As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  “You’re the only one for Lack.”

  “Yes.”

  It was work holding back my sarcasm. The result was silence.

  “Philip. You understand, don’t you?”

  I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall. “You’re sleeping with Lack.”

  She ignored the provocation. “I’m sleeping in the lab. I mean, I’m not really sleeping much, to tell the truth. Please understand, Philip. I’m on the edge of the territory.”

  Horizon of the real, I silently corrected.

  A desultory student passed us in the hall, headed for some office to beg for reprieve.

  “You’re leaving me,” I said.

  “I have to be where this takes me.”

  “It takes you away. You’re gone, and I’m alone.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “Worse than alone, actually. I’m partial. I’m part of something that isn’t there anymore. I’m a broken-off chunk.”

  Alice looked down. “What I’m doing is very important.”

  “When will you come back?”

  Silence.

  “Say something encouraging,” I said. “Tell me it’s good for us. Tell me you think I’m overreacting. Use the word us.”

  She met my eyes with a look of terror.

  “What I’m hearing is you won’t use the word us,” I said.

  She stared at her feet again. “Soft once told me that certain discoveries choose the scientist who discovers them. They wait for the right one. That’s me and Lack.”

  Welling sarcasm again drowned my tongue.

  Alice took my hand. “I have to go, Philip.”

  “To Lack.”

  “Yes.” She pulled her hand away, ran hair out of her eyes, smiled feebly. “I’m sorry.”

  Before I could speak she was gone.

  When Alice held her press conference I crept in and sat unobtrusively at the back. It turned out that Alice was right, Soft wrong. Lack was displaying a preference for certain particles. There wasn’t any explanation, but Alice had dubbed it vacuum intelligence, and Lack was instantly and forever anthropomorphized.

  Lack had star potential, at least on campus. He was a charismatic mystery, a mute ambassador, a cosmic Kaspar Hauser. Developments in his chamber went murmuring through the faculty daily. And today he was being offered to the larger world.

  The larger world was showing only the slightest interest. The conference hall was less than half full, and I recognized a lot of the faces. The physicists might have overestimated Lack’s sex appeal. Alice sat up on the dais, sipping water and paging through her notes, unperturbable, wrapped in silence. Soft was beside her, his legs crossed, pants hitched up awkwardly to reveal spindly ankles, his expression distant. The momentum in the department belonged to Alice now. Soft was just a token, a reminder of the Prize that could be had.

  The lights dimmed. Alice stepped up to the podium, waiting for the crowd to fall silent, and introduced herself and Soft. Then she explained, in lucid detail, the sequence that had led to the discovery and naming of Lack. Soft’s venture, the false vacuum bubble. The aneurysm. The gravity event. The audience followed her closely.

  My attention wandered. I was busy righting myself. It was useful, seeing Alice at a fixed distance, so far away. She was up there, and I was over here, she was apparently intact—maybe I was intact, too. So I sat and adjusted my own vertical hold after a week of spinning.

  Alice went on to describe the state of the experiment—Lack’s gradual stabilization, and the conversion of the chamber from Cauchy-space to earth-normal. “Lack’s tastes make up his being,” she said. “His preference for certain particles is all there is to him. If he stops choosing he stops existing.” She described the attempt to define his exact boundaries, the array of detectors, meters, and photosensitive plates they had aimed at this hint, this tenuous invisible presence.

  The audience applauded politely when she was done. Alice nodded her thanks and went to sit beside Soft, to field questions from the crowd.

  The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.

  “Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.

  It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.

  I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.

  “It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The spin of a particle, the color or flavor of a quark. A field or horizon. Beauty, truth, and strangeness. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”

  Some instinct led me to pause. I let the microphone drop to my waist. The audience looked up at Alice and Soft, searching their faces for response.

  I am the Lorax, I thought. I speak for the trees.

  “I have to question the assumption that Lack’s preference is for particles, in and of themselves,” I continued. “Why do we assume that our visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H’s to M’s. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose? Bebop or swing? I think we’re leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we’re—pardon me—failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror.”

