The Singularity

I’m falling.

The Universe moves instantaneously fast. I cannot tell if the hands that grasp it are stickily adroit or ursine crushers whose gravity exceeds all but the void in spacetime in which I am fading fast from this life. I see glimpses of others, a King riding the expansion equally fast in the opposite direction, his orbit now no longer capable of being reached, even if it were possible to escape. More figures with arms outstretched lunge at the chimera of bear and cephalopod vying to hold the Universe, not mocha as described to me by people who know more about the undying chaos among the stars than me, but shining in gold. A grasp clad in diamond, one reaching from watercraft, model citizens, crumbs, murderous shows of supernova force, even more I cannot make out from the cosmic gumbo unfolding in front of eyes observing final moments of existence.

So close to my hands the prize was, and now it feels like it’s light years away.

And I’m falling.

Falling… 🪐 “FAAAAAAAAALIIIIIIING, I’m FAAAAAAAAAALIIING!”

Tom Battaglia bolted awake from short slumber. Since arriving from Australia, sleep had eluded him for more than an hour or two at a time. Part of it was external, sure. The Pom Academy with its bustle during the day and Peppa Pig blasting at full volume at night was not an ideal substitute for paid accommodations. The money he saved taking up his old friend on a solid might eventually end up going to doctor’s bills when he eventually arrives home to the States.

Dexter Holland’s nasal vocals to kick off the Americana album ended this sojourn into dreamland. His voice emanated from portable speakers in the Academy’s commissary, where Kaori Uematsu-Hasegawa had just sat down for her lunch.

“Tom, did I startle you?”

“Did I fall asleep here?”

“I didn’t notice. I thought you just really enjoyed your lunch.”

Tom looked around. A half-eaten egg salad sandwich, homemade, not from 7-11, sat on a plate in front of him.

“I don’t even remember making this.”

Kaori tapped pause on her phone to stop the music, grabbed her bowl, and sat across from the exhausted Luchador.

“What’s up with you lately? Even Pom thinks you’re acting abnormally, and she spent the last year decapitating birdmen.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem unless your daughter notices.”

“I’m assuming you mean Chiyo. Ayame is observant. And we agree. You’re not in your right mind now, Tom.”

Tom shook his head.

“It’s hard to sleep around here sometimes, that’s all,” he said dismissively.

Kaori’s glare intensified.

“I know we are not as close as we were 20 years ago, but it’s not just the lack of sleep. You look…”

She gave a deep look in Tom’s sullen, bloodshot eyes.

“...bothered.”

He furrowed his brow.

“And how can you tell that?”

“I can go through the laundry list of things I’ve noticed, or you can just trust my intuition. I know a moody one when I see them.”

She pushed away her bowl and leaned in.

“So tell me, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ugh, you know. Tell me.”

“No, that’s the problem. I don’t know.” 🪐 People smarter than me have said we probably haven’t discovered everything that exists in the cosmos, which makes a hell of a lot of sense. Here I am, a celestial body being rent asunder across the event horizon of a black hole. But what exactly am I? A red giant, able to match abilities with the actual literal red giant with its mitts on the Universe of Gold? A white dwarf? Someone called me that once, a long time ago. I kicked him in the face and took his World Title. That was a lifetime ago. At least two galaxies in the past.

Weird.

I was ejected from that galaxy. Didn’t really have a say in the matter, even though I was happy to be gone. The time there was turbulent. The gravity there ripped me to unnatural shreds, and still, I wasn’t what they expected. By the time I got to the second galaxy, a calmer one but one fraught with larger stars with brighter radiation, I bore the scars of my first cosmic home. I thought I exhausted all my fuel too soon, but there would be no supernova blast. I fell back into interstellar space, a husk of a celestial body.

Or so I thought.

As the PRIME galaxy reformed, the gravity drew me in. The astronomers gazing through telescopes from afar have been recorded as saying this the history of the ReVival galaxy could not be told without me, but they stammer and stutter when asked what exactly I am. A fiery and reckless pulsar? A brown dwarf, massive enough to exist among the others but with not enough energy to heat up for fusion? A primordial star, purely existing of hydrogen? Or a nebula, resembling a flatulent Taco Bell emission?

