As She Climbed Across the Table Read online

  Acclaim for Jonathan Lethem’s

  As She Climbed

  Across the Table

  “A bravura send-up of academic foibles.”

  —The New Yorker

  “[It] has the disorienting quality of a fourth-dimension dream on a three-dimensional bed, interrupted by comic, down-to-earth rousings.”

  —Newsday

  “Entertaining, intelligently constructed, mind-bending.”

  —San Antonio Current

  “Bittersweet and often hilarious.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “Crisp, ecstatic chapters and wonderfully likable characters make this parody of academia wickedly fun.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “An extraordinary, fresh piece of fiction.”

  —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

  “Readers are destined to fall in love with both Alice and Lethem’s sentences as they embrace in this comic, cosmic novel.”

  —Carol De Chellis Hill,

  author of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer

  and Henry James’ Midnight Song

  “Never afraid to tweak genre, Jonathan Lethem is one of the most inventive writers in America.”

  —Cathryn Alpert, author of Rocket City

  Jonathan Lethem is the author of the novels Gun, with Occasional Music; Amnesia Moon; Girl in Landscape; and Motherless Brooklyn, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written a collection of stories, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. His latest novel, The Fortress of Solitude, will be available from Doubleday in fall 2003. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Books by Jonathan Lethem

  Gun, with Occasional Music

  Amnesia Moon

  The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  As She Climbed Across the Table

  Girl in Landscape

  Motherless Brooklyn

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 1998

  Copyright © 1997 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, New York, in 1997. This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  As she climbed across the table / Jonathan Lethem.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79149-8

  1. Physicists—California—Fiction.

  2. Discoveries in science—California—Fiction.

  3. Occupational neuroses—Fiction.

  4. Black holes (Astronomy)—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3562.E8544A9 1998]

  813′.54—dc21 97-36287

  Author photograph © Ken Kobayashi

  Random House Web address:

  www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  To

  Shelley Jackson

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  I knew my way to Alice. I knew where to find her. I walked across campus that night writing a love plan in my head, a map across her body to follow later, when we were back in our apartment. It wouldn’t be long. She was working late hours in the particle accelerator, studying minute bodies, pushing them together in collisions of unusual force and cataloging the results. I knew I’d find her there. I could see the swell of the cyclotron on the scrubby, sun-bleached hill as I walked the path to its tucked-away entrance. I was minutes away.

  Unlike the physicists, my workday was over. My department couldn’t pretend it was on the verge of something epochal. When the sun set we freed our graduate students to scatter to movie theaters, bowling alleys, pizza parlors. What hurry? We were studying local phenomena, recent affairs. The physicists were studying the beginning, so they rushed to describe or bring about the end.

  As I hurtled toward her, carving shortcuts across the grass, violating the grid of concrete walkways, my heart was light. I was in orbit around Alice. I was a fizzy, spinning particle. I wanted to penetrate her field, see myself caught in her science gaze. Her Paradigm Eyes.

  The supercollider stretched out, a lazy arm, across the piebald hills above campus. The old cyclotron was like a beehive on top. Underneath, a network of labs was dug into the hill. The complex grew, experiment by costly experiment, an architectural Frankenstein’s Monster to crush the human spirit. But as I approached the entrance, double doors of scratched Plexiglas, I felt immune. I knew what lay at the heart of the heartless labyrinth. No immensity was enough to dwarf me.

  So I stepped inside. The facility was made of bland slabs of concrete, as if to refute the hyperactive instability of the atomic world. The walls were run through at random with pipes and electric cables, painted gray to match the concrete. The floor thrummed slightly. The facility might have been a giant ventilation system, and I a speck or mote. But I had my target. I walked undaunted.

  Alice’s wing was empty, though. Alice was gone, and so were her students and colleagues. My footsteps echoing, I wandered the dingy concrete halls, searching the nearby labs. They were empty. Checked the muon-tank observation room. Empty. The computer center. I had never seen the computer center empty, without even a doleful supersymmetrist poring over high-resolution subatomic events, but it was empty now. I looked in at the beam-control room, but the doors were locked.

  I was alone. Just me and the particles. I imagined them resting at the end of a strenuous run through the supercollider, hovering in subzero silence, in states of calm nonexistence. The hum in my ears wasn’t really the particles, of course, but it could have been my fear of them vibrating in me. I got out of there.

  In the curve of the corridor I ran into another ghost, another human particle haunting the abandoned wing. A student, half in and half out of his sweatshirt, rushing to the exit. At the sound of my steps his head emerged from the neck of the shirt.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “It’s Professor Soft,” he said. “He’s succeeded in opening up a Farhi-Guth Universe.” He was so impatient to be past me that he burbled.

