BY ADAM STONE
Copyright is held by the author.
Dr. MIRIAM GOLDSTEIN was the first to notice it, and naturally she dismissed it as a mistake. Her own mistake, since Miriam was prone to self-doubt.
To put it more precisely, Miriam was adamant that things be done . . . precisely. Her fastidiousness as an astrophysicist could easily be mistaken for self-doubt, though, and her thesis advisor had warned her of this. “Stop second-guessing yourself,” he’d told her after she had completed her degree and accepted a job at Northeastern University. “You’re a good scientist, Miriam, your work is impeccable. Don’t let it hold you back, that need you have for everything to be perfect.”
She’d taken it as criticism. It had stung, and for a few months she had nursed a quiet grievance. Her husband Jonathan, an aerospace engineer, had unwittingly added to the hurt. “You know it’s true.” He had waved a hand at an open kitchen cabinet: All the mugs with their handles aligned, glasses neatly organized by size. He’d smiled when he said: “Who does that?” — smiled, because Jonathan accepted with loving grace his wife’s need for, well, perfection.
That had been two years ago. Miriam hadn’t loosened up in the slightest and still held a grudge about that conversation. She continued to go through his underwear drawer, refolding his briefs after he’d shoved them in haphazardly. Why should she change? Things ought to be done properly, with care. And where was the harm in that?
All of which is to say that Miriam was at first unwilling to accept the results of her own observations. Faced with a scientific fact that undermined cosmology at the core level, that in practical terms obliterated the meaning of all other scientific facts, Miriam checked her math. Repeatedly.
***
Jonathan had made a moussaka and Greek lemon potatoes. He’d sharpened the salad with a handful of finely-shredded arugula. Miriam clearly didn’t have her antenna tuned into the meal. “You seem like you’ve got something on your mind,” he said.
“It’s just work.” Miriam speared a forkful of salad.
“Anything I would understand?” By mutual agreement, Miriam never took Jonathan too deep into the intricacies of galactic pulsations and quasar anomalies, just as he never bored her with the mechanics of turbines.
In fact, he would understand this, Miriam thought. But since it couldn’t be right, there was no sense in talking about it. She just needed to check the math again.
She put the problem out of her mind, as much as she could, and returned to her moussaka. They talked about their plan to visit Walden Pond that weekend, one of their favourite Fall places around Boston, a city where picturesque Fall places were by no means in short supply.
***
Snow was falling outside the window of her lab Miriam, but she didn’t register it. Her eyes were fixed on her computer screen, where she continued wrangle with the latest data. She’d been able to piggy-back on a colleague’s use of the Effelsberg Radio Telescope, in the Ahr Hills in Bad Münstereifel, Germany, and had spent the past two weeks reviewing the data, correlating it against her earlier findings.
The results, although impossible, kept coming back the same.
A student knocked at the door, even though it wasn’t office hours. Miriam showed her displeasure and the undergrad made haste to put forward a quick question about the forthcoming exam. He left feeling somewhat chastened, which was a not-uncommon experience among students of Dr. Goldstein’s introductory astronomy course. She wished she had a nickel for every time someone left her office saying, “Sorry for asking.”
She shrugged off the interruption and returned to the spectroscopic analysis on her computer screen. It showed the light from a dozen distant galaxies, culled for specific absorption and emission lines of various elements. She compared the emission lines to laboratory-standard measures.
In recent weeks she’d broadened the range of signals within the spectrum upon which she’d performed her analysis, thinking that might be the source of the mistake. And she’d gone over the methodology, reviewing the process step by step. She’d added to the mix other recent observations, data samples from a range of sources — some that she had been observing, others drawn from colleagues’ research. The results kept coming back the same.
Finally she had scraped the underlying software from her system entirely, and reinstalled a fresh copy from the ground up. Because, obviously, some glitch had crept into the processing.
Except that this didn’t change the result, either. Nothing she did changed the results, and she’d done everything she could think of.
