Black Hole

Contains Alcohol references and minor expletives

Arthur Chestnut, 21 years old, unemployed, was walking down the main street of Tralee at four o’clock in the morning. He was very drunk. In order to travel in a straight line, he was having to use one arm to periodically bounce himself off the buildings to his left. This became intermittently problematic when he passed a window, misjudged the space, hit his head on the lintel and fell onto the road. He got up, however, each time, and resumed his horizontal kangarooing journey home.

He had been hopping off walls long enough for his arm to start throbbing through his stupor, when he decided to stop and have a smoke. The process of locating, producing and lighting the cigarette, an operation which would involve using both hands, which in turn meant finding an alternative balancing method, was an intimidating contortion in his current handicap.

To the uninitiated observer, uninitiated in the multifarious acrobatics of the drunken adventurer, Arthur probably looked like a man desperately, but in slow motion, trying to retrieve a squirrel from inside his jacket. It would not have looked graceful. These would not have been movements recommended in gymnastics. In actuality, however, the skill involved in the completion of the seemingly trivial maneuver of obtaining a lighter is, whilst under the burdensome cloud of seven beers, three vodkas, a bottle of Buckfast, and a shot of green Chartreuse, to be admired. The fact that Arthur managed to get both the lighter and the cigarette into his hands before toppling backwards through the window was, we have to give the man his dues, a mean feat.

Arthur’s body smashed through the window and thumped onto a carpeted floor, but Arthur’s mind went somewhere else. Arthur’s mind took the entire street with it, and in fact the entire night, and tumbled into a different body from the body which had just smashed through the window. Arthur’s mind now found itself in the Arthur’s body of several hours before.

Arthur’s mind wondered what the hell was going on.

The scene was exactly what it had been. There was no doubt about when and where he was. He was back at the table in the booth in the bar with the guys. He looked from side to side and round at the scene.

“What do you reckon, Arthur? Every day for a year, only one food.”

Arthur saw and felt and heard himself answer.

“Beams.”

Strange, thought Arthur’s disembodied mind. I am in me but not me. He tried to speak but nothing happened. He tried to move his body but he couldn't.

“There’s no such food as ‘beams’, Arthur.”

“Ah, beaps, I mean, I mean beebs.”

“Arthur, you are very drunk. Don’t you have a job interview tomorrow, dude?”

“Need a flupping job,” agreed Arthur.

“Arthur, go home, man.”

But as the he that he was in was thinking about getting up and leaving, the evening twisted back around on itself again and he found that he was lying on the floor of a sitting room, staring at a chandelier. He could feel the cigarette and lighter in his hand. Sweet Moses almighty, he thought, what the hell was all that?

He moved his head from left to right. Damn it, I’m in someone’s house, he thought. He could see a fireplace, a couch, and a large grandfather clock on the other side of the room. He quickly shot to his feet. What now? he thought, I’m not drunk anymore. Or am I? He tried to touch his toes. Success. Looks like I’m not drunk. He was a bit disappointed. But his disappointment quickly gave way to smug relief as he realized he would now have no problem hopping right back out the window and making a run for it.

He was just about to do this when someone behind him coughed.

“Ahem.”

Arthur turned to discover an old man.

He had a face like a withered god. His body was ambivalent. His head was undecided. His eyes were like proton stars. He was engulfed in a mass of robes. He spoke in a voice that could have been hollowed out of an oak tree.

“What happened to you just there now?”

“Em, hello, man, sorry about the window,” said Arthur.

The old man dismissed the window with a wave.

“Don’t worry about it. More important things are afoot. What happened to you?”

Arthur was completely sober at this stage. What had initially presented itself as an enormous catastrophe within which Arthur had visions of being arrested for being drunk and disorderly and breaking and entering, had back-flipped inexplicably into an experience that had confuddled him to such an extent that he was now questioning his very existence. An answer to that very question would not be unwelcome, he thought.

“Man, I’ve no idea what just happened. I don’t know. Do you?”

“No, I don’t know what happened to you but if something did happen, I should be very interested to know what it was. Did you travel in time?” said the old man.

“Is that what happened?” Arthur exclaimed, “I time-traveled! Wow man, yes! I think I did! I went back to earlier on tonight. It was weird.”

“Were you there when you got there?” asked the old man.

“Em, what do you mean?”

“I mean were you from earlier tonight there?”

“Ah. Kinda. I was inside myself from earlier. How did it happen?”

The old man got up slowly from his sedentary position. His body moved like an octopus in an apple tree. He came over to where Arthur was standing. He gently took him by both arms and slowly moved him aside. Arthur complied.