  “Where?”

  He pointed the way.

  “Why are you leaving?”

  “Soft wants footage, a document, to record the moment. I’m getting a camcorder. Reaction shots, in-cam
era editing.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  He hurried away.

  I went to the elevator. I knew about Soft’s experiment, his bubble. It was the topic of plenty of hushed, reverent faculty discussions. I knew I should feel the breath of history at my neck as I plummeted down into the depths of the complex, to the laboratory where the false vacuum bubble was being reared under Soft’s firm hand. Soft and his team were compressing matter, in an attempt to create a new universe.

  The physics department, Alice included, specialized in the pursuit of tiny nothingness. Soft had the audacity to pursue a big nothingness. If his work succeeded the inflationary bubble would detach and grow into a universe tangential to ours. Another world. It would be impossible to detect, but equally real. Soft was merely trying to reproduce the big bang.

  The crowd in the Cauchy-space lab observation room was oblivious to my arrival. Everyone was there: the students who ran the beam, the muon lab staff, the supersymmetrists, Alice and her students. They huddled in collective awe before the pixel-screen image of Soft’s false vacuum bubble.

  Soft stood with a wooden pointer aimed lazily at the radiant mass on the screen. His graduate student stood to one side of him. Soft’s pride was concealed, but it gushed in proxy from his student. The crowd of upturned faces glowed with the light of the bright nothing on the screen.

  “We had to devise a bubble geometry that featured spherical symmetry,” explained Soft.

  There was silence. We stared at the shimmering screen. They were pondering Soft’s words. So was I, sort of.

  “In order to adhere the Schwarzshild space to the De Sitter space,” Soft continued, “we had to develop a pair of anti-trapped surfaces, in an asymptotically Minkowskian background.”

  A chorus of murmurs applauded the wisdom of this approach. Amen, I thought.

  “The key was the quantum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor.”

  I slipped unseen through the hypnotized crowd, to find Alice. She was gazing at the screen, her feet a little apart, her head back, her hair loose. I stepped up behind her and whispered her name (it was a whisper already, Alice) and put my arms around her. I fit my knees behind hers, her elbows inside mine, and cradled her folded arms, and inside them, her breasts.

  “I can smell you,” I said quietly.

  She was distracted, a part of the bubble-event audience, not mine.

  “I feel an initial singularity,” I whispered. “Pressed against your spherical symmetry.”

  Nothing. She was deaf to me.

  “I want to adhere my Schwarzshild space to your De Sitter space,” I said.

  No response.

  “We’ll make a little Schwarz-child.”

  Nothing.

  Nothing. We stared up together, with all the others, at the wonderful nothing Soft had summoned up. The false vacuum region.

  “Alice,” I said.

  “The bubble has to detach,” Alice said, without taking her eyes away.

  The student I’d met in the hallway returned with video equipment, and set up to record the great moment. I pictured handclasps, high fives, a roomful of physicists piled up like a victorious baseball team.

  But not yet. The air of anticipation in the room was incredible. Alice, in my arms, was practically brittle with it. I felt my love plan slip away. I erased my evening’s map across her body. Physics history came first. The false bubble had to detach.

  It was there and then, in the dark heart of the physics complex, that I felt the first pangs of my coming loss.

  My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

  The false vacuum bubble would not detach. At eleven-thirty the food service delivered bread, tuna fish, egg salad, milk, and wax paper, a midnight picnic in the clammy heart of the building. No one left. No one despaired of waiting. The false vacuum bubble wouldn’t detach. The physicists milled in nervous clusters, expressing a solidarity that seemed feeble in that chilly core. At two the security guards delivered flimsy cots, pillows, woolly earthquake-victim blankets, fresh rolls of paper for the toilet stalls. No one slept.

  The false bubble would not detach.

  My dissertation work, five years earlier, was on “Theory as Neurosis in the Professional Scientist.” On its strength I won an assistant professorship at the department of anthropology, University of North California at Beauchamp (pronounced beach ’em). The September I arrived was the first time I’d been to California, apart from the job interview.

  My attitude was terrible at first. I wasn’t comfortable applying the social sciences, those fun-house mirrors, to real people engaged in real pursuits. It seemed presumptuous and unfair. So my tongue went into my cheek. My teaching suffered, and I was put through a severe departmental review.

