by Arthur Plotnik
I DOUBT if physicists envision black holes the size of pearls, much less black holes contained in small silver boxes. I'd certainly have dismissed such ideas as nonsense, or maybe some conceptual artist's fantasy. But then I hadn't yet found myself entering the Witches' Market of La Paz, Bolivia, after wandering through South America in a state of dread.
In El Mercado de Las Brujas, science, reason, and reality gave way to magical beliefs. Crowding the sidewalks of this old quarter, the vendors—most of them leathery Indian women—hawked supernatural powers to be gained through potions, dolls, rocks, herbs, silver bracelets, woven crosses, and dried animal parts.
I'd been traveling through South America not for pleasure, but because I'd needed to get at least a continent away from my husband Patrick and what I'd learned about him some weeks earlier: A secret club. School children. Filmings. Not only that, but to support his depravities and keep them secret, he'd been withdrawing bundles of my inherited money from one of our joint accounts. When I confronted him his rage manifested itself with thumbs pressed against my windpipe and threats howled into my face. Fearing for my life, I called a travel agent and had her book a month's itinerary in South America without Patrick knowing.
And so, equipped with a bit of Spanish, I'd toured numbly through Peru, Colombia, Brazil, then Bolivia—other-worldly with its Valley of the Moon, sky-high Lake Titicaca, thorny jungles, and terrifying mountain passes. Even modern La Paz was dreamlike, or seemed so in the thin air and blinding sunlight. Mountains rose above the city like gold-crowned gods, while Quechuan and Aymaran Indian women in multi-skirted costumes and bowler hats crowded the streets. But strangest on my final weekend in the city was the diminutive bruja. With a strong grip, she drew me away from the tourists and police among the sidewalk wares and into a narrow shop, dark and smelling of fungus and oily wool. "I show you something you want," she said in English. "Something special for you."
"I think I've already got enough." I raised a bag of trinkets I'd gathered for no good reason.
"No, this one for you husband." She edged me toward a masonry wall at the rear of the shop. A motley cat emerged from the shadows and slid through my legs.
I saw her looking at my wedding band. I should have thrown it away. "There's nothing I want to give my husband."
"Yes, is something," she said. "Something for what he do."
I looked at her. Her clouded eyes seemed to move forward from their deep recesses, as if to seize an image. "You have no idea what he did," I said.
"I know was malo, very bad, the worst thing for a man," she said, pulling a brick out from a space made for it in the wall. "In here you have something for make him disappear, no more here to hurt peoples."
As I watched, transfixed, she pointed inside the space to a tarnished metal box the size of a ring case. An intricate, ancient-looking design covered its top and sides. Below the tightly closed lid was a small keyhole. From somewhere the bruja fetched a flashlight to shine into the space.
"Inside of the box," she said, "is un agujerito negro. You know what is a black hole?"
I gave a half laugh, wondering why I was still standing there.
"Yes, if you mean the thing in space that sucks in stars and which nothing can escape from."
"I don't know. Maybe. But here is a very small one my son find in the old silver mine of Potosí. He say more are there."
"And why wasn't he pulled into it?"
"I think because of silver. Is a trap for agujeros negros. And he is a good boy. I can explain no more, but if you want to see, lift up this box. No try to open. Only lift."
I shrugged and put a hand into the space and grabbed the box. It wouldn't move. I looked at her. "It's stuck."
With a fine bruja cackle, she took the brick and slammed it violently into the box, which, undented, seemed to move a fraction. "Is no stuck," she said. "Is weigh like a truck. You cannot to carry this home by plane. Only my son and his cousin has ways to take to you house. Then you will give to you husband, with this key."
From under one of her skirts, she produced a silver key proportionate to the keyhole. She grabbed my hand and wedged the key into the palm. I told myself this had to be one of the biggest cons in a market famous for them; yet, I felt compelled to close my fingers over the silver. "All right," I said, "what would someone have to pay for this magic black hole?"
"One thousand dollar U.S., but only to borrow," she replied without hesitation, "You no pay until the cousins of my son bring it to you."
"Why would you trust me to pay then?"
She reached for my hands, took them, and closed her eyes. "Because I see an evil you must remove from you house."