“You were standing,” said the old man, “in a mathematical anomaly which I have created. You are very lucky. I’ve only ever tried it on rabbits until now, until you accidentally fell into the middle of it. You’re very lucky.”

“Am I?” said Arthur, incredulously.

“Oh for sure. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?” He produced one from his robes, steaming hot, and offered it to Arthur.

“Oh, yes, thank you,” said Arthur, and took the cup.

“Oh yes, you’re very lucky. You’ll go down in history as the first man in time. The first time traveler. You’ll be famous. You have to tell me every last detail.” He took out a notepad and pen from his robe. Arthur wondered what else he had under there.

“But how did you create a time machine?” Arthur asked. The hot chocolate was extremely relaxing.

“Ah, well, it wasn’t easy. I had to create two black holes, make them collide, maintain the rate of collision at an invariable constant and then, then, I had to find a way to seal the whole thing off from the rest of spacetime whilst also allowing for both an inlet and an outlet. It wasn’t easy at all.”

“Wow. How did you do that?”

“With snooker balls and idiotic propositions. Nothing denser in the universe. I combined them and squeezed them down into black holes.”

“Wow,” said Arthur again, “but how did you squeeze them down?”

“With a reverse microscope.”

“You mean a telescope?”

“No. A reverse microscope. Then, I waited until they were so small that I could feel spacetime warping around me. Then I stood on them with steel-toe-cap boots. The collision happened naturally, as physics dictates; because the first ball was a pink and the second a black, the pink was attracted to the black, being, of course, of a lower points value. To contain the experiment, I bubble wrapped the whole thing.”

“Where’s the bubble wrap now?”

“I popped it all last night. But that’s not important.”

“But where’s the black hole now?”

“Behind you! Just there under the window. That’s why I moved you. Don’t go back into it unless you want to travel again. Now, take a seat and tell me everything.”

Arthur sat with the old man at a table in the corner and told him about the whole episode. The old man scribbled eagerly, pausing now and again to draw some mathematical symbol in the margin. Arthur told him about being drunk and falling through the window. Then he described what it was like being inside himself but still being himself. The old man was very excited about this aspect of the experience.

“So you, your ego, was inside the mind of you, your ego, from earlier today. Fascinating. Could you feel your body?”

“I think so. I don’t know. No. Yes, yes, I could. But I had no control over it.”

“Did you know what the earlier you was thinking?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yes, but only because I remembered it, I think anyway.”

“Did you experience déjà vu?”

“No.”

The old man asked Arthur question after question and took a mountain of notes.

Finally, three cups of hot chocolate and a ham sandwich later, all produced from the robe, the old man was done. The old man made Arthur promise to drop in again the next morning ‘for some muscular reflex tests’. What a strange night, thought Arthur Chestnut as he walked soberly home.

                                  *                                            *                                            *

The next morning Arthur entered the old man’s house as promised, but this time via the front door.

“Hello?” called Arthur, “Hello?”

There was no answer, but he made for the sitting room. He knocked politely on the door before going in.

There were seven people in the room. Four of them were sitting rigidly against the back wall, staring vacantly into the air. They were not moving. Two people, a male police officer and a woman of around seventy years of age, were lying in the middle of the floor. The final, and only animated body in the room, was the old man, who was sitting at the table furiously scribbling in his notebook.

“Ah, Arthur! Hello again!” he chirped.

Arthur was in shock. He surveyed the room once more.

“What’s going on man? I mean, what’ve you been up to? Who are all these people?”

“Do you mean the time travelers?” he asked.

“What? Man, are you kidding me? What exactly have you been doing?"

“I have been conducting further experiments, Arthur. You don’t think I can write the experiment up based solely on your one drunken anecdote?”

“Have those people been into the black hole?”

“Well, you are phrasing it differently perhaps than I would myself, but yes.”

“How would you phrase it?”

“I’ve been pushing people into the hole.”

“Pushing people into the hole? What? Are you crazy? How?”

“I hid behind a wheelie bin and tripped them as they walked past.”

“But that woman must be seventy-five years old. Is she ok? Are any of them ok? They look like vegetables!”

 “They are fine, Arthur. Of course, yes, they are catatonic, but I think they are ok. It’s too early to tell. But the experiment is coming on amazingly. You won’t believe what I have discovered so far. And there’s no telling where it will end, if ‘end’ is even an appropriate word in this situation.”

“But you can’t just go around pushing people into black holes!”

“But Arthur, this is science. Do you know how many rabbits had to die before Edison produced a satisfactory fridge?”

“What?”

“Sit down and let me explain what I have discovered so far, Arthur, and then I have something momentous to show you.”

Arthur complied and the old man elucidated.

