We made our introductions. Alice looked to be in her mid-twenties. She had long, straight black hair, lovely pale-green eyes. She was wearing a yellow blouse, cashmere cardigan with bold red buttons, a bright-red wraparound skirt, black sandals. She told me she taught astrophysics at Columbia University. I was impressed.
“That’s some accomplishment for one so young,” I said. It was probably obvious that I was awe-struck. “How old are you, anyway?”
She blushed.
“Twenty-six.”
I told her I was twenty-four, a former graduate student at Columbia who’d been majoring in linguistics, but dropped out when it became apparent I was making little progress.
“Don’t give up,” she said. “You never know what’s around the corner.”
“It wasn’t the field for me.”
“When I was younger I wanted to be a ballerina, but my feet couldn’t stand the strain.
Astrophysics is the same thing only on a larger scale. Why, now I can pirouette amongst the stars!”
I laughed.
“Tell me what you think of that book,” she continued, pointing at the hardback I held in my right hand. On the Origins of the Universewas my current reading material.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s fascinating, to say the least. But there’s much I find confusing.”
“Such as?”
“The big questions. How did the universe arise? How will it end? After it ends, what will be where it was? Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. If there’s one thing that really bothers me, though, it’s when the author talks about the expansion of space. What is it expanding into?”
Alice laughed. “Nothing, silly. Space is all there is.”
“That’s another thing I don’t understand.”
“Think of it this way. Space is everywhere. As it expands, it’s not anywhere it wasn’t already.”
She paused, undoubtedly noticing my discomfort. “And it’s not really expanding, anyway. It’s stretching.”
I frowned. “What’s the difference?”
“Expanding implies movement from here to there, which, as I said, isn’t what happens.
Stretching is an increase in distance between two points. After a suitable period of time, the distance between A and B isn’t C, it’s two times C.”
We talked for over an hour. I learned she was unmarried, had taught at Columbia for a year, had a brother named Zeke and a sister, Cindy. She’d graduated with a Ph. D. in astrophysics from Stanford only the year before. Her specialty, she said, was the physics of black holes.
“I have one, as a matter of fact,” she dead-panned. “In my apartment on West 145th Street.”
***
As we climbed the stairs to her fourth-floor apartment, Alice talked about her family. Her parents lived in Ely, Minnesota, where she was born and raised. They were owners of Slatkin’s
Canoe Outfitters, a rental agency that had served northern Minnesota for thirty years. Her eyes glazed over as she spoke of midnight paddles across Great Bear lake, the stars twinkling against the jet-black background of space. It was then, she said, that she fell in love with the heavens, learned how to navigate via the stars, and decided to devote her life to astronomy.
I was mesmerized by her iridescent, black hair, hour-glass figure, hips that gently swayed as she mounted the stairs, and my heart was thumping wildly when she slowly opened the door to apartment 403.
She flicked on the light in the foyer.
I saw a black leather couch along one wall. An end table next to the couch. A dark-brown ottoman occupying the middle of the room. But it was the aquarium nestled up against one of the side walls that captured my attention. It must have been at least fifty gallons and was filled with fish, exotic plants, and aquatic sculptures.
“My pride and joy,” Alice said when she noticed me gazing at the tank. I counted a half-dozen fish, brilliant orange, with translucent black fins, bright red eyes, and light-blue lines that crisscrossed their bellies. I knew something about fish, yet I’d never encountered this species.
“What kind of fish are these?” I asked.
“Speculated Wild African Goldfish,” she said, a species I’d never heard of. Then she asked if I’d like something to drink.
“Iced tea, if you have any.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of a refrigerator door opening and drinks being poured.
The walls of the living room were painted dark-blue. The floors were carpeted, a thick, ultra-soft material. A bay window behind the couch overlooked a park across the street.
I turned my attention back to the fish tank. The goldfish had disappeared and I found myself staring into the languid, gold eyes of a Mexican axolotl. The creature was ghostly-looking: white with red gills, two short, fat front legs with four digits each and two thin, long rear legs with five. Its pupiless, unlidded eyes stared at me uncomprehendingly.
“Admiring my salamander?” Alice said as she strode back into the room, drinks in hand. “I acquired it about a month ago. It’s charming, wouldn’t you say?”
That wasn’t the word I would have used to describe the creature, but I nodded in agreement.
“It will grow to be about three feet long, but I’ll donate it to the New York Aquarium before then. They have a salamander exhibit that’s second to none.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. “But it was long ago.”
“Then we must go sometime!”
She had that way of talking, straight and to the point, but always from an unexpected direction.
“Alice, I was wondering …”
“Yes?”
“It’s like the expansion of space. The enormity of it all. I mean, I know we just met, but ah, eh
…” I hemmed and I hawed. I felt so embarrassed. Here I was, a former linguistics major, and I couldn’t string proper sentences together!
She smiled. “You’re thinking about the enormity of the cosmos, aren’t you? Well, the universe isvast. Did you know scientists believe we can only detect five percent of the content of our universe? The other ninety-five percent has disappeared over the time horizon, the point at which objects are so far away that light emitted by them will never reach us. In other words, not only is most everything unknown, most everything is unknowable. The only difference between us and him”-she pointed at the axolotl-“is that we’re swimming in a different aquarium.”