It’s like that scene in Interstellar: I’m in my wormhole, looking through time and space into the past, into my life, with my dad. I’m pushing books out of my own bookshelf, trying to get my past self’s attention. But the me in the Cloisters doesn’t see the me in the wormhole, the one who is on the other side of the wave, who knows it’s coming, who’s begging Past Me to warn them.

I watch as Dad and I walk into the cathedral-like space, drawn by the Latin chorus that had been floating down the hall. The music reminds me of the one time I went to Midnight Mass at Saint Cecilia’s with my grandmother, when the choir sang just like this and the hair on my arms stood at attention. But in this chapel, there are no singers or pews. It is an empty stone room with slightly vaulted ceilings. Raised speakers form a huge circle in the center, as though they are participants in an ancient rite. Dad silently points to a small placard, and we read how each speaker represents a different choral member’s voice. The voices of the invisible singers reach up into the ceiling, mournful and reverent, and I wish I could put this feeling into numbers, into an algorithm, because words will never explain what these notes do to me on a cellular level.

Dad and I join the visitors who stand in the middle of the circle of speakers, and we all listen together, silent. An old woman is smiling, her eyes closed as she sways along with the voices, one hand gripping her cane. A guy not much older than me is sitting on the ground, hands folded in his lap. Others stand with heads bowed as though the music is a prayer. And it is, I think. It doesn’t matter, not really, that there is no one who can answer it.

I think the asking is what matters.

Because of the music, we are no longer strangers. The words weave us all into the same tapestry, cream and brown and black and gold. Somehow, we are in four dimensions in spacetime, past and present and future all together, all at once. We are on the event horizon. I decide to add this music to my Golden Record, my own imaginary collection of things I would launch into space for life-forms forty thousand years away to find so they could learn about humanity, just like Carl Sagan did with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in the seventies. There is a voice recording on his Golden Record of a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

This music, it’s a kind of a hello, too. If human souls existed, they might sound like this. Or like David Bowie, maybe.