Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer

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Howe didn’t want to touch the body, but he couldn’t drive off with something stuck under there. Standing up, he walked to the edge of the parking lot and back to build up his nerve, then squatted at the rear of his car and reached under.

It was like reaching into a freezer: cold and a bit clammy. The night was warm and he couldn’t imagine how it could be so cold under there, but first things first. Pull the damned body out, then worry about thermodynamics. He swept his hand back and forth, trying to grab some part of the animal, trying to do it blind because he really didn’t want to look at it any sooner than he had to. Nothing, nothing but the cold. The dog must be farther under than he thought.

He went down on his knees again and looked. From this angle, the light was good enough that he could make out a running shoe.

For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He’d known all along, hadn’t he? It had been too big for a dog, he just hadn’t let himself that... that he’d killed someone. He’d killed someone. It wasn’t possible, but he’d killed someone. Run a person over, dragged the corpse under his car. Almost without thinking, he reached out to touch the shoe.

His hand felt only cold air.

Darkness or not, he could see quite clearly. His hand reached straight through the foot.

And then, because this was Kent State, and because every student knew this was  the parking lot, Benjamin Howe realized what he was seeing.

He got into the car, started it carefully, and backed up. There was no sound of dragging, no sound of flesh and bone crushing under the tires. When he’d backed up far enough, there was only the sight of a body bleeding on the pavement. A guy about Benjamin’s age, wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt.

There was another body not far off. A woman’s. A third corpse farther along, and a fourth in the middle of the road out of the lot. He cranked the wheel hard, hopped over the curb onto the grass, and kept driving.

When Benjamin Howe got back to his apartment, Cathy Weiss was still there. She thought that he treated her coldly at first, but he seemed glad to see her.

Back on campus, more bodies were appearing. At 11:30 the village of My Lai materialized in the football practice field beside the Taylor Hall parking lot — the village was close to Kent State in spirit, if not geography.

This materialization was observed by chemistry grad student Rebecca Kendall, who’d been awake 36 hours studying for exams. The sight of the phantom village terrified her... not because she thought it was a ghost, but because she thought it was a hallucination. The prospect of her mind breaking down filled her with fear, cold and pure. Her brain was all she had — no friends, no easy social graces, no Playboy bunny face and flesh, just her brain. And now her brain saw a ragged clutter of huts and butchered bodies out in the middle of a football field.

Rebecca started shivering and couldn’t stop. If someone had convinced her she was seeing a ghost she would have felt nothing but relief. As it was, she walked home in a cold sweat and went straight to bed. She didn’t fall asleep for hours.

On campus at quarter to twelve, a crowd of martyrs flickered into existence atop Blanket Hill... not the usual martyrs celebrated for clinging to their beliefs in the face of death, but the ones who died meaninglessly, without the chance to take a stand. Innocent women accused of witchcraft, hanged and drowned and burned. Civilians whose homes lay in the path of marching armies. Tribespeople who succumbed to disease, starvation, and sorrow in the cargo holds of slave ships. Hundreds of unmoving bodies appeared on Blanket Hill, many of them touching or overlapping: a young widow cremated in suttee, lying with her head on the chest of a teenage boy who froze in Siberia because his uncle denounced Stalin; a drowned passenger from KAL 007 linking arms with one from the Iranian Airbus A300.

As midnight approached, more and more bodies accumulated: in the roadways, on the Commons, inside buildings. Fearing panic, university security evacuated an on-campus pub when Bhopal gas victims began piling up the dance floor. “Nothing to worry about,” the security guards said as they hurried students out. “We’ll take care of it.”

“What are you going to do?” someone asked. “Call in the National Guard?”

That was my question too. What was I going to do? Call in the National Guard?

Look: ghosts appear because they have unfinished business. And if anyone has unfinished business, it must be those who were killed senselessly. But what can they do to finish their stories? Should the four Kent State students haunt the living National Guardsmen and torment them for their acts? That’s so cheap: just crude revenge.

Should the bodies be brought back to life at midnight, whereupon they could have a single hour to come to terms with their deaths? Maybe the same thing happens twice a year like business conventions, Walpurgisnacht and Hallowe’en, each get-together hosted by different committees — the soccer fans at Hillsborough, say, or the Jews and gypsies and gays processed through Nazi death camps — and the goal is simply to purge anger and regret, a little bit more each meeting, until finally the soul is ready to let go and move on. I could envision the Kent State students wandering their old campus, talking to night-owl students, trying to find peace...

