Hole

“Everyone, everything, is just a pattern of molecules,” he told the children. “Even the most different things you can think of. Like peanut butter and a big fire truck. They’re just different patterns of molecules held together by bonds. Even the ingredients probably aren’t much different. You’re mostly looking at carbon and hydrogen and oxygen when you walk around. Rearrange those few things a tad differently, throw in traces of other elements, and you get the whole variety of everything on Earth. Isn’t that amazing?”

The kids had no response.

“Joseph, what’s the weirdest thing you can think of?”

Joseph picked his head up off his desk. “What?”

“What’s the weirdest thing you can think of?”

Joseph smirked. “A booger.”

The class laughed, but not too hard, and the teacher was able to jump right in. “Okay, that’s great. Depending on what you put up your nose, Joseph, a booger is usually going to just be a little bit of dust — that’s carbon — coated in the slime your body makes, which, believe it or not, is almost all water — that’s hydrogen and oxygen. So a booger is the same thing as a swimming pool shrunk down into your nose! Quentin, what’s the weirdest thing you can think of?”

“Um, a cat-dog.”

“A cat-dog?”

“Yeah,” he repeated, giggling, “a cat-dog. A cat and a dog smushed together.”

“Okay, well, that illustrates my point perfectly. Because cats and dogs are made of the same atoms, the same ones that make you and I, and they just get arranged in different patterns at the teeny tiny levels we can’t see with our eyes, and those differences in shape and the way the shapes cling to each other, that’s all it takes to make a cat, or a dog, or a cat-dog.”

“So so,” Quentin jumped in, “so I could make a frog-dog, too?” He was cracking himself up here, along with a few other kids.

“Well, if you knew exactly how to break apart and rearrange atoms — which is something we kind of know how to do in theory but have an impossible time doing in practice — then yes, you could sit in your room and make a frog-dog.”

“But Mr. Beachem,” said Juniper from the corner with her hand raised. “If everything is the same stuff how come some stuff feels smooth and some stuff feels scratchy?”

“Great question, Juniper. So even though everything has the same ingredients, it has different shapes, and those different shapes make different surfaces. Some of the shapes are very, very even, and that makes the surfaces feel smooth. Some of the shapes are very irregular, very jagged, and that makes the surfaces feel scratchy. It’s the shape that makes the difference far more than what it’s made of. Great question.”

“Mr. Beachem?” The hand raised now came from right next to his desk, from Evan, a curious child who sat in the front but rarely asked questions or participated. He did fine on the homework and quizzes, and seemed by all accounts a normal child, but he was fanatical about sitting as close to the teacher as possible. Beachem asked around and found that he did the same in the other classrooms, too, and that in Kindergarten, Ms. Wilson had to have several talks with Evan about boundaries because he would try to sit in her lap.

“Yes, Evan?”

“What about holes? What are holes made of?”

This flash of lateral thinking took Mr. Beachem by surprise. “What kind of hole are you talking about? Like a hole in the ground?”

“I guess.”

“Well, that’s just a space where the dirt has been cleared away, and what rushes into fill it is air. Even though you can’t see air, it’s also made of the same things, but those things are very loose, so we can move through them. Air is still oxygen, but it also has nitrogen and carbon in it, along with tiny amounts of other stuff. Good clean air has fewer of those tiny amounts, and bad choking air is full of tiny amounts of other stuff and has too much carbon in it, which is why it makes us cough.”

“What about black holes?” Evan interrupted, pulling Beachem back from his tangent.

“Like in space? Very good, Evan. Yes, there are parts of space where the gravity is so huge, that light can’t escape. Black holes are made up of the same things as everything else, but squeezed so hard together that it makes super-duper gravity. So imagine squeezing a piece of Play-Doh into the smallest shape you can make it, then squeezing even more and more until it gets so small you can’t even see it. That’s what’s inside a black hole. Not Play-Doh, but a mix of everything. It’s pretty complicated and you’ll learn more about that in a few years.”

“But what about black holes here?”

This was the most Evan had ever spoken in one class session, certainly voluntarily. Beachem was torn between being delighted and concerned, but the class was attentive, clearly involved in this question about holes, so he dove in. “There can’t be black holes here. We’d all be swallowed up by their gravity. The only black holes are far, far away, and we’re very safe from them.”

Evan pulled up his lunchbox from the floor beside him. He looked at Mr. Beachem as he was talking about how black holes are far away, then unlatched the box and opened it. Inside was nothing. Just darkness. “Black holes like this,” Evan said.

