Jonathan Lethem - As She Climbed Across the Table

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-camera 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.