As She Climbed Across the Table Read online

  Today Soft was sitting in the waiting area, his hands folded primly. I hardly recognized him without his lab coat and pointer, his Nobel aura. He was a pale underground thing wandering in the upper world. It was a shock that his hair grew.

  “Soft,” I said.

  “Engstrand.”

  “The breach is untended,” I said playfully. “You’ve left it.”

  “Students are there around the clock,” he said.

  “What if something happens?”

  “Nothing will happen. The lack is stabilized.”

  “The lack?”

  “We’re calling it that.” He sounded a little uncomfortable.

  “So it’s stopped being an ‘event,’ ” I said. “Now it’s defined by it’s failure to ‘happen.’ An absence, a lack.”

  “We’re no longer defining it as a failure. Just a lack.”

  “Gentlemen.”

  “He was first,” I pointed out.

  “We can take you both.”

  Soft and I climbed into adjoining chairs, and were cranked into position. The long mirror framed us together, sitting passively with white bibs tucked up around our collars. The bottom edge of this picture was littered with gels, combs, and sprays.

  “Style or trim?”

  “Short back and sides.”

  “Trim, just around the neck and ears. You mean to say it’s not a breach anymore?”

  “Breach was a misdefinition. There was a lack all along. It was initially accompanied by a gravity event, which in turn resulted in a time event.”

  “Not too much off the top. But it’s not accompanied by a gravity event now?”

  “It’s no longer accompanied by any type of event. It’s entirely clean.”

  “Lean forward.”

  “Clean how?”

  “There’s nothing but the lack.”

  “Nothing but the lack,” I repeated. “How do you know you’ve got the lack, then?”

  “Particle counts, particles that should be there but aren’t. A trace imbalance in the M’s and H’s in the lab.”

  “God, that’s short. You mean it’s eating particles?”

  “Mr. Engstrand, in a week you’ll thank me.”

  “In layman’s terms, eating them, yes. They drift toward the lack and fail to appear on the other side.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “We’re at a point of theorizing wildly. For example, Alice and I disagree.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “I’m glad you asked. It’s my opinion that the creation event is being infinitely reproduced. The missing particles are fueling continuous inflation. The lack is the hub.”

  “You mean it’s reproducing the original experiment? The universe-in-a-lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s just spinning out universes, one after another?”

  “Yes. But that’s just my opinion.”

  “Alice?”

  “Ask her yourself.”

  “Here, have a look at the back.”

  The barber handed me a mirror and turned my chair around, and for a moment I was trapped in a world of infinite regress, a never-ending reflective corridor of Engstrands, Softs, barbers, gels, and too-short haircuts. I nodded my approval and handed the mirror back.

  Soft and I went out together. I ran my fingers through my hair to make it stand up, he carefully patted his to make it lie flat. We crossed the street in a crowd of murmuring, gossiping students, back onto campus. The day was glorious and the air was choked with Frisbees, the lawn strewn with slighted textbooks.

  “Soft, Lord of Universes,” I said.

  “I only meant to create one. And I could be wrong.”

  “Endless Soft Universes, the lack twitching them out like origami cranes.”

  “I imagine I’m probably completely wrong.”

  I was liking the way it defied theory, the way it had the physicists scrambling. Breach, gap, gulf, hub—the lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world. I felt a secret kinship with it.

  Then Soft, ever so casually and indifferently, broke my heart.

  “Alice is a curious case,” he said. “She’s in a very awkward position. I envy you.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I mean, she has an incredible subjectivity problem. If she were a bit less in love she might do less crappy physics, but we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

  “Well—”

  “I’ve watched her do a lot of physics in the last few weeks. I’ve had a lot of opportunities. She’s mistaken the gloriously random mechanism that is the universe for a locket, in a manner of speaking.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s a commonplace among physicists, Philip, that when one of our rank succumbs to mysticism it’s because of passion. Something projected out of the physicist’s private life, into the experiment. That’s what I see in Alice. She’s completely without the proper outlook. You must be a very happy man.”

  “Uh, yes.”

  He seemed pleased. We’d stopped on the commons’ lawn, where clusters of students lay prone in the sun.

  “I’m glad we had this chance,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He tittered. “Don’t go around speaking of Soft Universes.”

  “Yes. No. Don’t worry.”

  He walked away in his bad new haircut, looking for the entrance to his burrow, I guess. I stood rooted to the lawn. I felt stiff but bent, off-center, like a plank warped by storage in a mildewy cellar.

  Soft had described an Alice I didn’t recognize, an Alice who was different from mine. The Alice I knew was obsessed with objectivity. She’d never permitted her heart a voice in her work. What’s more, I’d never seen her less in love, less swayed by passion. These last few weeks she’d lived in the physics facility, not our apartment. No, Soft’s Alice wasn’t the same as mine.

  Except she had to be, of course. They were one and the same.

  So the passion he’d seen in her wasn’t for me.

