As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  I had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe we can offer the new text to Lack, to see if he’ll take it in.”

  “Lack is physics,” protested Soft feebly. “You can’t separate the two.”

  “Lack, Mr. Soft, is a singular monument transcending any banal explanation. Lack has a prodigious propensity to meaning. He seems to attract it like a lightning rod. For a lover of signification like myself, an irresistible phenomenon. Pure signifier. Lack is a verb both active and passive; an object and a space at once, a symbol. He is no single thing. Physics seeks to dismantle the surface, perceive beyond it, to a truth comprised of particles; I argue against depth wherever I find it. Lack’s meaning is all on the surface, and his surface appears to be infinite. Your approach is useless.”

  De Tooth rattled on, his distended lips forming the brittle sentences. Soft withered, and turned pea yellow. I started to feel protective. I wanted to hurry De Tooth away. The point had been made. But the little man, his tiny knuckles clenched white on the handle of his briefcase, was unstoppable.

  “Perhaps my text and yours will cancel each other out. They so often do, you know. It is possible Lack is no more than an assertion that has gone, until now, unanswered. Or perhaps Lack is a tool, a method, whose use has so far remained undiscovered. Certainly, in fact, Lack is all of these, and more. Lack is the inevitable: the virtually empty sign. The sign that means everything it is possible to mean, to any reader.”

  Soft put his hand against his pale, sticky forehead. “Does it seem a little warm in here?”

  There was no reply. Soft tugged at the knot of his tie. “Go on,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Perhaps we shall prove that Lack does not exist,” said De Tooth. Soft looked at me plaintively from beneath his hand. “And perhaps we shall prove that we ourselves do not exist. Perhaps Lack is editing the world for us, sorting it into those things that truly exist and those that do not; we who fail to exist may only peer with nostalgia across the threshold into reality; we may not cross.”

  Soft got out of his seat and went to the open window. He was breathing through his mouth.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  Soft shook his head.

  I got up and took him by the shoulder, and guided him through the door and into the hallway, where he slumped against the wall. He slid his hand from his panic-stricken eyes and used it to cover his mouth. His face had turned a brackish green. De Tooth hopped off his chair and dragged his briefcase out to where we stood in the hall.

  “Perhaps Lack has dreamed us, and we are only now, due to some scientific blunder, encountering the mind’s eye of our dreamer.”

  Soft choked and doubled up, pencils spilling from his shirt pocket and scattering on the floor. When he straightened there was spittle hanging from between his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. He hobbled down the hall, into the men’s room. I heard a retching sound echoing faintly off the tile.

  I looked at De Tooth. He arched his eyebrows into his wig.

  Three nights later, Alice loaded up the back of her Toyota with fifteen or twenty dashed-off paintings, and drove the short distance to the physics facility. She parked in the faculty lot, then piled the paintings through the main entrance and into the elevator.

  I followed at a safe distance in my Datsun, and then on foot. Unseen.

  The canvases were mostly self-portraits, painted in nervous, choppy brush strokes, images hacked out of the murk. There were a few abstractions, and a few still lifes. One painting of Evan and Garth. I liked her new work, actually. It was better than the earlier stuff. Maybe the emotional strain had freed her inhibitions, pushed her closer to the edge where art occurs. She’d certainly perfected a kind of 1950s painter’s temperament: surly, nonverbal, and permanently strung out.

  But would Lack like them?

  We were going to find out.

  When the elevator doors closed, I took the stairs, feeling like a spy. The stairwell, with its bare concrete walls, fallout-shelter notices, and unadorned light bulbs glaring from within iron cages, was perfect for espionage fantasies. It went on and on. There were three landings, three twists of stair, for every numbered floor. The building had extra depths, layers the elevator skipped. I wondered if the building contained its own opposite, an anti-building where anti-physicists collided anti-particles. Anti-men who paused only to wonder at the odd sounds coming from the floors and ceilings.

  At Lack’s floor I opened the emergency exit. I was alone in the corridor—no Alice. I went into the observation room and found Braxia, dressed in a lab coat, eating an apple, chewing with his mouth open.

  He tilted his head to indicate the chamber. “She wants privacy,” he said.

  “She took the paintings in?”

  He nodded.

  So Alice was alone inside, with Lack. The fundamental situation. This was the closest I’d come to it. I was annoyed to have Braxia there.

  “She’s offering the paintings to Lack,” I said. “They’re self-portraits. Surrogate selves.”

  Braxia smiled, crunched, swallowed. “Is something like physics, I think. To paint a self-portrait. You look at this thing, and it moves. You try to portray it, and it changes. You look out of the corner of your eye, it eludes you. You stare straight, you widen your eyes, and it makes a face at you.”

  I slumped down against the wall, across from the entrance to the chamber, fixing my gaze on Braxia’s kneecaps.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can’t talk now, about interesting things. You have to be worried and serious. I understand. So, if you will stay and be worried, I will go home and take a nap. You think I want to stay down here all night? I’ll watch television.”

  “I’ll stay,” I said.

  “It could be a long time,” he said. “You want to get some dinner, come back? I’ll wait.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Braxia shrugged, and went out. A moment later I heard the gurgle of the elevator as it ferried him up to the lobby.

  Leaving me alone, on AliceWatch.

  I stretched out my legs, checked the time, took a deep breath. This was what I wanted, supposedly, to have her under my care. So I settled down to wait.

  I started by listening intently, then realized there was nothing to hear.

  I tensed my body for action. Then untensed it. There wasn’t any action.

  My brain composed another bright dialogue. But I knew Alice wouldn’t provide the responses needed to cue my witticisms.

  Alice was alone with her Lack. I was alone with mine. Mine was less interesting than hers, I realized. She was obsessed, and I was bored. Bored and hungry and lonely.

  I was lonely for anyone, lonely for a human voice. Cynthia Jalter, maybe. Or Evan and Garth. I was lonely enough to wish Braxia would come back and jabber at me.

  The pay phone was just out of sight around the curve of the hallway. I could order food. I’d only abandon Alice for a moment. I went to the phone. The directory had been half-shredded out of its protective binder, but I found the number of a pizzeria near campus.

  “I want a small pizza and a bottle of beer,” I explained to the boyish voice on the other end of the line. “But no cheese. Can you give me a small pizza without cheese?”

  “That’s unusual,” said the voice. “Let me check. I’ll put you on hold.”

  He came back. “One small pizza, no cheese. Any specials?”

  “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 brushing her hair, head lowered. I remembered yanking on it as we fucked. 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 grass. 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 grass, 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 grass, 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. 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 assignment 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 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.