As She Climbed Across The Table Part 13

"Specials?"

"Special aspects, you know. Things. Mushroom, garlic, pineapple."

"Mushrooms."

"Just one? You get a discount if you get three."

I thought about it. "What if we consider no cheese a special?"

"Um, okay. So let's see, that's one small pizza, mushrooms, no cheese. Pick one more."

"How about no pineapple?"

There was a pause. "Let me check."

"Forget it," I said when he came back. "I don't want a pizza. No cheese was the giveaway. Can you just bring me the beer? Talking about pizza made me thirsty."

"I don't think I can do that, sir. I think just beer is against the rules, and it might even be illegal. I might get fired or arrested."

"Check," I said. "Put me on hold."

"I think I'll do that, sir."

I heard footsteps in the corridor, moving toward the elevator. Startled, I dropped the phone, and ran to look. A woman was just disappearing around the curve. Alice's height, and blond, but with hair cut close to her scalp, in a ragged, amateur crew cut. Someone else, in other words. But where had she come from? I dashed back to the chamber, baffled.

The door was open. I looked inside. No Alice. The spotlight glared against Lack's bare table, creating a blinding reflection. The room was like a set for a Beckett play. A pair of scissors lay on the floor, and a stack of Alice's paintings leaned against the far wall. Otherwise the room was empty. I went to the paintings. They were the self-portraits, Alice's tortured menagerie of selves.

The other paintings were gone, the still lifes and abstractions, the painting of Evan and Garth. Lack had taken those.

He'd found her other work to his liking, apparently. But not the self-portraits.

Then I saw the yellow shadow scattered across the floor, beside the scissors. It was Alice's hair. Her blond hair. My pillow, once. I'd stained it with tears. Now it was on a lab floor. I reached down and gathered up a handful, and held it to my nose. Alice's smell. I remembered her brus.h.i.+ng her hair, head lowered. I remembered yanking on it as we f.u.c.ked. Here it was, hacked off, tossed at Lack, and refused. I dropped it and ran out into the hallway. She was gone.

"I was reading about the dark matter," said Evan.

We were sitting on a sunny patch of lawn in front of the library. The ground was cool and wet and the monolithic school buildings seemed like a distant hallucination. Evan was at my right, his legs folded underneath him, his head lolled onto one shoulder, like a schoolgirl. Garth, at my left, sat on his haunches like a baseball catcher, his tongue out, hands gripping fistfuls of the damp gra.s.s. At the other end of the field a marching band practiced making turns in step, their instruments, heavy tubas and kettledrums, all silent.

"The dark matter?" I said.

"Ninety percent of the matter in the universe is impossible to detect. But they know it's there. They need it to balance their equations. To hold up the other stuff."

Garth ripped out a tuft of gra.s.s, held it to his nose, wrinkled his brow.

"That's what it's like for us," Evan went on. "Everything is dark matter. We're always setting up experiments, trying to confirm the existence of the dark matter. But we can't. We just have to trust that it's there."

Garth picked up his cane, and used the tip to root in the earth.

"And then I was wondering," said Evan. "Maybe Garth and I are in the wrong universe. Maybe in some other universe there's a form of matter that's visible to us. Maybe if we were much smaller. Subatomic."

"Huh," said Garth suddenly. "I was supposed to see the particles. I didn't see anything."

Garth, characteristically, was trying to drag Evan out of talking to me, back into their neurotic loop. Evan hesitated. I could see he wanted to resist the gravitational pull of Garth's bitterness. But he was drawn by habit.

Garth stopped digging, and waited for a response, his nostrils flared.

"But we do see things," said Evan, to me. "We talk about it when we're alone. Retinal patterns. We see them all the time, you know. We can't close our eyes and stop. Maybe that's the dark matter. Maybe you see ten percent of reality, and Garth and I see ninety percent."

"Huh," said Garth.

"Cynthia calls them forms and colors," said Evan. "She says that's what we're seeing."

"You don't even know which one is a form and which one is a color," said Garth.

"I do too. Remember what Cynthia said: Forms are like sounds, and colors are like smells. So a red cloud, for instance, might be a certain sound combined with a certain smell."

"But you can't know. Cynthia can't see what you see."

Evan cleared his throat. "It doesn't matter."

"But you can't know," said Garth, pounding it home.

I hated Garth suddenly. He was a dead weight around the neck of the world. Around Evan's neck, anyway. Cynthia should pry them apart.

We fell silent. Evan sat dejectedly. Garth digged determinedly in the moist ground with his cane. I watched the winter clouds, and my thoughts drifted to Alice.