  Could Alice love a blind man? Evan. Of the two of them, Evan seemed less inflexible. His part in the verbal remapping was wifely, supportive. Garth was the obsessor. And Evan had a certain skewed charisma, a Buster Keaton charm in his wrinkled suit. One-way gazes were infatuations, crushes. In that way a blind man was like an actor or rock star. Had Alice lost herself peering into the void of his eyes? I’m amaurotic, he’d said. I’m erotic. I pictured Alice folding his suit into a neat pile on a chair, kissing trembling, half-closed lids, guiding blind hands to her breasts. Nipples hard like braille.

  Or Garth. Garth was her star, her Blind Physicist. But he struck me as a borderline autistic. Together with Evan he formed a closed system as perfect and impervious as a perpetual-motion device. I couldn’t imagine Garth without Evan.

  Evan and Garth, then. A nightmare of Alice lost in the tangle of groping, clumsy limbs. Their mapping and remapping of the surface of her body, coordinating distances between landmarks and entrances.

  What about Soft himself? Could Alice love that pasty, underground creature? Remotely possible. There was his greatness, his Prize. I pictured long nights in the Cauchy-space lab. Lonely discoveries, unexpected parities, one hand reaching to still the trembling of another as it jotted down formulae.

  But then why would Soft talk to me about her passion? Couldn’t he see that he was the reason her physics had gotten “crappy”? So he was taunting me, toying with me. A classic example of a physicist’s contempt for other disciplines. I balled my fists.

  What if it was somebody else, though? Another faculty member, from the English department. A decoder of sonnets. His sentences finer than mine, metaphors less grotesquely modern. Or a student, a graduate student in physics. Soft’s maybe, stepping out from behind his mentor, becoming real.

  Somebody else. Somebody other. Some other body.

  Alice with Mr. Someotherbody.

  My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet. Down into my stomach and the g
loomy core of the physics complex, to walk those barren concrete corridors, brave those sterile labs, in search of what I’d lost. Where else could I go? I’d phoned in cancellation of my afternoon thesis tutorial, then wandered campus, hesitating like a ghost at mailboxes, bulletin boards, and coffee machines, but there was no pretending. I was looking for Alice.

  I stepped out of the elevator into a parade of students wearing radiation suits. They were carrying delicate chunks of electronic equipment through the Cauchy-space lab. Something important was happening, I thought bitterly. They were back on the verge of making history.

  Unnoticed, I went inside. The observation room was filling with dismantled electronics, set onto cushioned pallets and draped with anti-static drop cloths. The screen overhead was black. The student technicians padded in and out in their white clown suits, headset radios buzzing and clicking. Robots, but they had more in common with Alice than I did. They were the same species. Physicists. I was some other thing, a spider or rabbit or carrot.

  A student in a lab coat stopped in front of me. I recognized him. Part of Alice’s inner circle.

  “Mr. Engstrand.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to talk to Ms. Coombs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Follow me.”

  He gave me a suit and hood, helped me seal myself inside, and pointed out the buttons that operated the headset radio, the private frequency that would link me to Alice. Before I could object he aimed me through the airlock doors, into the outer chamber of the Cauchy-space lab. The doors opened and sealed behind me automatically as I stumbled through, no physicist, just a clumsy earthbound astronaut, a beekeeper.

  The outer chamber was a narrow, dimly lit area, separated from the Cauchy-space by a thickness of Plexiglas. I was alone there. White-suited figures ambled about on the other side of the glass, in the garishly floodlit lab, like spirits trapped in a bottle. They were dismantling the equipment that lined the walls, winding cables, decompressing valves, gathering washers and fittings in their soft white gloves. I was invisible at my dark window. I could only guess which was Alice.

  The lack is gone, I thought hopefully. It’s all over. They’re mopping up.

  I pushed the button and spoke into the headset mouthpiece. “Alice.” My own voice was piped back to my ear, rendered mechanical and feeble, a toaster or vacuum cleaner bidding for human attention. But one of the figures turned to face me at my window.

  As the mask of its hood passed through the light I saw it was Alice. She unclipped a lamp and brought it to shine through the window. When she leaned her headgear against her side of the glass the reflections were layered, so my features were superimposed over hers.

  “Philip,” she said, through static.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Lack is ready. We’re taking down the field.”

  “Lack?”

  “He’s stabilized. We don’t need to maintain the Cauchy-field anymore. Gravity and time are compatible. We’re dismantling the generators.”

  “Soft says ‘the lack,’ and ‘it.’ Not ‘Lack’ and ‘he.’ ”

  “Soft and I disagree.”

  “Soft says your physics are crappy. He says you don’t have the right outlook.”

  “Soft is retrenching. It’s his physics that are crappy. He refuses to admit that Lack has a preference for H’s.”

  “What?”

  “Lack is selective. He prefers H’s. M’s pass through him and accumulate on the screen. So he’s making selections. It’s not random. It’s discernment, intelligence.”

  I fell silent. Our channel buzzed.

  “Soft is predisposed against void intelligence,” said Alice. “It threatens him.”

  “You’re saying Lack displays intelligence?”

  “Lack is intelligence, Philip. There’s nothing else there. He has no other qualities. Without gravity and time irregularities he’s impossible to measure. His only aspect is his preference for the H’s.”