Now it really doesn’t matter, does it?

I’m finished.

As soon as this fucker turns me into spaghetti and rips me into the singularity, it’s all over for me, whatever it is I am. 🪐 “The problem is you don’t know what the problem is.”

“No, no, that’s…”

Tom trailed off.

“It’s that I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, who I am.”

He expected the exhausted sigh of someone who’d heard those words come from his mouth before, who were tired of an identity crisis with no permanent solution. But Kaori just nodded. Maybe the lack of regular contact with him in the last 20-or-so years helped obviously. Regardless, she was gentle.

“Why? C’mon. I may be just getting back into your orbit, but you meant a lot to me, to Nob. I have to help, right?”

“Can you, though? I’ve been to at least four therapists, I’ve…”

She shot him a scowl that stopped him dead in his tracks.

“You’ve not talked to a friend. Or maybe you have? You’ve spent more time talking to my daughter than you have to me since being here.”

“Well, to be fair, Ayame isn’t working around the clock like you and Pom. I don’t want to bother you.”

“Pfft, please. Pom spends most of her time stewing over invoices. And my outreach work just makes me look busy. Most of the time, I’m watching funny videos on TikTok.”

Tom looked like he was going to say something, but Kaori cut him off.

“And you’re a friend. One I haven’t seen in a long time, but a friend no less. Our hospitality extends further than a bed and use of our commissary, you know? Now tell me, why do you feel this way, this normal, natural way people feel when they’re under a lot of stress?”

“Way to make me feel like an asshole,” Tom responded stone-faced. Kaori leaned back in shocked like she committed a grave sin before he burst out laughing.

“I’m just fuckin’ with you. No.”

She shot him one of those looks that Tam so frequently gave him at one of those attempts at sarcastic humor.

“Seriously though, I went through this a lot last year, didn’t know what my purpose was. I was at the tail end of a mean, awful, trying year, and I was just acting differently week-to-week, struggling to have any kind of consistency of character other than ‘win matches.’”

“I mean, winning matches is what wrestling is about.”

Tom shook his head, slightly exasperated that his point didn’t come across.

“Yes, yes, I mean.”

He sighed and shook his head again.

“But the people who have purpose, a plan, they get ahead because they’re thinking bigger. They see the dominoes fall. And it was there, in Wales, thanks to Pom, oddly enough, I saw my line of dominoes. I was going to be the man who brought wrestling back to wrestling.”

Kaori laughed.

“You really haven’t changed, Tom. Still the big bold idealist you were all those years ago.”

“Yeah,” he replied with a chuckle of his own. “And it started out great too. I challenged Jason Snow and beat him.”

“I have no idea who that is, you know that right?”

Tom thought real hard for a moment before answering.

“Okay, well, he’s a big deal. BIG BIG DEAL. And things were going really great until Zapp showed up, and then my whole thing got derailed.”

“You know what Yoko Ono’s husband once said, life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”

“Did you say that just because you thought it’d annoy me?”

“No, I really don’t remember what her husband’s name was.”

“Well it didn’t annoy me, cuz John Lennon was a douchebag.”

“Ah, that’s it.”

“But then I got settled into life with him as my partner, and poof. Gone. And just as quickly as that happened, I have the Glue assholes trying to stick themselves to me, and now I’ve attracted two more younger wrestlers who think I’m someone to look up to, and I haven’t even gotten a chance to breathe let alone sit down and think what should come next since I got on that plane to fucking Sydney.”

He sighed deeply and loudly before throwing his head on the table in exasperation.

“It’s not your fault though.”

“Yes it is, K.”

Kaori leaned back with a quizzical look on her face.

“How? It’s circumstance. Life happens. There’s no grand plan.”

Tom lifted his head up.

