As She Climbed Across the Table (7 page)

If I’m lonely, I thought, I should at least be alone.

Lack, that week, refused a ski cap, a conical washer, and a pair of pinking shears. A curly lasagne, a twist of macaroni, a strand of nonskid spaghetti. A volume of Plutarch and a postcard of Copenhagen. A Robertson-tip screwdriver, a ball peen hammer, and a sundae spoon. Blueberries, oysters, calamine lotion. A photograph of the Rosetta stone, a gold-leaf cigarette case, and a concrete block. A lens cap, a hat tree, and a slice of chocolate cake.

He did, though, accept a slide rule, a bowling shoe, and an unglazed terra-cotta ashtray. A felt hat, a fountain pen, and a pomegranate. A Heritage Press reprint of
The Hunting of the Snark
, and an onyx replica of the Statue of Liberty. Pistachio ice cream in a porcelain dish. A bead of mercury.

Also a spayed female cat—a grizzled lab veteran, piebald from scratching at taped-on electrodes, named B-84.

B-84 had friends. They were massing angrily at the entrance of the physics complex, clogging the pathways, spilling out onto the lawn. The day was one of those California sports, summer in November, and I’d been strolling, avoiding my work. Then I met a student carrying a hand-lettered placard reading
WHERE’S LACK’S HEART
? I followed him to the rally.

The students who were only curious littered the fringes, exchanging disinformation. I pushed past them, to the front. The most defiant and outraged protesters were clustered under a bed-sheet banner, unreadable except in fragments.
UNIVERSITY, DOLLARS, RESPONSIBLE, DEATH
. I threaded my way deeper into the crowd, to the base of the microphones. The grass under my feet was already torn.

The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled
back in a ponytail, his plaid workman’s shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

“We’re obligated to demand an answer, to question this thing in our midst now. By all appearances it’s a rampant scientific development, and we have to develop some consciousness, some overview, because it isn’t being provided. We have the responsibility to ask some questions.”

He stopped and peered out over his audience.

“The Lack is just a raping, uh, gaping rent in the fabric of the universe. It’s been opened up right under our feet. The scientists can’t even agree on it, there’s disagreement in the scientific community, yet the experiments just go on. I for one think that maybe it’s time we said wait a minute, let’s have a serious look at this thing, decide what we have on our hands here, before we go throwing any more cats into it!”

Jeers of support from the crowd.

“The earth is just a small oasis in an endless desert of nothingness,” he went on, encouraged. “We don’t need more nothingness here on earth. There’s plenty in outer space. If they want to study the Lack they don’t have to bring it here to our campus.”

“Send Lack back where he came from!” someone shouted from behind me.

“We want to send a message,” said the student at the microphone. “We want to establish a forum where these issues can be properly debated. If the scientific community can’t provide oversight in this case we’ll be happy to provide it for them. We want to examine the Lack and any other development in the light of appropriate human values. That’s all we ask.”

Suddenly there was a bustling behind the banner. Some
kind of confrontation. The student at the microphone turned, and the public-address system issued a whine of feedback.

“What’s going to happen, Professor Engstrand?” said a voice directly behind me.

I turned. The voice belonged to one of my students. I couldn’t remember his name.

“It’s the authorities, isn’t it?” he said. “The science police.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Alice and her graduate student appeared at the microphone, looking small and out of place. Hardly the science police. Alice’s student conferred with the protest leaders while Alice stood, gazing blankly over the crowd. She looked like a thing dragged unwillingly into the light. The brightness of the day was on the side of the protesters, and the cat.

Alice stepped up to the microphone, sweeping the hair back from her eyes. She didn’t see me.

“I’d like to say a few things,” she said. “This is a misunderstanding. You’re creating a false dichotomy, something and nothing, life and entropy, the cat and Lack. We’ve been granted a chance to transcend those old distinctions. The void is making a gesture, trying to establish contact with life, trying to communicate with us. It would be tragic to turn down the offer. Lack is where life and entropy can reconcile their differences—”

The crowd began to boo.

You don’t understand, I wanted to tell her. They’re afraid. They’re not like you, Alice. Not drawn to the void. They want insulation.

“Knowledge is very precious,” she went on, quavering, defiant. She was playing the weakest card of a losing hand. “As precious as any living thing—”

She was drowned out in the booing, and though she went
on I couldn’t make it out. The group behind her tried to retake the microphone. I shouldered my way to the front, got a footing on the nubby hillock where the microphone rested, and hoisted myself into the public eye.

I planted myself at the microphone and squinted out into the crowd, and past them, to the oblivious Frisbee throwers on the sun-drenched lawn. I was quiet for a long moment. I let authority gather on me like a crown.

“The universe is always swallowing cats,” I said finally. “It’s forever swallowing cats. There’s nothing new here.” I let a weariness creep into my voice, a tone I knew was infectious. “To protest it like this, in isolation … well, it’s an act of enormous irrelevance. I’m touched, actually. There’s a futile beauty to this gathering. Pick a death at random, come out in force.”

Someone coughed.

“But it’s a poor choice. There’s a real confusion of symbolism here. Science, death, dollars. Lack isn’t any of those things. Lack is a mistake, a backfire. He wasn’t predicted, he’s irksome. No military application. He’s the human face poking back up out of the void, a pie in the face of physics. He’s mixed up, he can’t make up his mind. He likes pomegranates, except when he doesn’t. My friends, Lack is here to help you take science less seriously.”