***
“You don’t look well,” Jonathan said. He’d taken her out to their favourite kebab place in Cambridge, and watched her stare moodily at a plate of shawarma for half an hour. “Are you feeling all right?”
Miriam had lost 15 pounds over the winter. At first he’d blamed lack of sunlight for her pale complexion, but now it was mid-April and the golden orb shone brightly over New England. Her pallor was alarming, but the weight loss even more so. Miriam had never been robust — he likened her to a busy little bird — but now she looked downright gaunt. “I’m worried about you,” he said.
Miriam looked up, startled. What had he said? She saw him looking at her expectantly and knew a reply was required. “They really do make the best shawarma,” she said, and put a piece in her mouth. She chewed slowly, looking into middle distance over Jonathan’s shoulder, and thinking about the stars.
“You need to see a doctor, Mir.” Jonathan felt an impulse to wave his hand, to get her attention. He spoke sharply. “Probably an endocrinologist. I don’t want to interfere, you know that. But I’m concerned something might be really wrong. You need to take this seriously.”
He saw that she had arranged her French fries on the side of her plate, half a dozen of them spaced exactly an inch apart. Now she made her fingers into pincers and smooshed the fries together, collapsing them into a consolidated mass. She stared at the jumble of potato fragments and, to her husband’s absolute astonishment, tears rolled down her sunken cheeks.
“What is it?” he asked. He tried to contain his tone, but this was deeply alarming. In the silence he reviewed everything he’d said and done in recent months: Looked for any small unkindness, words spoken too loudly, cues he might have missed. “Are we in trouble, Mir?” he said, because what else could it be?
She looked up. In her eyes he saw what he could only call confusion. This was a state she had never before exhibited. Miriam was certain, she was always certain. If her failing physical state caused her husband concern, this sudden flash of profound uncertainty terrified him entirely. “Jesus, Mir, what is it?”
She wanted to tell him but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She rose abruptly and fled the restaurant in tears. Baffled, and now on the verge of despondence, Jonathan stared at the meat on his plate, swimming in its bath of slowly-congealing fat.
***
By the summer it could have reasonably been stated that every living person on Earth knew the name of Dr. Miriam Goldstein, the first scientist to definitively document the blue shift. And because she was so utterly persnickety in her work, not a single astronomer had been able to disprove her findings, though many had tried — naturally.
Despite the best efforts of the best minds, Dr. Goldstein’s conclusion held solid. Rather than receding away from one other — the “expanding universe” with its telltale red shift that human beings had taken for granted since 1929 — galaxies were rushing together. The universe had hit its tipping point, and was now collapsing in on itself.
As news spread around the world, it was first greeted as tragedy, and then promptly became parody, with an SNL news anchor getting a massive laugh when he straightened his tie and declared: “This just in! The universe is ending.”
Miriam spent months defending her initial research, while at the same time fending off the weirdness of her newfound celebrity. She’d tackled a few interviews — with NPR, the New York Times, Sky & Telescope, Scientific American. Then the hate had started: The cruel memes, the menacing emails.
Her name was tossed around at church rallies, where they sometimes burned her Sky & Telescope interview. The Pope had issued an encyclical, neither embracing nor denouncing the findings but instead reminding the faithful that all is within God’s mighty plan. Others were less accepting. Threats came to her home. Three people had been arrested by mid-September and she supposed she would have to testify at their trials. In cities around the world, furious and sometimes violent debates took place.
By October she’d stopped talking to the media. At the same time the university released her from the need to teach, and gave her an expanded laboratory and three eager grad students to assist with her further work. She and Jonathan had hunkered down, minimizing their contacts even with their small circle of friends. “Everyone has an opinion,” Jonathan lamented.
“You can’t have opinions about facts,” she told him. “Facts are just facts.”
He wondered sometimes whether she fully realized what she’d unleashed on the world. People were perplexed, terrified, and she was still re-folding his underwear. He thought about her crying over her shawarma and supposed she must have some inkling of what her discovery meant, what it signified. He didn’t want to burden her with his feelings on the matter, but it was weighing heavy on his mind, the now demonstrable fact that the universe was ending.
