Her second favorite sandwich is a roast-beef on rye from the deli beneath the apartment she shares with M. Tangy sourdough, a thick slice of cheddar, fresh crisp red lettuce, a golden coin of tomato, and thin ribbons of beef so juicy that the bread becomes a soggy mess as she eats. It’s the platonic ideal of sandwich, and thus all the more delicious to eat in the place that degrades the ability to organize and understand the world.
She has to eat quickly—barely enough time to really savor—because this far into the blank, the concept of oxygen is only partially meta-stable. Outside the proprioceptive substrate of the human body, exposed to the epistemological radiation of the blank, it degrades quickly. She can still breathe this far into the blank, but the air is thin enough to give her a headache.
Worse, her being here is a violation of the ethics-review-board’s stringent safety protocols. If she’s caught, they’ll threaten her access to the blank. And after years of exposure, she believes the blank is the only thing keeping her whole.
Iris finishes her sandwich, wipes her mouth, and picks up the chair. Walking into the blank—up the gradient, towards the point-source of the phenomenon—is much easier than walking out. Best to take it slow, like a diver surfacing from the mercifully blank depths to the harshness of sun and air and guilt.
The blank is a comforting lover, and a hungry one. It always takes something. As soon as she passes the red safety tape that demarcates the ‘safe’ distance, she takes inventory of her mind.
These are the memories she holds onto like a sailor clutching driftwood, which is to say, full of the knowledge of the ultimate futility of her struggle. She could let them go, let the blank have them, and yet like the sailor, she intends to cling to the pain and guilt of being human for as long as she possibly can.
• • •
She remembers—this is so important—that one of the chairs wasn’t empty. M sat in the second row, their smile blindingly radiant, like a lighthouse illuminated by a burning lamp of love and pride.
Iris doesn’t remember what she did to earn M’s devotion. Did she ever really—? She could ask M—perhaps she already has—but their answer wouldn’t be the thing itself. Words are merely referential. Words aren’t the territory, and like a map they could be so easily lost. None of it was the truth that Iris needed.
• • •
The library was a vine-covered brutalist, crouching in concrete atop the remnants of the old stadium. The undergrads who swarmed campus nine months of the year shared rumors that the basement stacks were still radioactive from the first nuclear power experiments conducted in the squash courts—before they were demolished to build the library.
The thing that didn’t exist in the sub-basement was—back then—no bigger than a grapefruit. Iris doesn’t remember the story about who found it. Presumably one of the adventurous students who enjoyed the challenge of exploring the campus’s forbidden back-tunnels.
Someone had laid a circle of red tape on the bare concrete floor, but there was nothing inside the circle. Iris rolled her eyes at her fellow grad students—who had brought her there as a part of her initiation in to the lab. She waited for the prank to come to its inevitable conclusion, until someone who no longer exists demanded she look closer.
She couldn’t. There was nothing in the circle. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Her eyes shied from it; she turned her face this way and that, trying to get an angle on the hole in her vision.
M had once—while painting—talked to Iris about the use of empty space on the canvas. Most people, when asked to picture nothingness, imagine an expanse of white or black. But the hole at the center of the circle lacked color entirely. Or if it did have a color, it was the impossible color of an after-image. More accurately, it was the exact color of the blindspot at the center of every human’s poorly designed vision.
Iris doesn’t remember what happened after her lab-mates pushed her past the red tape. Impossible to know what the blank stole from her; what memories it ate, what slice of her understanding of the world it dined upon. But she remembers it felt good, like a warm bath, or the dissociative pleasure of a gripping book.
She also remembers it was smaller back then.
• • •
Yet she knows she must have had a PI. All labs have one. Someone who writes the grant applications; who hires the post-docs and grad students; who directs the research and wields scientific glory like a scythe to harvest the prestige and money used for further inquiry.
Her PI doesn’t exist. He never existed. Even so, Iris can taste the edge of his impact on the world, like a tongue feeling around the bloody absence of a tooth. This is the foundational principle of the methodology that now bears her name.
