As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  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.

  The phone in our apartment was portable, and it was too nice a day to sit and wait for it to ring indoors. I set it out on the patio. I brought along iced tea and a book I knew I didn’t want to read. But as soon as I sat down I heard voices, odd voices, at the front of the building.

  “We’ve been here before,” said the first voice.

  “This is the place,” said the second.

  “We’re three blocks from the pay phone,” said the first.

  “Correction,” said the second. “Four blocks from the bus stop.”

  “The pay phone and the bus stop are two blocks apart.”

  “I think we’re speaking of two different pay phones.”

  “There’s only one pay phone. I mean, we only speak of one pay phone.”

  “Correction. Today is Tuesday. On Tuesday evenings we see Cynthia Jalter. We change buses. The second pay phone is two blocks from the transfer point. On Tuesday there are two pay phones.”

  “You mean on Tuesday we speak of two pay phones.”

  “Right. Today is Tuesday. We are currently three blocks from the pay phone and five blocks from the pay phone. What time is it?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Four-thirty-seven,” said the second voice. “Check your watch.”

  “Four-thirty-seven,” said the first.

  “Good. We’re on time. This is the place.”

  “Yes, we’ve been here before. Shall we ring the bell?”

  “Do you want to do it?”

  “All right.”

  Again, a long silence. Finally, the doorbell. I stayed put. I couldn’t imagine that these comedians had any real business on our doorstep.

  “No answer,” said the second voice.

  “Are we late?”

  A pause. “It’s four-thirty-eight. This is the right time. Is it the right place?”

  “It’s the right place. We’ve been here before. We walked from the bus stop.”

  “Where is Miss Coombs?”

  “Correction. Professor Coombs.”

  “Is she late?”

  “We might be early. What time is it?”

  Now I got out of my deck chair. I wanted to break the loop of their talk, save all three of us from going through any more of it.

  “Hello,” I said, as I rounded the corner of the building. Then, seeing them, I stopped and shut up. At the door stood two blind men, one black, one white, both in wrinkled black two-piece suits, both with canes. They turned their heads as I arrived, not to face me with their useless eyes, but to cock their ears, like German shepherds.

  The blindness explained the lag reading watches and ringing doorbells, and some of the oddness of their talk.

  “Hello,” answered the black man, who’d been the first voice. “Could you tell us if this is where Professor Coombs resides?”

  I had them wait inside while I collected the telephone from the patio. Our apartment was simple enough: two bedrooms off a central kitchen and living room, divided by a counter. They inhabited it like oversize windup toys, scuttling into corners and rebounding to meet in the middle, canes dueling. They ran their hands everywhere, mapping frantically, too frantically. I eventually had to lead them each to the couch, though they’d both touched it more than once in their survey.

  “We’re roommates,” explained the white man, the second voice. “I’m Evan Robart.”

  “Philip Engstrand,” I said, and took his hand.

  “Garth Poys,” said the other. I tugged free of one handshake and entered another.

  “Alice should be back soon,” I said. “Can I offer either of you a drink?”

  “No,” said Evan Robart. “I had something to drink before I left the house.”

  “We both did,” said Garth Poys.

  “We’re here to talk to Professor Coombs about an experiment,” Evan said. “It involves Garth.”

  “I apparently possess blindsight,” said Garth. “Not that it’s doing me much good.” He delivered this like the punchline of a joke he didn’t find particularly funny.

  “Miss Coombs apparently feels this qualifies him as a physicist,” said Evan. He spoke in the same ironic, world-weary tone.

  “Correction. Professor Coombs. Huh.”

  I sat, dumbfounded by the ping-pong clatter of their talk. I was doing my best to look comfortable, my mouth clenched in a smile, my legs crossed, all the while failing to produce the one signal that might be received—speech.

  “Do you have the time?”

  “Quarter to five,” I squeaked.

  “Really? I’ve got four-forty-two. Evan?”

  “Same. At least we’re synchronized. That’s something.”

  “Do you think I’m right?” Garth asked me. “Who do you think is wrong?”

  “I’m probably wrong,” I managed.

  Garth turned his head toward Evan. His eyes were open a little, slits of white beneath his near-purple lids, twin moons smiling in the night of his face. “We could all be wrong,” he said gravely.

  There was a sound at the door. Alice came in, arms loaded with straining bags of groceries, celery and paper towels poking out at the top. She peered over the top and offered superfluous introductions as she
juggled the bags into the kitchen.

