As She Climbed Across the Table (2 page)

Soft stood with a wooden pointer aimed lazily at the radiant mass on the screen. His graduate student stood to one side of him. Soft’s pride was concealed, but it gushed in proxy from his student. The crowd of upturned faces glowed with the light of the bright nothing on the screen.

“We had to devise a bubble geometry that featured spherical symmetry,” explained Soft.

There was silence. We stared at the shimmering screen. They were pondering Soft’s words. So was I, sort of.

“In order to adhere the Schwarzshild space to the De Sitter space,” Soft continued, “we had to develop a pair of anti-trapped surfaces, in an asymptotically Minkowskian background.”

A chorus of murmurs applauded the wisdom of this approach. Amen, I thought.

“The key was the quantum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor.”

I slipped unseen through the hypnotized crowd, to find Alice. She was gazing at the screen, her feet a little apart, her head back, her hair loose. I stepped up behind her and whispered her name (it was a whisper already,
Alice
) and put my arms around her. I fit my knees behind hers, her elbows inside mine, and cradled her folded arms, and inside them, her breasts.

“I can smell you,” I said quietly.

She was distracted, a part of the bubble-event audience, not mine.

“I feel an initial singularity,” I whispered. “Pressed against your spherical symmetry.”

Nothing. She was deaf to me.

“I want to adhere my Schwarzshild space to your De Sitter space,” I said.

No response.

“We’ll make a little Schwarz-child.”

Nothing.

Nothing. We stared up together, with all the others, at the wonderful nothing Soft had summoned up. The false vacuum region.

“Alice,” I said.

“The bubble has to detach,” Alice said, without taking her eyes away.

The student I’d met in the hallway returned with video equipment, and set up to record the great moment. I pictured handclasps, high fives, a roomful of physicists piled up like a victorious baseball team.

But not yet. The air of anticipation in the room was incredible. Alice, in my arms, was practically brittle with it. I felt my love plan slip away. I erased my evening’s map across her body. Physics history came first. The false bubble had to detach.

It was there and then, in the dark heart of the physics complex, that I felt the first pangs of my coming loss.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

The false vacuum bubble would not detach. At eleven-thirty the food service delivered bread, tuna fish, egg salad, milk, and wax paper, a midnight picnic in the clammy heart of the
building. No one left. No one despaired of waiting. The false vacuum bubble wouldn’t detach. The physicists milled in nervous clusters, expressing a solidarity that seemed feeble in that chilly core. At two the security guards delivered flimsy cots, pillows, woolly earthquake-victim blankets, fresh rolls of paper for the toilet stalls. No one slept.

The false bubble would not detach.

My dissertation work, five years earlier, was on “Theory as Neurosis in the Professional Scientist.” On its strength I won an assistant professorship at the department of anthropology, University of North California at Beauchamp (pronounced
beach ’em
). The September I arrived was the first time I’d been to California, apart from the job interview.

My attitude was terrible at first. I wasn’t comfortable applying the social sciences, those fun-house mirrors, to real people engaged in real pursuits. It seemed presumptuous and unfair. So my tongue went into my cheek. My teaching suffered, and I was put through a severe departmental review.

Then I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing. The review itself was the key. I didn’t have to look any further for my life’s work. I would study academic environments, the departmental politics and territorial squabbles, the places where
disciplines overlapped, fed back, and interfered. Like a parapsychologist, I set traps for the phantom curricula that wavered into existence in the void between actual ones. I applied information theory to the course catalogs, the reading lists, the food-service menus.

My new work was irrelevant and strong. It appeared only in translation, in the journal
Veroffentlichen Sonst Umkommen
, heavily footnoted articles, dry and unreadable as a handful of fine sand. My nickname around the department was the Dean of Interdiscipline. Interdean, for short. I got an apartment on campus, and there were days when I never crossed out of the benign square mile that included the buildings where I taught, ate dining-hall food, and read faculty notices on tattered, pinpricked bulletin boards.

It was some interdisciplinary project that first brought me to the gigantic and forbidding buildings that were the physics department, and got me grappling with the gigantic and forbidding theories that were modern physics. Even for the Interdean, that stuff was rough going. My reward was that hidden inside the theories and buildings, like a pearl in an oyster, was the new assistant professor specializing in particle physics, Alice Coombs.

I kept cooking up stupid questions, excuses to visit the collider where Alice was running her particles like champion greyhounds. It was a few weeks before I had the courage to ask her out. I suggested a walk in the hills that overlooked the cyclotron. I think it was my first time off campus in a month. I remember Alice with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, picking her way over exposed roots in the path. The sky was some dramatic uptilted cloudscape. Like the clouds were escaping to the stars. Beauchamp beneath us, toy city. I remember thinking, I don’t like blond hair. But I liked Alice’s. I was an idiot. Out of breath
from climbing, we stumbled into each other on the path and I smelled her. If olives were sweet—that was how she smelled.

