Face of God

It was Tuesday, nearly a month ago, now, that I arrived at Paul’s house,
without the slightest notion that the world had changed. I went there often; it was
not unusual for me to arrive nigh into supper, that annoying shepard leaping to
my face, his paws on my shoulders as he forced from me an unceremonious
dance to the hall closet, whereupon without fail little Anna would come running
to my rescue, calling off the timid giant and announcing to her parents, hoping
they didn’t yet know and that she could be the bearer of exciting events, “Ruth is
here! Dad! Mom!... DAAAAD!! Ruth is here!!” I suspect that the shepard was
forever driven to hiding by the sheer weight of Anna’s voice, and would have
gladly continued his waltz with me if she had not always made such a vociferous
pronouncement.

Invariably it was Mom, Grace, and not Paul who would come down that
middle-aged hall first; sometimes wiping her hands of the remnants of the meal I
had interrupted, sometimes of the remnants of the meal not yet served; but
always, always, wiping her hands clean of something. Tuesday, nearly a month
ago, now, it was suds from the sink where the dishes made their home after
meals, and she came smiling into the small foyer, the shepard scuttling past her
in the narrow corridor. “Hi Ruth,” she started, patting Anna’s head and giving
her a gentle shove out of the foyer, “Paul’s in his study. Maybe you can get him
out.”

“Oh?” I intoned, the quizzical eyebrow raised in inquiry.

“He’s been in there all day working on something... must have him
really rapt, he didn’t even come out for supper,” she said, smiling wistfully. To
anyone who knew Paul even a bit, you could not help but guess that if he missed
supper he must be REALLY excited over something. I smiled, and thus ensued a
trivial and brief conversation that I don’t recall now. Somewhere along Anna
interrupted with a multitude of questions about fractions and denominators, and
Grace disappeared into the living room, always a super-mom to the rescue.

I wandered my way down the narrow hall to its converging end, rapped
lightly at the tall, paneled door as I pushed it open. The familiar sound of fans
filled my ears as the brass knob swung away from my hand; fans in printers and
fans on processors and fans over banks and banks of sealed, magical boxes. Paul
was standing, leaning over the plush office chair, tapping keystrokes into one of
the keyboards spread across the sprawling desk. He did not look up as I came in,
merely threw over his shoulder, “Hi Ruth, have a seat, just a second, almost
done.”

I removed a pile of disjointed data from the nearest wooden stool and
perched myself upon it, waiting to see what had Paul in such a frenzy of activity.
He stood lanky, tall, the glasses permanently slipping from the hooked bridge of
his nose. I don’t know what people imagine an astrophysicist to look like; I do
know that that was what I imagined one to look like. After a time he finished his
immediate task and sat, ironically, in the seat before the computer, twirling it to
face my own perch only a few feet away. Almost instantly his hand shot out, a
laser print-out in his hand, rippling the paper eagerly towards me. Without a
word I pulled the sheet from his hand, snapped it flat, and looked carefully at its
image. It was black; or mostly so.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” he grinned ecstatically.

I waved at it grandly, saying, “Oh, sure... it’s a magnificent toner test,
Paul”.

He smiled at the tease, answering, “It’s an image from the Hawking
Scope, Ruth.”

I took a closer look, but failed to see the relevance. I was not, after all,
the astrophysicist in the room. “It looks black, Paul.”

A wave of what seemed disappointment washed across his face, but
only momentarily, and vanishing quite quickly. “Well, yes, but isn’t it sort of...
captivating?” he inquired, hopefully. I continued to glare at the image, trying to
discern some pattern in the blacks and almost-blacks of its shades. Momentarily,
my eye roved from corner to corner in a particular fashion; I blinked at just the
right time; and almost, something seemed to be there... but the page was snapped
away from me, Paul grabbing it back to him. For a moment a surge of anger
swelled in me, until I realized where I was. “Well, if you don’t see anything,
don’t bother,” he said, cheerfully it seemed. But his eyes darted, looking out at
me suspiciously, jealously. I shook my head, clearing the thought. Paul was
sitting there still, smiling at the image, silent. After a moment, he looked up at
me again, the former ecstasy renewed. Or perhaps never dissipated.

“Well, maybe there’s something there, Paul... but its just black...
where’d it come from?” I asked, encouraging his dialogue. He glanced over at
the monitor on which he had been working, his eyes searching for some read-out,
before looking back at me to explain.

