Inside a Black Hole by Andrew Bertainia

Long before he travels through the black hole, ripping the fabric of his life, they are looking for the perfect house, the sort of place you could raise a family on modest salaries. First, they have to say goodbye to their dream of a back yard large enough for a trampoline. Their daughters have been begging for it, wheedling and cajoling, teary-eyed. They both love their daughters in the oppressive way of modern parenting. But the taxes are too high on the houses with lush yards, large privacy fences, cone flower and tiger lilies ringing the bright green lawns. Barrel-chested robins hop about on the grass and light feathers the leaves of the oak. The idea of the trampoline now gone, the wife gazes at the oak. 

We could put a swing on it, she says.

Someone else will, he answers.

They spend time in the evenings calculating the property taxes, the down payment, the rising cost of daycare for the youngest. The problem is his job as a college lecturer. Often, he just says he is a professor to not confuse strangers. Professor carries a certain cachet, and he feels silly when asked to explain tenure versus non-tenure. It doesn’t exactly make for scintillating conversation. 

His wife sighs and turns from the bay window. She works for the city government. She isn’t as high on the ladder because she took time away for the birth of their two children. But still, she makes enough for them to have put away a small nest egg. 

On the drive home, the trampoline fading from memory, the oak leaves no longer quaking in the breeze, they realize they’ll have to live in the city. Easier commute, more time to spend with the children. Even with the low housing stock, they feel certain they’ll find something perfect, something that matches the life they should have. 

They look at houses on weekends, getting a sitter for the girls. The neighborhood they are looking in has a fine school district. It’s the only place they can afford, and the city is only getting more expensive, more out of reach. The streets are lined with gingko, oak, cherry. But the houses keep being wrong. In one, the basement has a fetid odor that turns out to be black mold. In another, the kitchen is tiny, and there is no dishwasher. In a last house, on the third weekend, they see something still occupied by renters, and people keep popping up in unexpected places as they tour. Two people in a closet, three more in the basement, one hidden behind a curtain in the bathroom. The house is chock full of renters, more than enough already. 

On the ride home, they agree they can’t displace the renters. The husband fiddles with the radio, puts on Taylor Swift and calls it quits. The wind rushes through the open windows.  They can afford a flipped house with stainless steel appliances, white walls and grey couches as though a fancy catalog threw up. They thought about the very full house, the utter strangeness of seeing all those people, the inaccessibility of other lives. The human imagination is fantastic, but it has its limits. 

The wife calls her mother to complain, secretly hoping for an offer of a loan. Her parents are planning an Alaskan cruise. 

Life is hard, honey, her mother says, sympathetically. It took your father and I until retirement to travel like we do now. 

She doesn’t have the heart to ask for the loan, merely asks her mother to stay away from polar bears. 

They are weary of searching for houses on the internet, weary of endless weekends in the car with Dan, their cheery real estate agent, weary of trying to imagine their way into spaces that aren’t for them.

Really, he says, it’s just a place to put your stuff. I mean, deep down. None of us will live anywhere forever.

She looks at him with something approaching disgust. Can you leave off Lucretius for a minute? Our daughter needs to be in a good kindergarten. It’s the year she’ll learn to read. 

They drive and drive through neighborhoods with Dan. Dan is excited about the prospects of every home. 

You could get rid of that cement and roll out some lawn. No problem. A bedroom could definitely go there. Just put up some drywall. 

In their small apartment, exhausted and sad, her husband imitates Dan. You can just toss up a huge retaining wall, no problem. A little bit of boiling pitch and you can keep out the peasants. Wash your clothes in the sink like pioneer times. You see a moldering basement, and I see an opportunity for growth. No plumbing. No problem. In the Middle Ages, people used to just dump their shit from the top window. Have you two ever considered a chamber pot? 

She thinks about laughing, knows her husband is right about Dan’s unbridled optimism, but she also wishes her husband were a bit cheerier. He could learn a thing or two from Dan. 

