Alice visits New Mexico, then the original just for the sake of it.
She sends John postcards from every place she visits: Ensenada and Puerto Penasco, Mazatlan and Ixtapa, Cancun and Oaxaca, all splashed with bright colours and cheerful messages. In Merida, she thinks of him, so she sends him a postcard from Dzibilchaltún, with the words WISH YOU WERE HERE and a smiley face written on the back in her pristine script. She's never been a one for progressive rock, but Pink Floyd has some beautiful songs, she tells the too-friendly man who asks her who the card is for, ducking his question by feigning eccentricity. She spends the rest of the bus trip back to the hotel wondering if killing him would be an appropriate reaction. His name is John, it turns out as he tries to escort her to the hotel bar, not even trying to hide the wedding ring on his left hand. He's cheerful to a fault, and she's sure the average woman finds him charming, funny, and handsome. She thinks he'd look a lot more attractive to her in a morgue.
But contrary to the profile that her John touts of her, she is not the violent sort. She kills for necessity, utility, revenge, and the John in front of her is frankly not worth her time. The John she left behind her, however, leaves an endless list of possibilities in his wake, and murder is still among them. (She'd both hate and love to do it. John, after all, is her friend and if needed she could provide him with one last measure of intimacy: the bloody pulp of his heart in her hands.)
She runs her finger along the lip of her wineglass and tunes the man out as he rattles on and on about himself. He's a lawyer, he explains at length, and thinks highly of himself in that regard. She's always liked lawyers, of course; any sort of linguistic sparring always attracted her, especially the sort based on being more cunning than those you oppose. She might make an exception for this John, however.
John the Lawyer makes her think about John the Copper, and she doesn't bother to stop the wry, distracted smile that carves its way across her face at the memory. John the Hero, John the Villain, John her lost boy. He's a one-man Good Cop/Bad Cop routine and she misses him, she really does; misses the familiarity of his slight unease and the way his shoulders pitch when he walks, like the bow of a ship tossed by the capricious sea.
"But enough about me. What do you do for a living?" John the Lawyer flashes her a deferential smile. She knows what he expects: inner city schoolteacher, or secretary, or perhaps a student finishing her master's degree in business and off to see the real world before she enters it. He wants her to be mousy and inconsequential, a little eccentric woman with a little job who will be easily cowed and impressed by John the Big, Important Lawyer.
She smiles, mentally cracking her knuckles. "Astrophysics."
In response, John the Lawyer raises his eyebrows. The gesture is supposed to show interest, but she's gotten it so often that by now she knows it's to mask shock instead. "How long have you been, er, in that field?"
"Oh…since I was thirteen," she says, turning up the grin. A lie. At seven she'd decided that even the deepest dredges of earth were below her and turned her mind instead to the stars; by the age of nine she could probably explain the universe better than most students at Oxford; at thirteen, it was empirically proven that she could.
There had been interviews, and her picture in the papers, and for a week or so everyone was saying things like "Astrophysics, eh? Gonna become an astronaut?" and "Don't you want to enjoy your childhood?"
As if she'd ever aspire to things so mundane.
John the Lawyer blinks again, and she smiles winningly. "So you've been interested in it for a while then," he hazards, clearly unsure of what to say. "Are you studying for a degree now?"
"Oh goodness, no," she says, lowering her voice and leaning in slightly. Maybe he thinks she means astrology, something he'd categorize as more fitting for women. "I mean that I started studying it in school when I was thirteen. Five years later I got my PhD from Oxford, and now, well, in the most plebeian way of explaining it, I study dark matter, that incomprehensible stuff of our universe. But I'm sure a smart man like you knows all about that, hmm?"
Maybe he'll get lucky and know something, have read an article about dark matter or know enough about the galaxy to at least classify the Milky Way as a spiral galaxy. Or maybe she should tell him about it, about how approximately one quarter (Planck's team gives the figure of 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy, putting the percent of the universe that falls under the scientific title of 'Things We Know Jack Shit About' at approximately 95.1%, with the possibility of tacking on another 4.9%) of the universe is comprised of a mass that the scientific community can only dream of understanding, and how if it hadn't been for Ian Reed's unfortunate tendencies to do ridiculously stupid things, she would be part of the community working toward that goal. She could tell him about what would happen if the Earth were to be sucked into Sagittarius A* right at this very moment, how the supermassive black hole wouldn't even give him the luxury of feeling flesh being stripped from his bones; how time slows as you approach the singularity but that wouldn't matter to him one whit, because he'd be dead and the astrophysics controversy surrounding whether or not a black hole is even a black hole would matter even less. She could tell him about that controversy as well, watching him smile and nod and get more and more confused and out of depth and by the same token ever more afraid to ask what the hell she was talking about.
