The Instant You Entered the Black Hole

1

Teh-chang came home a couple of days after the surgery, wheeled out of the hospital with a cotton bandage wrapped around his head cartoon-style and, even stranger-looking, a white mesh Styrofoam netting gathered into a point on top of that, which made him resemble a delicate fruit packaged for long-distance transportation.

He had survived having his skull sawn open, a surgeon slicing out a tumor over a centimeter and a half in diameter and then putting his head back together. If that were all, it would have been a happy ending. Instead, it was just the beginning.

The brain tumor was not the source but an emissary. Stage 4 lung cancer. The intern just happened to mention the words printed on the chart during his morning rounds. And that was how they found out.

A black hole is a place where the laws of physics as we know them break down. Einstein taught us that gravity warps space itself, causing it to curve. So given a dense enough object, space-time can become so warped that it twists in on itself, burrowing a hole through the very fabric of reality.

The instant you entered the black hole, reality would split in two. In one, you would be instantly incinerated, and in the other you would plunge on into the black hole utterly unharmed.¹

Much later, his daughter found the article about black holes. When she read it, she felt a powerful longing. In this reality, he had died and become ash. She knew this to be true. She had been with him when he took his last breath and then stopped breathing forever. She had felt the warmth dissipate from his body over the course of several hours, until he was wrapped in a sheet and taken away. She had touched his ashes with her own hands and rolled tiny fragments of his bones between her fingers.

But what if, as the physicists hypothesize, the universe split?

“There will be many things to happen,” he had written to her in an e-mail during the weeks after the surgery. “Just be quiet and wait and see. I will be all right.”

As you go deeper into the black hole, space becomes ever more curvy until, at the centre, it becomes infinitely curved. This is the singularity. Space and time cease to be meaningful ideas, and the laws of physics as we know them—all of which require space and time—no longer apply.

Immediately after the surgery, he was different. Usually reserved and silent to a fault (in his wife’s opinion), he marveled out loud at how beautiful the nurse was, how incredibly handsome the surgeon. The nurse, a blonde-haired woman dressed all in pink, appeared to be a crew member on a spaceship, part of his abduction to another planet or galaxy. Crying, he asked his wife, “Can I be a writer?” More firmly, he said, “From now on, we only say positive things.” Turning to his son, he observed, “You have big ears.” His wife and daughter and son laughed through their tears.

What happens here, no one knows. Another universe? Oblivion? The back of a bookcase? It’s a mystery.

Before he retired and started writing poetry full-time, he had been a nuclear physicist who studied fusion energy. He had a lifelong interest in theoretical physics, which led naturally to interests in philosophy, religion, and ancient history, and a belief in the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. After the surgery he became obsessed with “the issue of the universe. It is fundamental,” as he wrote in an e-mail to a scientist friend. Of his daughter, he asked insistently, with the manic energy that pulsed through him in those weeks, “Are you Heisenberg or are you Einstein?”

His daughter seemed confused.

He knew she didn’t know anything about Werner Heisenberg, or even Albert Einstein. He wanted to tell her that this was a question concerning his own fate and, indeed, the fate of the universe. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle posited an underlying unknowability in the universe. In contrast, Einstein believed in an underlying order, that the complete predictability of physical laws determined the course of events. If Einstein was right, following the laws of classical physics, then the laws of the universe could not be altered; his illness would follow its inevitable course, and he would die. If Heisenberg was right, however, following the laws of quantum physics, there were other possibilities: unknown quantities, alternate universes, and multiple realities.

She had studied art and literature and didn’t know anything about physics, though, so he didn’t try to explain. Someday, probably soon, she would see for herself.

When you reach the horizon, you freeze, like someone has hit the pause button. You remain plastered there, motionless, stretched across the surface of the horizon as a growing heat begins to engulf you.