“Like I said, it’s an image from the Hawking Scope. Down at the lab we
had a major success yesterday and were able to re-focus another billion light-
years distant. Farthest ever,” he added, nonchalantly. “I had some ideas on
improving the resolution, hoping for another million or two light-years. I’ve been
working on it all day, tweaking the scope,” he grinned, pausing climactically; “I
got another half-billion out of it, Ruth!”

He seemed extremely excited by this point, but I could only shrug and
say, “That’s impressive, Paul.” He looked at me, stunned, before regaining his
sensibility.

“Well... right, of course...,” he stammered, searching for the flow of his
achievement, before continuing, “I mean, you don’t realize what that means, of
course. Think, Ruth, every light-year farther we see, we go back in time. Every
light-year away from us is another year back in the history of the universe; back
to when the light first started its journey to Earth.” I nodded, understanding the
idea but not his excitement. He seemed to wait for some revelation, some
awestruck image on my face. I smiled, encouraging. “You don’t get it... Ruth, we
were right at the edge as is. We don’t know for sure how old the universe really
is, not yet, but we knew we were getting close. With the extra we got at the lab
yesterday, we were right there, Ruth. I hoped to get us even closer, but... I
overdid it, Ruth! Do you understand? I went another half-billion, right when we
were at the edge of the universe... I went PAST it, Ruth! Past the edge! Right
back before the beginning of time, before the universe itself!”

His narration had grown more and more frantic with each moment, and
as the realization dawned on me I too grew more and more excited. “And
that...?” I said, pointing at the paper he grasped tightly in his hand. He nodded.

“This is the first image from the scope... awful resolution, but... you
see? This is a picture of pre-time, Ruth, before everything.” I leaned back in the
stool, realizing just in time that there was nowhere to lean back to, and managed
not to fall off. I sat stunned, considering the possibilities.

“That’s a picture of the face of God,” I whispered, whimsically.

“What?” he retorted too quickly, then looked down. “Oh, yes... I see
what you mean... I guess in a way, sure...” he tapered. After a breath, he regained
his purpose once more. “Look, anyway, like I said, the resolution is awful and I
can’t be sure about the math on the exact time and distance anyway. I need you
to run some differentials for me, solve some of these tensor problems, so that I
can get a better resolution on the scope. I’ve got ‘em all ready to go, here,” he
said, waving towards one of the consoles in the study. I ambled over to the
computer, dragging my now familiar seat behind me, and planted myself to work
on the machine. Sometime after one or two in the morning, I looked over to see
that Paul had fallen asleep at his keyboard. With a start, I realized that I, too, had
been drifting off at the computer. Groggily, I made my way out of the study and
back home, trying not to wake the shepard as I left.

It was Tuesday, only a week ago, now, that I arrived at Paul’s house,
this time at his explicit telephone request. After the last late-night stint, I had
gotten caught with the impending funding cuts at the department and had had no
time to see if the tensor solutions I’d come up with were anywhere in the vicinity
of what Paul needed. In fact, except for a few brief, hurried “hi’s” in the
corridors at some of the labs, I hadn’t seen him at all. He’d been equally brief on
the phone, with little more than “Hurry over, I want to show you something”
before hanging up. When I opened the door, there were no leaping shepards to
greet me. At first, I was relieved, but then I noticed the lack of assorted items in
the hallway. The paintings hung lovingly had disappeared; the shoes in the foyer
consisted of one pair of brown loafers. The hall closet housed only Paul’s fall
blazer.

“Anna?” I called, wondering where the little girl had gone. She should
have been home from school by now. “Grace?... Paul?” I continued, wondering
what had happened to the life in the house. I was startled by Paul’s imminent
reply, echoing hollowly from the living room adjacent the foyer. I had expected
to hear Grace from the kitchen, or even Paul from the study; not his rasping
voice right there, only one thin wall between us. I peeked around the corner into
the living room, stunned by its emptiness. The sofa, the table, the plants... well,
everything but Paul and some of his equipment... it was gone, barren.

“Paul?” I asked again, concerned. “Paul, where’s your things? Where’s
Grace, and Anna?”

He did not turn, merely shrugged his shoulders, stating, “Oh, they left a
bit ago. They took the furniture, I think.” It was then that I noticed the hardwood
floor had been covered with pages and pages of laser print-outs, and Paul
standing at the very edge, in the corner, staring down at the sheets in rapture. I
hurried over to him, rustling a few pages, and grabbed his shoulders.

“Paul?! What’s going on? WHERE did Grace and Anna go?” I
demanded from him. He didn’t move, his gaze caught in the rustling pages on the
floor.