Beachem looked into the lunchbox. Was it painted with some special light-absorbing black paint? “May I?” he asked, gesturing to pick up the box. Evan looked uncertain, but nodded. Beachem lifted the box by its sides. It was perfectly sound on the outside, but there was that gaping blackness inside with no shape, no edges. It stopped right at the brim of the box’s inside. No noise came from it. No matter what angle he turned the lunchbox at, no light penetrated the blackness within. Which was clearly not solid, but Beachem didn’t want to…

“Have you touched this? The hole?”

“No, sir.”

Beachem felt a war of curiosity and fear in his heart. The classroom may as well have vanished, so focused was his concentration on the void-in-a-box. “Have you … have you put anything in it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Like what?”

“I put a grape in it yesterday.”

Beachem looked at Evan. He looked scared, like he was going to get in trouble. “That’s good science, Evan. A good experiment. And what happened to the grape?”

“It fell.”

“It fell into the hole?”

Evan nodded.

“Then what?”

Evan shook his head.

“Did it make any sounds?”

Evan shook his head again, more vigorously.

“And, Evan, how long has this hole been here?”

“Since yesterday. Since yesterday at lunch.”

“Have you shown anybody else the hole?”

“Just Sarah. It was her grape.”

Beachem didn’t have a Sarah in his class. Some other kid, then. He put the lunchbox on his desk and scanned his class list to be sure. It was still early enough in the year that he didn’t know if some kids were simply escaping his attention. Suddenly, there was a clatter. The lunchbox had fallen off the edge of his desk and landed face down, its lid splayed open and its solid metal bottom facing the ceiling.

The kids in the classroom gasped. All except Evan, who was watching the box with rapt attention.

Beachem bent down to pick it up, but Evan said, “Please don’t,” almost too quietly to hear.

“What’s that, Evan?”

“Please. You won’t be able to pick it up. It’s going to be stuck for a while.”

Beachem gave Evan a quizzical look, then grabbed the lunchbox. But Evan was right. Some kind of suction force had fixed it to the ground. At least, Beachem presumed it was a suction, since the hole resembled nothing so much as the vacuum of space. In practice, it felt more like the lunchbox was now a structural part of the floor, and he could no more budge it than he could lift the school from its foundation. “Evan,” he said carefully, “how long will it be stuck like this?”

Evan shrugged. “It was like that all night in my room when my mom slapped it out of my hands. But this morning it was okay on the inside and I closed it and put it in my backpack.”

“You showed this to your mom?”

“She thought I was lying,” he whispered. “She thought the bullies took my lunch and that’s why I was hungry.”

The bell rang. While this would usually have spurred a flurry of activity and chatter, especially given that it was the last class of the day, the kids remained in their seats, riveted by the lunchbox. “Okay, that’s it for today. We’ll see the end of this experiment tomorrow,” Beachem said, standing and retaking authority. Tonight, I want you all to form an idea about what could be inside the lunchbox. A hypothesis, remember? You don’t have to write it down, we’ll just share ours before we pick it up and see what’s inside tomorrow. Okay? Class dismissed.”

The kids shuffled out. As Evan walked past, Beachem touched his shoulder. “It’s okay that your lunchbox stays here overnight?”

Evan shrugged, as if to say neither of them had a choice in the matter.

After the kids had left, Beachem sat for a long time in his desk chair, regarding the lunchbox. He gave it a few tentative kicks, but it was as immobile as ever. What could that be? He searched his brain. Despite being assigned to science, he was really a business major, not an academic with deep knowledge of astrophysics. Apparently his minor in food chemistry was enough to qualify him for fourth grade science teacher. And this. This didn’t exactly show up in his refresher courses or the fourth grade textbook.

He prodded the metal bottom, which surely wasn’t strong enough to withstand the powerful forces going on inside, but it felt ordinary as could be, not at all under great strain.

After a half hour of pondering, Beachem went home.

The next day, the lunch box was on his desk with a sticky note on it from the janitorial crew that said they had cleaned up the mess. He looked at the floor where it had been, but there was no trace of a difference. The lunchbox was just a regular lunchbox inside, albeit extremely clean. Being a teacher, he put it back on the ground with the lid open, so he could complete the experiment with his final class and tease the kids in the previous classes with what could be inside. Were they too young for Schrodinger’s Cat? Maybe.

Being a teacher and not an astrophysicist, he didn’t have the sorts of stories in his feed about the Earth’s magnetic field, and the way it had abruptly reversed itself twice in a matter of two days.

Being a teacher and not a geologist, he hadn’t seen the chatter on bulletin boards about deep level tremors that usually portended massive earthquakes, but this time had yielded nothing known.

Being a teacher and not a psychic, he had no idea that his improvised classroom experiment would tomorrow yield the result of literal Hell on Earth.