As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  I leaned over, tucked her hair behind her ear, and put the flat of my hand on her forehead. I felt a twist of shame. This was stolen intimacy, the first time I’d touched her in more than a month.

  “I should go,” said Soft.

  He rolled his eyes to suggest that I should follow. We stepped out onto the porch together, leaving Garth and Evan, grim sentinels, to watch over Alice. Soft turned to me, his features drawn.

  “She’s no longer competent to manage the project,” he said. “I’m looking at alternatives. But what’s important is that she slow down. She needs to step back, get some perspective. I need your help. Don’t let her spend any more nights in the lab. We’ve got students for that.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened?”

  “This business with the cat. Alice took it very personally. I don’t know, I can only speculate, but I think she may have tried to enter Lack.”

  I stared at Soft. My face felt like Play-Doh receiving a footprint.

  He nodded confirmation.

  “Come see me in my office tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk more then.”

  He crossed the street to his car. I went inside. Alice was still asleep. Evan and Garth were pacing, busy doing nothing, like their first night in the apartment. Alice’s return had unsettled them. Soft didn’t know of my recent distance from her, but they certainly did. I imagine their alert noses had sniffed out the traces of my drinking, too.

  “Professor Soft suggested that she stay here at night from now on,” said Evan. “We certainly agree.”

  “We’d be happy to sleep in the guest room,” said Garth. “Or out here if that’s better.”

  “Take the guest room,” I said.

  “Good. And Philip?”

  “Yes?”

  Garth grew solemn, raised his chin, fixed his ungaze on some infinite distance. “Evan and I want you to know we’ll do anything we can to help. You just have to ask.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a pause, a leaden silence. “Huh,” said Garth. “I suppose we’ll go to bed now.”

  They scuttled into the guest room, and closed the door.

  I knelt beside Alice, careful not to wake her. I could hear the blind men running water, brushing their teeth. Outside, crickets pulsed. I don’t know how long it was that I sat there, silently contemplating her, tracking the flicker of dream state across her eyelids, the murmur of breath in her throat. Finally I spoke her name, and nudged her shoulder.

  “Philip,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Soft brought you here. Everything’s okay. Come to bed.”

  She nodded, still asleep, really, and let me guide her to the bedroom. She stood wobbling and mole-eyed while I tugged the disarrayed blankets and sheets into shape, then she slid into the bed. When I switched off the overhead light she looked up at me meekly through the dark.

  “Philip?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “I’ll sleep in the living room.”

  Reassured, she curled up and fell asleep.

  I closed the door to the bedroom and patrolled the apartment on tiptoe. In the kitchen I scraped food off the blind men’s plates and drank a glass of water. Then I remade the makeshift bed on the couch, stripped to my underwear, and put myself to bed.

  But I didn’t sleep.

  The alcohol had leached out of my brain. But now I was drunk on Alice. She was back in the house. A miracle. I pictured her alone in the chamber, clambering onto the steel table to offer herself up to Lack’s indifferent mouth. I shuddered. No wonder she couldn’t love me anymore. She’d become estranged from humanness. She was on the brink of the void.

  My heart pounded with fear. But she was safe for the moment. Safe in my bed. Under my care. I just had to make it last, keep her here. I’d draw her back to the human realm. I’d teach her human love again.

  I couldn’t afford any stupid mistakes. Any Cynthia Jalters. I had to walk the line. Be worthy.

  Headlights from the road outside flared across the ceiling. In the kitchen the refrigerator hummed into midnight life. (I always imagine the light inside switching on, food cavorting.) My pulse slowed.

  When I first heard the murmur I thought I was dreaming. But I opened my eyes, and it continued. Was it Alice, calling my name? I put aside the blankets, and crept out, cold and huddled, to the middle of the room, nearer the bedroom doors. The voices went on. I made myself still, to listen.

  Evan and Garth arguing.

  I went back to bed on the couch.

