As She Climbed Across the Table (21 page)

De Tooth crossed his arms, his drink dangling underneath. He narrowed his eyes, studying me. The pipe was coming into focus now. There was definitely an imaginary pipe involved in his stance, his whole attitude.

“I’ve been taking a look at some other projects,” I said. “Now that we’ve got this Lack thing off our plates. I’ve got a few ideas that might interest you. So we could fire up the old collaborative thing again.”

Nothing from De Tooth. But I was rolling now.

“For instance, how about this: unifying the disciplines, the various modes of cognition, by
smashing thought itself
in the particle accelerator. Subjecting it to fantastic pressure and seeing what sort of basic components fly out of the collision. You and me, Georges. I think it could be big. Real big. I don’t want to be the one to say it, Georges, but N.P., you know? N. Prize. You read me? Do I have to spell it out? N-o-b Prize, Georges. I think you know what I mean. You finish it, Georges. What are the missing letters?”

Stony silence. Dartlike eyes. Imaginary pipe.

“Okay, Georges. I get the picture. I see. You’re going to do the easy thing. Stand back and watch while I self-destruct. This is fun for you, I guess. Being Mr. Big Guy. It’s your revenge. You come to a party and surround yourself with titanic women and refuse to speak to me. All because I know your secret. I know that you climb up on tables and hurl yourself at voids.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry, Georges. God, I’m sorry. You have to forgive me. I’m not myself.”

He studied me. The party flickered on around us, an alcoholic nightmare.

“I had a plan. I had it mapped out. I thought when I found someone like Alice I would know what to do. My plan was a failure, Georges. It didn’t work.”

De Tooth was the vortex of the party, the still, small presence at the center.

“I lied to you, Georges. I didn’t try. Lack, I mean. I haven’t yet. I don’t know. He might take me. I want to find out while there’s still time. Before he closes up. I have to know if she loves me.”

The tiny man pursed his lips.

“I’m hinting at something dangerous, Georges. More than hinting. Aren’t you going to try to stop me? This could be a cry for help. I’m not sure. I’m asking your opinion, Georges. Does it sound like I should be talked out of it? Talk me out of it, Georges.”

Invisible clouds of imaginary pipe smoke rising up into the green and blue lights.

“You don’t think he’ll take me, do you? So you’re not worried.”

Nothing. Behind him, dancing had started, frenzied, primitive, spasmodic. The literature professor had taken off her T-shirt. Soft was talking to the tall, knock-kneed woman from admissions, his head enclosed in her hair.

“I’m not feeling well, Georges. I think I’ll go outside and some fresh air. Get. Thanks for listening.”

“My pleasure,” said De Tooth. He put his left pinky into his ear and turned it slowly three times, like a third-base coach signaling for a steal. Then he marched away with tiny, metronome-precise steps. A vortex slipping away. Leaving me in charge. A mistake. I was less well-equipped in terms of silence
and enigma. The larger chaos of the party matched the chaos inside me. I was a storm at the eye of the storm.

I stood teetering for a minute, almost sick. Then I stumbled through the crowd of dancers, to the door, and out under the tilt of stars, into the shockingly cold night.

Where, moving again and again through clouds of my own breath, I trekked up the frozen hill to the physics facility.

I used the elevator to descend.

The lights inside Lack’s chamber were already on. They were always on. A stage always set, where nothing ever actually happened. There wasn’t any sound, apart from a ringing in my ears and the hum of sleeping machines.

I shut the door behind me. Lack’s table glowed in the spotlight, and my drunken eyes contributed a blurry halo. The room had been professionally cleaned. There was no sign of blood.

Lack was abandoned, I realized. Braxia was gone. The students were partying, or already headed home for Christmas. It was Alice’s shift, but Alice had fled. Soft had turned his back. Soft was so happy Lack was vanishing that he was pretending it had already happened. Lack had been spoiled with attention, but now he would wither and die alone. I might be his last visitor.

I circled the table drunkenly, squinting into the glare. I was
killing time. I think I expected Braxia to appear, the way he always did, and pull me away from the threshold. But Braxia was on a plane, over an ocean. Nobody was going to stop me. Nobody had even seen me leave the party.

Do what you have to do. Those were Alice’s words.

I circled the table, hypnotizing myself. I was a question mark in orbit around an answer. I felt the urge to speak, but whom would I be addressing? Alice, or Lack? The two had canceled each other out, become one, then zero. There was nothing on the table, nothing at all, except it was a nothing that somehow included Alice and Lack, and a nothing that I wanted to include me, too. Lack was a hole that had sucked away my love by refusing to suck it away, a nullity. Now I wanted to be nullified.

Do what you have to do.

So I climbed up onto the table. It was so simple. I would be the first lover in history to receive an absolute answer, a
yes
or
no
notarized as cosmic fact. I gripped the sides of the table and vaulted up, first on my knees, then flat on my stomach. Or almost flat. I had an erection. It was rock-hard and almost insensate. Some part of me had mistaken this for a sexual event. I ignored it. I held the table tight and slid myself forward, until my weight was centered just inches from the line that signified Lack’s boundary. I tucked my legs underneath my stomach, making myself a human bullet, and reached for the far edge of the table. Then I closed my eyes and pulled myself through, across the boundary, into Lack, and beyond the edge of the table, to tumble onto the floor of the chamber.