  I followed her in and cleared space on the counter, which was crammed with humming, ready appliances. We unpacked. Alice sorted out dinner. Green peas, salmon, rice, avocado, ice cream. The rest we crammed into cupboards. I waited for the sound of running water to cover my voice.

  “They’re incredible.”

  “They can’t help it.”

  “The talk. It’s obsessive.”

  “Compensation. They can’t see. They map their environment verbally.”

  “It requires a lot of confirmation, this map.”

  “Listen to them. It’s poetic.”

  “Synchronizing their watches constantly. Like astronauts.”

  Alice put on water for rice, rinsed the peas, skinned the avocado. I offered the blind men drinks again. They refused again. We listened as they quietly and persistently mapped the living room, negotiating over the distances between various landmarks, the floor lamp, the fireplace, the doorstep. I cut a lemon.

  “What about the aneurysm? What happened?”

  “The breach stabilized.”

  “Breach?”

  “Soft upgraded it to breach status.”

  “Worse or better than aneurysm?”

  “Different. More stable.”

  “But completely unexpected.”

  “In retrospect less so. I took it to my computer this afternoon. My equations don’t balance unless I allow for the portal.”

  “Portal or breach? There seems to be some blurriness.”

  “Soft calls it a breach,” she said. “I call it a portal.”

  “It’s Soft’s thing.”

  “If I describe it it’s my thing. I’m getting interested.” She was turned away from me, slicing avocado, crushing herbs. Inside I heard the blind men talking of bus stops and pay phones.

  “I thought you already were interested.”

  “When it was going to detach it was more Soft’s kind of thing,” she said. “But it’s still here. That’s my kind of thing.”

  “You like perceptible things,” I suggested. “You like to make measurements.”

  “Not easily perceptible,” she pointed out. “Just barely present.”

  “It’s all colors,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The food. You’re cooking for blind men, and it’s all colors. Green peas, blueberry ice cream, salmon. Avocado.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Will they feel like they’re missing something?” she whispered.

  “It must happen sometimes. I mean, they are missing something.”

  We took dinner out and set the table hastily around it. The blind men, led to the table, became formal and quiet. I could see them browsing the collage of smells and sounds, the gentle clinking of silverware and ice. Alice filled the plates, and we ate, the blind men leaning over their plates, forking up unknown quantities to meet trembling lips. Peas and rice tumbled back to the table.

  Alice began to talk. “In physics we have an observer problem,” she said. “Suppose we take a spinning electron and observe which direction its spin axis lies along. We find, oddly enough, that it lies along whatever direction we choose to observe from.”

  “An observer problem, huh,” said Garth, with disturbing emphasis.

  “This chicken is very good,” said Evan.

  “We rarely have chicken,” said Garth.

  We were eating fish. I said nothing.

  “Some people think the observer’s consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron.”

  “I believe the salt is three, maybe four inches to the right of your plate.”

  “More like five.”

  “That’s probably closer to my plate, then.”

  “It’s a problem of subjectivity, really. How can the observer make an objective observation? It’s impossible.”

  “A problem of subjectivity. Huh.”

  I wanted to interrupt. Alice’s effort seemed hopeless. I hadn’t learned yet that Evan and Garth were listening.

  “We spoke about this before, didn’t we?” said Garth. “In her office, last Friday.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Evan. A grain of rice clung to his upper lip. “In her office.”

  “About what time?”

  “About three in the afternoon.”

  “Roughly ninety-six hours ago. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Huh.” Garth raised his head, aimed his eyes at the ceiling. Alice and I looked at him.

  “Well,” he said, “we got a book.”

  “From the library,” said Evan.

  “We read about it. The observer problem.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Alice.

  “She says it’s wonderful,” said Evan, as if Garth couldn’t hear anyone but him.

  “I think I understand,” said Garth. “It’s a problem of subjectivity, knowing. Thinking. Observing is like thinking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except for me. I can see without thinking. That’s what they mean by blindsight. Not that it’s doing me any good. Huh.”

  “Yes,” said Alice again. The white man and the black man smiled. Some kind of understanding had been reached. I was alone in my confusion.

  “What’s blindsight?” I said.

  “He wants to know what blindsight is.” They snorted over private ironies. “Do you want to tell him?”

  “I’ll tell him. What time is it?”