  In the morning Evan and Garth vanished. I woke to see them breakfasting in decorous silence. I watched with half an eye as they tiptoed past me to the door. Then I went back to sleep, and a pleasantly forgettable dream.

  An hour later I woke for real, to a hangover. I reconstituted myself in the bathroom with paste and swabs, drops and floss. I got a kettle boiling, its whistle-top propped open with a fork, shook coffee into a filter, and set out two cups. Evan and Garth had the cupboard stocked with a product called Weetabix. I opened a packet and poured milk over a desolate pod.

  Alice padded in and sat at her place, not saying anything.

  I gave her coffee, and we ate breakfast like mimes, yawning, stirring, and chewing in exaggerated silence. Alice hit the side of her cup with her spoon and spilled out a neat pylon of sugar. The room was washed with light. Alice’s mussed hair was a backlit halo. We were a diorama labelled Philip and Alice, Breakfast. Circa two months ago. The past. Before.

  “You slept about ten hours,” I said. “From the time Soft brought you.”

  “It was Soft, then.”

  “Yes. He thinks you belong here. As far as he knows he was putting something back in its place.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “He’s worried about you,” I said. “He says you’re no longer competent to manage the project.”

  I decided not to make any I statements. We would talk about Soft’s perceptions, Soft’s concerns. Or Alice’s. But not mine.

  “There isn’t any project,” she said. “Just Lack. Lack and approaches to Lack. Soft’s holding on to the idea of a project. That’s his big blind spot.”

  “Soft’s concerned about your approach to Lack,” I said coolly. “He feels your approach is too, um, direct.”

  She looked down into her coffee. The sun sculpted hollows of light in her tired features. Tender feelings rustled in me like bat wings unfolding.

  “He thinks you’re identifying too much,” I said. “Losing that essential detachment.”

  She looked up sharply. “Lack doesn’t require detachment. That’s Soft’s error. Lack requires engagement, a relationship. It’s something I was able to rise to. Soft is out of his depth.”

  “You’re saying that what Lack wants is a relationship.” I said, still calm.

  “Right.”

  “And you’re saying you can provide that.”

  “Right.”

  “A human relationship.”

  “Right.”

  I lost my cool a little. “He isn’t getting one in you, Alice. You’re moving away from the human. Lack is too powerful an influence, can’t you see? He’s changing you. You’re becoming a void to match. You’re not human if you’re no longer able to love.”

  I caught myself before I added the word me.

  “Love isn’t the problem,” she said weakly. “I’m not having a problem loving.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You still don’t understand, do you? Why I can’t be with you anymore.”

  Don’t address me, I wanted to say. Philip isn’t here. This is Omnipotent Voice you’re speaking with.

  “You’re in love with someone else,” I heard myself say.

  “Yes.”

  A change came over me, a phase transition. A flush rose through my chest and neck.

  “You’re in love with Lack,” I said.

  “Yes.
”

  Should I have known sooner?

  Love is self-deception, remember. And my competition was so improbable.

  But now that it was named, Alice’s Lack-love seemed obvious, a foregone conclusion. Probably the whole campus buzzed with it, and I was the last to know.

  “The way you loved me?” I squeaked.

  “No. Yes.”

  I studied her. She sat with a leg up on the chair, her hair wild, her eyes glowing from tired sockets. Her mouth was drawn defiantly tight. Her Lack-love was real, I saw. She looked crushed under the weight of her impossible love. I felt an admiration, despite myself.

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “I hadn’t even admitted it to myself until just now.” A tear painted a reflective stripe down her cheek.

  “Does Soft?”

  “You would know better than I would.”

  Yes, Alice had been living on the brink of the void, but it wasn’t some singular, icy, inhuman place. In fact, the same void yawned out underneath me, too. Unrequited love.

  It seemed reasonable to call hers unrequited. If Alice had really climbed up on Lack’s table, then he’d turned her down, hadn’t he? Making things disappear was the only I love you in his binary vocabulary.