“The most interesting aspect of your experience, Arthur, is that you went in drunk and came out sober. Why? Why should this be the case? And what was the common denominator, I asked myself. Time, memory, drunkenness? Memory, of course! I was intrigued by your report that you remembered what you were saying whilst your mind from the present moment was inside the mind-body of you from earlier in the night, but that you were not experiencing any feelings of déjà vu. Déjà vu is memory syncing with the present moment, as you might know. However, though exactly this was happening to you, you did not experience the feeling. You might be able to guess what that means.”

“Haven’t got a Scooby.”

“You were not here, Arthur, but you were also not there.”

“Where the hell was I then? I remember being in both places.”

“No, no you do not. You only think you do. The reason is that you were baloobabbed out of your head on Buckfast and Green Chartreuse. The mind does not make new memories when it is thus intoxicated. Therefore, when you arrived back into this mind, you arrived into a mind which was not making new memories. Had you not travelled in time last night you would have woken up this morning having experienced a blackout of the night before. Now, Arthur, I found this immensely curious. Why would you go to a time when your mind was not making memories? Why?”

“I have no idea, man.”

“Why do you insist on reaffirming my gender with every utterance?”

“Dunno, man.”

“I will tell you why. Time is inextricably connected to memory. Without memory, there is no time. There is change, but change is different from time. You can’t undo a change, but, but, Arthur, you can refold time. If you do refold time, as it seems I have done with the black hole, the vacuum which has been created in memory must be filled.”

“Interesting,” Arthur said.

“And Arthur,” but here the old man stopped and addressed Arthur questioningly, “How much do you know about physics, Arthur?”

“Absolutely nothing, man.”

“Ah. Then you are not aware of something called the ‘space-time continuum’?”

“Oh I know about that.”

“Ah, great! Then I am sure you can guess where I’m going. Maybe you can guess what I’ve been doing with our friends here.”

“Not a clue.”

“Arthur, I have to show you.”

Here, the old man slowly and dramatically produced a pocket watch attached to a gold chain.

“You see, Arthur, it is known that time, and space, are codependent. This much we can accept from the fact that you moved into the body of your earlier self. But watch what happens, ha ha, no pun intended, when….”

The old man walked over to the catatonic time travelers.

“….I swing this watch….”

The old man dangled the watch from the chain and swung it in a pendulum motion towards the police officer. Arthur looked on in horror as the police officer’s head began to expand to the size of a large pony. The head grew in size as the watch swung closer, then shrank as the watch moved away.

“Stop!” cried Arthur.

The old man was beaming with excitement.

“Amazing, Arthur, isn’t it?”

Arthur was stunned.

“This is madness,” Arthur implored, “What do you think you are doing? You’ll kill someone!”

But the old man wasn’t listening. He moved along the line of time travelers, swinging the watch in front of each one, laughing and cooing as their various body parts inflated and shrank. Arthur decided he had had enough. He began to inch towards the door.

“No, Arthur, don’t go!” the old man protested, stopping his watch-swinging. “I need you to help me move something.”

“I’m not helping you do anything,” said Arthur, “This is crazy.”

“One more thing, Arthur. One more thing. Help me move the clock, and then you can go.”

The large grandfather clock stood several meters away.

“Okay, nut-job old man. Then I’m outta here, first man in time or not, man.”

“Just help me move it over here and you can go.”

Arthur slid the grandfather clock across the room while the old man guided him.

“That’s it, Arthur, that’s it. Don’t worry, we have all the time in the world!”

After much effort and sweat, Arthur had the clock where the old man wanted it, just next to the black hole. Glancing at the clock face, Arthur remembered that he was supposed to have a job interview that morning. It was ten fifty-nine on the clock. What the hell am I doing here, he thought, when I could be out improving my life? Time, said Arthur to himself, for me to get myself well and truly out of this nonsense. He turned to face the old man.

But as he did so, the old man took a wallet out of his robe and threw a fifty-euro note on the ground.

“It’s yours if you want it, Arthur,” said the old man, “for all your trouble.”

I might as well get something out of all this, thought Arthur, and stooped to pick up the money.

And then the old man pushed him.

And then

BONG!

Both the body and the mind of Arthur Chestnut dropped into the back hole and away from everything. The old man stared at the space where Arthur had been.

“Hmm,” he said to himself, “I wonder where he went.”

At that moment, the catatonic time travelers began coming round. There was much head rubbing and grumbling. The old man kindly and helpfully assisted them all to their shaky feet. One by one they filed out onto the street in a post-traumatic daze.

The old man sighed, and shuffled back to his notepads. But then one of the time travelers returned.

“Excuse me old man,” he said, “But I thought you might like to know that there is an extremely drunk young man falling about on the street outside, trying to light a cigarette.”

And then SMASH, Arthur came through the window.