According to an outside viewer, you are slowly obliterated by the stretching of space, the stopping of time and the fires of Hawking radiation. Before you ever cross over into the black hole’s darkness, you’re reduced to ash.

But before we plan your funeral, let’s view this gruesome scene from your point of view. Now, something even stranger happens: nothing.

In the wake of his surgery, his world changed. Everything he encountered was suffused with special significance, and every person could be conversed with. When hot-air balloons drifted close over the house near sunset, as they often did in the spring, taking off from a nearby open field, he ran out to wave to the passengers, still wearing his Styrofoam netting on his head. “They came to see me,” he told his daughter, grinning happily. After each doctor’s visit, he kept the hospital’s paper identification bracelet on his wrist and thrust it at strangers, informing them enthusiastically, “I am a hospital patient, dying of lung cancer!”

You sail straight into nature’s most ominous destination without so much as a bump or a jiggle—and certainly no stretching, slowing or scalding radiation. That’s because you’re in freefall, and therefore you feel no gravity.

After all, the event horizon is not like a brick wall floating in space. It’s an artefact of perspective. An observer who remains outside the black hole can’t see through it, but that’s not your problem. As far as you’re concerned there is no horizon.

Two weeks after the surgery, he ran away from home.

He had been posting increasingly candid messages on a family webpage his daughter had set up to share news and support during his treatment. He added his middle-of-the-night musings (he could not sleep at all) about his love, about the universe, about having to get up to pee—everything that came into his mind.

S. may not be happy because she always thought I cared and care for others, and never care for her. I always ignore her. I always lied to her. I never loved her. But I want to tell all of you that I loved her, and love her. The only thing I don’t really know is that whether I loved her before I was born. There is another thing even if she still not believe it, I will go to another world to find the answer whether I will love her there. My prediction is that I will. But you will have to wait, like S. She has to wait.

His wife and son were not happy.

He knew they were talking about deleting the page. They were going to cut off his access to the outside world. What choice did he have? He had to go. That afternoon he sent his son an e-mail titled “My Last E-mail” and walked out of the house.

After an hour had passed and he hadn’t come back, his wife went out in her car to look for him. She spotted him about a mile away, sitting on the steps of the library, but when he saw her, he ran.

His daughter was in New York, traveling for work, when she received a string of urgent calls and text messages from her brother. Had their father called her? He had not. Panicking, she dialed his cell phone number several times in a row, but it only rang and rang, and went to voice mail.

Back home, his wife and son decided to call the sheriff. Because of Teh-chang’s erratic state of mind and their location in a wealthy area, the police acted immediately, sending a helicopter to circle the typically quiet enclave. The helicopter shone a searchlight through the tall eucalyptus trees, over the gentle slopes of the golf course, onto the dirt paths by the large reservoir abutting the other side of their street, and over the ominously dark two-lane highway upon which cars and trucks sped recklessly into rocky, mountainous terrain. They used a loudspeaker to call for him, the foreign last name and the bright, sweeping lights perhaps striking fear into the hearts of their elderly white neighbors. The landscape yielded no answers.

By that time, he was far away.

Sure, if the black hole were smaller you’d have a problem. The force of gravity would be much stronger at your feet than at your head, stretching you out like a piece of spaghetti. But lucky for you this is a big one, millions of times more massive than our Sun, so the forces that might spaghettify you are feeble enough to be ignored.

In fact, in a big enough black hole, you could live out the rest of your life pretty normally.

2

He walked out of the house that afternoon with no destination in mind. His thin rubber flip-flops made a slapping sound on the asphalt road. Every once in a while, a large SUV would barrel past him, crossing into the other lane to do so, but no one else was out. He himself had walked this road hundreds of times and had driven it every day over the past seventeen years. It was a golden spring afternoon, and the air smelled of orange blossoms and freshly cut grass. When he got to the main road, he didn’t keep his head down, as he would have before (his previous self would have been contemplating something and also wanting to avoid any attention from the local security patrol, who tended to stop single men with brownish skin). Instead he tilted his face upward toward the sky and grinned. It was a beautiful world. Why hadn’t he always known that? Why didn’t they know that?

