A Big, Meaningful Thing in Space
It looks like a nighttime lake. It reflects the purple sky, tripping with stars. That’s what my brain has to tell me to move on to the next thing. In reality, as if THAT word helps at all at this point, it reflects nothing.
Standing at the observation window of the touring shuttle Curiosity, clutching whatever railing is nearby so I don’t buckle and/or piss myself, I peer into the sinister mouth of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our dear Milky Way Galaxy. This thing is all mouth, by the by, toothy in its mockery…Cheshire. I feel like if I turn my back to it for a second, the fucker will tractor beam me in, breaking the NASA-grade plexiwhatever window and all of my bones, leading to the suffocation and pressure death of Dr. Spital’s entire AP Cosmology class (M-F 10a-10:45a), not to mention the forfeiture of several thousand dollars’ worth of Florida Bright Futures Scholarship money.
But okay the thing is there is no actual reflection coming from it; light can’t bounce back out of a black hole (no duh indeed) cause when it’s in, it’s in for the long haul. Rather, and I had a quiz on this phenomenon in Spital’s class like last week no less so I’d better get this right: Gravity itself had wrapped around the hole like a shiny NASA blanket, like what they put you in when you’ve been physically traumatized and are waiting for further questioning. The gravitational force is pulling light like taffy from the stars around the spacesucker Sagittarius A, and the light goes in, yes, but because its relative time stops for us, it (the starlight) freezes on the surface of the B.H. and we’re treated to a mind-wrecking still image of the galaxy that’ll just…stay there. Until Sag.-A evaporates I guess. This cute trick renders a flat glassy starry surface that looks exactly like a lake at night.
Good, you’re still awake.
“Gravitational lensing” is the term that I used to fill in the quiz on Thursday (quizzes making up 20% of our final grade but 80% of my final anxiety level in their sado-random deployment). “Gravitational lensing” is also ass-wrong, as I realized mid-stretch later that afternoon at track practice. Lensing only refers to how we see it on Earth whereas “gravitational WRAPPING” is the new hip pet term of the cosmically pretentious (incl. Dr. S when he gets going) and boy did I feel like a dodo bird then. Refer back to class on the afternoon 3 October Lecture 18: Gravitational Wrapping (fuck me):
Spital: “I like the term! I like how warm and comforting it is: gravitational wrapping. Mmm, toasty.” A smile pulled at his thin wet lips. “So cold out here as a black hole, lemme just pull my starlight jammies on. Oops! I flashed my event horizon!”
Student laughter. His bald crown made way as the wild eyebrows jumped from a middle C to an A#.
Spital, cont’d: “Point being, with this wormhole development and the fact we can get close to these now and see what’s what, “lensing” just don’t do it justice folks. It was fine for Steve Hawking, but now we can see the stunning [unintelligible] …faint impressions of the millions of local [garbled] …made possible [audio corrupted] …the progress [boring]…a new sense of perspective [more corrupted audio]…”
At this point, I was dealing with a certain rapid expansion as a result of a high-riding thong of one ember-haired Claire Holdenburg in the desk at my 12 o’clock and long story short I put lensing and it was wrapping and I got a B-minus and can we move on now.
It’s eerie to stand in silence with a group of high school seniors. I can now say the quietest thing I’ve ever heard was the sound of eighteen minds exploding at once. Tractor beam threat be damned, I actually have to close my eyes for a moment to put my thoughts in the appropriate boxes. For sanity. This is the first time our AP Cos. class has been to the black hole.
“Thar she blows,” Dr. Spital twangs.
“Ungh,” I quip.
Context: On August 30th, 2016, scientists discovered a wormhole that had appeared without fanfare 200 miles above Fiji. By Christmas, they figured out that it led to our local supermassive black hole. By February, astronauts had gone and returned intact, and by Spring Break ’17, you could take the kids and make a day of it.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that something so awesome is immediately lameified by tourists and field trips. As the class boarded the Curiosity, each of us was given a day-glo orange wristband. Why? Is there like general seating for a black hole? Will we need a buddy system? Is there rappelling? When Good Businessmen make an infrastructure of experience around a profound thing, it’s a lot harder to have any kind of deep communion with it.
Upon arrival to B.H. Sag-A, our “Cosmoguide” Krista walks us through a simple app download to “Access the immersive experience that is…Sag-A.” We are taught how to appreciate the vastness, the sheer power of gravity, recapped on the history of mathematical hemhawwing that led us to the theories that paved the way to the experiments that upended the field that put us in the lucky spot we find ourselves in to fully appreciate what these brilliant men and women speaking of women Claire Holdenburg is holding her phone out in such a way that you can see down her shirtsleeve to the crease where her boob meets her armpit and how can she not feel like a breeze I think about running my fingers down the underside of her arm as she blushes and feigns scholarly attention and stiffens in places under her t shirt and I think maybe dark matter is like blood flow and I feel an utterly man-made infrastructure in my Dockers all of a sudden and Cosmo Krista reminds us that we can approach no closer to the event horizon without being firmly tugged inward.
Dr. Spital deftly connects parts of Cosmo Krista’s monologue to various lessons we’d covered. He is what several of my female peers call “an adorable old nerd.” He has the kind of specificity of manner that is easy to imitate. E.g. One time, class cutup Greg Schumer mimed suspenders and said, “Y’all ain’t gonna b’lieve this, but tahm is like your auntie: relative.”