“But there is. I trained the universe to expect a formless lump of clay when it came to me. Hell, it was the persona I crafted for myself when I got my first contract in America. My gimmick is gimmick infringement! HA! What pernicious bullshit that was. You reap what you sow.”

“You know, Pom told me you believed in this grand architecture nonsense, which doesn’t shock me. You’ve always been a drama queen.”

Tom rolled his eyes but then nodded, because Kaori spoke truth.

“But you have to understand that life is life, and no matter how much you think you should fit in a single category, sometimes…”

She stopped mid-sentence.

“You know what? I don’t think I’m the one who should be saying this to you.”

“First you offer to help and…”

“I’m not the right person. I know who is.”

Tom raised his eyebrow.

“My husband.”

Tom startled back.

“Your husband. The one who’s been dead long enough for someone to be old enough to drink in America?”

Kaori exhaled sighingly and shook her head.

“I found a letter of his he never sent. He wrote it before he died, but I guess he just forgot to mail it before he took his bike out the last time, or maybe he still wanted to edit his thoughts? I don’t know. But I was looking for the best time to give it to you, and now might be it.”

The color drained from Tom’s face as he thought of the implications of reading the words of a man 20 years dead. 🪐 Ayame told me once that the Sun is an astronomical anomaly. Most stars exist in pairs. Binary systems. Maybe Jupiter was supposed to be the Sun’s twin, but Saturn and Neptune and Uranus just couldn’t stand how bossy that motherfucker was and formed their own little balls of gas and dust. Or maybe the Sun was just like me, fundamentally unlovable.

Okay, scratch that. I’m already feeling my legs turn into cosmological noodles as they stretch further from the top of my body, hurtling towards its center, the end of time. There’s no need for performative self-effacing. The black hole is doing that quite nicely on its own.

But I can’t help but think that the little boost of gravity from Zapp might have kept me from the finality of the end of time.

I don’t know what outside force broke the bond of inertia between me and my binary. Maybe it’s because I’m not even a star. I don’t know what I am, remember? I certainly don’t believe it was all Glue that sent him packing. Zapp is a cockroach. Was a cockroach. Conjugate the verb “to be” in all voices and tenses because I’m sinking to the singularity, baby. I’ll be a dot sooner than you can say “Eleven herbs and spices down here at Noah Hanson’s KFC!”

Funny, I think I saw that very location on my way down, somewhere between the event horizon and one-half the Swartzchild radius. Bathory says hi, or at least he would if he didn’t forget the gravy on Azathoth’s three-piece dark meat combo.

Maybe I wanted to be a solitary heavenly body after all. Zapp annoyed the piss out of me more than often than not anyway.

That intrusive thought isn’t helping.

I’m spaghetti, completely. Goodbye, PRIME Universe. It’s been real. I’m a dot.

I’m a dot.

I’m… it’s not a dot? 🪐 There was only one appropriate place to read a letter from a dead man.

At his headstone.

“‘Sup, Nob. I’ve been visiting a lot lately, huh.”

No answer. Shit outta luck a second time. Tom guessed that the ghosts were done with him.

“K says you wrote this for me but never sent it. Gonna see why. Let’s read it together, huh?”

He sat down on top of his friend’s grave, leaning back against the stone. He opened the trifold and squinted to adjust his eyes for the natural light. He planned on reading it aloud, but instead, he just whispered the note back to himself.

Thomas-san,

Sorry to not write you for so long. Busy with wrestling. Aoki is sick. Leans on me more than ever. But I still watch you on TV. Every show. I sad when I see you. Not because you not doing well. I see sadness. Lack of energy. You not yourself.

Tom looked up from the letter and mouthed the word “fuck.”

Why they put you in narrow box? Not T.A.L. I know. They break you spirit? I have reason. I long to leave. Wrestle in big company. Maybe come to America. With you. But honor keeps me with Aoki. Especially now, with his sickness.

There only one thing to say. Whatever they say you do, tell them to fuck. No box contain T.A.L. He is the fire. The air. The water and the earth. All element in one. One of a kind, as you gaijin say. It okay to not know. We learn all the time. Like flow of the river.