The couple lies awake while the ceiling fan cuts ribbons of invisible air. The man thinks about writing an essay on late-stage capitalism, maybe incorporating Schopenhauer’s theory about will, and the house search, but he’s too tired and sad. The girls need to enroll in school soon, his wife says, as though he does not know this very thing. But the truth is, she thinks about it more. Time is not on their side. Time is on no one’s side. Time is just time. 

The perfect listing appears out of nowhere. Neither of them can explain its sudden appearance. Back in the car again, they feel a renewal of hope, like travelers reaching the end of the Camino de Santiago trail. Dan chatters merrily on the way over. They marvel at the large tree out front, perfect for a swing, gasp at the splendid cabinets, the spacious and airy kitchen. The windows are abundant, and there is yard space for the girls to run and play in and plant a small herb garden. 

How can we afford this? the wife whispers to the husband. Dan is enthusiastic about the house, as he is enthusiastic about everything. 

Dan calls the listing agent. They haven’t had an offer yet, he tells them, beaming while he holds his other hand over the phone. This is ours, guys! 

Their hearts lighten. They are briefly as angels, instead of two mildly depressed people on the cusp of middle age. 

One caveat, Dan says, but honestly, the house is already theirs. The problem with the house isn’t really fixable, but it’s minor, Dan assures them.

This issue with the house is that one of the closets opens on a black hole, which leads to God knows where. Maybe eternity? Maybe death? Maybe a diner in Cleveland with really fantastic waffles? No one can be certain. The house has been vacant since the hole opened up in the broom closet a few years back. 

Can we see it? The husband asks. 

Dan gets the combination to the lock and opens the closet door, slowly, not with his usual aplomb. It’s not a hole so much as a swirling vortex, not exactly the midnight black they’d been expecting, but something shot through with shades of deep blue like fjords. But still, quite a shock. You’d be surprised to find it in lieu of a dustpan. 

On the ride home, a bee flies in the window, startling them both, before stinging him, falling away, dead now, waiting to be turned into another form of matter. Neither of them believe in omens or even know what sign they are. They think about the children though, their girls, how they’d love to run around in the yard, to have their own rooms to paint and design. 

In bed, they talk about possible solutions for the hole. Would drywall do? Is it possible to rent a Hadron Collider for the day and reverse engineer the thing? Night settles in the trees, and the streets below are nearly silent, save the sound of a man shouting to no one in particular. They stop talking about the rip in the space time continuum. Instead, they think in the dark about what they’ve done to bring their lives to such a hopeless position. 

Once, during an interview for a contingent position with slightly higher pay, the husband had been told his creative work didn’t matter, and he’d known then he had come to a dead end. Maybe a more forceful person would have taken the news better, gone back and gotten an MBA or moved into PR, but he’d not only built a minor career from his love of stories, but also an idea or aesthetic contingent on the value of creative work—art, poetry, painting—as essential to the well-lived life. And now this choice, his artistic aesthetic, is why his family has to decide if they wanted to live in a house with a rip into space. 

He thinks of waking his wife, of turning to her and apologizing for not being a more present partner, at least financially, but she’s pretending to sleep, and he doesn’t want to bother her. An owl starts hooting at the window, but he realizes it’s not an owl at all, just a mourning dove, singing his eulogy.  

A sudden scream breaks open the thicket of silence. Their daughter roars into the room, red-faced and tearful over some nightmare she can’t explain. He pulls her small body into bed and comforts her, rubbing his hand across her back, calming her. 

You were gone, daddy. You were gone, she keeps saying over and over. And he tells her he’s right there, she doesn’t have to worry. The dream is over. Everything will be all right. 

When she stops crying, she lies between the two of them like a bridge spanning a gorge, joining two sides of a city into one.

Birds are at the window, singing about light. While they sleep, their subconscious minds reach the same decision. Their daughter still lies between them, her small chest rising and falling. They are buying the damn house. 

She can swing on the oak, her mother says. Maybe this house is about the dreams of their children. 

They move into the house with little fanfare. They put a large lock on the closet, shutting it off. They explain to the girls that the broom closet must never be entered. The girls are confused at first, so the husband tells them a monster lives in there who will gobble them up. 

