The Fourth State of Matter

“She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator—careful, almost went down—then a straightaway to the door.”

Beard’s domestic space and her dogs are foils to the violence of the mass shooting that comes to consume this braided essay. This quotation describing her collie, the “she” of this sentence, uses imagery in the phrase “her broomstick legs” to describe Beard’s ailing, deteriorating collie in domestic terms, which also introduces the harbinger of death into this essay early on.

“In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.”

This passage introduces the importance of space to this essay, both thematically—the reach for the celestial to process death—and in terms of plot, as it introduces her work colleagues, “space physicists,” to the essay. The celestial images in this passage—the Milky Way like a blackboard smear and blinking Mars, all seen during the nightly trips to the yard with her dog—recur throughout the essay and contribute to the essay’s braided structure as Beard moves the reader from encounters with the dog, the squirrels, and her space-physics department workplace. The introduction of space and of Beard’s career also introduces the theme of The Tension Between the Scientific/Rational and the Emotion/Spiritual. She is consistently juggling the two sides, which are sometimes at war with one another (in the case of her collie) and sometimes working together in harmony (in her post-event reflections).