As She Climbed Across the Table (11 page)

She didn’t speak. Maybe she flushed—it was hard to tell in this light.

“You know I’ve been asked to administer your lab time,” I said. “Soft’s worried about what you’ll do with Lack.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I couldn’t care less about Soft. Under
normal circumstances I’d prefer your approach. If it didn’t involve the love thing.”

“And under these circumstances?” she said, harsh, unrelenting.

Our eyes locked. Hers fierce, mine searching.

“I want to be your friend,” I said.

No reply.

“Forget what went before,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. You need support. That’s obvious.”

Her eyes were still hard. “I can’t believe you all of a sudden understand about Lack.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’m going to help you climb up onto the table and disappear. But understand the feelings, generally, yes.”

She looked at me warily. She brushed her hair back, and I saw her chin was trembling. “I’m under a lot of pressure right now, Philip.”

“I understand.”

“The kind of friend I need now is one who doesn’t put a lot of demands on me. Someone I wouldn’t have to answer to or make justifications to, or even necessarily see or talk to when I didn’t want to.”

“Right,” I said.

“I don’t have room for anything else in my life right now.”

“Right.”

I couldn’t keep from thinking, she wants me to be as invisible as Lack. If I left her completely alone she would do me the favor of
envisioning
me as her friend. Another one of her theoretical cohorts.

As I sat there, smiling weakly at Alice, the two of us bracketing the empty space of the hallway, I hallucinated vividly that
we were in the bowels of some vast interstellar vehicle, a futuristic ark that had fallen into disuse yet still drifted through the gulf of stars, and that we had lost our way, Alice and I, in our search for the control room. Or found it securely locked, like Lack’s chamber. That this vast drifting thing we were so helpless to command had, somewhere, an ignition key, a steering wheel. But we couldn’t find them.

The vision faded. Once upon a time I would have described it to Alice.

“You want me to go, don’t you,” I said. “I’m not helping, I’m not even entertaining you. You want me to leave.”

She nodded in a helpless way.

“I can’t possibly compete. I could never offer you as little as Lack does. He’s playing hard to perceive.”

Alice stared at me through red-rimmed eyes.

“I’ll just leave you down here,” I said. “Crying alone in this place. I’ll go back to the apartment and be alone there, in the same state. Alike, but exiled from each other, islands of misery. You down here and me up there.”

“Evan and Garth are there,” she said.

It wasn’t cruel humor. She honestly thought they were a consolation.

“They’re—,” I almost said Cynthia Jalter’s name. “They’re at their therapist’s.”

We were both crying. Invoking the blind men, and the apartment, had drawn us back to earth somehow, out of the searing, empty sky of our pain. That plain configuration of rooms and beds. Finally there were always objects—the car and the apartment, Lack’s tuning forks and terra-cotta ashtrays, the blind men’s clattering canes—ballast to drag us away from the void.

“Philip, hold me.”

I crawled across the margin of floor and held her. I put my arms around her shoulders, my face in her hair. We cried together. Our bodies made one perfect thing, a topological whole, immutable, complete, hollows turned to each other, hollows in alliance. We made a system, a universe. For a moment.

Then I left her to her vigil. I went to pace the campus, to be under the stars, fog, and pollution with my thoughts, circling only gradually on the apartment. By the time I got back to my couch Evan and Garth were returned from their therapy, and peacefully asleep.

“Well, you’ve got a case,” said the radio talk-show host. “No problem there. But if you sue her you lose the relationship. I haven’t seen the marriage that could survive litigation.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” said the caller.

I was on the couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. I’d kicked my blanket onto the floor in the night, and tugged the sheet up in a bunch around my neck. The radio was playing in the guest bedroom.

The blind men were in the kitchen running water, clanking silverware, cooking what smelled like glue. I crept to the door and slipped out, not wanting to explain Alice’s absence to them. I couldn’t face them in the dead, used-up space of the apartment. From outside I peered in and saw Evan poking questioningly at the bedclothes on the couch. I ran.

The day was cold and bright. I crossed the lawns, retracing
my steps. I’d slept badly. I was sealed in a pocket of leftover night, mouth dry, eyelids swollen.

I went back to the physics facility. Now the hallways bustled with students, their hair wet from the shower, mauling bagels or croissants as they hurried to check the outcomes of overnight experiments. Instruments that had been quiet the night before beeped and blinked at me, as though they’d detected an inauthentic presence. I was a bit of the night myself, haunting the new day. Garth would have called me a time traveler.

Lack’s outer doors were open. Phase two had started. I went inside. I was alone in the observation room. The overhead screen was dead. The blinds were down over the window to the Cauchy-space lab. I levered them open, and there was Alice in the intermediate zone, the clean room. She had her back to me. Her face was pressed against the glass of the window to Lack’s chamber.

Inside, Braxia and the Italian team frenziedly set up their equipment, a galaxy of cameras, detectors, shields, counters, and meters, a forest that overwhelmed Lack’s little table. I raised my hand to tap at the glass, to draw Alice’s attention, then stopped.

What would I say to her?

So I watched. Watched Braxia command his efficient team, and watched Alice watching, leaning on her elbows, her devotion to Lack absolute. She must have hated to see him swarmed over by the Italians. We made a pyramid, Braxia observing Lack, Alice observing Braxia and Lack, myself observing all three. I thought: If Alice still feels my eye tracks, she’ll turn. She didn’t. I shut the blinds and went out of the facility.