Stop scaring them, his wife chides him later. 

I’m trying to keep them safe, he says. She argues that it’s a flaw, that instead he should be honest. 

They skip the housewarming party because things are tight financially, and they worry about the black hole in the broom closet. You can’t fall through a lock, he argues. But she worries people will want the full tour, even the broom closet. It’s expected, she says. 

They ask a contractor to look at the rift, but he says no one would ever approach the hole. The house issue was well-known in the contracting community.  

I’m not getting close to that fucking thing, he says, and they can’t blame him. 

In the evening, the moon sails through the sky. Squirrels jump like wild acrobats from an elm, scrambling along the roof. There is the dull hum of summertime cicadas and the smell of something fecund, the warmth leaving the grass. She pours him a glass of wine, and they sit on the porch and talk. 

Did you ever think we’d be this happy? She asks. 

Hard to say, he answers. 

What? She asks, awaking from her reverie. 

Fireflies wink in and out as streetlamps. 

I just didn’t always think we were suited for one another, early on.  

This is news to me. 

I thought you knew. 

People are a mystery. 

She leaves the porch in a huff and goes inside to make another drink but never comes back. He sits in the evening air as it grows cooler, raises the hairs on his arms, brushes through the oak leaves. 

One night, they have friends over and drink too much wine. Because he’s not judicious when drunk, the husband talks about the black hole. The gin and tonics make him bold, and he’s feeling wild and a bit sad. You’re shitting me, Greg says. No way you have a black hole in the broom closet. Prove it! Greg says it in the aggressive way of certain men, and the husband gets up immediately and opens the lock. 

The four of them stare into the swirling mass. Am I drunk or is that a black hole in your closet? Greg asks. 

It’s both, Greg’s wife chides, standing as far as possible from the closet while still peering in. 

That night, the wife says he’s been an absolute ass for mentioning the closet. That no one will ever allow their children to play at the house, and the girls will have only their stupid drunk father to blame. He listens without getting upset, realizes that she is right. When her breathing evens, he lies in the dark and thinks about the black hole swirling, about its strange appeal. The fact that unlike most of his life, the hole is something unknown, a chance. It comforts him, and he thinks about it in the days that follow as one might a lover. 

The girls do well in the new school district despite their father’s indiscretion. They wear uniforms and learn how to read books: The Boxcar Children, The Babysitter’s Club. As he drives them home from school, they say things like, We are happy to be humans because humans are the dominant species. 

He looks in the rearview mirror at his two little dominant beings, and his heart swells with love. They are so much themselves already, so distant from him. He reminds them humans are destroying the planet. 

His older daughter says, Still, I’d rather be the dominant species than a swan.

Her logic is irrefutable, even if he half-heartedly reminds her that swans are very beautiful creatures.

They go pensive, gaze out the window, and he does too. They pass an Italian pasta bar that is supposed to have really fantastic gnocchi, but he doubts they’ll ever go there. He passes another bar, an outdoor spot where people in their twenties get buzzed on overpriced beers and wander home to sleep it off or have mid-afternoon sex. 

Dad, are you going bald?

At home, the girls are terrified of the locked closet. The husband and wife often forget about the rip in the space time continuum. They used to make jokes about it. Have you seen our third child lately? What? I feel like they take up all our time.

They are aging parents, and the gentle slope of life’s downward turn has begun. This movement has changed the fear they’d once felt when thinking of the rip. 

Hummingbirds hang in the air, heads dipping in a cardinal climber he planted the year they moved in. The plant now climbs the trellis, spreading across the fence in a brocade of red. Sometimes the smell that reaches their nose is mint or lavender, and it’s hard not to feel solidly home. Their daughter, her black hair shining in the light, swings through the air as though it too is in full bloom. 

His wife begins to get aggressively fit. She wears tight fitting yoga pants, smiles a bit less frequently, and keeps dropping the name of her personal trainer into conversations. She takes an evening class to try out watercolor, another to work with found objects for sculpture. As he sits in the yard, wine in hand, he knows the classes aren’t really about sculpting or watercolors, they are for avoiding him. 