The blank doesn’t exist; it has no properties to measure. The only way to understand the phenomenon that she has devoted her academic career to studying, is to examine the epistemological decay it emits.
Professor Iris uses a hypothetical story to explain it to new grad-students. A couple have a baby. They choose a room in their house to be a nursery and fill it with things the baby needs. One day, the blank eats the baby. The baby doesn’t exist. No birth certificate, no hospital bills, no small chubby fingers. Nothing. The couple don’t remember the baby, nor its conception, gestation, or birth. And yet, there is a room in the house with a crib in it. A room that evokes a profound and inexplicable sadness.
• • •
Love is an imprecise word, a way of categorizing a set of actions, feelings, and experiences. What does it mean to feel love, to make love?
To M, love was spending hours making fresh pasta for their girlfriend. Love was the fizzing churning sensation in their stomach when they thought of Iris. Love was their need to care for her, to cup her face with their hand, to drag her beneath the covers and explore the warm love that exists in the spot where hands and thighs intersect.
To Iris, love was undefinable. Always out of reach; just past the tip of her tongue. Had the blank stolen love from her, or had she always been like this?
The fight that night wasn’t defined by raised voices or broken plates, but by the silent empty spaces between the two. It wasn’t about the late nights, the early mornings, or the way M had to put aside their own ambitions to support Iris. M said they would throw all that away, if only—
If only, what? If only M could look Iris in the eye and not see the blank there. If only Iris would stop studying the phenomenon that gave her life meaning. M loved Iris, and wanted to protect her from sacrificing herself on the altar of academia, like so many before.
They fought only because they both instinctively understood the conflict to be fundamentally unresolvable. At the end of it, lying in bed together, M forgave her, though Iris didn’t understand why.
• • •
She doesn't understand why she remembers the prosciutto, when the animal that died to make it never existed. It's possible there was once a snuffling pink beast with kind eyes, but its name is lost. To who?
She once spent a sabbatical in a country on the other side of the world, obsessively pursuing the beast. Months spent searching, alone. Where were the farms, the farmers, the recipe books and restaurants? Agriculture is not a simple thing, it depends upon a complex supply chain of feed and waste and tools and medicine and safety inspections and distribution networks. Each of which should yield paperwork. And yet, nothing.
She’d hoped that distance would have saved the beast. Thousands of miles of crust and mantle lay between the blank and the country where prosciutto originated. If such a barrier could shield against the radiation of the sun, surely it would protect against the epistemological decay of the blank.
Distance is critical to the human understanding of the world. Oversized visual cortexes, auditory triangulation, internal proprioception. The separation of the self from others—mediated by distance—is one of the fundamental epistemological edifices upon which a baby begins to build their understanding of the world.
Distance was what separated her from M for those lonely months. When her sabbatical ended, the potential energy held in that distance would collapse, released through the joy of skin touching skin. She would see M’s cheek-aching smile, not just remember it.
Yet, distance is just another way of measuring and understanding the world, and thus easy for the blank to consume. Distance from the hole did not save that country's kind-eyed beasts. Iris cannot save herself by fleeing the blank. She cannot run from what she's done.
And what happened to the beast itself? Until this sabbatical, she’d believed epistemological decay to be ephemeral; degrading abstract knowledge, not physical objects. So where were the ___ that had once—she presumed—inhabited this country?
Was it naive to hope that they still lived? Maybe the decay was a local phenomenon, occurring only within her own blank-damaged brain. A tumor could excise a person’s ability to recognize faces or language, or their ability to understand themselves as alive. Perhaps the blank merely made it impossible for Iris to comprehend any evidence of the beast’s existence.
Or maybe the blank merely removed the human ability to categorize the beast as domesticated. Perhaps the kind-eyed beast had managed to wander free of the confines of human understanding, living unseen and unhurt by human desire.
Iris never told anyone what she learned on that sabbatical, and she prefers not to remember why.
• • •
Neither of them were supposed to be down in the library sub-basement at four in the morning. M wasn’t affiliated with the university and hadn’t signed any informed consent forms. Iris—knowing it would be rejected—hadn’t submitted an access proposal.
