As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  She nodded.

  I squinted up at the winter sky. It was a beautiful day. I felt dirty, unshaven, and hopeless.

  Suddenly, idiotically, I realized I’d been counting on spending Christmas with Alice. A chink in my heart’s pill-bug armor. I’d be hurt by her going away.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “I understand,” I said. “You feel bad about Evan and Garth. And everything that happened, your hand, me. But it doesn’t mean you have to run away.”

  “For a while, Philip. I’m sorry.”

  I struggled for words. “You still love Lack, I guess.”

  She nodded.

  A cold wind swept over the roof of the car, into my face. I coughed into my fist, and felt my stubbly chin and chapped lips against my hand.

  “What you did down there is crazy, you know.”

  She nodded again, and ran her good right hand through her short hair, front to back. She had new mannerisms to go with her short hair.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “It bleeds a lot,” she said.

  “Did you disinfect it?”

  “Yes.”

  We fell silent. I wanted her bandage to come undone, her wound to bleed, so that she would need my help. I could carry her from the car, then come back, turn her key back out of the ignition, and pocket it.

  “What should I tell Soft?” I said. I was stalling.

  “About what?”

  “I can’t keep covering for you. It’s too much. Questions are being asked. Soft said it looked like a murder. That’s just one example. There’s also Evan and Garth. You’re dropping everything in my lap.”

  Alice looked at me sharply. “There is no more Evan and Garth,” she said. “Nothing in your lap.”

  “Listen to you, you’re jealous. Lack took someone else. That’s what’s behind these suicidal gestures, these elegiac departures. Jealousy.”

  “Don’t, Philip.”

  “I just don’t understand—”

  How you can leave me, I almost finished. But I caught myself. Her car was running, and the chances were that in a minute or two I’d have to face myself, alone. So I put together another end for my sentence, one safely shallow and bitter.

  “I don’t understand why I go on making this so easy for you. Why I’m such a—what’s it called? A doormat, that’s it. Or doorman. Good morning, Ms. Coombs, watch your step, here’s the void. When one word from me and the jig, as they say, is up. No more Alice and Lack.”

  That did it. Alice gripped the steering wheel, obviously fighting pain, and shifted the car into reverse. She pulsed her foot on the brake so the car rolled an inch away, as warning, then looked up at me one last time.

  “Do what you have to do,” she said.

  She accelerated backward in a lurch out of the driveway, then shifted and sped away, leaving me standing there, less doormat or doorman than door, slammed.

  I went inside and called Soft. I told him that I’d found Alice, that she was fine, and that she’d only accidentally cut herself in the chamber. I spread apologies like margarine. Soft seemed mollified. I hung up and went into the bathroom to shower and shave, to reorganize a presentable, inhabitable self. By the time I was done it was five-thirty. The day had leaked away. I heated a can of bean-and-bacon soup on the stove and ate it in silence, my mind vacant like a chewing cow’s.

  Then I found a dusty bottle of scotch, and poured myself a glass.

  Two hours later I knocked on the door of the Melinda Fenderman Memorial Guest Apartment, where Braxia was staying. Students were partying in anarchic clusters, and the campus was like a darkened landscape lit by tribal bonfires.

  Braxia opened the door.

  “May I come in?” I said.

  “Of course,” said Braxia.

  The Apartment was clean. The walls were all oak paneling, with a row of plaques noting the previous occupants. Braxia’s was surely in preparation. His baggage was heaped in the foyer. I smelled bleach. The Italian physicist must have been scrubbing the fixtures when I knocked.

  “I was just walking, and I saw the light on,” I said.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  Braxia was dressed in a white shirt, and black suit pants. The jacket was draped over the back of a chair in the living room. Every light in the apartment was on. Suddenly he looked like Manhattan Project newsreel footage. I saw him in black and white.

  “You’re packed,” I said stupidly.

  “My plane is tonight.”

  “What? You’re missing the Christmas party?”

  “I suppose. You? Or have you been there already?”