  Then I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing. The review itself was the key. I didn’t have to look any further for my life’s work. I would study academic environments, the departmental politics and territorial squabbles, the places where disciplines overlapped, fed back, and interfered. Like a parapsychologist, I set traps for the phantom curricula that wavered into existence in the void between actual ones. I applied information theory to the course catalogs, the reading lists, the food-service menus.

  My new work was irrelevant and strong. It appeared only in translation, in the journal Veroffentlichen Sonst Umkommen, heavily footnoted articles, dry and unreadable as a handful of fine sand. My nickname around the department was the Dean of Interdiscipline. Interdean, for short. I got an apartment on campus, and there were days when I never crossed out of the benign square mile that included the buildings where I taught, ate dining-hall food, and read faculty notices on tattered, pinpricked bulletin boards.

  It was some interdisciplinary project that first brought me to the gigantic and forbidding buildings that were the physics department, and got me grappling with the gigantic and forbidding theories that were modern physics. Even for the Interdean, that stuff was rough going. My reward was that hidden inside the theories and buildings, like a pearl in an oyster, was the new assistant professor specializing in particle physics, Alice Coombs.

  I kept cooking up stupid questions, excuses to visit the collider where Alice was running her particles like champion greyhounds. It was a few weeks before I had the courage to ask her out. I suggested a walk in the hills that overlooked the cyclotron. I think it was my first time off campus in a month. I remember Alice with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, picking her way over exposed roots in the path. The sky was some dramatic uptilted cloudscape. Like the clouds were escaping to the stars. Beauchamp beneath us, toy city. I remember thinking, I don’t like blond hair. But I liked Alice’s. I was an idiot. Out of breath from climbing, we stumbled into each other on the path and I smelled her. If olives were sweet—that was how she smelled.

  “It’s funny like—”

  “You reminded me—”

  “We’re hardly—”

  Talk was hopeless. We smiled apologetically, while our words went spilling like platefuls of barbecue sauce onto a white dress in a detergent ad, comical slow-motion disaster.

  I could only kiss her. That worked. I got another whiff of the sweetness of olives.

  Alice Coombs and I soon learned to do many things together, including talk. We could even banter. Argue, if necessary. But we maintained a little cult of leaving things unsaid. Somehow we were wiser with our mouths shut, knew each other better.

  Or so we thought.

  The silence is where the idea of asking Alice to marry me got lost, stranded forever on the tip of my tongue. It was too obvious and uncouth. Too institutional. We’d been living together for nearly a year now, anthropology and physics. I cooked dinner most nights. Alice worked late.

  I woke in the grip of a terrifying dream, involving tribesmen, clouds of dust, my answering machine. I was actually on a cot in the curved hallway outside the Cauchy-space lab. Alone. Finding myself in the bowels of the chilly,
humming complex was stranger than the dream, and worse. It was like I’d been sleeping in the safe of a sunken ocean liner.

  I’d fallen asleep at four in the morning. Professor Soft’s inflationary universe had still been perversely refusing to perform. The bubble wouldn’t detach. I’d gotten bored waiting and climbed onto one of the cots. Now I heard Alice’s voice inside the observation room.

  I went inside. The floor of the lab was littered with wax paper, empty pint containers, and crumpled printouts. The physicists had mostly curled on cots, or slumped home. Only a few remained, sore-eyed, waiting. Soft was scribbling notes at his portable workbench. His graduate student was still at his side. The pixels oscillated serenely overhead. Alice stood where I’d left her. How long had I slept?

  I took her hand. “What time is it?” I whispered.

  “Out here it’s eight-thirty,” she said. “Inside the Cauchy-space it’s still six yesterday. Time collapsed around the bubble event.”

  “Did it happen?”

  “The wormhole dilated,” she said.

  “That’s good.”

  Alice shook her head, still watching the screen. “It sounds good, but it isn’t actually good. The bubble may actually have detached, as planned. But there shouldn’t be an aneurysm.”

  “A wound?” I said.

  “A hole.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Is Soft very upset?”

  “Look at his student.”

  I looked. It was true. Soft was a pillar of strength, but his graduate student was a mess, hair matted with nervous sweat, eyes shrunken from weeping. I looked up at the screen, and tried to make out the aneurysm. I couldn’t see anything. The physicist in me was a blind, stunted thing.

  I held Alice’s cool hand and watched her watching the screen. She still couldn’t spare a look to meet my eyes, couldn’t tear herself from the impossibly boring experiment.

  “Alice.” I squeezed her hand.

  She turned and kissed me. A small, measured kiss that landed on the edge of my mouth.