I landed on my hands, and flopped over backward, flat on my back, my head under the table. Like Wile E. Coyote tricked over the edge of a cliff in a defective Acme parachute. But there
wasn’t even a sound effect, or a cloud of dust. My impact went unrecorded. One small step for nothing, one giant leap for nobody. The floor was cold. The physics facility ignored me, humming. My erection slackened. I felt it untwist from my undershorts. My head rang. When I opened my eyes my visual field was spattered with phosphenes, like a bad action painting. I closed my eyes.

Do what you have to do.

So I passed out there on the floor in an alcoholic swoon, until morning.

I woke up and stumbled out of the chamber, into what should have been the observation room. Instead I walked into a new world.

I wasn’t underground, for one thing. I was outdoors. The sky was orange, and cloudless. The buildings on the horizon were familiar but wrong. Skewed. Strange.

My foot sank into the earth. I looked down. The ground was ball bearings, heaped in drifts. Spread over the top was a tangle of green and yellow wool, which created the superficial impression of a lawn.

I turned. The door I’d passed through led out of the base of a gigantic onyx replica of the Statue of Liberty, which leaned on a drift of bearings, like a cooler on the beach. Through the doorway I saw Lack’s table, where I’d spent the night.

I took another step and sank in to my ankles. When I lifted
my foot I dragged off a tangle of wool. I trudged away from the base of the oversize souvenir, leaving the door open behind me.

Ahead was the administration building, but it looked wrong. The building had been robbed of its color, texture, vitality. It looked like it had been reproduced in chewing gum.

I went closer. It wasn’t chewing gum. It was clay. Unglazed terra-cotta. There weren’t windows in the frames. Inside, the rooms were dark and empty. I put my hand on the wall. It was cool and chalky, perfectly smooth.

I waded on. I had to stop every few yards to clear my ankles of wool. I saw now that what I’d taken for buildings were fac-similies of the various campus structures. Some were made of clay, like the administration building, others of porcelain, or bowling-shoe leather, zigzagged with stitching. They rode the desert of ball bearings at various angles, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, or half-buried, or lying on their sides. They stretched on to the horizon in all directions. The hills above campus were gone. There wasn’t any sun. The sky glowed as if some upper layer of the atmosphere were fluorescent.

I made my way to the side of a strawberry-scented wax replica of the Helen Neufkaller Arch. It wasn’t in the right place. The facsimile campus didn’t correspond to the original (if mine was the original). I’d have to mark a trail if I wanted to find my way back to Lack’s chamber. I kicked at the wool to mark my spot here. My foot caught on something submerged in the bearings. I pulled it out. A pomegranate. I started groping around. I found a fountain pen, an eight ball, and an argyle sock. A boxed edition of Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark
. At the base of a math-department building made out of glass ashtrays, I fished up a bunch of paper slips bearing my handwriting. They read,
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I LOVE HER?

A duck came hopping along over the bearings. At the sight of me it flapped its wings and quacked, then flew away.

I found a facsimile of my apartment, made of coiled bed-springs. The orange sky glowed through the wire. I looked inside. The structure was hollow. There weren’t furnishings. There weren’t even floors. In the center, on a heap of bearings, was the charred remains of a fire.

I went inside. The ashes were cool. I found the blackened spines of several copies of the Carroll, and a few burnt duck or chicken bones. I dug in the bearings near the fire, looking for clues. I found a Coke bottle, another pomegranate, and the key to my apartment.

I climbed out of the bedspring structure, and walked back out toward the Neufkaller Arch, which I still associated with the entrance to campus.

Braxia was right. The new universe was clinging to its parent reality. The results were poor. Lack was trying to make a world, but he couldn’t get the parts. He’d manufactured a version of campus made only of the elements Alice found charming or harmless. Another example of rotten collaborative scholarship.

Publish or perish, I guess.

The most important thing was, Lack had taken
me
. I’d passed the Lack test, along with the ducks and pomegranates. Lack loved me. He’d taken my key, and my words, inscribed on slips of paper bearing my personal scissor marks. And now he’d taken Engstrand, in the flesh.

She loves me. She doesn’t love me not.

I waded through the bearings, my heart beating. I just had to get back now, and tell her. Explain that she loved me, actually. Since she didn’t seem to know.

I found the fountain that stood at the entrance to campus. It was made of crushed aluminum foil, which glinted brilliantly in the orange light. It was full of melted pistachio ice cream. The aluminum-foil cherub at the top gushed ice cream, green nuts dribbling one at a time from its lips.

Sleeping at the base of the fountain were dozens of identical peach-colored cats. A few were awake, and grooming themselves, or lapping at the ice cream. The cats were all fat, grizzled, and oblivious. It was B-84, the lab animal, photocopied into many cats by Lack. It didn’t seem to care about its multiple selfhood. Cats don’t look in mirrors.

I sat on the edge of the fountain and peeled a pomegranate. A few cats wandered over, half-interested, and rubbed against my ankles. I looked at the empty facsimilies against the orange sky. It was a beautiful ruin, a haunted Zen garden. Alice’s, but she wasn’t allowed to visit it herself. I’d tell her about it.

I sucked the fruit from a few pomegranate seeds, but my mouth was parched from drinking, and the acidity made my teeth hurt. I put the pomegranate on the side of the fountain. A few cats sniffed at it, but they were spoiled, weaned onto ice cream. I took a cat in my arms—picking at random, since there was no way to distinguish the original—and made my way back through the maze of facsimiles, to Lack’s chamber.