Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 76 - Charcoal

Photo by Gustavo Candido da Silva on Unsplash

Like her office, the magnetic laboratory facility was also remarkably unchanged from when Becca last stood there just weeks before, even though more than forty years had passed between then and now.

The lab was split between two rooms, one much larger than the other, with a large glass window dividing them. The side she entered was the primary workroom with twenty-foot-high ceilings illuminated by suspended fluorescent lights. The walls were boringly painted a plain slate grey from floor to ceiling, void of ornamentation or decoration. Not even a corkboard or chalkboard was affixed to the plain walls. There was nothing at all — as if a policy had prohibited it — or merely the fact that everyone who worked there was more concerned with data than decor and never did anything to address the unadorned bleakness of the room.

In the center of the workroom was a plain wood-top table affixed atop metal legs painted the same dull color as the walls, with rolling wheels at the feet. A large iron rod, three feet long and heavy looking, at least twenty pounds, was wrapped in insulated coil and sat in the middle of the tabletop among a sea of discarded tools: various-sized wrenches and screwdrivers, a roll of duct tape, and more spools of wire.

Next to the center table, on a blue metal rolling cart, too weighed down now to move quickly, was a three-foot-high Matrix isolation spectroscopy device, its vacuum chamber and turbo molecular pump startlingly shiny and new.

Becca held her breath without realizing it as she entered the room. An unseen pressure bore down on her to keep moving, to not waste precious time. Still, she was so taken aback at seeing the room in its original state — so startlingly similar to what she remembered, but smaller somehow — that she was awash in distraction and struggled to find the inertia to move forward in her work. The overwhelming sensation of so much being so familiar and at the same time so foreign and forgotten and far away that it left her dizzy, like with vertigo, the room not entirely spinning, but ticking, ticking, ticking, with unexpected and jarring movements that she told herself were not happening. It was disorientation meeting familiarity, crashing upon each other like oceanic waves.

In various spots were four rolling chairs that had long ago been discarded after their casters eventually failed and the arms broke off. A minor thing, seeing those chairs, one by the far wall, another by the worktable, and two more by a desk pushed to the far left wall. But seeing them resonated — somehow produced discord — like so many things. She’d forgotten they ever existed, but like an old photograph, seeing them again brought back abandoned memories from the countless hours she spent assembling components in this room — this very room where an uneasiness now found a strange refuge within her.

She peered through the glass window partition into the larger workspace, which housed even more memories of disequilibrium, particularly the space in the middle of the room. There — just weeks before — she’d watched the second black hole appear from nothingness. The space between it and the original black hole was initially in stasis. But when the two expanded and grew, the space between them became volatile as the two black circles swallowed everything in the room — the cluster beam apparatus and various spectrometers, the actual processing and spectroscopy chambers themselves, and finally, the same equipment that initially generated the actual black holes.

However, the equipment used to generate those great voids was still years away from being developed, let alone assembled and ready for use.

Lightheaded at the thoughts ricocheting through her brain like errant bullets exploding scattershot from a gun, Becca grappled for a seat and sat, pressing her hands against her eyes. Why this? Why now? Why this disequilibrium?

But they weren’t just thoughts about black holes blasting through her brain. They were thoughts of her wedding day and dress, a creme-colored silk gown with a low-hanging neckline that gathered in a wide rippling ribbon. It wasn’t an ornate wedding, for she and Frankie had opted for nothing more than a simple courthouse wedding, the justice of the peace, and an office worker they’d never see again for a witness.

Frankie cut trim with broad shoulders in his charcoal suit, and his silk necktie matched her dress perfectly. He’d come straight from the barbershop and was proud of having paid for his first shave and high-dollar professional grooming, with the idea that somehow legitimized him, as if his budding work as an upcoming architect had not.

She’d looked at him and run a hand across his cheek. She was never sure if she loved him before or after as much as she did in the hallway outside the courthouse registration office when she realized this man was willing to commit everything he’d ever worked for and would give it all to her. And even as she’d lovingly grazed his lips at that moment with her own — lingering — she was reasonably confident that she still didn’t love him as much as he loved her or as much as she would ever need to love him. Still, she married him anyway because that was what she wanted at that moment. In that spontaneous moment that, despite the spontaneity, was somehow still unavoidable, predictable, from the moment they’d first met by pure randomness while buying a Danish at Dinkel’s on Lincoln, which was even more random by the fact she was never on Lincoln, and yet was drawn into the bakery that day simply by the rain, by the desire for a cup of coffee, and out of curiosity from the line curling out the door.

The black notebook with red binding she brought from her office suddenly tilted uneasily off Becca’s lap and landed with a loud slap on the floor, causing her to jump and pulling her thoughts away from Frankie in his charcoal suit.

It was more than just being back in the room, she knew. There were emotions slamming in her heart that she was not accustomed to wrestling with. There was more. There was more.

Perhaps the space itself. Hadn’t she just concluded, quite clearly while sitting in her former office, that based on Gerard’t Hooft’s holographic principle, the possibility of an infinite time loop, of stepping from one black hole and right back into another, was a genuine possibility? And that this possibility tied itself to various string theories in which a specific time and place may, in fact, be stuck in that same space forever?

Then, were these feelings she was having from now, or were these the feelings she had as she first set forward to change all of time? Could emotions, places, and events all be stuck in a sort of time prison, locked into a particular set of coordinates of time and space?

“Ridiculous,” she muttered. Ridiculous, for that’s how she felt.