  “Five-fifty-seven. What time is the last bus?”

  “Eleven. I’ve got five-fifty-eight.”

  They reset and corroborated the bulky braille watches. Garth leaned back in his chair and fixed his ungaze on a point a foot or so to the left of my face. “Evan and I are blind in different ways,” he said. “Evan has eyes that don’t work. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”

  “I’m amaurotic,” said Evan, with a hint of pride.

  “My eyes work fine,” said Garth. “But I have an atrophy of a part of my brain associated with visual awareness.” He was quoting some text, I could tell. “My eyes work fine. I can see. I just don’t know I can see.”

  “He can’t know.”

  “My brain doesn’t understand sight.”

  “Blindsight,” said Alice excitedly, “is when you trick Garth into forgetting he doesn’t know he can see. The doctor commands him to reach for an object. He grabs it without hesitation. When the doctors trace the vectors of his hands, arms, fingers, and the movement of his eyes, they’re all precise. He still doesn’t experience sight, but he’s unquestionably seeing. Making an observation.”

  “Not that it does me any good. Huh.”

  It slowly sank in. “Observation without consciousness,” I said.

  “Observation without subjective judgment,” said Alice.

  “The spin of a particle,” I said.

  “Physics,” said Alice.

  “Your office is in the physics building,” said Evan.

  “We were there,” said Garth. “It’s about five blocks from the bus stop.”

  Alice and I had sex that night. For a long time afterward we didn’t talk. The bedroom was dark and cool. Light leaked in from the hall and outlined our bodies in the darkness as we lay still, sweating where we overlapped, goose-pimpled where we didn’t. The quiet was rich with things unsaid.

  We didn’t speak of Soft’s experiment, the breach or portal. We didn’t mention the blind men, or Alice’s dream of a perfect, sightless physicist.

  Soon Alice was falling asleep, and I wasn’t. I heard the air flutter between her lips.

  “Alice.”

  “Philip?”

  “Where do I stop and you begin?”

  She hesitated. “You mean what is the cut-off point?”

  “I mean if you went away what would be left of me?”

  “I’m not going away.” Her voice was very quiet.

  “But answer anyway.”

  “All of you would
be left,” she said. “None of me. I would be gone and you would still be here.”

  I could tell she wanted to sleep. But it was as though letting her sleep tonight was the same as losing her.

  “You complete me,” I said. “I’m not sure I really exist, except under your observation.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “If you left me,” I said, “you’d take so much of me with you that I’d be inside you, looking back at what was left—the husk of Philip Engstrand we’d abandoned.”

  She stared at me across the pillow. “That’s actually beautiful,” she said.

  “So when I feel distance between us it’s like there’s something wrong between me and myself. I feel a gulf in myself.”

  Alice closed her eyes. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

  “No?” I said.

  “I was up all night. I have to sleep. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I just—”

  “Philip, stop, please.”

  I held her while she cried. When her body stopped trembling, she was asleep.

  Days passed. Classes were taught, seminars held. Papers were handed in, graded, and returned. The team won something, and the trees filled with garlands of toilet paper. It rained, and the toilet paper dripped to the pathways, and into the wiper blades of parked cars. A group of students seized the Frank J. Bellhope Memorial Aquarium to protest the treatment of Roberta, the manatee savant. The protest was a failure. I called a symposium on the history of student seizure of campus buildings. The symposium was a success. In the larger world, the team invaded something, some hapless island or isthmus. A letter of protest by the faculty was drafted, revised, and scrapped. Bins of swollen pumpkins appeared in the produce sections of Fastway and Look ’n’ Like.

  Alice went on demolishing particles. When I saw her she was distracted, absent. She worked long days with her graduate students and with Garth Poys, Blind Physicist, readying a series of proton runs. Nights she spent huddled with Soft in the Cauchy-space observation room, following the progress of the breach or portal. I sometimes brought sandwiches to her in the long chilly arm of the accelerator, but I drew a line at descending again into that dark heart where Soft’s monster lurked.

  I first heard the name Lack in the campus barbershop. The barbers there specialized in crew cuts and baldings for the campus athletes, the swimmers, wrestlers, and football players. The walls were layered with programs and posters, autographed by college stars long since graduated into painful, grinding NFL careers. When I strolled in, maybe six times a year, my barber would sigh, put down his electric clipper, and search out the misplaced thinning shears.