Nothing Special

"Play it again," Soren said.

"You've heard it four times."

"Play the one sentence."

Maya thumbed the podcast back. A voice came out of her phone, calm and certain. "And here's the strange part. An astronaut falling through the event horizon would feel nothing at all. No bump. No wall. They'd cross it without knowing."

Soren shook his head. "That can't be right."

"You always say that."

"Because it can't. The event horizon is the edge of the black hole. The point of no return. If you cross the most dangerous line in the universe, you should at least notice."

The parking garage roof was empty except for them, the telescope, and a city full of lights too bright to see much through. They had come up to look at Jupiter. They had not found Jupiter. They had found this argument instead.

"Okay," Maya said. "Tell me what the line is made of."

Soren opened his mouth. Closed it.

"That's not a trick question," she said. "What's the line. The horizon. Is it a wall?"

"No."

"Is it gas? Is it a surface? Is there anything there?"

He was quiet. He took out his notebook, uncapped the pen, and drew a circle. He drew a dot falling toward it.

"There's nothing there," he said slowly. "It's just the place where gravity gets too strong for light to climb back out."

"So it's not a thing. It's a where."

"It's a where," he agreed. "It's a boundary. A line on a map nobody painted."

Maya pulled her knees up. "Lines on maps. The equator isn't a rope. You don't trip over it."

"This is different. The equator doesn't trap you forever."

"But it's the same kind of nothing," she said. "That's what I keep snagging on. The trap part is real. The line part isn't."

Soren stared at his drawing. He drew a second dot, just outside the circle, and a tiny arrow from it pointing back out. Then a third dot, just inside, and tried to draw the arrow, and there was nowhere for the arrow to go.

"Wait," he said.

"What."

"Where would the astronaut feel the wall?"

Maya turned to look at him.

"I mean it," Soren said, and now he was talking fast. "A wall pushes. A floor pushes up on your feet. You feel a thing because the thing is right there, touching you, in one place. But the horizon isn't in one place. It's not at your feet or your hands. It's just a size. A distance from the center. The astronaut passes through it the way you pass through, through, through noon."

"Through noon," Maya repeated, and grinned. "Did anything happen to you at noon today?"

"No."

"Did noon happen?"

"Noon definitely happened."

"So the most important second of the day went by and your body didn't get a memo."

Soren laughed, but it came out thin, because something underneath the laugh was getting cold. He looked back at his notebook.

"That's the part I don't like," he said.

"Which part."

"The astronaut doesn't get a memo either. They fall in. The most important second of their whole life goes by. The second after which they can never, ever come back. And their body feels exactly the same as the second before. Same as a thousand boring seconds before." He pressed the pen down hard. "There's no alarm. The universe doesn't ring a bell."

Maya didn't answer right away. The lights of the city buzzed below them.

"How would they ever know?" she asked. "After. If they wanted to check."

Soren worked it through out loud. "They'd try to send a message home. Shine a flashlight back at us. And the light wouldn't make it out. It'd try to climb and fall back in." He stopped. "That's how they'd find out. Not by feeling it. By trying to leave and finding out they already can't."

"So they only learn where the line was," Maya said softly, "by being past it."

"Yeah."

They both sat with that. It was, Maya thought, a genuinely strange thing to be true. Not scary exactly. Strange in a way that made her scalp prickle.

"Okay but," she said, "this is everywhere."

"What do you mean everywhere."

"I mean it's not just space." She was working it now, the way she did, the answer arriving before the reasons. "Think about anything you can't undo. There's never a wall. You don't feel the second you say the wrong thing. You don't feel the second a plant gets too dry to save. It all feels like a normal second. The line is invisible while you're crossing it. You only ever see it from the far side."

Soren looked at her. "That's the thing I didn't want it to be."

"Why not?"

"Because I wanted the important moments to feel important. I wanted there to be a bump." He turned a page, then turned it back. "And there isn't one. Not even for a black hole. Not even for the biggest line there is."

Maya hugged her knees. "But that means the opposite too."

"What opposite."

"If the worst lines don't feel like anything," she said, "then most of the ones that feel huge probably aren't lines at all. Most scary seconds, you can still climb back out of. Your light still gets home. You just can't tell which kind you're in from the inside."

Soren stopped writing.

"So you have to actually check," he said. "You can't trust the bump, because there's no bump. You have to try to send the light."

"Try to leave and see if you can."

He looked down at the circle and the dot inside it, the dot with no arrow.

Then he looked up, away from the page, at the haze of the city where the stars should have been, and he started drawing the arrow anyway, out from the dot, off the edge of the circle, off the edge of the paper, pressing until the ink ran off onto the rooftop tar.