  My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallow it, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. For that’s when I played my part, with Soft and Alice, in our collective Dr. Frankenstein. That was how I conspired in the creation of my own monstrous rival, my personal Stanley Toothbrush.

  Would it have occurred without my help? I’ll never know. But until then I’d been passive, a victim of fate. Now I was as much to blame as anyone.

  The next day the microactivity detectors were dismantled, and the proton gun wheeled away. In their place a small lab table was rolled up to the bottom edge of Lack’s particle strike zone. Otherwise Lack was left bare. Alice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.

  The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side.

  Alice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile on the other side of the table, and each item clattered to the lab floor, refused.

  Alice went and gathered her belongings. One was missing. She searched the floor, frisked herself, reloaded her pockets, conducted an inventory. It was nowhere.

  Lack had gobbled the key to our apartment.

  In the weeks that followed it was as impossible to avoid updates on Lack’s tastes as it was to catch a glimpse of Alice. Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter’s helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck’s egg, fertilized, refused a duck’s egg, scrambled.

  Some items we
re measured, weighed, evaluated, before going over Lack’s table. Others were just giddily tossed across. Nobody understood Lack’s system for choosing. He was consistent in never accepting something previously refused. Electric beater-blades tumbled off the table nine days in a row. He was inconsistent in sometimes growing bored with a previously favored item. The lists in the campus paper, under the heading Lackwatch, served as a daily dose of found poetry: hole punch, rosin bag, cue ball.

  Everyone had a theory. We were all physicists now, thanks to Lack. Anyone could win the Prize—at least until the following morning, when some contradicting item was consumed. Lack seemed to have a fondness for disproving each new system of prediction at his first chance, as though theories themselves were to his taste.

  Life went on. Pumpkins were purchased, mutilated, and left to rot on porches and windowsills. The team lost the Big Game. My hair grew out. Alice, living as she was “on the edge of the territory,” was excused from teaching, and a graduate student took over her classes.

  I missed her, terribly. I yearned, heart big and tender as a ripe eggplant. At the same time I played at indifference, my heart squeezed small and hard as an uncooked chestnut. The day she strolled into my office I felt my heart opt for chestnut size.

  Her expression was gentle, her hair mussed into a halo. She took a seat across from me at my desk. I leaned back and compressed my lips, pretending she was a remiss student.

  She looked past me to the bookshelves, the tattered notices and rusty thumbtacks that littered the walls. “I remember this office.”

  “You never came here,” I said.

  “I remember it. I sat here, you sat there.”

  “Maybe you picked me up here once. You never sat down.”

  “I sat while I waited. You had to finish something.”

  “I never work here. I can’t imagine a time when I would have had something to finish in this office.”

  “I remember it.”

  “I hardly ever sit here, it’s amazing you caught me here now. I was just coming in and sitting down for a minute. I certainly wouldn’t just suddenly start finishing something here. It’s a false memory.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Philip. It still reminds me of you.”

  “Me sitting here now, you mean. Me sitting here now reminds you of me. I remind you of myself.”

  Alice sighed. I realized how angry I sounded.

  “You threw away the food,” Alice said.

  “You were in the apartment?”

  “I needed clothes. I was just looking around, and I saw the food was in the garbage.”

  “It went bad.”

  “Well, there’s something about the apartment I wanted to talk to you about.”

  My heart twitched like a stone with a frog underneath. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “It’s just sitting there. I can’t use it right now, but I’m still paying rent.”

  “I’m still living there,” I said bitterly.

  “I know, Philip. But I keep wondering if you’d be better off with some company. So, when I suggest this you shouldn’t just automatically say no. You should consider it. It would make me very happy.”

  “Who?”

  “Evan and Garth. Just for a month.”

  “No.”

  “It’s only a month. They’re being kicked out and they didn’t find another place.”

  Was she offering me a chance to even the score, to refuse her something? Or was it a test, to see if her charm could still sway me?

  I felt my defenses leak away. It was a kind of masochistic thrill. Come back into my life, a part of me cried. Build an ant farm in the apartment, sprinkle German yeast. Anything. Just fill the lack there.

  “I don’t even know them,” I said.