Students at Kent State were demonstrating for peace when the four victims died.

I broke off writing for supper. Sunday supper, traditional time in North America for family and conviviality. I don’t remember how convivial I was. I could have been distracted because I wanted to get back to writing after dinner.

But when I went back, I realized I had trivialized my subject again. It wasn’t just that the tone of voice was flippant; it was the glibness with which I tossed off references to tragedy. My Lai, for example — what did I know about the My Lai massacre except that a lot of Vietnamese civilians were killed? I could research and find more details, but that wasn’t the point. I had used the name My Lai for its immediate guts’n’gore familiarity, not out of genuine feeling for the victims. The same for all the other ghosts — I had used them to give the story color, nothing more. They were only empty names. They were just body count.

I stared at the computer screen for a long time, wondering what to write... wondering if there was anything I could write that wasn’t just exploiting someone else’s pain.

Nothing came to mind.

A mathematical singularity is a place where a function, a formula, breaks down. Often the breakdown happens because the function “goes to infinity” at that point; for example, the formula for the function may try to divide by zero.

In the heart of a Kerr-Newman black hole there is a singularity in a function called R, the Riemannian scalar curvature, a measurement of gravity. R goes to infinity. It cannot be measured.

For a long time, physicists wondered if the singularity was genuine. Maybe it was simply a result of their choice of coordinates: the way they wrote out the formula for R With the right choice of coordinates, one can extend the black hole model past the singularity into the white hole beyond. Perhaps with another choice of coordinates the singularity in the middle would go away. Perhaps it was only the ruler that broke down, not the universe that the ruler measured.

In the late 1960s, mathematicians proved that the singularity existed in all coordinates. All possible rulers broke at the same point. At the heart of the black hole’s darkness, physicists could only throw away their rulers and stand back in blank contemplation.

Days and weeks passed. I kept thinking. Nothing more, just thinking. I didn’t see the dead students in my dreams. To tell the truth, if I wanted to remember their faces I had to go back and look at their photos in the book.

Kent State didn’t haunt me. It niggled at me.

The library books came due. I wrote the names of the books in my files and took them back. I also recorded the names:

Allison Krause

Jeff Miller

Sandy Lee Scheuer

Bill Schroeder

Those names hadn’t appeared anywhere in my three story attempts. I had to write them down separately so I would remember them. Otherwise I’d lose the names and be left with three uncompleted story-scribbles that all missed the point.

Now and then I would open my “ideas” notebook and see my original jottings about Kent State. Time travel. Ghosts. But I couldn’t travel backward in time. I couldn’t summon ghosts or lay them to rest. I could stuff my stories into the empty spaces surrounding the tragedy, but the stories themselves walled off the reality, put it out of reach.

The situation reminded me of a white hole. A white hole floods its universe with light; but you can never touch it.

And so I began thinking of white holes, black holes, and a mathematics thesis whose math had leaked away, leaving behind only metaphors. The result wasn’t a story about Kent State. But at least it was my story to tell.

Imagine an object falling into a black hole: something small like the body of a young man or woman, or perhaps something large like the campus of a university.

Imagine an outside observer, a distant spectator far removed from the immediate pull of the black hole. He shines a light toward the falling object — the object casts no light of its own, so if the observer wants to see it he must provide his own illumination. He waits for the light to strike the object, then return to his eye.

There are several possibilities for what happens next.

The light may strike the object as it falls through the ergosphere, a region where places become moments and moments become places. That close to the black hole itself, the returning light particles may take years to climb back out of the gravity well and reach the observer. But someday the light will return.

Or the light may not reach the falling object until the object has crossed the event horizon. If the object is inside the hole, the light may strike the object and bounce, but it cannot reach the observer outside. The light will only bounce deeper into the blackness. The observer will never see it.

Or perhaps, if the cosmos deigns to conform itself to mathematics, there is a third alternative. The falling object plunges through the heart of the black hole and out a white hole on the other side. By the time the observer’s light enters the black hole, the object is gone. The light finds nothing but blackness. There is no contact. To the observer, the object has fallen into an impenetrable dark; but in another universe, perhaps the object tranquilly sails on.

The outside observer waits for his light to return. He wonders if the object has fallen so far he will never truly see it. There is no way to tell until the light actually comes back. If it ever does.

Other observers have given up and gone home.

The outside observer waits.

Author’s Notes