit up by the strobe lights, swirling around; she could be standing in the middle of them and no one would notice. She throws a drink into her throat, slams the glass down onto the table. Decisively she walks over to where Sarah is dancing, mouths ‘I’m going home’ pointing to her watch. Sarah shakes her head, beckons her with one free hand, the other snaked around one of the men’s waists. Astrid shakes her head, shakes her hand. Sarah shrugs her shoulders, turns away, carries on dancing.

She heads towards the exit, though a combination of the alcohol and strobe lighting makes her feel as though she is moving in slow motion. It is then that she sees him standing in the darkness like she was, those bright yellow eyes unmistakably staring at her. For a moment she is transfixed by them, the club, the music, the dancers fade into nothing. He is leaning against the wall a bottle of beer in one hand, the other tapping the wall in time to the music. Then he is moving towards her. He places the beer on a table. He reaches out an arm. He touches her arm. Slides his fingers down her arm. Twists his fingers in her fingers. His body is close to her body; so close she can hardly breathe. In her ear he whispers “You really want to learn about black holes?” His breath stinks of beer. She nods, looks around. People are dancing. She looks at him. Yellow eyes staring. Strong grip bruising. "Let's go then." he says. She thinks no one notices them leaving.

*

10. At the singularity the laws of science break down.

They are looking at the girl through the one-way glass. She is sitting in a bare white room, hands cuffed behind her back. She is sitting slightly off-centre in her chair. She looks like she doesn’t care about anything.

“Doesn’t look like a killer, does she?” the detective says, rubbing his beard. His companion an attractive, blonde, psychologist shakes her head.

“They never do.” she says.

“Do we have a background?”

The blonde psychologist flips through some papers. “There’s not much here. University student, clean record, nothing remarkable. Good family background, working class, looks like she’s the first in her family to go to university. Everyone we’ve spoken to says the same things: hard-working, quiet, polite, nice girl. That they can’t imagine her doing anything like this.”

“So what’s your opinion?”

“A girl like this? Something must have happened, something stressful triggering a break down. The question is: what?”

“Who knows?”

“Has she said anything yet?”

“Not a word.”

They watch the girl through the glass. She is an empty shell, all trace of the person she was is gone and in its place: nothing. The bearded detective says “I guess there’s only one way to find out.” The blonde psychologist smiles, hands him the papers.

“Good luck.” she says.

“Yeah.” he opens the door. The girl, she doesn’t do anything.