As he walked down the pedestrian path parallel to the road, he was flanked by the rolling hills of the golf course on the left and immaculately maintained bushes of blooming flowers and fragrant herbs on his right. He could hear the deep metallic tink of golf club smacking golf ball every now and then, imagined in his mind the tiny pitted globes hurtling high into the air.

When he got to the bridge, he looked for the egret, as he always did—that majestic, pristinely white creature of infinite patience—but it was not there. Instead, there were two boys, sandy haired and serious faced. They crouched halfway down the bank, staring longingly toward a soccer ball, which floated rather unmovingly on a thick scrim of algae, close to where the small creek either began or ended in the circular mouth of a large concrete storm drain.

He thought about how his own kids had passed over this wooden bridge every day when they were little, walking home from elementary school. For a period of time, the boy had caught crayfish here and taken them home to live in the square fountain by the swimming pool. (The adults had thought about cooking them to eat, but the kids only wanted to keep them as pets and feed them, watching as the creatures snatched silver guppies midcurrent with their surprisingly quick claws and then used those same claws to stuff the soft iridescent flesh into their tiny crustacean maws.) These kids, he realized, were just like his kids, before his kids grew up into reticent and rather joyless adults.

“Need help?” he called, his voice cracking only slightly. (He was not used to speaking loudly, had been doing so only these past couple of weeks, since his world had broken open into these luminous spaces of beauty and possibility.)

The boys seemed surprised but only for a moment. “Yeah,” one of them nodded. “We’re trying to get our ball.”

It was not difficult to ease himself down the bank and wade into the water. It was, however, deeper than he expected, and colder. He was up to his waist, the algae clinging to his wet shirt, by the time he reached the ball. With both hands, he grasped the ball carefully and held it up in front of his chest all the way back to the bank.

“Thanks!” both boys yelped when he handed it back to them, thrilled by this unexpected turn of events. They were not yet old enough to be frightened or upset by the sight of a grown man fully dressed and half-soaked with creek water.

“No problem!” He smiled. He felt like singing. It had been such an easy thing to do for them. It was not how it was at home. His family was so hard to help. To his wife, everything he did was wrong. And now he had gotten cancer and would be such a burden on her. A failure of a man, his earlier self intoned. But he pushed the thought away. Now, there was only this day, this afternoon, these boys, this victory. He could do anything.

When he got to town, he sat down on the brick steps of the library to rest. He had been there just a few minutes when suddenly his wife pulled up to the curb in her white Mercedes. Through the tinted windows, he could see her mouth set in a grim line. Oh no, he wasn’t going back to that. He ran.

It was not hard to duck behind the low buildings, to slip away between them. He walked quickly through a courtyard, passed a stodgy restaurant they had gone to a few times when the kids were young, a real-estate office, a law firm. Without really thinking about it, he found himself standing in front of a plain white building that said First Church of Christ, Scientist. Christ, Scientist! Grinning, he walked up to the double doors and pulled on the handle. It was locked. He frowned. Weren’t places of God supposed to be open all the time? He could see a young woman sitting behind a desk inside. He knocked on the window. She looked up but didn’t move. What was wrong with her? Didn’t she understand that the door should not be locked? Impatient, he knocked on the glass harder, with an open hand. Now he saw fear on her face. She stood up, but instead of coming toward the door, she went the other direction and disappeared from sight. He waited. He banged on the glass again, but no one came.

Never mind. He knew there was another church down the road. Maybe there would be some true Christians there.

The doors were not locked. He found himself inside an auditorium. There was a rehearsal of some kind going on. Several young people were speaking loudly and making sweeping gestures with their hands. He smiled at them, and they smiled back, without fear or suspicion. This was how a church should be, he thought.