“It’s funny like—”

“You reminded me—”

“We’re hardly—”

Talk was hopeless. We smiled apologetically, while our words went spilling like platefuls of barbecue sauce onto a white dress in a detergent ad, comical slow-motion disaster.

I could only kiss her. That worked. I got another whiff of the sweetness of olives.

Alice Coombs and I soon learned to do many things together, including talk. We could even banter. Argue, if necessary. But we maintained a little cult of leaving things unsaid. Somehow we were wiser with our mouths shut, knew each other better.

Or so we thought.

The silence is where the idea of asking Alice to marry me got lost, stranded forever on the tip of my tongue. It was too obvious and uncouth. Too institutional. We’d been living together for nearly a year now, anthropology and physics. I cooked dinner most nights. Alice worked late.

I woke in the grip of a terrifying dream, involving tribesmen, clouds of dust, my answering machine. I was actually on a cot in the curved hallway outside the Cauchy-space lab. Alone. Finding myself in the bowels of the chilly, humming complex was stranger than the dream, and worse. It was like I’d been sleeping in the safe of a sunken ocean liner.

I’d fallen asleep at four in the morning. Professor Soft’s inflationary universe had still been perversely refusing to perform. The bubble wouldn’t detach. I’d gotten bored waiting and climbed onto one of the cots. Now I heard Alice’s voice inside the observation room.

I went inside. The floor of the lab was littered with wax paper, empty pint containers, and crumpled printouts. The physicists had mostly curled on cots, or slumped home. Only a few remained, sore-eyed, waiting. Soft was scribbling notes at his portable workbench. His graduate student was still at his side.
The pixels oscillated serenely overhead. Alice stood where I’d left her. How long had I slept?

I took her hand. “What time is it?” I whispered.

“Out here it’s eight-thirty,” she said. “Inside the Cauchy-space it’s still six yesterday. Time collapsed around the bubble event.”

“Did it happen?”

“The wormhole dilated,” she said.

“That’s good.”

Alice shook her head, still watching the screen. “It sounds good, but it isn’t actually good. The bubble may actually have detached, as planned. But there shouldn’t be an aneurysm.”

“A wound?” I said.

“A hole.”

“What does it mean?”

Alice shook her head.

“Is Soft very upset?”

“Look at his student.”

I looked. It was true. Soft was a pillar of strength, but his graduate student was a mess, hair matted with nervous sweat, eyes shrunken from weeping. I looked up at the screen, and tried to make out the aneurysm. I couldn’t see anything. The physicist in me was a blind, stunted thing.

I held Alice’s cool hand and watched her watching the screen. She still couldn’t spare a look to meet my eyes, couldn’t tear herself from the impossibly boring experiment.

“Alice.” I squeezed her hand.

She turned and kissed me. A small, measured kiss that landed on the edge of my mouth.

I put my thumbs under her eyes, where the flesh was gray and tender, and kissed her again.

“You have a class,” she said.

“There’s time to have breakfast.”

She looked up at the screen, then down at the floor. I could tell she didn’t want to talk here. “I have to stay,” she said.

“This is important?”

“Very.”

I smiled, but I wasn’t happy. I wanted
Philip
to be playing on her screen now.

In the corner several physicists had gathered at Soft’s desk, drinking at his murmured explanations like animals at a desert hole. Alice saw me looking and turned. She obviously wanted to join them.

I put my hands in her hair, and gently tilted her head to mine.

“I’ll call you after your class,” she whispered.

“Okay.”

“I do want to see you.”

“I know.”

“I have to see this through. It’s how I am. I like to be on the edge of the territory.”

“The horizon of the real,” I whispered.

Alice and I were the same size. We displaced the same amount of air. But when we embraced she became elusive and darting, like a remora fish. When I held her I imagined that I could crane my neck and kiss the small of her back, or reach around to clasp my own shoulders in my hands.

“Okay,” I said. “Call me after class.”

“You’ll be at the apartment?”

I nodded. “I’ll be defrosting something.”

“I’ll call you.”

“With a bubble update. I’m genuinely interested.”

We detached. She joined the confluence at Soft’s desk. I felt a rustle of jealousy, but couldn’t fix it to a target. It blurred and vanished.

As I came up out of the gray, timeless physics facility, into the nine o’clock light of campus, my heart lightened. I should have been exhausted, but I felt like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. I had an edge on the bleary students on the grass-fringed paths. I alone knew of the aneurysm, the puckered bubble that lurked below. Here windows in white clapboard buildings squeaked open to admit the light, here the groundsmen plucked rubbish off the vast, waking lawns, here freshmen blinked away Zima hangovers. For them another day, but I knew time had stopped in its place.

A new universe. I pictured it twisting away from this one, kicking free of the umbilical wormhole in Soft’s lab. The notion shed an odd, fresh light on the morning, on the twittering birds overhead, the chalk-slash of cloud, the student-council election flyers taped everywhere. Maybe this was the new universe, and Soft’s monster had sucked away all staleness to the far ends of the galaxy.

Vowing to impart some hint of this vision in my lecture, I skipped toward the cafeteria, for a breakfast of Team, or Total.