M stood at the edge of the red line; bright brown eyes illuminated by Iris’s flashlight. Iris could see the worry on M’s face, but worse, she could recognize that familiar tilt of their head and lift of their eyebrows. Love. Uncomplicated and undeserved. Trust that Iris couldn’t believe she’d earned.
M stepped forward. Tentatively at first, and then with the determined stride that Iris had fallen in love with so long ago. Seven paces in, and they faded away, like they’d stepped into an invisible fog bank. Iris called out to them, reminding them of the procedure they’d practiced, but it was too late. The blank swallowed her words along with M.
Iris waited, and thought of gender.
What happens when a human sees another human? So much of gendering occurs at an unconscious level, in the focal points of the temporal lobe responsible for image recognition and categorization. Humans with damage to the temporal lobe often have difficulty identifying faces or gender. Yet, there were no signs of lesions or damage to the temporal lobe of those exposed to the blank. The information was being lost elsewhere. Iris—through careful study of actual information eaten by the blank—had developed a method of controlled epistemological decay.
Gender is a system of categorization. If the blank could devour a world’s worth of animals, and all the information about them, surely it could erase a single person’s gender.
Or it could erase that person entirely. How long had it been since M stepped into the blank? In the terror of the moment, she’d forgotten to set a timer. The blank had eaten M. No, that was impossible, because Iris could still remember their soft face, their belly-deep laugh, the way they bit their lip in concentration while holding a paintbrush. M was real, even if Iris could no longer remember their name.
Iris remembers her relief when M wavered back into reality, a smile on their face, their steps so light, as if the blank had stripped a heavy weight from their shoulders. Gender—and the expectations that came with it—had always been a burden to M. Now they had a clean slate, a body suffused with the power to defy definition. Iris remembers M’s joy and confidence, the way they could cut through a crowded room like a knife, sliding free of the weight of other’s categorizations.
Iris tries not to think of what else the blank might’ve taken.
• • •
She surmises now that this must’ve been shortly after her PI—the true master of the lab—was eaten by the blank. The human mind abhors the void—whether real or hierarchical—and thus bent to place someone at the head of the lab. The university administrators were quick to correct the embarrassing hole in their records. Of course the lab has a PI, and of course it was her.
She remembers how easy it was to slip into that false skin. This was what she always wanted. And if there had been a sacrifice made to achieve this victory, it wasn’t one that would ever be recorded.
• • •
In bed—when the lights were off and the brain was untethered by the noise of visual cortex—M let their anxieties out. Iris just wanted to sleep.
M wanted to leave the grayness of the city in winter. Frozen concrete and scant barren trees. Empty sidewalks and brutal winds. They wanted to go where the colors were vibrant and the air was clean and the trees thick and friendly. But Iris couldn’t leave the blank, and M couldn’t leave Iris.
And if—over the years—the color slowly drained from M’s paintings, Iris chose not to notice.
• • •
She sat in a dean's office, her vision blurred with tears. Spoken words echoed in the room: duty of care, power imbalance, liability, and a woman's flowery name. She glanced up, and on the other side of the desk, the dean's chair was empty. Perhaps they just stepped out, or perhaps they were never there to berate her.
What had she done? She worries that she slept with a student. An endless parade of young grad-students—so desperate for affirmation—place themselves into her orbit every year. Had she been tempted into betraying—?
Yet, she remembers no lovers. Each morning, she awakens in a large bed and faces the emptiness of the opposite pillow. Sometimes she presses her face into that pillow, searching for a lingering scent, but she only ever smells the crisp smell of fresh laundry. She stares at the bare walls of her apartment and wonders why she never hung any art.
Perhaps she has had lovers. But if she did, none of them left enough of an impact on her life—or the world—for her to sense the edges of their absence.
Which leads her to an inescapable conclusion; she did something much worse to a student than become their lover.
• • •
Hands wrapped her waist from behind as she stirred caramelized onions. Wine-drunk laughter.
