Jenna Crowder
On the way to meet Gui for coffee a week before the solstice, I hear on the radio that a black hole is sucking its way across the universe.
Consuming the equivalent mass of one Earth per second, the black hole is currently five hundred times the size of Sagittarius A*—the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way—and increasing in mass.
The anchor reports this calmly, with minor wonder, the way one might point to horses and say, Horses.
The black hole is growing rapidly, showing no signs of slowing down, as other black holes of the same magnitude often do.
I park across the street from the coffee shop. Gui sees me and waves from a shaded picnic table.
The black hole is still far enough away that scientists are not yet—
A mutual friend, a painter, introduced Gui and me at her opening last month, and we talked easily in the glow of mud-colored canvasses gridded with filaments of neon. Later that night, I looked up Gui’s work and found image after image of finely detailed dioramas depicting the post-apocalyptic seashore. Foggy coastlines with oil derricks pumping away for no one, pools of oil glistening on the surface of the sea. Piers in disrepair, barnacle-crusted and water-logged by rising tides. Lobster orgies, piles of brown-shelled bottom feeders fucking in broad daylight with no one around to hunt them. I don’t know how he works so small, each joint and scale so perfectly crafted. I zoomed in to see if I could see the mechanics of lobster sex, maybe little tongue-like lobster penises sliding into some soft, shell-protected pussy, but the images, too pixelated at that size, censored the action. Gui’s dioramas are supposed to be eerie and melancholic, but they made me so horny I had to close my laptop.
I sit down, and Gui slides a cup and saucer toward me. A cappuccino, he tells me. In the foam, a curved laurel has begun to disintegrate, and it looks like a lobster.
“Did you hear about the black hole,” I ask, trying to be normal.
He looks at me from the side of his face, whispers, “The scientists—they think something weird is happening in the universe.”
“How long do you think it will take to get here?”
A ripple of silence runs through the muscle of Gui’s jaw. I remember he has two children. Probably curious, well-behaved, gentle children.
It’s 8:37am on a sunny June morning, and while I’d hoped to ask him about crustacean dicks, we are both now thinking about mass death.
“It’ll probably never get here,” he says, rubbing the tops of his thighs.
I suspect he’s wrong, that the black hole will grow exponentially.
We move our conversation to other things: the ever-creeping gentrification in this part of town, the upcoming solstice, our friend’s new paintings of tightly rendered and restrained geometries. Worry and fascination crackle under all of it.
***
Later that afternoon, I’m working in the studio when Gui texts me: What do you think is inside it?
I once read an article about black holes being like holograms. I didn’t really get it, but I text back something about a black hole being like a record we could play if we had the right needle. He sends a shell emoji followed by a rock emoji.
I turn back to my work, which is much less refined than Gui’s. I build large sculptures out of cedar, hulking shapes I want to feel like tsunamis or giant mouths or narrow crevasses in the side of a mountain. I stack and arrange the wood using pulleys, join the pieces together with rods and bolts, and carve them so they look like one towering piece, the more enormous the better. Once assembled, I burn their surfaces in the Japanese style, waterproofing them. Their blackness shines like quicksilver.
How big would the black hole look in sky, if we could eventually see it coming? Would we be annihilated by radiation long before that? From which direction would it arrive? I remember thirty earths can fit between us and the moon: thirty seconds to make peace with death. If the black hole ate the sun first, we’d have a few more minutes. We’d live the last seconds of our lives in darkness before being sucked into the belly of the unknowable.
I pick up my torch, scrape striker against flint, and press the flame against a swelling maw.
***
The day before the solstice, Gui and I play records at his apartment. His kids are with his ex-wife; their drawings and toys lie scattered everywhere. He’s become obsessed with the idea of black hole-as-record. We listen to Oneida, Sheida Gharachedaghi, Alice Coltrane, trying to get closer to the feeling of annihilation.
“Maybe there are new worlds in there,” he says suddenly. “New physics. New configurations. New life.” He makes a swirling motion with his hands. “Like a remix.”
We drink Moschofilero and watch the wet sun sink over the mountains. “Come back tomorrow,” Gui says, voice full of urgency and hope.
Sometimes, the desire for obliteration overwhelms me. The container of my body appears to me like a familiar stranger, an inadequate sheath that both touches and separates me from the world. I spend the night in my studio and dream about tides so big they leave whole sides of the earth picked clean.
I wake at dawn on the solstice. On the radio researchers say, The point at which one breaks apart in relation to a black hole depends on the size and mass of the object. Falling toward the center is inevitable. They mean spaghettification, a quaint term for being atomically ripped apart by unimaginable gravity.
I go straight to Gui’s apartment and find him in the back room he uses for a studio, his dioramas smashed to bits across the work tables. There’s a tiny lobster on the floor, and I place it supine on my palm to inspect the anatomy. Gui picks it from my hand, his touch electric, and he solders the lobster to an oil platform. He solders the platform to a mooring, the mooring to a submersible. A dark opalescent liquid drips everywhere.
You can pass through the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. You can see inside, and you can never return.
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Jenna Crowder is a writer and editor with a background in visual art. Her writing has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Wendy’s Subway Endless Playlist, The Brooklyn Rail, BURNAWAY, and Art Papers, among other places. She received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she currently reads nonfiction submissions and copy edits for VCFA’s literary journal, Hunger Mountain.