***
Granted, it wasn’t ending for another 10 billion years, give or take a few. The jury was still out as to when exactly the vast accumulated matter and energy of the entire physical manifestation would smoosh in on itself.
Miriam had done a rough calculation of the present rate of contraction, to satisfy the reporters. But physicists all over the world were frantically building new cosmological models, trying to make sense of the new data and vying to be the first to come up with a provable answer. They were running and re-running the numbers hard, bickering amongst themselves in journals and at symposia as to whether that rate of collapse would increase, and if so by how much, and when. Some people seemed to feel it was important to know when exactly the entirety of physical existence was scheduled to snuff itself out.
By Halloween, Jonathan appeared to have lost all interest in the question. Miriam found this worrisome.
His job had allowed him to go fully remote, his presence in the office having become a disruption to productivity: Any time he was in the room, conversation turned to cosmology. At home he did the minimum work necessary to maintain his employment, and otherwise sat on the sofa in the living room, hugging a pillow and staring out across the lawn at the line of trees, the back sides of the houses in the next street. Staring at nothing, apparently.
Miriam tried to rouse him from his funk. She suggested going out to Walden, or even driving up to Vermont, now the leaves were changing. He’d say things like: “What does it matter?” and scratch the crotch of the pajamas she was pretty sure he hadn’t taken off in three days.
The question made no sense to Miriam, who by now had regained much of her vigor. The need to defend her work had lit a fire, rousing her from the complex emotions that had left her temporarily at sea. She’d been right, that was what mattered, and proving it to the world had given her new vitality.
As to what she was proving — that all of space and time were destined to implode in an incalculable gravitational cataclysm — that didn’t seem at all germane. “We’ll all be dead by then,” she had calmly told one of the reporters. “Not just you and me but the whole human species. In a billion years the Sun will have run out of hydrogen. It will expand, and Earth will be too hot for us. And then the Sun will collapse into a white dwarf. All that will happen billions of years before the end comes.”
“The end of . . . everything?” one reporter had asked.
“That depends on how you look at it,” Miriam had replied. “Everything will still be there, but it will all be infinitely small. It might be what we call a singularity, all the energy of the universe contained in a mathematical point. That’s one of several possible outcomes, but the models are still being developed.”
The reporter at this point had reached down to click off her recording device, and looked at Miriam with a mix of curiosity and fear. “And doesn’t that frighten you, personally? I mean, how do you feel about that?”
Miriam had to think about it for a minute. She groped for an analogy that would communicate her understanding. “How do you feel about arithmetic?” she had said.
The reported seemed puzzled. “I don’t feel much about arithmetic. Two plus two, you mean? It just . . . is. Right? It doesn’t ask me to feel anything.”
Miriam had nodded, smiling. “I’m glad you understand.”
And yet her own husband didn’t seem to understand, and it pained her that she could not resolve his existential crisis. She was dimly aware that much of the human race was in the midst of its own existential crisis, on account of her work. But she’d turned off the news and mostly disconnected from the internet, so the anguish of those few billion tortured souls did not much disturb her wellbeing. It hurt her, though, to see Jonathan laying on the sofa day after day, hugging his pillow and eating cinnamon Pop-Tarts. He seemed truly miserable. And he was making crumbs.
***
“Where are we going?”
Miriam took Jonathan’s hand and herded him into the bedroom to change. “It doesn’t matter. Just put on some pants.”
“I’m wearing pants,” he complained.
“Not pajamas.” Should she even need to say that?
They hadn’t sat in Rabbi Finkel’s office since before they were married. As he’d prepared to officiate at their nuptials, the rabbi had met with them a few times at the synagogue, talking about the kind of Jewish home they might want to keep. He’d known, and they had known, that there was little likelihood of their becoming active members of his little congregation.