Sorry my English still bad. I still learning. I want to come to America. Maybe when I learn language, I see you again.

Your friend, 長谷川宣夫

Tom slumped down, sliding his back down the headstone. A tear formed in the corner of his right eye.

“You son of a bitch,” he said softly as he looked into the sky. The clouds rolled in across the Sun, dimming the natural light. For the first time in seemingly forever, he smiled as his eyelids grew heavy. 🪐 One thing about spending so much time around a science-obsessed youngster is that they have the energy that exceeds my own battery by astronomical margins to keep up with their special interests. I learned so much just by listening to what Ayame listens to between telling her stories about when me and her father were younger and more restless, maybe even reckless.

Astrophysicists, for example, theorize that the singularity model of a black hole is, in a word, bullshit. Matter forms in the shape of a disc everywhere else in the universe, why not in the center of a black hole?

And Einstein’s equations do not preclude the existence of white holes, massive jet streams of energy whose repulsive force is so strong that nothing, not even light, can enter.

And higher planes of physical theories suggest that there are multiple universes, each with differing laws of physics, and that maybe black holes are gateways to them.

Disc-shaped singularities that form a boundary between black holes in this universe and white holes in another?

Don’t ask me if I think it’s real. I’m a dumbass who got a D in physics in high school only because my teacher was also the football coach, and I played a year of Catholic League football as repayment.

That’s how I got my first concussion. True story.

I think. Memory’s hazy.

All I know is the spaghetti that the black hole turned me into reformed like pasta going back into the extruder and turning back into dough. The new Universe is right in front of me. The bear and the gluectopus are still there, fighting for the Gold. The diamond and the crumb and the lizard and the shidder and yes the sniffling cowboy on the jetski are there too. They’ve all got sights on the same thing.

But I’m no longer falling.

I have my sights on it too.

And I know what I am.

I am The Singularity.

My gravity is great. I reach for all I can see, and my eyes are only set on the Universe of Gold. I am fixed upon it in ways that bewilder and beguile this cosmos.

In a Universe that only knows repellence, I am the attraction.

And all I see, all I hunt will sooner or later fall into orbital decay until I have it where I want it.

In my gravity. 🪐 “And he’s been sleeping out here since when?”

Pom Shinjoku and Ayame Hasegawa gaze upon Tom, slumbering while contorted awkwardly against the latter’s father’s headstone.

“Mom says he gave him a letter from Dad, then he came out. This was around lunchtime.”

“For the love of the heavens,” Pom muttered before turning to her friend and using the sternest, most “mom” voice she had.

“LUCHADOR! WAKE UP!”

Tom startled awake.

“Jesus, what time is it?”

“It’s almost time for dinner. I made udon with beef tongue.”

Tom rubbed his neck as he rose to his feet slowly and creakily.

“Are you sure you made it, or did Haru up the street?”

Pom groaned.

“Can’t get anything by you, huh? But it was pretty expensive. You better eat or…”

“Does it taste good heated up?”

Pom’s yuck-face would have killed the cedar tree overlooking the two graves if it had actual energy attached to it.

“Of all the nerve!”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I finally got to sleep, and I need to catch up. I have a really, really big weekend ahead of me.”

“And that’s why you need to eat! You know, some of the best wrestlers in this country load up for big shows at the Dome with beef bowls!”

“No, I need sleep more..”

Tom closed his eyes momentarily and breathed in deeply.

“Because if I’m going to hunt some mans AND keep the Tag Titles with Crash? I need to be well-rested so I can be the Avatar Fuckstorm of Violence that I know I need to be.”

Ayame mouthed the phrase “Avatar Fuckstorm” while Pom groaned and smacked Tom in the back of his head. As the two women walked up the steps to the Academy, he lagged for a second. He turned to look back at his friend’s grave before folding the letter he was still clutching in his hands back into a neat trifold and placing it back in his pocket.