Dispatches From the Heart of the Teeming Void
Lately I feel like a mirror that got shattered and glued back together. To fill the hours, I’ve been reading about the Boötes Void. It’s a kind of oil stain in space, an absence of stars some 330 million light years in diameter. It’s so big, scientists like to say, that if the Milky Way sat at its center, we wouldn’t have even known about other galaxies until the 1960s. This is meant to convey the sheer immensity of the void, but what they don’t tell you is that we ourselves had only learned about other galaxies some forty years earlier. In other words, because the Milky Way just so happens to sit where it does, within a cosmic egg-toss of Andromeda, and because Edwin Hubble had a mountain telescope he could press his eye to one chilly night in 1923, mankind learned of its true insignificance in a crowded cosmos some forty years early. Presumably, we have benefited from this knowledge. Haven’t those forty years enriched us somehow, if only because all knowledge, by definition, is an opportunity for growth?
Because my grandmother died of COVID, we were not allowed to visit her. For weeks, she languished in a hospital bed, gulping more and more oxygen from a mask until the doctor explained that intubation would soon be necessary—and after ninety years rocking grandchildren, canning tomatoes, surviving fifteen presidents, weathering countless illnesses, funerals, and over sixty years married to a shell-shocked alcoholic, this was a fight she couldn’t win. So she elected to remove the mask while two of her children, covered in plastic armor, held her hands. Only two relatives could be in the room, you understand. The rest of us watched her die over Zoom from the hospital parking lot. A nurse quietly, dutifully held a tablet in front of my grandmother’s reclining face. Some of us shouted into our phones that we loved her, though we doubted she could hear us over the noise.
Most people think of the universe as an ocean, with all the galaxies distributed evenly throughout. They imagine starry clusters as jellyfish performing a well-choreographed line dance. Really, though, it’s more of a spiderweb, or soap bubbles from a child’s bath. Sometimes the bubbles collide, grow larger. They think that’s what happened with Boötes—except it was the emptiness that grew.
More than once, my grandmother told me the story of how she saved my life as a child. How she found me sleeping facedown, my lips blue, my throat full of phlegm. How she cleared my throat with her finger, how she found my pulse like a lost set of keys. How she phoned the doctor but there was so much frost on those dark Iowa roads that they told her to stay put, just keep measuring my breath until dawn. So she stayed up all night, fussing over my lungs—as I did hers, the night before we took her to the ER, in a reversal I still scarcely believe. How I paced and paced outside her bedroom, phone in hand, listening to the fading cadence in her throat. How I helped her to the bathroom a couple times—the same woman who told me not to be embarrassed as she changed the diapers I had to wear until seven—and called her “Sweetheart” and pet her thinning hair, and she laughed.
During those weeks in which my grandmother lost twelve pounds in a hospital bed, I heard about the Leonids, a meteor shower best viewed far from city lights. I was staying at her little cottage set against a wooded river so far from streetlamps that you could stroll out most nights, look up, and see an arm of the Milky Way. Still, two different nights, I went out and saw nothing—not one streak, not one scratch in the film.
Once they took her mask off, she called for water. The nurse dipped a straw in a cup and sealed one end with her finger, creating a vacuum. She held the straw over my grandmother’s lips and let it go. My grandmother drank and asked for more. The nurse gave it to her. Then my grandmother said, “Okay.” We think she said more a few seconds later, but by then the Zoom call’s audio was dominated by others sobbing and calling out, so we couldn’t be sure. She just closed her eyes, tipped her head, and went to sleep. A while later, her heart stopped. The darkness of her open mouth reminded me of a black hole. Days later, I dreamt the nurse shined a penlight into my dead grandmother’s mouth, showing us her soft palate, like a little pink bat sleeping in a cave.
Of course, the Boötes Void isn’t actually empty either. Scientists have located around sixty galaxies there—less than the 10,000 you’d expect for such a span—mostly woven in a thin filament joining two halves: further evidence that we’re really just seeing two voids that merged together. Like soap bubbles, like cells, like memories.
By the 1960s, my grandmother was already having her seventh child, then her eighth. She also worked long hours at the local hospital, mostly in the maternity ward with its constant screaming. Each night, she’d return to the same ramshackle cottage near a gurgling dam and a forest thick with deer and woodpeckers. She was in her thirties, an impeccable driver with curly dark hair and a broad, symmetrical smile. After the children were fed and tucked in, her husband probably out in the woodshed near hammers and a spinning saw, she’d watch the news. I wonder what she thought the night they told her what they’d found out there, beyond that quilt of darkness a quadrillion miles thick, beyond our brightest imagination.
Michael Meyerhofer’s (@mrmeyerhofer) fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He is also the author of a fantasy series and serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.