Dr. Spital forges ahead in the lesson. There are a few topics to cover to do our due diligence: quantum theories of gravity, hologram theory, alternate universes. As he starts on wave function collapse, he glances away from us to the dark heart of our galaxy, basically within arm’s reach.
“In the singularity, remember, time…kind of, well again, the wave function-”
Mid-sentence, the eyebrows relax to a reasonable height, and Dr. S abruptly shuffles to the observation window. I keep forgetting this is his first trip too. His breathing changes to a deeper, more measured sort. I notice Claire imitating this. She closes her eyes. I don’t know why I do the same.
Hours of lectures and Instagramming later, we are digesting a lunch of wraps and salads. The ship that bears us has a cafeteria in its bowels, its single wall encircling us with a mural of astronomical progress. The style suggests early concept art of Epcot Center. The hard-featured science heroes look vaguely Communist. Dr. S checks his watch sporadically. Conversation has mostly moved away from space stuff as we are pretty tuckered out. That is, until Greg Schumer says:
“If I was going to kill myself, I’d launch myself into a black hole.”
“Get in line,” sighs Claire.
“Seriously?”
Presumptive valedictorian Ayeesha Holmes chimes in: “Part of Sag-A is like a fucking Japanese forest. Totally littered with depressed tourists who ditched their shuttles and jumped.”
“Oh. Thanks assholes. Not you, the depressed tourists.”
“Agreed. The mentally unstable ruin everything.”
“Wait, but wouldn’t images of these guys be trapped on the surface? Can we see them still? Where’s Krista?! Tell her to take us to the graveyard! I’m feelin’ torqued and morbid.”
I get anxious all of a sudden, throat tightening. Vividly, I imagine the faces of a thousand dead depressed asphyxiated tourists floating forever face-down, their exposed flesh a purple-white Monet echoing the arm of the galaxy itself. The pattern is a gruesome doily: floppy hats and Tevas are separated from their host bodies, silver packets of freeze-dried ice cream are now triple-frozen: in preparation, in space, and in time, never knowing what it means to rehydrate. This bothers me in a deeply existential way.
I cover my tandoori shrimp wrap and clear my throat several times, citing spices. With no other recourse, I take out my phone and become quite casual.
Claire Holdenburg turns to Ayeesha, spitting quinoa as she asks, “What was the word for how you actually die?”
“‘Spaghettification. Neil Degrasse Tyson said it on a Nova special.”
“I’d still do it, just cause I have to know.” Greg Schumer is worked up. I think he might be really disappointed if he goes home without having some kind of revelation. “I have to know what’s in that bitch. Like where…dude like when do I end up?”
I’m checking Instagram until I can swallow properly. Tori Dreschler, savage that she is, posted B.H. Sag-A in a toaster filter, fucking the detail beyond redemption.
Claire yawps, “Spital! Describe spaghettification like you did in class.”
“That was such a fun lesson,” I feebly manage, face in phone, mumbling generally to Claire-ish.
Dr. Spital snaps his head up out of a fog. “Oh, I love spaghettification. It’s hilarious.”
“You’re a sick bastard, Spital!” Claire mugs, fists on hips, undoubtedly hearing a phantom studio audience.
Dr. S is feeling it now, eyebrows straining to detach from their native head skin:
“A sickening affair. Timmy the astronaut gets too close and crosses the event horizon. Bless his heart, don’t even realize it ’til he gets pulled like a strand of spaghetti into the black hole.” He makes a moist schlorping sound. “Atom by atom he is deconstructed, just a line of ’em sucked into the singularity. I’d guess it’d be a tear in the space suit kills Timmy first.”
“So you’d die before seeing anything good,” Greg Schumer concedes.
“You’ll have to settle for a trampoline accident, Schum,” I follow.
By now, our table is the nucleus of conversation. People have gathered. A collective breath, and Dr. S has a glimmer in his eye:
“Well,” he can’t resist, “now hold on there. Remember those stars y’all saw on the surface, stretched over like a tarp? So, okay Greg-you’re a depressed photon. Life is miserable because you don’t experience time. Soon as you’re emitted, you’re absorbed by an asteroid or a piece of dust or Guy Fieri’s chinbeard. You decide ‘I’m gonna end it all’ and fly into a black hole. You go bye bye, but y’also get trapped on the surface, like we see out there. Now Greg you’re you again, but you’re depressed because Guy Fieri won’t retweet you. You say ‘Hell with this, I’m black holin’ it.’ What’s the last thing you see?”
“…”
“What’s the last thing you remember? The event horizon? The singularity? Something from your childhood? Me stealing your mint Milanos right now?” The class laughs. “Better yet, where is your mind? In the hole? Dead? Or stuck on the surface like all those memories of stars?”
“God, that’d be hellish if all these depressed people were condemned to be stuck conscious forever,” muses Ayeesha.
“Not if the thought they get stuck on is ‘Finally it’s over.’” This is Spital’s hammer, whether he means it or not. “That’s a beautiful thing, I think.”
I look at the faces of my classmates. I just shattered in some way, but don’t yet have the words to acknowledge it. I suspect the others may have, too. The last sucking sounds of waters and Capri Suns echo off the celebratory wall. Trays are lifted and clanked into plastic bins. Shielded from view of the new reality lying outside the ship, our little class weathers the arrhythmia of conversation. We have to. There is only so much profundity we can take in one day. We may live forever. Greg resumes talking. Ayeesha is hand sanitizing. Claire is journaling. Spital checks his watch. Moments later, we follow him to the observation deck.