His wife is putting found sculptures in the yard. One is somewhat reminiscent of a diorama. He swears, but maybe this is his imagination, that the sculpture includes three figures, all happily playing by a lake. Again, he knows he’s seeing things, but maybe he isn’t. Maybe she wishes he was out of the picture. 

At work, his contract is renewed every year, but there have been budget cuts across the state. He wishes he worked in the hard sciences or had gotten an MBA, but he’s chosen his passions poorly. His students love him and give him good ratings after the course, ask for recommendations, but he knows it doesn’t matter. By the nature of his contract, he’s expendable, like species that aren’t a good fit for the warming Arctic. 

One of his students asks for a recommendation letter, and he writes it at home, while rain patters in the trees. He writes of the student’s facility with language, her incredible ability to engage in discourse in a meaningful way. He talks of her incredible dedication. 

When he finishes, the rain has passed, and only the sound of the starlings remains. He wishes someone would write a letter like this about him, describe his dedication to teaching students, to remaining engaged even when they haven’t done the reading or being wholly open to them if they’ve had an issue and missed too many classes. He sleeps and has only nightmares. 

The girls are older now, often involved in after-school activities, soccer and school plays, dance. His wife considers leaving him but stays. Though a part of her is unavailable to him now. She seems dazed and irritated with her life. 

Did you move the clothes to the dryer before you went to sleep? Did you remember Helen has a travel soccer game on Tuesday, and I’ll be doing my sculpture class? 

 The questions don’t really bother him. He is a forgetful person. Rather, it’s that she already knows the answer to her questions, has already thought of him as a failure. Maybe he is. 

His department chair is sitting in a large swivel chair, watering a plant when he enters. We’ve loved having you here, she begins. 

Rather than driving home, he stops at a bar to get good and drunk. 

She doesn’t love me anymore, he tells the man sitting next to him, a stranger. 

The stranger looks back at him very seriously and puts a hand on his shoulder. No one loves you. 

The road swerves wildly, but he stays the course. The overhanging trees act like a shield. He still writes stories sometimes, and he understands, narratively speaking, that characters need rising action, but he doesn’t feel the narrative of his life cohering. Theoretically, the loss of his job could lead him into a new career, but he feels too old for that, knows it to be true. 

As he drives, concentrating on the road as closely as he thinks is possible, he understands his life has been unraveling like a long spool of thread, and he’s only now noticing it. It’s as though he’s staring into the darkness directly for the first time. 

Back home, he takes down the whisky and pours a shot to calm himself. He breathes deeply as he’s been practicing lately in yoga classes with his wife, an attempt at connection. But all he smells is the stench of the trash moldering in the overly warm kitchen, and his breathing goes ragged again. The girls have a ballet recital, and he’s missing it, missing it to get drunk by himself and be sad. The amber liquid flows through him as fire, and he thinks he can do anything. Come home so we can fuck, he texts his wife and stares at his phone until it’s clear he’s getting no answer. 

He pours another round and downs it swiftly. The liquor doesn’t burn at all. It goes down smoothly. He looks out the window at the swing moving slowly in a breeze he can’t otherwise see. He knows he should go back outside, watch moonlight fold on the grass, think of the girls and how best to tell his wife. But instead, he thinks of the black hole in the broom closet. 

He thinks of resisting it, but he feels powerless. He leaves his body almost, watches himself walk to the closet and unlock it, open the door. He stares into the darkness as God must have stared into the void of the universe. The man swears he feels something pulling him, something beyond his own volition, the terrible pull is too much for him. He has no choice but to pass through. 

***

In this world, things are radically different. The man has no children to think of, no house, no black hole. In this world, he becomes famous rather quickly for the combination of his strange origin story and his creative work, which includes an incredibly realistic depiction of family even though he doesn’t have one. He’s renowned for his ability to conjure stories about characters, a wife, two daughters, who come alive on the page in a way unmatched by any other contemporary writers. For he not only brings them to life, but their very essence is also of loss, as though his fully realized characters are ghosts, impressions on the page. 