After the rehearsal was over, he approached one of them, a young man with a particularly kind face. It was not hard to persuade the man to give him a ride. As strange as Teh-chang looked (his pants were still a bit damp), wasn’t he like Jesus, a humble, wandering prophet? He was not Christian himself, but he had always known Christians and been interested in Christianity. Christians understood that there was something much bigger than human beings in the universe. And they believed in life after death.

The young man was driving back to his home in Temecula, about forty miles away. Teh-chang knew then where he needed to go. At first, he had told the young man he could drop him off in Temecula, but as they approached the turnoff for the place he really wanted, he told him plainly, “Turn here.”

“I can’t.” For the first time, the young man, really just a boy compared to Teh-chang, looked frightened. “I, uh, have a date tonight. I can’t be late.”

“She’ll be impressed!” Teh-chang insisted. “You helped a stranger in need. It’s very Christian. I will even help you score points on the date.”

Finally, reluctantly, the young man made the turn. But after that, he focused only on driving and didn’t want to talk anymore. That was fine. Teh-chang’s destination, the one he now realized had been in the back of his mind all along, was close at hand.

He felt so powerful. He had walked out of his house with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, his wallet, and his cell phone. Without calling anyone or spending any money, he had bent the universe to his will. Strangers were so kindhearted, so easily manipulated. It was remarkable that he had never realized his own capability.

He knew he had had to leave his family to come into it, this power. They wanted to censor him, to isolate him. They didn’t understand him, had never understood him. He did not hate them—no, of course not— they were his angels, he had always loved them, maybe even before he knew them. But they seemed very far away now, and that was a good thing.

3

Looking back now, his daughter realizes they should have known exactly where to find him. He had written it plainly himself, after all, in that “last e-mail” he sent to his son:

“I long to play slot machines until the day I die.”

Pala Casino sat in the San Luis Rey River valley, in remote northern inland San Diego County. In the spring it was a wistfully beautiful place. The valley’s eponymous river, dry for much of the year, asserted itself, greening the trees and attracting songbirds to its rocky creekbeds. Graceful cottonwood trees reached their intricately twisting branches up into the air, and their heart-shaped leaves fluttered in the breeze. They released wispy puffs of cotton that drifted in the air like fairy dust.

And then there was the casino, which rose out of the dry land like a magical castle.

This was the land of the Pala Indians, whose Luiseño and Cupeño ancestors lived and worked and thrived in the region for thousands of years, and then suffered and were forced together here, under first the Spanish mission system and later the American reservation system. They still lived here today, in double-wide trailers and modest shack homes that lay just past the shadow of the casino.

But he didn’t know about any of that; like most of the people who came to this flashy temple of dreams, he didn’t even think to wonder about it. On that day, in the passenger seat of the silently afraid Christian boy who drove where he was told, he just followed his heart, and his heart wanted to play slot machines.

Years ago, when he had gone to the Casino by himself for the first time, he felt a sense of freedom he rarely had before. No one in his family knew he was there. His kids had their own lives, and across the ocean in Taiwan, where his wife had moved back for work, it was the middle of the night and his wife was sleeping.

He loved the utter chance of the slot machines, their colorful graphics, the thrill of possibility, the repetition of pressing the buttons and watching the images spin again and again. It didn’t matter if he won; all he had to do was not lose too much. It was unlike anything else in his life: the simple enjoyment and, over and over, the possibility of winning. Start over. Start over. Start over. Every push of the button was a fresh chance. You could win at life, or at least know what that felt like.

Now he felt all of that, magnified by a thousand. But it was like everything had been turned inside out. He realized that this joy and possibility were not only part of the Casino but part of the entire world. The Casino was the world. It was thrilling. He felt as though the portal of the universe had opened up to him and he could see it all, its workings, its endlessness, its unknowability. But it was a glorious unknowability, an unknowability that he wanted to count on. Maybe, just maybe, the universe offered something rather than nothing. He wanted to live the rest of his life based on an assumption of somethingness, rather than nothingness, as he had always done before.

