As She Climbed Across the Table (4 page)

“Philip, stop, please.”

I held her while she cried. When her body stopped trembling, she was asleep.

Days passed. Classes were taught, seminars held. Papers were handed in, graded, and returned. The team won something, and the trees filled with garlands of toilet paper. It rained, and the toilet paper dripped to the pathways, and into the wiper blades of parked cars. A group of students seized the Frank J. Bellhope Memorial Aquarium to protest the treatment of Roberta, the manatee savant. The protest was a failure. I called a symposium on the history of student seizure of campus buildings. The symposium was a success. In the larger world, the team invaded something, some hapless island or isthmus. A letter of protest by the faculty was drafted, revised, and scrapped. Bins of swollen pumpkins appeared in the produce sections of Fastway and Look ’n’ Like.

Alice went on demolishing particles. When I saw her she was distracted, absent. She worked long days with her graduate
students and with Garth Poys, Blind Physicist, readying a series of proton runs. Nights she spent huddled with Soft in the Cauchy-space observation room, following the progress of the breach or portal. I sometimes brought sandwiches to her in the long chilly arm of the accelerator, but I drew a line at descending again into that dark heart where Soft’s monster lurked.

I first heard the name
Lack
in the campus barbershop. The barbers there specialized in crew cuts and baldings for the campus athletes, the swimmers, wrestlers, and football players. The walls were layered with programs and posters, autographed by college stars long since graduated into painful, grinding NFL careers. When I strolled in, maybe six times a year, my barber would sigh, put down his electric clipper, and search out the misplaced thinning shears.

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 gloomy 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.