Simple Laws of the Physical World

In the days before Ellen and Viv, my girlfriends from childhood, my steadfast confidantes for the last twenty-five years, arrived for a four-day stay with me in San Francisco, I was reading for a research class about Stephen Hawking and black holes. Hawking announced the existence of black holes in the seventies but recently changed his tune: there are no black holes, he said. The famous event horizon where nothing (no matter or light) can ever escape once passed is now an apparent horizon. In the apparent horizon, matter and light are only temporarily suspended, then released.

Black holes led me to dark matter and dark matter to stars—exploding and stilled—and stars to moons, how many moons the three of us shared. And moons to the concept of syzygy, a word that recalled the three-beat heat lightning that flashed in summer after summer of Iowa thunderstorm.

Syzygy: a conjunction or opposition, often the alignment of three celestial bodies, such as the sun, earth, and moon. For example, the moon is at syzygy when full. And moon brought me back to 42^nd Street, where Ellen and I lived ten houses away from each other, arriving the same week, the same year—1988—from two towns in Texas, seventy-two miles apart. Ellen was from Granbury.

Granbury was where my great-great-grandfather had worked and then owned a grist mill that was turned into an opera house. The opera house converted to a kitchen cabinet factory. Generations later it is a local museum that bears his last name and my first. When Ellen and I first met, in the fourth grade, I heard her accent hang in the air, leisurely like the last trail of a firework. I told her my name.

“Is your family from Granbury?” she asked.

“No, Dallas.”

“Oh, because there’s a house there with your name and we took a field trip there once. There were things with your name stitched on them.”

Or, at least, this is how we’ve recreated that first dialogue over the years, Ellen telling my new boyfriends and me telling hers. “You can’t fight fate, my love,” she’d often say.

A week before they arrived, Ellen called. She was surprised that she’d caught me, laughed her throaty Lauren Bacall laugh. “Hark! I’ve got you!” she said. We laughed together for no reason, just delight in each other’s voices, all the tenderness we save up in-between talks rushing out. We talked about dates and times and plans. Her tone shifted. Wind smacked over her voice. “Look, Greg and I decided to finally get some help … we started methadone treatment two days ago at Mercy Franklin, just near the house, you know, by the library where we used to smoke your Dad’s Winstons. Anyway, I have to have a dose. Our counselor said there are several clinics in the city but I need your address. I need to find one I can walk to or bus easily. I have to do it at like 6 a.m. I am so sorry; I don’t want to bother you.” I told her I could drive her or that she could just take the car. She laughed. “Good plan, my love, I’ll just get heavily dosed with opiates and remember to buckle up.” I gave her my address and said that I could research it, find the closest one. She told me to research other things, like how to eat in San Francisco on ten dollars a day. She was broke but hoping we could still have a great time. Of course, I told her. We closed with I love yous as usual.

I heard the slur in her voice that I’d come to count on as typical in the last ten years. I heard it but decided it wasn’t about where she was but where she was headed that mattered, and until then I was increasingly more convinced of what the end would look like: a call from her mother, or Greg...