  Did my breath stink of the scotch I’d been drinking? “I don’t know if I’ll go, actually. I was just out walking. The last night, you know. I like to feel it. Soak it up. And I wanted to talk to you.”

  Braxia smiled to himself, and led me into the middle of the tiny apartment. He sat on the couch and crossed his legs. I stood leaning against the back of an easy chair. The room was so bare I wondered if Braxia had packed up a few of the furnishings.

  “Talk,” said Braxia.

  “You can’t just go, like this,” I said, surprising myself. “Soft isn’t man enough to call you on it, but I am. What did you learn? Why are you leaving early? I’ll pay your cab to wait while you talk to me. But I’m not leaving without some answers.”

  “About Lack. You think I have some answers for you.”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled again, demurely. “Okay, Mr. Engstrand. We will talk about Lack. What do you want to know?”

  “How. Why. You said you’d solve it. You said you’d give me Alice back.”

  “Sit down, my dear fellow. You are making me nervous. I found out what I could from Lack. Lack is nothing. I am working on a larger problem now. I am sorry if I was no help with your Professor Alice. I forgot.”

  “That’s your big theory? ‘Lack is nothing’?”

  He looked at me warily. “Okay, Mr. Engstrand. Sit down. You have an advantage over me: You have had a drink, and I have not. Now I will have a drink too. You want a drink? Have a drink with me, Mr. Engstrand.”

  I sat on the chair. Braxia went into the kitchen. I heard him easing ice cubes out of a tray. A minute later he reappeared with a pair of tall glasses, filled with orange juice.

  “Vodka, you know, has the fewest impurities,” he said. “And some vitamin C. Good for you.”

  I took a glass. He guzzled, I sipped.

  “Okay,” he said, smacking his lips. “A drink is good, for big talking. To talk to you about Lack I first have to talk to you about observer-triggered reality. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “This is my life’s work, Mr. Engstrand. Ah, I wish you spoke Italian. It’s like this. Consciousness creates reality. Only when there is a mind to consider the world is there a world. Nothing before, except potential. Potential this, potential that. The creation event, the big bang—it was the creation of enormous potential, nothing more.”

  I was already lost. “You’re saying there’s no world where there isn’t a mentality to consider a world.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s just a gap,” I suggested. “A lack.”

  “Hah! Very good. Yes. A lack, exactly. A potential event horizon. Everything is only potential until consciousness wakes up and says, let me have a look. Take for example the big bang. We explore the history of the creation of our universe, so the big bang becomes real. But only because we investigate. Another example: There are subatomic particles as far as we are willing to look. We create them. Consciousness writes reality, in any direction it looks—past, future, big, small. Wherever we look we find reality forming in response.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah, why. This is my life’s work, Mr. Engstrand. I think there is a principle of conservation of reality. Reality is unwilling to fully exist without an observer. It can’t be bothered. Why should it?”

  “I can relate to that,” I
said.

  “So, it’s no simple thing, then, the creation of a universe. If consciousness is required to confirm the new reality, you have to provide the consciousness too. You can’t make just a whole new universe full of reality, without making the commitment to look at it. You’ve done only half the job. That, my dear fellow, was Soft’s mistake.”

  “Lack, you mean.”

  “Lack. My theory is the first good explanation for Lack. Listen. Soft creates a new universe, of potential reality. But no intelligence to fill it up. Fine, it collapses into nonreality. Perhaps someday consciousness will evolve, like here, and it will become real. A long slow road.”

  “Every universe has to wait for observers to evolve, you’re saying.”

  “That’s right. Except for Soft’s. Soft’s had a shortcut. Because it was created in Soft’s lab. It is attached, it finds out, to a gigantic reservoir of nearby consciousness. Us. It thinks, I could exist if I hold on to this, you see? So it refuses to part with the mother universe. It is drawn to us, moth-to-flame-like. That is why it would not detach. That is how Lack was formed.”

