The Black Hole Experience
By Anna Mantzaris
He bought two tickets to the Black Hole Experience. I was, admittedly, a bit reluctant to accept as the commitment would be billions of years and technically, it was only our third date but he’d paid a lot for them and I liked the guy.
I had counted a second date even though it was an accidental meeting at the bodega where I was buying Red Vines and he was getting the Sichuan tofu from the open buffet that runwayed the middle of the corner store.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I said holding up the candy to show I was there for a reason and adjusting the sunhat I had worn in winter for some reason.
“Nice chapeau,” he said closing the lid on his clamshell container.
We went back to his place where he showed me his vinyl records and we shared the spicy bean curd that really wasn’t that spicy before fumbling around together in his dark bedroom and both apologizing a lot.
We are divorced. Well, I am. He lived with a woman a decade before she left him. “Red flag” everyone said but I took it as a smart move on his part. I wished I hadn’t gotten married. I wouldn’t be carting a cat in a carry-on every other weekend and keeping in touch with a man who said, “It is what it is,” after we signed the final papers.
My date called the night before the Black Hole Experience. “Listen,” he said, in his rock star raspy voice that I’d already grown to love, “I didn’t realize something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Excuse my technical language here,” he said, continuing to rasp, “but I was reading about how the GRS 1915+ 105 can spin at over 1,000 rotations per second, and that there would still be a chance of escape with the ergsophere, which is good to know if either one of us changes our mind, but that led me to the Schwarzschild radius, which if you don’t know …”
“I don’t,” I said. I had read that smart people don’t pretend to know things they don’t.
“Well, it’s the size of the event horizon in a black hole that doesn’t rotate.”
He continued for twenty-eight minutes. I know that because I looked at my stove clock. He explained that he originally thought observers (like the next set of ticketholders) would see us careen to the barrier of the black hole and freeze. I imagined us splayed out like crime scene victims caught in our final moment or like the silhouette on the Vertigo poster. But we’d be alive and moving through the hole but for those behind us, our images would be frozen, for eternity. I had always wanted to be immortalized in some way.
“The thing is,” he said, “I came across something else, that makes much more sense, and it’s not the spaghettification that we talked about the other night.”
I bristled thinking about how when he invited me he warned me that we could both be stretched liked noodles, but the event organizers had told him with the specifically chosen black hole that was unlikely to happen.
“It’s the Pancaked theory.”
For some reason when he said “Pancaked theory,” I got turned on, just like when he had invited me to his place. It sounded comforting and warm and for me, that translated to sexy. I thought about the black-rimmed glasses he had worn on our date. Actually two dates, if you count the bodega. I thought about the way he had gently laid on top of me after the tofu dinner and whispered, “I think you’re really something,” in my ear.
“Can you explain?” I said, “the pancake thing.”
“It means we won’t appear frozen or be frozen,” he said, “we’ll be flattened.”
“Go on,” I said.
“We’d be reshaped, into discs.”
“OK,” I said, “I’m still up for it.” It wasn’t easy at our age to meet someone and feel a real connection.
“Let me put it this way, we’ll be doomed matter.”
Doomed matter. The phrase lingered in my head.
“Are you saying you’d rather not go?” I asked.
“No, no, I’m still up for it. I just thought you should know.”
“I’m OK with the doomed matter thing,” I said, and we decided we’d meet there. It would be out of his way to pick me up and he said he’d rather take the bus from his place because he wasn’t sure what would happen if he left his car on the street forever.
The morning of the Black Hole Experience I chose my outfit carefully. There were very few guidelines aside from no luggage but I decided on layering, like everyone had told me to do when I went to San Francisco on my honeymoon but hadn’t listened and the fog was so unpredictable that I was cold all the time. I grabbed a scarf and opted for my kitten heels. I figured we’d be doing much more swirling than walking in the hole and it was a date.
I left a note for my ex, assuming he’d come to look for me when I didn’t pick up the cat for the next rotation. He’d be relieved. I left the extra cat food tins on the counter for him.
It was only a twenty-minute walk to the departure platform. The sun was just beginning to come up. I thought about how The Black Hole guy had told me how stars die, about how the hydrogen eventually runs out and the star collapses and sheds layers that explode and what’s eventually left is a black hole. I wondered how cold it would be in there. I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, stopping at the first garbage can I saw. I closed my eyes and tossed my housekeys in like they were pennies in a wishing well.
THE END
Author Bio: Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of “Occupations” (Galileo Press). She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University.