"Thirteen," he says weakly, and she smiles as brightly as she can, exuding a brilliantly beatific air. He doesn't deserve to spend time in her presence, not a little man like him. When he dies, he'll be swallowed up by time, and his aspirations are just as mortal as he is (Business law, she thinks with relish. How quaintly charming. The wholly human practice of devoting human ingenuity to making life harder.), and her stars will twinkle on above her in the sky, burning bright and dead and beautiful as the Earth keeps spinning.
She leaves Mexico soon after, and heads back home, back to the little world of John and Mark and Jenny, all wrapped up and warm without the universe to worry about.
The plane ride is comfortable, albeit boring, and she falls asleep to the sound of the calm babble of her fellow passengers around her. The sun is rising over the horizon and limning the sky in reds and purples when she wakes to the sound of the woman to her immediate right loudly proclaiming its beauty.
"Now, now," her father says. "We don't want you to have to live in any spotlight. Enjoy your childhood, Alice—being an adult is stressful."
Alice is ten years old and in a higher level of maths than he at any point in his life had hoped to achieve. She understands the concept of stress better than he ever will, and revels in it.
They buy books for her in the hopes that she'll be challenged by them, and Alice has difficulty not laughing at such a notion. History bores her, as the mistakes of old white men have never captured her attention; her mother buys her a book about Margaret Thatcher (chemist; her mother says the story is to show that women can achieve but Alice takes Thatcher, and later, Angela Merkel, as empirical evidence that science is a precursor to success for the fairer sex) which lies all but untouched under her bed until she leaves for Oxford.
She does, however, devour books. The virtue of her intellect alone makes her an apt reader, but she has a sense for literature, the sort that will later render her theses into lofty works of prose and burgeoning crescendos of intellectual superiority. Her teachers read her essays at all hours of the night and spend hours researching the topics she mentions, complex philosophical theories and the fallacious reasoning that, she contends, is prevalent in all works she is asked to analyse.
A teacher has the gall to contest her ideas and for the first time she wonders what it would be like to take a life, to separate him from all the viscera he's grown so attached to and dump him into nonbeing. Taking someone's life, she thinks, might be the ultimate form of achievement.
Logically (for Alice is always logical), it's an overreaction, so she puts it out of mind.
"Alice." He says it quietly, taking the glass she offers him with little hesitation. She relishes the small victory: there was a time when he would not have accepted it, and probably a time when he would have considered throwing it in her face. The liquid gleams dully in the dark of his house, rendered faintly glutinous. "You're back."
She resists using one of the petty colloquialisms her fellow tourists used, phrases like No shit, Sherlock and Thank you, Captain Obvious. Instead, she raises her glass slightly, both in assent and in the faintest of toasts, then places it back on the table, untouched.
"How have your dreams been, John?"
She thinks she might have seen a flash of understanding in his eyes, but knows better than to assume so. But it's easy to imagine the content of his sleep: Zoe Luther bleeds sluggishly, a bullet in her chest and her eyes glossed over and blank. Ian Reed smirks frantically up, weaving a tale of nearly believable debauchery even as his upturned face betrays the desperate lie (or does it?); Mark North's face contorts and he probably is near tearing the dirty copper asunder, save for Alice Morgan's intervention. That part interests her the most; as a narcissist, she is of course the sun around which she would like the rest of the world to orbit, but nevertheless knowing how John views her in lieu of that bullet in Ian Reed's chest. Alice Morgan, freaky genius? Alice, friend? He's probably dreamt it so many times that the lines of morality blur, that the event is just faded into shadowy figures labeled [GOOD MAN], [BAD MAN], and [PSYCHOPATH].
(Her own dreams are less conflicted: the sun and sound of waves on a beach in Cabo San Lucas; her legs are still pale and gleam faintly as she stretches out on a towel next to a palapa, worming her toes into the warm sand. She holds a post card from John in her hands. It says WISH YOU WERE HERE in his thick, stolid scrawl; on the front, there is a picture of a cozy little house, the sort a man like Mark North would dream of and a man like John Luther would consider unnecessary but desirable.
The postcard ignites in her fingers and she wakes up abruptly, bemused and annoyed. And repeat.)
Alice knows better than to put stock in her own dreams, but John's bring with them a whisper of secrecy and a tone heavy with questions.
She has yet to explain black holes to him; how they collapse and collapse and collapse, literally ad infinitum, because time slows as it approaches the singularity to the point that a black hole never fully collapses into a black hole.
Maybe that would make a difference to him, how the cruelest thing in the universe can never come into its own.
Getting thrown into a black hole would still mean your end, no question about that, she considers telling him. But you'd hardly be erased. Mass leaks, and your atoms would be expelled neatly from the other side of the black hole in some senselessly poetic testament to the persistence of man.
When John asks her about her dreams, she smiles and says she doesn't.
Shortly after she leaves, pressing her fingers to his cheek and whispering a soft "welcome back" into his ear. The wine bottle and glasses sit on the table in her wake, untouched.
That night she dreams of their bodies entwined, slipping slowly through time as the descend forever into the heart of a perpetually collapsing black hole.
Ad aeternam.