They weren’t “synagogue Jews,” they had told him up front, and it hadn’t fazed him in the least. He’d assured them that his door was always open, and now they walked through it. Miriam noted how little had changed in the intervening six years.
The same weighty books lined the shelves, both religious and historical. The rabbi had a particular interest in Holocaust studies, and the dust jackets on many of the historical volumes tended toward black and red. There was the same anemic lily in a pot on the window sill (or maybe it was a new one?) and he’d added new pictures of his kids to the collection on his desk: They’d both gotten older, of course. Little else had changed, and she found this reassuring.
When they’d taken their seats, Rabbi Finkel congratulated Miriam on her accomplishment. Jonathan’s eyes bulged. “You understand the world is ending?” he groaned.
The rabbi leaned back and laughed. He laced his fingers over his ample belly. “When isn’t it?” he shrugged.
Jonathan shook his head and moaned. Miriam met the rabbi’s eyes with a look that said: See what I mean?
“It wasn’t . . . before,” Jonathan said, with a little fight in his voice. “It was expanding, it was always expanding. Into what, and where, and why? We didn’t know, but it didn’t matter, because it would just keep expanding. We didn’t need to understand it, because it would always be there.”
The corners of the rabbi’s lips seemed to Miriam to betray the smile he tried to keep out of his voice. “And now?”
Jonathan turned to glare at his wife. “She ruined it!” he cried.
It was the last thing Miriam had expected. “Me??”
“Of course you. If you hadn’t seen it, we wouldn’t have known. If you hadn’t had to prove yourself right, if you hadn’t had to be so goddam flawless . . .” He ran out of steam.
Miriam would have liked to defend herself, to point out that some other scientist would have noticed the blue shift, eventually. But the rabbi was making shushing motions with his hands, palms down and fingers splayed. “I remember what my mother said,” he murmured. “When the kids would demolish the living room. I don’t care who made the mess, she’d say. We’re all going to clean it up.”
And then they talked, really talked, about the problem at the heart of Jonathan’s problem. What was it all for? What was the meaning of anything? No one had ever known, but now that they’d heard the punchline — it doesn’t mean anything, it’s all going to collapse back into Nothing — he felt suddenly and entirely at a loss.
“You want to know the meaning of life? You should ask a rabbi. Oh, I’m a rabbi? How convenient!” And they talked some more. After an hour the rabbi declared he needed a nosh, and he pulled from his desk drawer a box of cinnamon Pop-Tarts. “You want one?”
Jonathan’s eyes lit up and soon the two men were bickering back and forth across the desk, smiling and laughing, trading absurd arguments and tripping each other up with philosophical language and clever turns of phrase.
Everything, nothing: Isn’t it all the same really?
What makes something . . . something? Let’s define our terms.
Things mean whatever we determine them to mean.
Miriam sat a little off to the side, listening to the banter, smiling to herself. She wasn’t the least bit interested in philosophical debate. The universe was mathematically provable; it was a demonstrable fact, whether it was growing or shrinking. The purpose of life, as far as she was concerned, was to do the math, and do it right. Meanwhile:
Let’s keep God out of it. A universe comes, a universe goes.
Probably nothing matters, if you want to put it that way.
Probably all that matters is what we do with our time here.
She listened with partial attention as they made their arguments for and against, taking her elegant and irrefutable math and using to it build up and tear down entire metaphysical structures. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, as they struggled together to tease out meaning, purpose, intent, from what appeared to be an essentially meaningless cosmos.
She knew that truth could never be expressed in words. Words were approximations. Truth could be only be understood mathematically. But she enjoyed hearing her husband and the rabbi toss their approximations back and forth. It had been a little bit of a cheat to tell the rabbi beforehand about the Pop-Tarts, but Miriam could forgive herself. She was just glad to see Jonathan feeling better.
***
Adam Stone’s fiction has been published in Altered Reality, Corner Bar Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Freedom Fiction Journal, Whiskey Island Review, A Very Small Magazine, Farthest Star, Mystic Mind Magazine, and Harvey Duckman Presents.