I traveled another twelve days—Chile, Argentina, Uruguay—but finally exhaustion outwrestled fear and I returned to the comfortable suburban home I'd bought with my own money some twenty-five years ago, after Patrick had lost his first coaching job. Mercifully, he wasn't there when I arrived, though signs of his drinking and general dissipation were in evidence. Early the next morning I heard a vehicle in the gravel driveway, but instead of Patrick's car it was a flatbed truck carrying a small crate and a forklift. When I went outside, two young Latino men greeted me politely. The older one, with a trimmed mustache, indicated that my package from Bolivia was here to be unloaded.
After some stilted discussion, during which I agreed to write a check—what else could I do?—they forklifted the crate from the truck into our double garage and placed it on the concrete floor where Patrick used to have a work bench. I felt a thump underfoot as if a boulder had landed. They then dissembled the crate's top and sides and removed newspaper wrapping until only the silver box remained, planted solidly on the base of the crate. Shortly afterward, with my check in hand, a tip of their caps and an exchange of sly looks, they took off.
So I owned a black hole now, or something trumped up to appear uncannily dense. Whichever, it stimulated my curiosity enough to brush up on black-hole theory, at least what I could find in a superficial Internet search. Similar to what I'd recalled, black holes were described as spherical shapes in space, possibly formed when dying stars collapse in on themselves, their mass contracting and creating enormous gravitational density until nothing, not even light, can escape the boundary—or event horizon—of their force.
I read that objects arriving at the gravitational boundary would be drawn into the heart of the force, but that theories differ as to what might happen to those objects—perhaps crushed at the center, torn apart, incinerated, and maybe subjected at some point to warped—time effects. Newer theories seemed to suggest that objects end up not inside the hole, but on its boundary, recreated as a kind of hologram. Or that a black hole might be a one-way gateway to another universe.
It was enough information—more like speculation—for now. Having read that even a mosquito-sized black hole would likely weigh as much as the Earth, I concluded that the silver box might contain something bizarre, but not a black hole.
Late that evening, I heard Patrick's oversized SUV pull into the garage. He didn't appear for another twenty minutes, during which he banged away at something, swore loudly, threw things. When he staggered in I could smell the liquor and God-knows-what abomination on him, Skulking, belligerent, he seemed no more interested in my reappearance than as if I'd returned from a boarding kennel—or should I say bird sanctuary: Patrick enjoyed ridiculing what he had once called my "endearing little beak," a prominent sharp nose that ran in my family. Now it prompted such endearments from him as "hawk-face," "Dodo," and worse, often preceded by an obscenity.
"You thought you could march off without checking with me?" he was saying. "Wherever the hell you went to?"
"Why? Were you worried?"
"Yeah—worried you'd come back. I was hoping you'd have the brains to stay away, go live somewhere else and keep your birdmouth shut." He squinted at me, as if aiming a weapon. "Unless you've already opened your beak."
I said nothing.
"Have you?"
I let him stew another moment. "So far, I have not," I said. "If I'd done so you'd be rotting in jail."
"Maybe. But I promise you this: You are never going to put me there."
"And what makes you so sure?"
He lowered his chin—one of his chins—glared at me, closed his fists, moved closer.
"If you touch me," I warned.
"I have no interest in touching you," he said. "In any goddam manner or form. But that doesn't mean..." He didn't finish.
"Doesn't mean what? That you won't hire one of your sickos get rid of me? Have me 'offed'?"
"Not a bad thought," he said, enjoying my unease. "Offing a beaky little bitch who thinks she's so high and mighty. Thinks her money makes her my moral judge. Sticks her big Alien nose where it doesn't belong."
I didn't say anything. I looked for a way to escape the room, the house.
"And what's that little box and scrap wood stuck to my damn garage floor?— Some other useless thing somebody dumped on you?"
I looked at him, hating him to the core. "Actually, it's for you" I heard myself say. "I bought you a gift. A science thing."
"I don't want any gift from you. What I want is loyalty."
Loyalty. Meaning not only my silence, but support for his perversions. Look," I said, "I saw it, and...I don't know, I thought you'd like it."
"Why'd you glue the damn thing down? What is it?"
"I think... a kind of super magnet," I said. "Very rare. From Bolivia." I had no idea what I intended, but he was already weaving toward the garage, swearing under his boozy breath.
"The silver box might be worth something, " he said, standing over the workbench. "But you can't get the goddamn thing open without busting it."
"Well I have the key, of course," I said. "Let me get it."
