Jonathan Lethem - As She Climbed Across the Table

“Don’t worry,” said Cynthia Jalter as we pulled up outside the apartment. “I understand. You don’t have to say a word. Forget this ever happened, if you like. Or change your mind, come find me. I want you to feel okay about this.”

“Okay.”

“You’re making the worst mistake of your life. I resent you for being so blind. You’d better win Alice back, and it had better be wonderful, because after this anything less is inexcusable.”

“That doesn’t go with the other thing you just said,” I said.

“I know. You can choose which of them you prefer. I’m comfortable either way.”

“Do I have to say now?”

“No, take your time, let me know later.”

“Okay. Good night, Cynthia.”

“Good night, Philip.”

I went inside. The house was quiet, the blind men asleep. I crept in to look at Alice, in our old bed, where she was sleeping. She looked very peaceful. I got under the covers beside her, fully dressed. She stirred, but didn’t wake. I curled around her and quickly fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning she was gone.

It was a week until Christmas. Two days until the end of the term. National Entropy Awareness Week, according to the papers. A cloud of stress hung over the campus. Students appeared in my office ranting or shaking like heretics. Tempera Santas appeared on store windows, and immediately began flaking into colorful drifts in the window displays underneath. Braxia announced that the Italian team would fly back to Pisa at the end of the term. They were abandoning Lack. My sports-injury student called me, badly shaken. His results had been published in an in-house journal of the Navy Seals, been taken as relevant to combat situations. On Tuesday hail fell, lodging in the shrubbery like crystals of salt in broccoli.

As for Alice, after our night together she crept back to the margins, the zone of silence. Sometimes it seemed to me that Lack had, after all, accepted her offer, and Alice had passed through to the other side. The part of her that mattered, anyway.

When I came home Thursday she spoke again, but this time my hopes didn’t rise. The trail to my heart was growing cold.

“Something might have happened,” she said.

“Probably something did,” I said. I set my papers on the table.

“Something bad, I think.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Evan and Garth didn’t come home last night.”

“I noticed. Did you check with Cynthia Jalter? Or the blind school?”

“I called them both,” she said.

“That’s a lot of talking,” I said. “Are you sure you really spoke to them? Or did you just dial and breathe heavily?”

“I asked,” she said, ignoring me. “Nobody’s seen them.”

“They’re capricious,” I said. “They’ll come wandering back any minute now, humming the latest pop tunes. They probably went out and got girlfriends and jobs.”

Alice shook her head. “I can’t find my key.”

“What key?”

“The key to Lack’s chamber.” She stared at me, her eyes welling, her chin warping.

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” she said, beginning to sob.

“Well, that’s ridiculous. Braxia explained it to me. Lack won’t take people.”

Alice’s tears stopped abruptly. “Braxia said that?”

“Yes.” Actually, I wasn’t sure he’d said that. But I let it stand.

“How does he know?”

“He knows. He’s a physicist. It’s probably some simple thing, some experiment he did. You could have done it, if you’d stuck with physics.” I went on buttressing my lie. Why, I’m not sure. “So stop worrying about Evan and Garth. It’s just a projection. You’re obsessed with the idea that Lack would take someone else, after rejecting you.”

Alice stared at me hollowly.

“I’ll go find them and bring them back. You stay here.”

I rebuttoned my coat and went out. I drove straight to the physics facility, of course.

There were students idling in the observation room, chatting about Lack, batting out theories. The Lack crowd, the groupies, making the scene. I hated them. I went to the door of the chamber.

“You can’t go in there,” said one of the students.

“Believe me, we’ve tried,” said another.

“He’ll eat you alive,” said a third.

“Who?” I said.

“Professor De Tooth.”

So De Tooth was still at it. My windup toy had turned out to be a perpetual-motion device. “I work with De Tooth,” I said. “I put him onto Lack in the first place. These are my hours he’s working with.”

The first student shrugged. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

I turned the handle, went through the clean room, and into Lack’s inner sanctum.

De Tooth was on the table, his stubby arms outstretched, the worn soles of his black shoes in the air, swimming his way toward Lack. His blond wig sat beside his open briefcase on a chair in the corner. When I entered the chamber he pushed himself backward off the table and onto his feet. I closed the door behind me. De Tooth twisted his disheveled suit back into place, smoothed down his tie, ran a pincer-like hand through his thin, gray hair, then scurried to retrieve his wig. Only after it was screwed back into place did he turn and face me

“You too?” I said.

The small man turned bright red, fastened his lips together, and said nothing.

“Do what you like,” I said. “I just need a few minutes alone with Lack. Then he’s all yours. Or vice versa.”

De Tooth picked up his briefcase and executed a militarily crisp pivot on the ball of one foot, to march past me to the door.

“And give me a sheet of paper and a pen while you’re at it.”

He escalated his eyebrows into his wig, fished in his briefcase for the paper and pen, then turned his back to me and disappeared.

I was alone with Lack.

I took De Tooth’s paper and pen and pulled a chair up to Lack’s table. The steel was still warm from the deconstructionist’s body. I folded the paper into a series of lengths, creasing it between my fingernail and the hard surface of the table, then carefully tore it apart along the creases. I piled the strips into a bundle and ripped it in half to create a supply of cookie-fortune-sized slips. On the first slip I wrote:

DID YOU TAKE EVAN AND GARTH?

I slid it across the table, past Lack’s lip. It rose on a cushion of air as I released it, then, fluttering down into Lack, vanished. I stood up and peered around the edges of the table. It was gone. Lack had taken the slip of paper. He’d found the question palatable. But what did it mean? I pulled another slip and wrote:

IF YOU TAKE THE SLIP DOES THAT MEAN YES?

I slid it across, into the gulf. The gulp. Crossing the line, it was snuffed out of existence. I still didn’t know what it meant. Lack might like the paper, the ink, my handwriting. But it was possible we’d established a link, a common language. I was impatient for more answers, too impatient to quibble. I wrote:

ARE THEY STILL ALIVE?

I handed it across the line, where it was extinguished. Three in a row. We were talking. Lack had taken the blind men. He’d swallowed them up. And now he was confessing it to me. But they were still alive, wherever they were. Wherever it was that Lack led. Alive as Lack defined it, anyway. In a spell, I wrote:

WILL YOU EVER TAKE ALICE?

Fingers trembling, I pushed it across. It disappeared. This time I wanted to check again. I got out of my seat and went around the table. A part of me insisted that the slip—all four of the slips—should actually have swirled to the floor like maple-seed pods. But no. Nothing. I got down on my hands and knees, under the table. All I found was a single long strand of Alice’s hair, left over from her self-scalping.