  “So Lack is hungry for meaning. Awareness. It’s his only hope.”

  “You could say that. He could wait for evolution, but that is a long time. Some more?” He pointed at his empty glass.

  I looked down. My glass was empty too. Braxia took them and went into the kitchen. In another minute he was back with more.

  “But what about the effects?” I said. “Lack’s personality. His choosiness.”

  “Ah.” He smiled into his glass.

  “What do you mean, ah?”

  “I lied to you just now, my dear fellow.”

  “Lied?”

  “I did not forget about your friend Alice. She is central to my problems. She is the reason I have to pack up my team and—” He moved his arms, imitating airplane takeoff.

  “What do you mean?” Was he about to reveal his own love for Alice? A passion that was driving him from the continent?

  “It is hard to explain. Another theory.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Lack, in his hunger for consciousness, grabbed on too strong to one that was near by. Professor Alice, I think, was the one. Lack borrows her opinions and tastes. They make him imbalanced.”

  “What?”

  He sighed and closed his eyes, as if he had to remember to be patient with me. “You see, Lack should be impartially hungry. But no. Instead he is making his stupid selections. Based on Professor Coombs, I think. Very unfortunate.”

  “You’re saying Lack’s personality is borrowed from Alice?”

  “Yes.”

  “But then—”

  Braxia wouldn’t meet my eye. He drank instead. “You see why I lied to you, my dear fellow.”

  It was too much for me. My responses came in a crazy jumble. “I still don’t understand why you have to leave,” I said.

  “This Lack is tainted by the persona he has adopted. Therefore he is useless. Professor Coombs’ tastes are too limiting. Especially one in particular.”

  “Which one?”

  “Against science. Against research, scientists, physics. I think she picked it up from you, and passed it on to Lack. You have this element in your personality, you will have to admit. And Alice adopted your prejudice, despite herself. Because she was so close to you. So now, Lack resists all attempts.”

  I was stupefied.

  “So now I go back to Pisa.” Braxia raised his drink, like he was making a toast. “I will make my own Lack. If I impart it with biases, they will be my own. Against the social sciences, perhaps. And American wines. Then we will see what can be done. Then we will accomplish some physics.”

  “You’re going to repeat Soft’s experiment?”

  “Sure, why not? I think this Lack will close up soon, anyway. It can’t stay open forever.”

  “It can’t?”

  “No. Violates the laws of physics. Hah!”

  Braxia found this hilarious. He laughed obnoxiously. As he drank his face turned red, dispelling my black-and-white newsreel respect for him. I nursed my drink.

  I wanted to deflate his smugness, but he was the only one who’d even claimed to have solved Lack. It was nothing to sneeze at. He was so sure of himself that he was leaving. Now Lack was no international prize, just a pothole malformed by subjectivity.

  “Then Alice is in love with a reflection of herself,” I said. “She’s Narcissus.”

  “Sure,” said Braxia. “But who isn’t?”

  “No, it’s more than that,” I said. “She was drawn to Lack from the beginning. So it’s a combination of things. Her obsession with the void.”

  “Maybe. Here.” Braxia jumped up, retrieved the vodka from the kitchen, and sloshed it into my glass undiluted. It combined with the residue of orange juice to form a blend resembling Tang, the drink of the astronauts.

  “So Lack only takes what Alice likes,” I said, still working it out in my simpleton way.

  “I guess so. Hah! She didn’t like me.”

  I looked up. “You only stuck in your hand,” I said. “Lack takes whole things.”

  “No, my friend. I gave him the chance. I went on the table too. But I couldn’t go in. Lack said no.”

  “What about Alice, then? If Lack won’t take Alice herself—”

  “So?” Braxia shrugged. “Alice does not approve of herself. Is not unprecedented, I think.”

  “So Lack knows things about Alice that she doesn’t know herself. About her tastes. Lack could be used as a way of testing Alice’s judgments, in an absolute sense. Even if she’s denying the part of herself that feels that way—”

  “Maybe. Who knows? Hah. Once we used scientists to learn more about physics. Now we use physics to learn more about the scientists! Forget it. Very inefficient. I’ll go to Pisa and start over.”