  “They like you. They’ll do the dishes, clean, cook. They go out during the day. You’ll hardly see them.”

  “Go out where?”

  “They wander around. Evan teaches braille three times a week. They go to the library. They go to their therapist.”

  “Together?”

  “It’s a special thing. They get paid for it. Some woman is studying them, the way they are, like those twins that make up private languages.”

  “Are they lovers?”

  “I don’t think so. They seem very interested in women.”

  “Women?”

  “Not me, Philip. Just women, the idea of women.”

  I sighed.

  “Say yes. It’ll be good for all three of you.”

  “Bring them over and we’ll talk about it.” Come back to the apartment, I meant.

  “We’ll come by tonight.”

  “So you’re still working with them, on seeing particles.”

  “Not exactly. I’m not really focused on that right now. But they got very excited, so I still give them things to do.”

  “You’re more focused on Lack.”

  “Yes.”

  She got edgy. She didn’t like the change of subject.

  “How is Lack, then?” I asked.

  “That’s a silly question, Philip. Lack isn’t how.”

  “I thought your whole point was that he was. That he had a personality.”

  “Not a personality like ‘how are you?’ He doesn’t have good days and bad days.”

  “You sound a little frustrated.”

  “I don’t mean to lump you in with everyone else, but there’s a degree of sensational interest—”

  “He’s a fad.”

  “Yes.”

  “It makes you feel protective. Possessive.”

  She recoiled at the last word. I suddenly saw how tired and frightened she was, her eyes rimmed with red, her cheeks sallow. I thought of her sleeping on a cot in the subterranean gloom, kept awake by the beeping detectors.

  “Maybe I am,” she said quietly.

  Agreeing to think it over was the same as saying yes, of course. It brought Alice temporarily into the apartment, anyway. She ferried the blind men in and out with their belongings, cardboard boxes of utensils and condiments, heaps of braille magazines, black suits in dry-cleaner plastic.

  Alice and I didn’t talk, though. We listened to Evan and Garth. “Correction,” Evan would say, “Tuesday, the appointment. The potluck dinner.”

  “There isn’t any appointment Tuesday,” Garth replied smugly. “It was moved to Wednesday. The application deadline was moved back a week. It has to be postmarked by midnight Thursday.” Smiling mysteriously, his voice full of pride, he delivered the payoff. “The potluck dinner stands alone.”

  Alice and I were left alone just once, and then our talk was wound down, entropic.

  “There are calls for you on the machine,” I said.

  “You mean the students with the tutorial thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I called them.”

  Silence. “So they have to be driven everywhere,” I said. “The blind men.”

  “Only with their stuff. They take the bus.”

  “Or walk, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “The city is like a giant maze to them.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. “You’re listed in the winter catalog for a course called ‘The Physics of Silence.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “Lack, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  Her yes was a wall. I had lived inside the circle of Alice’s silence, before. Now I stood utterly outside.

  When Evan and Garth were installed she vanished again. The blind men took over, began redefining the apartment. Everything was knocked over, handled, repositioned. Dishes started piling up precariously, unrinsed, scabby with bits of egg, jam, and mustard. Briefcases full of braille were unpacked across the couch. Conversations rattled away over my head.

  “What would you do if you found out I’d been lying to you?” said Garth suddenly.

  Evan turned. “What do you mean?”

  “What if I’d been lying about the precise location of certain objects?”


  “Have you been?” Evan sounded a little panicky.

  “What if I had? You’d be living in a world of my imagination. Huh. Think of that.”

  “We already discussed this. Ms. Jalter had a word for it. Delusive conditioning. It’s not fair.”

  “I didn’t say it was fair.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  Evenings Evan usually dug in with a braille physics textbook on the couch, while Garth sat on the guest-room bed and listened to his portable radio on headphones. I washed the dishes and paced onto the porch, to contemplate the night. I couldn’t relax with them in the apartment. The blind men listened too hard. It made me too aware of my sounds, the scuffling of chair legs on hardwood, the flutter of turned pages. Each visit to the bathroom was a disaster, urine pounding into the bowl, ear-shattering flush.

  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.