Black Holes Are Not Real

When she yawned once more, it was the third in a row, she set down the book she was reading and her glasses on the nightstand. She knew it must be midnight—that third yawn had a habit of visiting her every night at that specific hour—yet she checked the electronic clock on the nightstand to see if she was right. And both as a physicist whose theory was once more proven, and as a lover of routines, which were only laws of nature yet to be proven, she was ready to sleep.

She looked out from the curtainless window to the grey wall level with her room, three meters away. It was rather a redundant and good-for-nothing wall, built with the intention of raising a barrier to mark the boundary between the neighboring property and her building's land. The tree trunks could be seen behind it and it was rather good-looking for a mere wall, with branches and leaves surrounding it. Usually, there were cats lying on the wall, watching her as they licked themselves.

That night, no cat came to her visit, yet she didn’t take it personal nor a deviation from her routine. Serene with the knowledge that probability is a branch of mathematics she fell asleep effortlessly.

At the climax of her sleep, she woke up, breathless. She was suffocating. Her eyes bulging from their sockets, she gasped for breath. She tried to reach her throat for help, but her hand didn’t move. Her attempts to twist her neck, to move her body, all were destined to fail. Her only function was to think and fear as she was gasping for breath.

Maybe the oxygen molecules went wild and assembled at the corner of ceiling, a hypothetical possibility, she found her deranged mind considering.

Like a statue overthrown to its side, and as awkward as one, she kept on lying, her unblinking eyes fixed on outside. All she could see, in the dim light of the moon, were the shadows dancing over the wall. Perhaps they were dots that had begun to appear before her eyes from being out of breath for a long time. What if, she had already died and this was the very death itself, she thought. It was more rational of a way of thinking, that stillness of body and asphyxiation were signs of death, rather than blaming oxygen molecules for running away.

The electronic clock on the nightstand blinked green declaring a minute passed, illuminating the grey wall before her eyes. The shadows of night were still there, but now they had a shape. There, on the wall, she saw a darkness sitting—a shadow of a man, his outlines drawn by the green light of the clock that lasted only for a second. It was more like an idea than a reality, that long she had seen the figure. Though once again it was just a grey wall, barely visible behind the shadows, the image and the fear it had inspired were already stuck in her mind. Whether it was an optical illusion or real, the panic was strong enough to rally her lungs to take a breath. She sucked in as much air as her lungs would let in. They burnt like a new born’s, though she couldn’t cry like one.

The panic loosened its grasp on her a little bit as her oxygen-deprived brain received its fuel and began working properly again. It must be a night terror, she reasoned. That was all; it was just a serious misunderstanding, an entanglement of the dream world and the real one.

Like the rest of her body, her eyes were still not bent to her will, and with the feeling of a thousand needles stinging them, they remained fixed on the wall. She continued her forced watch, observing the leaves stir in the breeze as their shadows danced faintly on the wall.

Once more everything was green, and the figure was there, and for the worse: he was now leaning forward as if measuring the distance for a jump to her window. His hands grasped the wall to balance himself, while his legs hung down leisurely. Distinguishing any feature of him was impossible; his arms, body and legs all were darkness outlined by the light of the clock. Once the clock ceased to illuminate the wall, the green, for just a very small instant, was visible on the outlines of the figure, framing him even more distinctively in the darkness.

Abruptly, her eyes closed like a window shade that broke from its cord. The curse of seeing ceased to be. She would never have thought that she would be so happy to be imprisoned by the blackness of her eyelids.

‘He is not there,’ she told herself, her eyes closed tightly. Now all she had to do was to keep her eyes closed and go to sleep. When she woke up, everything would be as same before. Then, she would go to the college to give her lecture as she had always done every Monday.

Counting the faint flashes of green glowing behind her eyelids, she waited expectantly. It had already shone three times, and just before the fourth time, her curiosity prevailed over her fear, so she opened her eyes to see if the shadow was gone. He was no longer on the wall – for he was suspended in the air, his arms stretched forward as if to catch. He was not getting any closer, just hanging up there in still-air, like a radioactive cloud. The green light around him faded slowly, slower than before, she noticed. Unlike before, he wasn’t mixed and lost behind the shadows – he was too close, and she was too aware of his existence to ignore.

Afraid of closing her eyes, even blinking, lest the man appear closer the next time, she lay still. She got mad herself for leaving the window open. It was a tilt-window, so the gap was small, but one couldn’t be sure when a figure was hanging in the air before one’s window and whether he might flow like a shadow through it.

Ten times the night turned green by the clock’s light to prove again and again he was there, floating before her window, in an infinite hunt to catch his prey—her. As the green glow radiating from the blackness lasted every passing minute more and more, to a point, she thought in fear, where it would never fade.

She recalled the first time she had seen the wall, and how she felt intimidated by it. Erecting a wall right opposite of a window was ridiculous; it was building a sightseer’s place for perverts. To avoid sleeping in that room alone, she had gotten a boyfriend. He was insignificant; indeed, she couldn’t remember his name anymore. So why did she recall him, and why was his shapeless, expressionless face looking at her, glowing green?

She woke up—it was a dream—to see the man perching on the windowsill. His hands and head were pushing against the window, and he was, except for his outlines, an entity comprised of pure darkness. If only he had eyes to peep and were an ordinary pervert, she found herself thinking, then everything would be easier.

The green light reflecting off him reached to her, crawling over the sheet and on her skin. This time that repulsive green didn’t stop glowing—he might have captured and made the light a part of him, or the clock was broken.

With disgust and repulsion, she shrieked and jumped from the bed to save herself from the touch of green.

She saw her body lying before her, facing the window. It was rather weird to see one’s back in real life, something usually only possible in photos.

She was two now, and seemingly she had not been the one who was blessed with the ability to split down the middle like a cell undergoing mitotic division, creating an identical twin. The figure split in two, and it was so black that one can’t help but agree that another color existing on him was out of the question. One of the spheres stayed where it had been, growing bigger, while the other flew above her head and disappeared behind her.

The darkness before her grew so immense and deep that she lost the sensation of whether her eyes were open or not. Though, it didn’t matter, since looking at nothingness wouldn’t mean comprehending it.

What she was experiencing was against the laws of nature, but weren’t black holes too? And she knew he was behind her, whether he was taking his time, or had already taken. As waiting for imminent end, she even found time to renounce the existence of black holes.