My first class was at three. I needed a shower and a shave before then. Maybe a nap. But if I killed some time the blind
men would go out. I could have the apartment to myself. I raised my collar against the morning wind and hiked up the sunny path to the soccer fields. Practice was underway.

My graduate student had applied for funding to study the geographic spray of athletes on a playing field following an injury. He wanted to understand the disbursement of bodies around the epicenter of the wounded player, the position of the medics and coaches, and the sympathy or skepticism implicit in the stances chosen. All taking into account the seriousness of the injury, the score in the match when it occurred, the value of the player injured. Et cetera. I’d written an effusive letter in support of the application. The work had been funded generously. My student was here now on the sidelines, jotting notes on a clipboard as he watched the players sprint. I moved up beside him.

The players on the sidelines jogged in place, cold in their shorts, skin red and goose-pimpled, tousled hair glinting in the late-November sun. They were used to seeing my student by now, but they seemed wary of me. The coach straddled the line, barking orders, slapping at the men as they joined the drills.

“Subjects who express sympathy at a teammate’s fall are sixty-eight percent likelier to sustain a treatable gravity-related injury in the same game,” my student said, not looking at me, his eyes trained on the field.

“That’s good work,” I said.

“Subjects who assume a sympathetic posture at an opponent’s fall are another sixteen percent likelier.”

“Very good.”

We were like athletes ourselves, perfecting a purely meaningless activity, ears growing numb in the wind. I felt a solidarity with the players. I wanted to sustain a treatable gravity-related injury myself. I tested my weight surreptitiously, faked a limp.

It was good to see my student so busy doing what I’d taught him to do. Looking for the hidden data, the facts that hide inside obvious things. The interdisciplinary dark matter. And a protégé confirmed my existence in the world. I felt grateful. I wanted to share some kernel of advice with him, some warning about women, but nothing came to mind. It was okay. We were safe here, on the sidelines, far from danger.

So we watched the players drill. Passing the ball, rolling it backward with their toes, popping it up with their knees and foreheads. Running patterns, in bursts of speed, then falling away. The goalies lunged from side to side, protecting the sanctity of the delineated space. And when a defenseman shot suddenly upward, then fell groaning to the ground, players around him freezing, assuming revealing postures, the ball rolling to a stop unmanned, my student and I rushed together onto the field, huffing, experts who’d been waiting in abeyance for the right time to assume their roles, and had a closer look.

Alice’s first shift began at noon, three days later. Soft had reassigned her the key, after extracting solemn promises. Still, I meant to be there. I spent the morning in my office attempting to make good on my threats to Soft, drawing up and discarding a series of mediocre proposals for use of Lack-time, getting nowhere. Faced with Lack I became Lack-like myself. I had nothing to say, no experiment to conduct. I wanted to represent the needs of those baffled and helpless before Lack, but I resembled my own constituency too closely.

So I sat crumpling sheets of paper. The problem was that my usual approach—anthropology—would give blessing to Alice’s anthropomorphization of Lack. I wanted to prove Alice wrong, to show Lack to be a dead thing, a mistake, a cosmic pothole. But the physicists were in charge of that. So I ground to
a halt, let my pen hand fall to the desk. And looked up at the clock.

Late.

I was late for Alice’s first shift. Potential disaster. Did I want her to throw herself in? I ran from my office, and across campus, to the physics facility. Eyes bulging with terror, I made my way down in the elevator, to Lack’s suite. The doors were locked. I pounded on them.

This would be a magnificent rescue. Or a tragic near miss.

Nothing. I pounded again.

The handle turned, with a calmness that was an admonishment. Braxia’s florid face appeared.

“Hello,” he said. “You would like to come in.”

“Yes.”

“By all means, dear fellow. Come in.”

The lights were off in the observation room. The equipment was quiet. Braxia led me through to Lack’s chamber, which was lit. Most of the Italian team’s various monitors were folded away into the corners of the room. Lack’s table was spotlit in the center of the floor, alone. Laid out on wax paper on the near side of it was a sandwich and a green plastic supermarket basket of strawberries.

Braxia turned to me, looking vaguely menacing in the shadows. “It’s nice in here now, no?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, panting, surely bright red.

“Well. So. An unexpected visit, eh?”

“It’s Professor Coombs’ first shift,” I said. “Where is she?”

He folded his arms and looked at me appraisingly. The corners of his mouth twitched into a smile.

“Where is she?” I said again.

“She came already and went already,” said Braxia. “You missed her.”

For one deranged moment I imagined that Braxia had committed some act of violence. Lack, the perfect murder weapon. I took an involuntary step backward before I regained my poise.

Braxia turned to the table, and picked up a neat triangle of sandwich. Mayonnaise glistened in the spotlight. “You’re very worried about her, I gather,” he said.

“I’m supposed to administer her shift.”

“Watch over her, you mean. Because of Soft’s concern.”

“Yes.”

“Well, Soft asked me to do the same. So here I was. No problem.”

“Soft asked you to watch Alice?”

Braxia smiled disingenuously. “Yes, my dear fellow, he did.” He bit off the corner of the half-sandwich, then fit the rest of it back into place on the wax paper.