The trick was not to lose too much.

4

In total, he stayed at the casino hotel for five days and four nights. Although he hadn’t really thought it through, it was an ideal place to run away to. There were comfortable hotel rooms to sleep in and three restaurants, one of which featured the American diner food he loved. The waitresses—especially the kind angel, Maria—knew his name and remembered his order (in the morning: sausage, eggs, blueberry pancakes). Unlike his wife and daughter, they smiled at him and treated him kindly. And, of course, there were the slot machines, hundreds of them, spinning and flashing and beeping day and night, to keep him occupied for hours on end.

His wife and son had shown up late that first night, while he was drinking a Coke and up by almost two hundred dollars at a machine with particularly beautiful graphics. They said they had just guessed he would be there. But for some reason, there was a police officer standing several feet behind them. Before the police officer left, he told them there was nothing he could do in this situation: he, Teh-chang, was an adult, and no one was in danger or being harmed (he could have told them all of that himself). After that, he was impatient with his wife. She was so grim about everything, so negative. He spoke loudly. Maybe he was yelling. He just wanted her to be quiet. Why did she always want to control him? Why didn’t she understand? At some point, he saw that his son was crying as he had not cried since he was a small child. He didn’t really feel worried, though. It was okay for people to cry.

Finally they left, with an agreement that his son would come back the following day to bring him some requested items from home. He did not trust them, though, so he insisted on writing up a contract, which two of the front-desk clerks agreed to sign as witnesses. Under these circumstances, it was important to have things in writing.

Day 3, 6:10 a.m., handwritten contract on Pala Casino stationery, signed by Edward (Teh-chang) Cheng and desk clerks “Adriana” and “Tay”:

“I did not have sleeping pajama, and felt cold in the room, and had to have higher temperature in the room in order to sleep—I never ask my wife to bring that to me. And when my son brought the thing I asked my wife to bring to me I got all things. Pajamas was not the thing I asked and I did not find it. That is okay.”

On Day 3, he wrote on the family webpage: “I have escaped from my family to look for a single person who would believe me.”

On Day 4, he e-mailed his family:

Dear love and children, I am okay. Thanks my love for the understanding, and [my son] for coming to see me and talk to me. I have a lot of fun in the evening after taking a nap and dinner. I plan to stay one more night here as I have developed a theory for having fun playing the slot machines. I will need to write it down, and do some testing here. I will get a complimentary night for tonight. So come to have lunch with me tomorrow. Then we go home together. If you have time, perhaps I can show you how to enjoy playing the slot machines. It is really easy and fun.

5

On Day 5, he went home. For the first time since his surgery, he felt a bit tired. That was okay. There was always tomorrow.

Gradually, over the weeks to come, he subsided back into his old self.

The sheen of the world, its brightness and clarity and endless possibility, dulled and shrank back down into daily routines, circumscribed geographies.

His house.

The orange trees in front of his house. The road to town and back.

The road to the reservoir and back. The road to the stop sign and back.

The road, a few gravel driveways down, to the fence post, where he had to stop and lean on his cane and wait for his daughter to walk back home to get the car and pick him up.

The driveway, with his walker, and with the help of Theresa, the assistant his wife hired after they decided he would stay at home and not go to the hospital anymore. He learned a new English word: hospice, as though it were a combination of “hospital” and “peace.”

The room and the adjacent corridor to the bathroom.

The room.

The bed.

The bed.

The bed.

You can’t turn around and escape the black hole.

But when you think about it, we all know that feeling, not from our experience with space but with time. Time only goes forwards, never backwards, and it pulls us along against our will, preventing us from turning around.