  “So far.”

  “You’re right, I think there’s more. In a few days we’ll be able to walk through this chamber in our street clothes.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll be able to bring subtler instruments to bear.”

  “Tarot cards, you mean. Magic eight-balls. Seeing-eye dogs.”

  Alice frowned through three layers of glass. I realized I had no stake in siding with Soft. I hadn’t come here to debate “Lack’s” nature.

  “Alice,” I said again. I winced at the electronic slush the radio made of my whisper.

  She didn’t speak.

  “Alice, let’s quit. Let’s go away.” I knew it was wrong as I said it. I was breaking the silence that bound us. I might as well ask her to marry me now.

  “What?”

  “Let’s disappear together. Leave no gravity or time irregularities behind.”

  “This isn’t the right time to suggest that.”

  “That’s what’s great about it,” I said. “It wouldn’t be exciting if there was a right time.”

  I was testing her. It was better than blurting out accusations, at least a little.

  Another voice came onto the channel, encrusted with static. “Excuse me, Ms. Coombs.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “We’re ready to distribute the yeast.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The voice crackled away.

  “Yeast?” I said.

  “G. P. Neumann Yeast. It was developed by a German firm for use in reactor settings. It devours radiation. We’re using it to clean the chamber.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My momentum was gone. I was in a floppy suit discussing yeast.

  “Philip?”

  I looked up. She’d stepped back behind the lamp, so her own face-place was reflective. I saw two of myself, and none of her.

  “We’ll talk later, okay, Philip?”

  “Okay.” I wanted to say no, later isn’t soon enough. A German yeast is about to devour the radioactive traces of my hands on your body, the isotope emanations of my heart. They’re delicate things, no match for yeast.

  But I didn’t say it. I plodded back through the airlock and waited to be helped out of my suit, like a child in clip-on mittens standing in a puddle of melted snow.

  A student with a clipboard was checking off items in a Buddhist monotone. “Gas barriers. Scintillation counters. Photo-multipliers. Photodiodes, phototriodes.”

  I left the lab.

  In the corridor I found myself on the heels of Alice’s blind men. They were tapping with their canes to the elevator. I slowed and stayed behind them, wary, jealous, not wanting to be detected.

  They hesitated at the sound of my footsteps, then shrugged together and groped at the elevator doorway for the button.

  “You must have done something wrong,” said Evan.

  Garth didn’t speak.

  “You must have done something wrong,” said Evan again. Nothing.

  “You must have done something wrong.”

  “What time is it?” said Garth. They groped their watches.

  “Two-fifty-seven.”

  “Right. At least we’re synchronized. I didn’t do anything wrong. I saw a particle.”

  “I don’t think you did it right.”

  “She wanted to measure the spin. But there wasn’t any spin. It wasn’t spinning. Huh.”

  “That was no particle.”

  The elevator doors opened. They stepped inside, and I followed. They bustled into the rear, canes tangling.

  “Would you press lobby?” said Evan.

  I hit the button.

  “Whoever it is, they’re probably going to the lobby too, you know,” said Garth, as if I couldn’t hear it.

  “We can’t be sure,” said Evan.

  “Probably about seventy-five percent of the people in a given elevator are going to the lobby,” said Garth.

  “Unless they got on at the lobby,” said Evan.

 
; I remained silent.

  “You didn’t see anything,” said Evan, a little viciously. “That’s why she has no use for you. That wasn’t a particle.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It wasn’t a particle. It wasn’t anything.”

  “Correction. I don’t see things that aren’t there. That’s the whole point.”

  The elevator opened to the lobby and I stepped out.

  “Lobby?” said Evan.

  I didn’t speak.

  “It sounds like the lobby,” said Garth.

  “We’re about five blocks from the bus stop,” said Evan as they came out of the elevator.

  “We should be there in about five minutes.”

  “It took four minutes on the way over. Not that there was any reason to rush, as things turned out.”

  They tapped past me, toward the breeze and its smells, the chirping insects, the warm invisible sunlight. The bus stops and parking meters waiting to be cataloged and curated.

  My mystery had deepened. The blind men were like me and Soft. They stood outside of Alice’s narrowing circle of favor. I’d have to find other suspects.

  Garth paused at the entrance and raised his head, wrinkling his nose as though detecting my presence by scent. He pursed his lips and frowned, like a bullfrog. “At least I saw a particle,” he said, as much in my direction as Evan’s. “She never had any use for you in the first place.”

  Alice never packed a bag. Her time in the apartment just dwindled. I pretended we were suffering a temporary rift, and that in her silent way she would slip back into my arms. Four or five lonely nights had passed before the morning I cornered her in the hall of the administration building.

  “Philip,” she said, almost sweetly.

  “Alice.”

  “I have to stay with Lack,” she said. “He can’t be left unobserved.”

  Neither can I, I wanted to say.

  “I’m canceling my classes. This is a big opportunity. Lack’s all mine now. I understand what he’s saying. I’m the only one.”