A stained cookbook. Each recipe is a story not just of the dish but of the life of the person who cooked and collated it. Each ingredient reveals the diet and staple crops of the society that produced it. A recipe references tools, methods, and homes. A recipe is the love transmitted in a meal, transformed into text.
She tried to cook the recipe—a soup, rich dark broth—but something was missing. No matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t recapture some indefinable aspect of the dish that once brought her so much joy.
• • •
He was short and clean-faced. He had a tendency to bound from thought to thought like an overstimulated rabbit; his eyes full of a certain sharp light that she recognized as a mirror of her own academic hunger. This was a man who would burn himself to learn the oven was hot, then do it again to be sure. In no time at all, he was standing at the edge of the red tape.
She pushed him in.
Her hands remembered how to do it. She doesn't remember him emerging from the blank, but she remembers him, remembers the research he's done, the papers he's published. So he's still alive, still real. She can picture his face, and see the blankness in his eyes.
Iris believes she can learn things from watching the blank eat. Interviews and employment give her a perfect opportunity to learn everything she can about each new grad-student. Each one is described in the same format, a recipe for a person. And what holes appear in that recipe when she feeds it to the blank?
Iris believes she can choose what the blank eats. She has to believe it, has to ignore any evidence to the contrary. Better to feed it gruel, than have it develop a taste for—
• • •
• • •
• • •
She remembers eating an Italian-beef sandwich, soggy from the juice and spicy-sour from the giardiniera, while a topologist and a theoretical physicist desultorily explained their research at an inter-departmental lunch.
The hole is a hole in the same way a coffee mug and a donut are the same shape. It is a curved light-cone, twisted back onto itself. It consumes information, because it is information, radiating backwards, overwriting the present with the future. The blank is the shadow of that future, obscuring the present. It will continue to grow spatially as the temporal distance to its origin point decreases.
Iris calls bullshit. Their math—even if it can perfectly describe the shape of the hole—is powerless against a phenomenon that eats concepts. She can only understand the blank through the instrument of her body, and none of the mathematical predictions aligns with what she’s experienced. Clearly the blank has degraded their ability to consider alternate understandings.
And where are those physicists and mathematicians now? What happened to their fields of study? She doesn't care to remember.
• • •
She’d come home to her apartment, to find the table empty. Staring into the dark and drafty kitchen, Iris knew it was time for her to admit to being wrong. The academy was a glue trap, and she was ready to leave.
But there was no-one to tell; no-one to beg forgiveness from. Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling of bright eyes staring at her from the dark. Shivers, in a place that no longer felt like home.
She returned to campus, back to the fluorescent lighting of her office. She locked the door and fell into her hard-backed chair. Her office—surrounded by her colleagues, by the evidence of the life she’d built—felt more like home than an empty apartment ever could.
• • •
• • •
She turned to stare at the hole. It was big enough now that it took up almost her entire vision. A strobing twisting flower, the color of the negation of sight. What was—
Disorientation. Pain in her shoulder; she was laying on the floor. Why hadn’t she brought a chair?
She remembers crawling towards the hole. Inch by inch, closer to the thing that had swallowed her life. She’d lost something, hadn’t she? The sandwich? Someone important? And if she could just crawl forward, she might be reunited with everything the blank had stolen from her. Kind eyes waited for her across the threshold. It all lay there, through the hole, past the point of no return.
Closer and closer. To truly understand the blank, she needed to give herself up to it wholly. To pierce the veil of human understanding. Forward forward, let her guilt be overwritten by a pure clean future she couldn’t see.
• • •
• • •
• • •
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
• • •
• • •
No—she must hold the blank at a distance, as it holds its own secrets from her.
She knows she’s going to keep doing the thing she hates to remember doing. If she lets it eat her, who would be left to direct the research? No-one competent. If she disappears, who will be willing to sacrifice everything to recover the things she can’t remember? Better to ride the beast; better to let it devour the world, than to let go of the reins.
So, she does what she always does. She enters the empty deli, steps behind the counter, surveys the ingredients, recalls the recipe, makes herself a roast beef sandwich, and returns to eat it in the one place she can feel at peace.
