She paused, then said, “Shall I show you what you came here for?”
I gulped. “Yes.”
“It’s in the bedroom.”
It seemed to take an eternity to make our way down the red- carpeted hallway that led to
Alice’s sleeping chamber. She kept talking all the while, but I can’t remember a word of what she said, other than it had something to do with the structure of space.
When we reached the room she ushered me inside with a wave of her hand. “After you.”
The room was pitch black. Instead of turning on the lights, she lit a half-dozen candles on a dresser that rested against the far wall. They flared up like little supernovas, casting wandering shadows on the walls. I sighed when I saw her queen-sized bed in one corner, the lace sheets warm and inviting.
But that was not all that I saw.
The ceiling was covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. They’d been arranged to form a replica of the winter night sky. Aldebaran was a shining red jewel in the constellation Taurus. Orion the Hunter contained the bright stars Rigel and Betelgeuse and the three smaller stars that formed the magnificent belt. Directly overhead, in the constellation Andromeda, was a prominent oval patch which, I assumed, represented the Andromeda galaxy. The closet galaxy to our own, it was barely visible to the naked eye; here it was brighter than anything else on the ceiling. Alice had taken great pains to ensure the correctness of her overhead mural and this deviation seemed odd.
I was conscious of strange gurgling sounds coming from the back of the room. Looking down, I saw a filtration device, perhaps three feet wide by two feet tall. It was wedged in one
corner next to a casement window whose shades were tightly drawn. A simple canister filter, it worked by suctioning liquid into a canister through an entry pipe and pumping the liquid out through a return pipe. Both pipes were visible wrapping around the room and disappearing into a bedroom closet.
When Alice saw me gazing at the filter, she said, “A hobby of mine. I put this one together with parts from a local surplus store.”
What she didn’t tell me was what the filter was doing in her bedroom.
Just then I heard her sigh. She had removed her cardigan and sandals. Her green eyes sparkled in the flickering candlelight and the smile that played on her lips could only have meant one thing.
I was wondering if the time had come for me to kiss her when she went over to the bedroom closet and pulled open the door.
“In here.”
As I peered into the closet I saw an inky black void.
“It’s in the corner,” she whispered.
And that was when I saw it: underneath the bottommost shelf, a pinpoint of light. It was only a point, no wider than the end of a pencil, but it was so bright, so intense, that it seemed much larger. “Yes,” I said. “I see it now. Amazing!”
I paused. “But I’m confused. You said you were going to show me your black hole. This is something else.”
“No,” she replied. “This is what I mentioned.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look closely,” she said, “and tell me what you see.”
Trembling, I entered the closet and got down on my hands and knees to examine the entity, but the angle wasn’t right.
“It’s easiest to view if you lie on your back and look up,” she said.
Thus positioned, I gazed upon the radiant jewel’s infinite expanse. I saw everything that ever was, I saw everything that ever would be. Everything was clearly visible in the depths of the black hole. I saw my birth in a hospital in Athens, Ohio. I witnessed my recovery from the childhood illness that nearly killed me. I saw my baptism, I saw my high-school graduation. The look of pride on my parents’ faces when I was admitted to Columbia on full scholarship. I witnessed the car accident which claimed my brother’s life when I was in my freshman year. The agonizing aftermath. The long and lonely evenings drinking in bars around Manhattan wondering what any of it meant. I saw myself meeting Alice in a restaurant on Forty-Third Street. And I watched in wonder when the circle became complete as she took me to her apartment and showed me the black hole.
“Why doesn’t it consume what lies around it?” I asked. “You, me, this room, everything.”
“They don’t work that way,” she replied. “At least not the little ones.”
I told Alice I felt like I was in a tale by Jorge Louis Borges. “The Aleph.” One of my favorites. She smiled. “The Argentinian’s aleph was a figment of his imagination. Mine exists.”
I asked her what was inside the black hole, that is, what was on the other side of the black
hole.
“Another world, much like ours.”
“How do you know?”
“Perhaps I’ve been there?” She laughed. Her green eyes sparkled and I found myself gazing longingly at her pearly white throat. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved,” she continued. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
Without waiting for a reply, she ushered me into the dining room. She apologized for leftovers, but assured me Indian food tasted better after the spices had time to meld.
As we consumed a delicious meal of tandoori chicken, vegetable biryani, and garlic nan, we continued to discuss the nature of the universe.
“It says in here,” I began, holding up my copy of On the Origins of the Universe, “that the cosmos is actually the inside of a monstrous black hole, a black hole which will expand forever, or until it fades from existence.”
Alice laughed. “I know what the book says, but it’s wrong.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t understand the details of the author’s argument. The mathematics involved. But he seems to make his case.”
“It’s hogwash.”
“He sets forth a reductio ad absurdumthat-”
“-that is itself absurd.”
“So what are they? Black holes. You said you study them. The author of my book calls them portals to the past. Are they that or something else?”
“It’s been mathematically proven that you can’t revisit the past,” she said, “but you can change the rate at which you go into the future.”
“You mean black holes are portals to other worlds?”
“I mean no such thing,” she said. Too quickly, I thought; there was something behind her words. She rose from the table and began clearing the dishes. “They’re permanent fixtures of our universe, nothing more. Scientific curiosities. Leading nowhere.”