"What is see?" said Garth.

"What?" said Evan.

"What is see? What is see?"

The marching band approached us, still in formation, still miming their playing. Evan and Garth looked up and trained their ears on the disturbance. The band marched past us, the only sound their quiet synchronized tramping on the gra.s.s, and a soft clicking as the horn players opened and closed their valves.

"See is just a movie in your eyes," said Garth. "It's not out in the world."

"A movie?"

"It's not out there, it's not dark matter or anything else. It's just in your eyes. A movie. And the only difference is that everyone else has the same movie playing. Cynthia, Philip, Alice, their movies agree. So they can see. You and I are watching the wrong movie, so we're blind."

Evan and I were silent.

"See is a dream," said Garth. "There isn't anything to see. Real things come one at a time. They come into your hand, and then disappear. Huh." He felt at the end of his cane, then put his hand to his chin and left a smear of mud there. "See is a movie. But when something goes wrong in their movie, when something is odd, they don't question themselves. They don't say, gee, things are disappearing in this laboratory, something must be wrong with my eyes or my brain, I must be blind. They put it outside of themselves, they say, gee, something is wrong with the world world. There must be a Lack. Well, I say we're not blind anymore. I say something is wrong with the world. People talk about things that aren't there. And they never talk about what's in their hands."

"But that's exactly what I was saying," said Evan.

"Exactly," said Garth.

"But you contradicted me."

"But now you see I didn't."

I looked at Evan. If he'd had eyes, he would have looked at me. We would have shared a knowing look, one that excluded Garth. But he couldn't enter my glance. I was the one excluded. Evan and Garth were alone together, in another world.

They belonged together, I thought now. Cynthia should help them to see that.

"Do you remember when I said I might be lying about the precise location of certain objects?" said Garth.

"Yes," said Evan.

"Well, don't worry," said Garth. "I don't know where they are either."

I went back down the next day, to watch as the graduate group introduced their custom-built probe to Lack. The faculty heavyweights were all present: Braxia, Soft, De Tooth, myself. All except Alice. The fresh-faced graduate students set up their experiment around us, taping cables and cords to the floor, testing transmitters and recording devices. At the last minute they unveiled their probe.

At first I thought it was too big for Lack. But they had his measurements, based on the particle screen hits, and this thing must have been made to fit. It resembled a cube of compacted garbage, or an a.s.signment by an eccentric art teacher. Construct an interplanetary probe exclusively from the following list of materials: first baseman's mitt, two-dollar bill, French horn, salad spinner, cotton swab. It had treads for negotiating terrain, like a moon buggy, a robot arm for righting itself or seizing objects, and dishes and antennae pointed in every direction, hoping for a signal.

They brought it in on its own steel table. It was like a reply to Lack, a presence to equal the absence, a Frankenstein's Monster to master the Invisible Man. I could hear a fan inside, humming ominously. The students pushed the table up to Lack's and then backed away. They seemed a little awed by their own hurried, patchwork creation.

Soft looked the most optimistic. These were his students, after all. A triumph for them would vindicate the department. He stood closest, on the fringe of the students, hovering like an older brother. Braxia, on the other hand, stood to one side, his crossed arms and sour expression underlining his prediction of failure. This was not only a waste of Lack-time, his expression seemed to say, but a personal affront, an abuse of precious Braxia-hours.

And then there was De Tooth. What a roomful of Frankensteins, I thought, with our monsters all in attendance! Soft had Lack and Braxia, the students had their ungainly probe, and I had De Tooth. The deconstructionist had undone his briefcase, and papers were spilled out all around him. He scribbled frantically into a pad propped awkwardly on his knees, pausing only to cast accusatory glances in every direction. Two days before I'd received a letter from him, a manifesto, declaring his independence from me in his work with Lack, decrying my status as "false auteur." He'd insisted on a complete blackout of communication between us. When he caught my eye now he scowled, then crumpled the page in his lap and tossed it aside, as if it had been polluted by my gaze.

Alice was Frankenstein and and Monster, I supposed. Creator first, in that vibrant period when she'd seized Soft's project away. Now, mute, tormented, and crew-cut, she was a monster. And Lack was her creator. Monster, I supposed. Creator first, in that vibrant period when she'd seized Soft's project away. Now, mute, tormented, and crew-cut, she was a monster. And Lack was her creator.

After interminable spot checks, test signals, and huddled conferences, the team abandoned the paired tables, leaving their machine alone to face its invisible twin. There was a modest countdown, and the device began to crawl on its treads toward Lack, to attempt to carry off the incestuous union. I was horrified. Wasn't the device as much of a scientific aberration as Lack? They were definitely siblings. They might as well use Lack to investigate the mystery of the probe.