In this way, the man is a bit like expats of the twentieth century, who managed to write about America with startling clarity from Paris. His novels and memoir of living in another world, which people both doubt, but can’t entirely refute, win awards. He’s a sensation. An enigma. He’s spoken of in reverential terms. They talk about the quiet sort of sadness he carries with him, which could almost be mistaken for the absolute truth of his claims. 

His life is so unlike the life he lived in his own world he sometimes thinks it’s that other life that was the dream, the one where he’d struggled to find a solid footing in his career and connect with his wife and daughters, no matter how hard he tried. 

This life, he thinks to himself, looking out the window of a hotel room at the city lights glittering below, is the real one. He’s been asked to do a reading in Washington, D.C., and he’s agreed because they’re paying him enough money. His publisher calls, and they talk about where he’ll go next while he sips sparkling wine on the balcony. Sometimes he feels a longing stirring in him when the wind rises, lifting the hairs on his arm. Sometimes that same longing when he hears children laughing from very far away. 

In those rare moments, he finds himself wondering about the physics of both worlds, wonders if goodness wasn’t a finite substance he’d used up in his past life, tending the girls to sleep, never mentioning the trainer to his wife, lying there on the hardwood floor night after night while the girls fell asleep in their cribs as babies. He hadn’t been perfect, but he’d committed himself to always being there to rub backs, to give medicine and take temperatures, to give the best of himself to them. 

Perhaps he’d been born into that world by accident. His life. The girls. An accident. This idea comforts him. He smells chlorine and rises to look over the balcony in the hotel room. The pool is a flashy aquamarine, lit from below. He wonders, as he often has through the years, if he jumped from the balcony, if his death would lead him back to his own world, back to his wife and children. 

The reading goes well that evening. He reads something funny on a whim as opposed to his usual pensive reflections. Often, he reads from an essay about seeing his first snowfall, running out to play in the snow but being viscerally ashamed he’d wet his pants. From there, the essay explores his complex relationship with his father, juxtaposed with the relationship he has with the children. 

But tonight isn’t a night for that. He reads something he’s just started working on, a small scene of family life, two little girls reciting funny things they’ve heard from school as he drives them home. He describes the way the light threads through the trees. The way the girl’s laughter caroms off the walls of the car, and the father begins laughing so wildly he has to pull onto the side of the road. He describes the way the father feels wholly wrapped in the moment, deeply loved and content. 

When he finishes, the audience sits rapt. The publicist comes on and describes how the signing will go. He sits down and signs the books one after another. Has it changed him so much, he wonders as he signs a book, going from obscure to famous? From misunderstood to fully realized? He addresses the books to husbands and wives, old friends and lovers. People he’s never seen but has to imagine as he writes their names in the books. All those strange constellations that make up our lives, which we try and make sense of, turning them into hunters, bears, the wreck of days.

As he’s signing, he notices a woman as he sometimes does, lingering near the end of the line. She’s waiting to speak with him alone, nervously running her hands along her dress. He tells the publicist she can go and turns back to the woman. He’ll order a gin and tonic for both of them and see where the conversation goes. She is younger and smiles at him sweetly. 

At the bar, he folds and refolds the bar napkin, making a haphazard swan. He presents it to her, and she smiles with something mischievous in her eyes. 

How accurate are the stories? She asks. What parts are made up? 

It’s a question he gets all the time, and he doesn’t quite know the answer himself. 

I’ll tell you after another round, he says, flagging down the barkeeper. In a moment, he might tell her the truth, close the distance between them. But before he can lean, she turns back to him and looks for a beat too long into his eyes, and he recognizes her, swinging through that summered air, lying on the bed between him and his wife, sad and scared. 

The bar is full of so many strange lights, it’s as though he is swimming through an aquarium. His heart goes wild in his chest. What can he say that will sound convincing enough? That will explain why he never searched for a door back. Maybe if he describes the pull of the darkness she’ll understand. Maybe she felt it too. She looks back at him intently, waiting for the story to begin. 

END

Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere.

10 January 2024