  Had she, though? I was afraid to ask. Instead I got up and cleared the dishes into the sink. I wanted to buy a plane ticket, fly away, make my claims to Cynthia Jalter true. Leave my colleagues with a mystery. Professor X.

  In the sink the coffee grounds rose up, swirling out of the bottoms of our cups, and were washed down the drain.

  “All this time down there,” I said, not facing her. “You were slipping away from me. Feeling communion with this thing, unable to talk about it.”

  “Yes.”

  I realized, too late, that I’d used a forbidden pronoun. Me. Distracted, I’d pled guilty to possession of a self.

  “So it’s simple, then,” I said. “No mystery. You don’t love me because you love Lack.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he doesn’t love you back.”

  “Yes.”

  “You tried, then. You offered yourself.”

  No answer. But when I turned from the sink she stared at me hollowly, and nodded.

  “We’ve drifted a long way past physics here, Philip. I’d like to try to get us back on course.”

  Soft’s office was surprisingly intimate. It was easy to imagine it as a blown-up model of the interior of his skull. The walls were lined with texts, a decade’s issues of Physics Letters and Physical Review. The desks were heaped. On the wall was a water-stained certificate, subtly crooked inside its frame. Yellowing fireproof ceiling, ancient fluorescent desk lamp. Soft always seemed reptilian inside the physics lab, and out of place everywhere else, but this office was an intermediate, a human space he could credibly inhabit.

  Soft sat behind his desk. In the rotting chair to his right sat an Italian physicist, just off the plane. He was tall and ruddy, and wore a wrinkled, lemon yellow suit. His collar was open and his tie was bundled into his jacket pocket, where it stuck out like a tongue. Soft introduced him with a name that began morphing so crazily the moment I heard it—Crubbio Raxia? Carbino Toxia? Arbino Cruxia?—that I didn’t dare try to say it aloud.

  He sat watching me intently while Soft spoke.

  “We’re dividing up the Lack hours,” Soft said. “I’m reclaiming a portion of the schedule myself. A team of our graduate students has submitted an impressive proposal, and they’ll be awarded a shift. Most exciting to me personally is the exchange we’ve negotiated with the Italian team. Carmo and his staff will be given access to Lack, in return for a share of hours at their supercollider in Pisa, something we’ve craved for years. Lack is a considerable bargaining chip.”

  The Italian pursed his lips. “We have been following your results very closely. It is important work. Cannot be monopolized, you see? The international community has claims.”

  “Carmo’s team has some very interesting theories, and they’re eager to put them to the test.”

  “Hah! Yes. It’s a very narrow interpretation, so far.”

  Soft winced. The Italian’s enthusiasm obviously irritated him. Maybe there was a political side to this exchange, some debt being paid.

  “The reason I called you here,” continued Soft, “is that I’d like to ask you to administer Professor Coombs’ hours. Be her, ah, chaperone. I wouldn’t dream of disrupting her work, but I am looking to tighten up our sense of procedure here. I want to develop a variety of approaches, foster a little give-and-take among the various teams. And naturally there’s going to be some downtime, when one team is breaking down equipment or cleaning up the observation area. There’s only one Lack. So we’re all going to have to move forward in a spirit of cooperation. I’m looking to you, Philip, as someone who’s really an expert on how we do things around here, to help apply the subtle brakes and levers that can make this thing go. Especially with Professor Coombs. Because it’s not an easy thing, but in effect we’re downgrading her status in this situation, cutting into her time. Not that there aren’t compensations, of course, but still. I’m sure you’re cognizant of my drift.”

  Soft smiled at Carmo—Texaco? Relaxo? Ataxia?—and folded his hands across his desk.

  “But Alice—” I began.

  “I don’t think this is really the time and place and time to talk about Professor Coombs’ recent difficulties, Philip. Professor Braxia isn’t interested in our petty little disputes or eccentricities. There’s a difference of opinion between myself and Professor Coombs. That’s no secret, I’m not hiding that from the Italian team. The point is to open this thing up to a variety of approaches.”