  “Yes. Do that.”

  “Be happy, my dear fellow. The term is over. Drink up. Oh boy. You think they will let me on a plane like this?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was fathoms deep in my own sea.

  Braxia’s inane grin slipped away. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You still love her? After this?”

  “I still love her, Braxia.”

  “Okay. But you worry too much.” Drunk, he was more perfunctory with his English. “Lack will close. You will have her back. If you want her.”

  “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “You explain what I said, explain everything. Tell her my theories. Claim as your own. Then you will have her back.”

  “I don’t want to tell her what you said.”

  “Okay, okay.” He put down his glass and got off the couch. “Come here.” He tugged at my sleeve. “Come.” He led me to the bathroom door, which was backed with a mirror. “Look at yourself, Engstrand. You are a mess. It’s been a long term, yes? Take yourself home now. Go to bed. You will feel better.”

  I looked. There stood a mess. The self-unmade man. Just a question of composure, though. I patted down my hair, practiced a smile. Outside was fresh air, elixir. I had things to do tonight, and the fresh air would help me.

  But I wanted to conceal my intentions from Braxia. The party, and the destination beyond.

  “So,” he said, his point proven. He led me through the obstacle course of his luggage, to the door. “Go home. Think nice things. Have a dream. Forget about her, if only tonight. Think again in the morning.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll think in the morning.”

  He unlocked the door, then pushed me through with a series of hearty slaps on the back. “Go home,” he said, like he was talking to a wayward dog. “I see you later. We can have an international conference or something. Good-bye!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good-bye.”

  The air was invigoratingly cold. My drunken eyes couldn’t adjust to the darkness, but it didn’t matter. I knew my way. I wobbled away from the porch, back toward my apartment. I wanted to mislead Braxia. I wasn’t sure he knew where I
lived, but I wasn’t taking any chances. My legs buckled once, and I adjusted, compensated for the handicap. I was okay. I turned to see Braxia smiling at me from the door, a black smear in a blinding frame. He waved. I waved back. When I heard the door shut behind me I swerved, and headed, through the darkness, in the opposite direction. Toward the party.

  “Philip! I was afraid you weren’t coming. Have a drink.”

  It was Soft. Unaccountably gleeful, he grabbed my arm and led me to the makeshift bar. The room was already brimming, the air filled with a gabble of overlapping conversations that peaked and ebbed like automatic gunfire. I entered a maze of bobbing and ducking heads, with faces that crunched up with ironic anguish or jawed open wide with laughter, nostrils flaring, ears burning red, cigarettes and glasses and food shifted from orifices to holders and back again by subservient hands. Every head made up the maze, the remorseless consensual nightmare, and every head wandered through it, lost, frightened, alone.

  Here I’d find a parting taste of the human world, perhaps even a voice to call me back from the brink. At the very least, a chance to stall.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve had a drink already.”

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “Yes.”

  “Eggnog, Philip.”

  He handed me a plastic cup full of frothy nog and hollow cylindrical ice cubes. I tasted it, to be polite, and a surprising amount entered my mouth. Soft grinned, happy to see me drink. I grinned back, happy to see him happy.

  “What’s the good word?” I said.

  “It’s almost over.”

  “It is over.”

  “I don’t mean the term.” He grinned again, as if that were sufficient explanation. I wondered if I’d missed something in the din.

  “What do you mean?” I said finally.

  “Lack. He’s closing up. Going away.”

  We were attacked by a costumed waitress with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, tiny wrinkled crackers spackled with phosphorescent pink mortar. She wore a dewy black nose. She was forced to carry the tray so high that her face appeared situated there itself, offered with the food. Soft turned and the tray came up under his chin. He reached around and guided a cracker into his mouth. With their chins each resting on the tray it looked like a sexual act, the pink smears surrogate tongues.