A Telescope at the Sky

Abstract

A Telescope at the Sky Alison B. Thomas (bio) The fabric of the universe is made of stories; it bends and folds and tears, and sometimes we wonder if we can rewrite ourselves to sew it up. At the planetarium on a Thursday, she stops to see two features: cosmic collisions and black holes. The black holes interest her; she is not in the process of meeting someone, but of saying goodbye. The actor Liam Neeson narrates this journey into “the secrets stolen from the other side of infinity,” and from this confident voice, she feels that she is promised scientific answers to the universe’s most complicated questions. She is looking for a guide for the new person she might become, now that she is outside of the specific story arc of a couple, a tandem, a co-domicile. She had been one of a set of stars, rotating around one another, unaware of another massive gravitational force nearby, lingering. She doesn’t live anymore in their small apartment with one other person whose shoe collection she knew by heart, who shared her mouthwash, olive oil, and fabric softener. The planetarium camera careens through space-time—a vast emptiness of things floating in a dark world without direction. She remembers how their apartment was its own soft world: white lights strung like distant stars on the stairway railing, her poster of the celestial map on the bathroom wall. The edge of a black hole is the end, a force drawing everything into it—an invisible who-knows-what. The edge, Neeson’s voice tells visitors, is the “event horizon,” and if we were moving toward it, we’d know, like kayakers at the edge of a waterfall, that there was no other way but down. We’d be torn apart after crossing the threshold, and if we were plummeting into its abyss, we might look for a wormhole—a puncture in the fabric of space-time. [End Page 119] She felt sure it was over the minute she was alone in their apartment. Somehow, when he was there with her, she couldn’t recognize that the event horizon had already happened, and that they were over the lip of the end and into something else. She had said, Let’s try again, let me try. She had said it was her fault. Why did she do that? It wasn’t her fault, and for that matter, it wasn’t his fault—there had been no explosion. Sometimes, stars just die, or they lose the gravity they need to hold their swirling dusts and gases together. They collapse. She knew that. She had known for a while. She couldn’t admit it. What happens, she asks her friend—a physicist—when you fall into a black hole? You die, silly, he says. But what does it look like, what does it feel like? She wants to know. It hurts, he says. You could never get out. He tells her about the twin paradox: if one twin were sent into a black hole while the other twin remained outside, the twin on the inside (if it were possible for it to escape) would emerge younger than its sibling. She remembers walking with him in Chinatown. A man sitting on a stoop leaned over—“Y’all brother and sister?” They had looked at each other and laughed. “She’s my girlfriend,” he’d said. “Ha,” the man said. “I guess you stay together long enough, you start looking alike.” She asks another scientist over a glass of bourbon about the twin paradox of black holes—why would one twin age faster than the other? Everything slows down inside a black hole, he says. You’d get crushed, and in theory everything would stop. The further in, the slower you’d go. When she left their apartment and stepped out onto the street, she wandered around crying. This was the other side of the event horizon: the time when it doesn’t matter if people see you behave like this or not. For once, you don’t see them seeing you alone in the dark. A few days later, she sat in a...