The protest evaporated. The mob began to chatter, then wander away. Even as the students drifted off I felt their gratitude toward me. I’d relieved them of their unmanageable crusade. They could get back to skipping class.

I turned and saw Alice walking toward the entrance of the physics facility.

I chased her. She disappeared through the doors, but I caught her at the elevator, tapping impatiently at
down
.

“Alice.” I was a little drunk with myself. “Alice, wait.”

She stood facing the elevator.

I was panting. “Don’t I deserve some thanks?” I said. “I did it. I broke up the lynch mob. Like Henry Fonda in
Young Mr. Lincoln
.”

She turned to me. Her expression was furious. “You want to make Lack yours,” she said. “You think if you describe him he’ll suddenly belong to you. Just like everything else.”

The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. I stared, struck dumb.

“But this time you’re wrong,” she said. “Lack is mine.” The doors closed over her ravaged face.

I paced campus until dark, then stalked back to the apartment. When I saw the blind men were home I got into my car and drove off campus, found a bar, and deliberately had a drink with a woman.

An interesting woman, as it happened. She was dark-haired and tall, with a penetrating gaze and a smile that didn’t show her teeth. She was sitting alone, sheltering a glass of red wine. I told her my name was Dale Overling, and asked if I could sit at her table. She said yes.

“You’re not from the campus,” I said.

“No.”

“Not affiliated.”

“No.”

“Not a graduate of the school.”

“No. No connection.”

“You can’t imagine how that turns me on.”

“Buy me a drink.”

The bar was tame and suburban, a fifties cocktail lounge not yet refurbished by student irony. It was nearly empty, a weekend place on a weeknight. I’d picked it for its distance from campus. But when I flagged the waitress it was a girl I recognized, a dizzy undergraduate, costumed in a yellow apron. Her eyes met mine and I froze her with a look of dread, willing her not to blow my cover.

“Take this wine away,” I said. “Bring us drinks. Margaritas, salt on the glass. Bring us six of them. Line them up on the table.”

“I can bring you a pitcher.”

“I want a line of drinks. I want to see the glasses accumulate. Don’t take away the empties, either.”

She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.

“You’re a very self-assured man, Mr. Overling,” said my companion, her smile flickering.

“Dale, please. And you’re a very perceptive woman, Ms.…?”

“Jalter, Cynthia Jalter.”

“May I call you Cynthia? You’re a very perceptive woman.”

“Thank you.”

“I like to walk into a bar and find a perceptive woman sitting alone. It excites me. It doesn’t happen that often.”

“I’m flattered.”

“And the fact that you’re not from the campus, that takes it over the top. Because there’s nothing that excites me quite like the idea of perceptive, intelligent women living in a university town
yet having no connection with the school
. Just living in the
same town, right there, not needing to have anything to do with it. The idea of the intelligent woman in the university town. What is she? Why is she there? It’s a stimulating idea.”

“You must be from the school.”

“Me? No, no. It’s true, I’m visiting the campus, I’m a consultant. They fly me in. I spend a lot of time in towns like this, being flown in, flown out. I’ve got enough frequent-flyer points to send quintuplets around the world. But I hate these big university schools. They’re big rotting carcasses. Rotten in the center. If I didn’t just fly in, consult, fly out, I couldn’t live with myself. As it is I take a hotel off campus, eat off campus, and go to bars and look for intelligent people who have nothing to do with the school. Those are the people to talk to in any situation. The ones on the edge, the outside.”

“Like me.”

“Exactly. They offer me a room on campus, you know. But I take a hotel. And I rent a big shiny car so I stand out. The American campus is crawling with these little brown and gray and buff-colored Peugeot cars and little Japanese cars. I get a big bright American car so they know I don’t care. Bright red if I can.”

It didn’t matter if Cynthia Jalter didn’t believe me. At that moment Dale Overling was truer than I was. Heartier, more substantial.

“I sit in a bar in a different city three or four nights a week,” I said. “I always order the same things. I should write a guidebook. A browser’s guide to tequila drinks in college towns.”

“Nonfiction bestseller list,” said Cynthia Jalter. “Position two, holding strong for months.” Her smile was pursed.

“No. An underground guide, a photocopied thing. Little
tattered copies passed from hand to hand, with annotations, disagreements scrawled into the margins.”

“Published under a pseudonym.”

“Right. Professor X.”

We drank. Mostly I drank. I needed to bolster the courage I’d already shown, as if it were borrowed in advance against future drinks. Cynthia Jalter sipped.

“Bigger gulps,” I said. “There’s a lot of drinks here.”

She only smiled.

“Don’t be smug. We’re in this together. I can only run the show for so long, then I’m going to need your help. Drink up.”

I finished one and put it aside, and took up the next. The sharp salt clung to my lip. I didn’t bother wiping it away.

“You’re probably wondering why I don’t ask you what you do,” I said. “The truth is I’d rather not know. It’s probably something pretty dry, that’s a safe guess. Despite your lack of connection to the school.”

“It’s a safe guess.”

“And you’d rather not tell me, am I right? You like watching me do these verbal belly flops. And the more enigmatic you are, the farther out on a limb I have to go.”