The object wobbled perilously at the joint of the two tables. We held our breath. Then a foot descended from the interior of the probe, to steady it, and the treads reengaged. The machine rolled on. We breathed again. The students stood ready to receive signals from the other side, from inside Lack, or beyond Lack, whichever it was. From un-Lack. We all stared as the probe lumbered up to Lack's entrance. Hoping, despite ourselves. Even Braxia, I imagine. We forgave it existing long after it really should have disappeared.

Soon, though, it was unmistakably past Lack, and still in awkward grinding evidence on the table. For that moment when it drove on toward the far edge it seemed full of misguided valor, an object of beauty, a Quixote in full armor, but as its treads jutted idiotically over the rim of the table, and especially once it plopped stupidly off the end to crash in a heap on the tiles, treads spinning hopelessly in the air, arm fighting loose of the wreckage to grope hopelessly for orientation, it was only an embarra.s.sment. The students turned from their monitors, clicked off their instruments, hitched their thumbs in the belt loops of their corduroys or adjusted their eyegla.s.ses, but n.o.body approached the wreck. Soft coughed. Braxia rubbed at his chin. De Tooth went on scribbling. I left.

The next night I found Alice alone in the apartment. The blind men were at Cynthia Jalter's. Alice was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, drawing in a spiral-bound notebook. She'd cleaned up the painting supplies. The lamp by the bed was the only light on in the apartment. Alice's boyish, lopsided haircut had been growing out its worst irregularities, and I found myself actually charmed by the androgynous curve of her neck and scalp.

The apartment was quiet. We were quiet. I stood in the doorway and she looked up at me. If I didn't talk, her silence wasn't anything abnormal. Maybe we were about to touch. As I recalled that kind of mutual, affectionate silence I stared, and she stared back.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY SOBER REALITY into another labeled into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

"Do you want some coffee?" I said.

She stared.

"I guess that's a bit naive, thinking you'll break your silence to ask for coffee. Anyway, you probably just had coffee, just now."

She continued to stare.

"Tea?" I said. "We could have tea. I heard someone say tea builds bridges between people. Coffee is more isolationist."

Alice smiled. My head flushed with blood.

"I'll make tea, then. I'll go out and get some. You stay there. Keep smiling."

"Philip," she said.

"You spoke."

"Stop talking," she said. "Stop for a minute."

I nodded, which she missed.

"Why do you keep trying to talk to me, Philip?"

"That's it? You open your mouth to ask me why I talk to you? That's what you have to say?"

She nodded.

The mad scientist dumped both test tubes on the floor, and the contents ran down the drain marked EMBITTERED EMBITTERED.

"I've thought about shutting up, believe it or not. But I think the solution is more talk, not less. I could learn ventriloquism. Ask questions and answer them myself. After Evan and Garth move out we could get some cats and dogs, and I could make up funny voices for them."

No reaction.

"I talk to offer some contrast to Lack, to help you understand your options. I talk, he doesn't. I talk because I've been consulting with an expert in ontological breakdown and he prescribes inane chatter. Doctor's orders. You think I like this? It's a living nightmare. I hear my voice in dreams, offering you coffee. This is a bedside vigil, an act of faith. And now the patient rouses to ask if I would please pull the plug on the respirator."

I heard footsteps. And cane taps, outside. A car door slamming. The blind men were back.

"I talk because-listen, before they get inside, let me ask you a question: Do you think Garth would make a good blues singer? Or is that racist? I'm thinking of buying him a guitar for Christmas. You can write your answer down on a piece of paper."

The blind men clattered through the front door, into the darkened apartment. Alice looked away from me. Garth buzzed straight through to the kitchen, to the humming refrigerator, which spilled light into the living room. Evan walked a tight circle at the doorway until he stood facing me, approximately.

"Philip?" he said. "Cynthia wants to talk to you. She's waiting outside."

I looked at Alice again. Her eyes were stony. The moment of connection was over. If it had happened at all. Perhaps "Alice," as previously formulated, resided more in my memory than in the depleted original container.

"Stay there," I said to her. "We'll talk more in a minute. Practice moving your lips and tongue while I'm gone."

A car horn tooted. I went out. Cynthia sat waiting inside her rumbling, steaming Pontiac. I went to the pa.s.senger window. She powered it down a crack from her place behind the wheel. "Get in," she said.

I slid in beside her. "Are you with the mob?"