"Dodo!" he called after me. When I rejoined him he was bent over the box, peering at its top and sides. "It doesn't say 'sterling'," he groused.
"They don't stamp—or maybe it's on the bottom. Anyway, don't you want to open it?"
He straightened up and turned to me. "Maybe you think this is some kind of deal," he said. "That you bring me some piece-of-shit box and I change my ways. Live by your morals."
I lost the pretense of good will. "If by ways, Patrick, you mean your perverted, revolting abuse of those children with your fellow degenerates, your drinking, your belligerence, then yes. Either you—"
"No!" he said, pinning me against the wall with his body. "There's only one ultimatum. You shut your parrot face, or you I shut you down."
"Fine," I said, squeezing away from him. "That's just perfect." I broke into tears, ready for any fate but to continue living in his grip. Before he could react, I inserted the key into the box. It turned easily, as if by its own force. The lid flopped open. I awaited the worst.
Nothing happened. Patrick bent and peered inside. "Surprise," he said. "Dodo got suckered for a change. They took our money for an empty worthless nothing."
I braved a closer look in the box. I thought I saw a dark something, like a tiny dust ball sitting at the bottom. Whatever it was, it began to revolve slowly, then faster. "My god, look at this!" I cried.
I backed away as Patrick stuck his face over the box. "Yeah," he said, "there's something. Some trick thing."
The box began to hum, vibrating the floor. The sound grew louder, into an eerie half-roar, half-moan. Patrick's hair flew forward as if yanked by a vacuum and I saw his jowls stretch toward the box opening. "Christ!" he yelled, trying to pull himself away. "Bitch! What have you—"
He managed to fling an arm my way and grab my hair, jerking my head next to his. "I'll. Kill. You"—his voice was muffled, as if underwater, fighting for breath. Meanwhile, other than the pain of his grip, I felt only a wind encircling us, a gentle vortex. But now something like wooly black smoke began to stream from the box; I could feel it brushing my face, growing in density, encompassing our bodies, a small cyclone howling in my ears. I heard screams, cries of anguish, perhaps multiple voices, near and distant. Patrick's grip on my hair went slack, let go; and when I turned my head and looked through the black fog toward where he'd been, I saw the horror: Patrick, rearranged into an elongated figure-eight, crackling with radiant light, rotating slowly as he—what had been he—narrowed to a single beam, fiery red, the width of the garage. Then, in an instant, everything was gone: the smoke, the wind, the voices, sucked away faster than I could perceive. Only the snap of the silver lid gave form to the event.
Black hole? How could it be when I, who had stood next to Patrick, was untouched? Although the garage felt hot and smelled of an electric fire, not one of its objects had been displaced. I turned the key to the lock position, opened the garage door, and went outside to breathe the fresh, fresh air.
The next day I called the police and reported my husband missing. I also told them what he'd been up to, providing all the information they would need to put the rest of the club members away and see to those children.
I thought of hiding the box, moving it somewhere, but knew I'd be unable to do it myself. As it turned out, I didn't have to touch it. Three days later, after my first good sleep in ages, I woke from a long dream in which the bruja appeared, laughing and jabbering in a Spanish I couldn't follow. Yet somehow, in the wordless way of dreams, she let me know that black, to her, meant not the absence of light, but of goodness; not a relentless force of gravity, but of evil.
Later that same day, I came home from an errand and found the two cousins waiting for me. The forklift and a new crate sat on their flatbed truck. Yes, they told me, they were here to retrieve the borrowed box. I thanked them perhaps too passionately and offered them another check, which they refused. I decided it was best not to ask anything more, and the two spoke little as they went about their business, grunting from the labor. Finally, securing the crate on the forklift, the younger man called to the other, "Mira, hombre—" followed by something about, "el agujerito" and "uno cochino más..." I couldn't quite translate and asked what was said. The older man smiled and shook his head at the other. "What he say, Miss, he say the little hole is one dirty pig more heavier."
And then they were gone.
Arthur Plotnik (1937-2020) was the author of eight books, including Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style and two Book-of-the-Month Club selections: The Elements of Expression and The Elements of Editing. Among his many publications are award-winning fiction, essays, poetry, and biography. He studied under Philip Roth at the Iowa Writers Workshop, worked as editorial director for the American Library Association and was a former columnist for The Writer magazine. Del Sol Review published this story in 2016.
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