  “We are not coming in here blind,” said Braxia smoothly. “We know your Professor Coombs’ work. She is passionate, stubborn. We like that, we understand that.”

  “I think it goes somewhat beyond that,” I said. “Alice’s feeling is that we’re past traditional approaches here. That this is more along the lines of, say, alien contact, first contact, and that we ought to have a heightened sensitivity to, uh, anthropological or exobiological concerns. I think she’s likely to object to a strenuously hard-physics approach at this point. Speaking as her representative here.”

  I was winging it. Stalling. But if Soft wanted to come between Alice and Lack, did I really want to stand in the way? My wishes and hers weren’t necessarily one and the same.

  Carmo Braxia stretched back in his seat, and crossed his leg over his knee. “My dear fellow. It’s extraordinary to me that you would oppose an exercise of the basic scientific rigorousness that the situation is demanding. Just, for example, setting up a sonar or light beam to try and bounce a signal off the interior surface of this Lack. No damage is risked. Why has this not been attempted?”

  “I’m afraid he’s right, Philip. There’s a basic threshold of responsibility here. We’re currently below it.”

  “Perhaps there is a corresponding Lack, an out-hole,” suggested Braxia excitedly. “Undiscovered somewhere. Spewing out the junk you push into your end here. In some third-world nation perhaps. Hah! Very American.”

  “Professor Coombs will have her time,” said Soft. “She’ll have plenty of chances to vindicate her theories. We’re all going to stay open and receptive. We’ll all pursue our own conclusions. At some point the teams will converge on the actual truth. We’ll know what we’re looking at here.”

  “Results,” said Braxia gravely.

  “And so you need my help with Alice,” I said.

  Soft winced again. He wanted me to call her Professor Coombs. “More than that,” he said. “We’re inviting your presence. Work closely with Professor Coombs, with Carmo and the Italians, with myself, and look for correspondences we’re missing. Things we’re too close to see. Your kind of thing. And use your influence to keep Professor Coombs on an even keel. Focused, but not … obsessive.”

  Braxia had pulled a tuft of stuffing out of the torn arm of his chair and wa
s holding it up quizzically to the light.

  “What if I were to submit a competing claim for time,” I said, improvising. “Representing, say, the concerns of the interdisciplinary faction. Sociological, psychological, even literary concerns. I’d represent the community of the bewildered, the excluded. I think yesterday’s demonstration proves the existence of my constituency. Would that be compatible with your time-share format?”

  Soft looked like he was trying to swallow his Adam’s apple. “I see no problem there,” he managed to say. “Put in your claim. We’ll run it through the usual review process.”

  “What’s important, my dear fellow, is that we get some physics done. We understand your Professor Coombs is feeling unwell. We extend our best wishes. Until she is ready to utilize her time we propose to offer a further exchange.” Braxia rustled in his pockets, pulled out a single folded sheet, and opened it. “For every additional weekly hour past the initial allotment,” he read, “one additional square foot of observation space in the Pisa facility. After an additional ten hours weekly, the rate changes to six additional inches per additional square hour.”

  “I don’t think Alice will consider any concessions.”

  “Here.” Braxia handed me the paper. “You will have our offer at hand. That is all I ask. The exchange is no concession. We have a very desirable facility—ask Soft. Four thousand events per run. A very nice machine. Explain it to him, Soft.”

  “They have a very nice machine,” said Soft. “The envy of the international community.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  Soft had Lack’s chamber sealed off during the reorganization, leaving Alice to founder in the apartment. She never went out. I would come home to find her dazedly channel-surfing, or stirring a can of condensed chowder to life on the stove, or fallen asleep on the couch, a notepad clutched to her chest, pages blank. We didn’t talk. We avoided each other. I slept on the couch and was awake and out of the house before she even stirred. She and the blind men dined together, I ate separately. The apartment was a museum of unspoken words.