Toward the end, there was just so much silence. His wife and son and daughter and friends came and went. Theresa and his wife fed him, spoonful by spoonful. Theresa and his wife changed his adult diaper. Theresa and his wife gave him crushed-up morphine pills that turned his pureed food bitter. It was okay. He couldn’t taste the food anyway. It was all texture now, unbearable texture to be forced down in order to live.

They eased him up to a sitting position with some difficulty and stuck fentanyl patches onto his bare back, underneath the threadbare white V-neck undershirt he wore all the time now. He tried to remember when his wife had first bought him that undershirt. It was probably twenty years ago now.

Twenty years ago his children were teenagers. Twenty years ago there was still so much ahead of all of them. He wanted to talk to his wife, but he didn’t know what to say. Hadn’t he thought about and said everything already? He had written it out in his poems over the past dozen or so years, over two hundred of them.

He thought of the last two stanzas of one of the forty poems his daughter had helped him to translate into English. The title of the poem was “Visiting Old Places to Say Goodbye to the Past.”

I returned to a place where a life began
to say goodbye to the past,
recalling an era,
the last of a memory.

Memories of a snow country
(those are the most vivid)
are deeply embedded in my heart
(Let’s bury them).
Instead, bring the expectation of spring,
with completely new hopes.
Don’t look back,
while boarding a vessel of fate
headed toward an unknown destination.

In those poems, he had written everything he could not say. Wasn’t that enough? He just wanted people to talk to him. Not ask him for things, not be disappointed with him, not talk about things that didn’t really matter, just talk to him.

“Tell me a story,” he asked his daughter.

“I can’t think of any stories,” she answered. She was tired, distracted. She looked toward the doorway.

His first grandchild was born to his son and daughter-in-law. Mako. He was named after a shark, a Maori word. But it was also the name of a Japanese princess, and all their Taiwanese friends were confused. The baby’s Chinese name, chosen by his wife, made more sense: Pei-chi. “Pei” for abundant, “Chi” for strange, unexpected; for Chilai, one of the tallest mountains in Taiwan, where he and his wife had hiked when they were young and falling in love. The mountain where, a year after they met and he was doing his required military service, his wife had gone with their friends and nearly died in a typhoon. (Everyone else died except for her and one other person.) Had they cheated fate then?

He never said these things out loud, but he wondered.

What if his wife had died on Chilai, before they were married, before their son and daughter were born?

What if he had never regained consciousness on that rainy day sixty years ago when, running to school, he had slipped and hit his head?

What if he had quit smoking five years earlier, ten years earlier?

And so on.

His son put the baby at the foot of his bed. He was a round, fuzzy creature, all cheeks and drool. He looked like his son had, so many years ago. If only they could start over too.

“Mako,” he called. “Mako.” The tenderness in his own voice surprised him.

6

The laws of physics require that you be both outside the black hole in a pile of ashes and inside the black hole alive and well.

There is no paradox, because no one person ever sees your clone. There’s no observer who can see both inside and outside a black hole simultaneously. So, no laws of physics are broken.

Unless, that is, you demand to know which story is really true. Are you really dead or are you really alive?

On the last night, his daughter read to him. She read him the entire summary of The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story he had loved. She told him back the stories of Sun Wukong, that immortal trickster monkey, which he had told her and his son when they were children. She got a lot of the details wrong, but that was okay.

He couldn’t see her anymore, could only hear her now and then. His wife spoke to him in Taiwanese. Her voice was steady. “It’s okay. You can go now.” She held his hand.

He breathed. His breath was the universe.

In and out.

In.

And out.

In.

Out.

In-

The great secret is that there is no reality. Reality depends on whom you ask. End of story. Well, almost.

There will be many things to happen.

Just be quiet and wait and see.

I will be all right.

1. All italicized text about black holes is from Amanda Gefter’s article “The Strange Fate of a Person Falling into a Black Hole,” which appeared on BBC Earth’s site in May 2015. Some excerpts are slightly altered from the original. ↩︎

Read more from Issue 18.1.