As She Climbed Across the Table

12

In the weeks that followed it was as impossible to avoid updates on Lack’s tastes as it was to catch a glimpse of Alice. Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter’s helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck’s egg, fertilized, refused a duck’s egg, scrambled.

Some items were measured, weighed, evaluated, before going over Lack’s table. Others were just giddily tossed across. Nobody understood Lack’s system for choosing. He was consistent in never accepting something previously refused. Electric beater-blades tumbled off the table nine days in a row. He was inconsistent in sometimes growing bored with a previously favored item. The lists in the campus paper, under the heading Lackwatch, served as a daily dose of found poetry: hole punch, rosin bag, cue ball.

Everyone had a theory. We were all physicists now, thanks to Lack. Anyone could win the Prize—at least until the following morning, when some contradicting item was consumed. Lack seemed to have a fondness for disproving each new system of prediction at his first chance, as though theories themselves were to his taste.

Life went on. Pumpkins were purchased, mutilated, and left to rot on porches and windowsills. The team lost the Big Game. My hair grew out. Alice, living as she was “on the edge of the territory,” was excused from teaching, and a graduate student took over her classes.

I missed her, terribly. I yearned, heart big and tender as a ripe eggplant. At the same time I played at indifference, my heart squeezed small and hard as an uncooked chestnut. The day she strolled into my office I felt my heart opt for chestnut size.

Her expression was gentle, her hair mussed into a halo. She took a seat across from me at my desk. I leaned back and compressed my lips, pretending she was a remiss student.

She looked past me to the bookshelves, the tattered notices and rusty thumbtacks that littered the walls. “I remember this office.”

“You never came here,” I said.

“I remember it. I sat here, you sat there.”

“Maybe you picked me up here once. You never sat down.”

“I sat while I waited. You had to finish something.”

“I never work here. I can’t imagine a time when I would have had something to finish in this office.”

“I remember it.”

“I hardly ever sit here, it’s amazing you caught me here now. I was just coming in and sitting down for a minute. I certainly wouldn’t just suddenly start finishing something here. It’s a false memory.”

“It doesn’t matter, Philip. It still reminds me of you.”

“Me sitting here now, you mean. Me sitting here now reminds you of me. I remind you of myself.”

Alice sighed. I realized how angry I sounded.

“You threw away the food,” Alice said.

“You were in the apartment?”

“I needed clothes. I was just looking around, and I saw the food was in the garbage.”

“It went bad.”

“Well, there’s something about the apartment I wanted to talk to you about.”

My heart twitched like a stone with a frog underneath. “Go ahead,” I said.

“It’s just sitting there. I can’t use it right now, but I’m still paying rent.”

“I’m still living there,” I said bitterly.

“I know, Philip. But I keep wondering if you’d be better off with some company. So, when I suggest this you shouldn’t just automatically say no. You should consider it. It would make me very happy.”

“Who?”

“Evan and Garth. Just for a month.”

“No.”

“It’s only a month. They’re being kicked out and they didn’t find another place.”

Was she offering me a chance to even the score, to refuse her something? Or was it a test, to see if her charm could still sway me?

I felt my defenses leak away. It was a kind of masochistic thrill. Come back into my life, a part of me cried. Build an ant farm in the apartment, sprinkle German yeast. Anything. Just fill the lack there.

“I don’t even know them,” I said.

“They like you. They’ll do the dishes, clean, cook. They go out during the day. You’ll hardly see them.”

“Go out where?”

“They wander around. Evan teaches braille three times a week. They go to the library. They go to their therapist.”

“Together?”

“It’s a special thing. They get paid for it. Some woman is studying them, the way they are, like those twins that make up private languages.”

“Are they lovers?”

“I don’t think so. They seem very interested in women.”

“Women?”

“Not me, Philip. Just women, the idea of women.”

I sighed.

“Say yes. It’ll be good for all three of you.”

“Bring them over and we’ll talk about it.” Come back to the apartment, I meant.

“We’ll come by tonight.”

“So you’re still working with them, on seeing particles.”

“Not exactly. I’m not really focused on that right now. But they got very excited, so I still give them things to do.”

“You’re more focused on Lack.”

“Yes.”

She got edgy. She didn’t like the change of subject.

“How is Lack, then?” I asked.

“That’s a silly question, Philip. Lack isn’t how.”

“I thought your whole point was that he was. That he had a personality.”

“Not a personality like ‘how are you?’ He doesn’t have good days and bad days.”

“You sound a little frustrated.”

“I don’t mean to lump you in with everyone else, but there’s a degree of sensational interest—”

“He’s a fad.”

“Yes.”

“It makes you feel protective. Possessive.”

She recoiled at the last word. I suddenly saw how tired and frightened she was, her eyes rimmed with red, her cheeks sallow. I thought of her sleeping on a cot in the subterranean gloom, kept awake by the beeping detectors.

“Maybe I am,” she said quietly.