“They left, I said. Grace took Anna and they went away,” was all he
replied.

Finally I squeezed his arms, a wash of pain breaking over his face, and
shouted into his hooked nose, “PAUL! What is going on!?”

He twisted violently out of my grasp, crouching back into the corner
further, hunching. For one, brief moment I thought he was going to pounce at
me, attack me until I was silenced and removed. Instead, his tensing shoulders
relaxed marginally, and he started bubbling with laughter. After a few moments,
I realized he was talking, too.

“I got it!” he screeched, hysterically. “Those tensor solutions were just
the trick, Ruth! Boy, were they ever!” he laughed gleefully, childishly. “The
resolution went up a hundred-fold, Ruth, and just like that I was out past the
edge of the universe!” he snapped his fingers demonstratively. “Boy, what a
ride!” he grinned up at me. Then, suddenly, his arms shot out from his body in a
wide, embracing gesture, taking in a sweep the entire living room. In the dying
light, I could see that essentially the entire floor was covered with the black laser
print-outs, all similar to the one I had seen two weeks earlier in his study. “There
it is, Ruth,” he whispered to me, pulling at my shoulder. “You were right... the
face of God... there it is...” he continued hoarsely, afraid. And then, quite
suddenly, for one instant in his eyes a cold, piercing glare stared out at me, and
his shoulder’s straightened with his back as he stood tall again, staring into me.

“I want to look away, Ruth.”

And then it was gone again, and now he was on his knees before the
image on the floor, laughing or crying and babbling words that I did not want to
understand. I backed away slowly, fearful, watching him in horror; but he made
no more attempts to assail me, or even to speak to me. I shut the door softly as I
stepped outside, and then I ran to the car. Inside my hands trembled on the wheel
as I sat, afraid and uncertain. Finally, after several minutes in the arcing orange
glare of the streetlights, I relaxed enough to decide what to do. I would go to a
pay phone down the block, and call the hospital, and have them come for him. I
did not know what had happened, but maybe they would. Maybe they could...
what, heal him? Was he sick? I didn’t know, and didn’t think, I just drove to the
gas-mart down the block, fumbling for quarters in my purse.

After fifteen minutes, I had finally progressed from an orderly to a
nurse to a bona-fide doctor, when I heard the wailing, lonely call of the sirens.
Moments later, the first of the fire-trucks flashed by the gas-mart, and my gut
dry-heaved with foresight. I let the phone drop as I jumped back into the car, and
was beaten only by one other fire-truck as I returned to Paul’s house. It was
already engulfed in the living liquid heat of flames, the fire-fighters spraying
token blasts of foam, concentrating more on dousing the adjacent lots and walls
with layers of cold, preserving water. I found someone who looked reasonably in
charge, and at first he eyed my hysterics with doubtful suspicion.

“There’s someone in there!” I shouted at him. “His name’s Paul! I was
here just twenty minutes ago!” I yelled, now pounding on the firefighter's
shoulders. “He’s in there, you’ve got to get him out!” I repeated inanely, and the
firefighter put a hand on my shoulder in solace before answering.

“If there was anyone in there, ma’am, they were gone before we got
here. I’m sorry, but we couldn’t even get our guys on the lawn when the first
truck arrived. I’m sorry.” he repeated, attempting comfort. I simply sat down on
the wet pavement in the street, watching ashes fall like rain into the streams of
dirty water flowing to the sewers. And I knew they were the ashes of the pages
spread reverently on Paul’s living room floor.

Today is Tuesday. It’s been a week since the fire, and they’ve already
cleared the lot and buried it under. With Grace already having taken almost
everything, there wasn’t much to salvage anyway. The lot is simply a muddy hill,
now, with odd protrusions and a few sprouts of grass already pushing from the
rim. I had to come back, because last night I dreamed about that image in his
study, the one that was black and almost-black and of horrible resolution. The
first snapshot of God. I can’t get it out of my head, though I never did see
anything but a blur, a momentary black-stained trail when I’d looked at it. But I
still can’t get it out of my head. And every time I look out, and up, into the sky,
night or day, I can’t help but wonder, if all the stars and clouds and planets were
stripped away, how bright would be that light from the edge of the universe, the
light that has been there traveling, traveling to bathe us and consume us, for
billions and billions of years. And I wonder, too, that in billions of years to
come, when the light just now leaving that place, beyond the rim of time, arrives
here on Earth to shed us with its constant glow, will it still be the face of God
shining down, behind all the heavens?

And when, eternally, it finally comes... who will be here to see it?