17

In the morning Evan and Garth vanished. I woke to see them breakfasting in decorous silence. I watched with half an eye as they tiptoed past me to the door. Then I went back to sleep, and a pleasantly forgettable dream.

An hour later I woke for real, to a hangover. I reconstituted myself in the bathroom with paste and swabs, drops and floss. I got a kettle boiling, its whistle-top propped open with a fork, shook coffee into a filter, and set out two cups. Evan and Garth had the cupboard stocked with a product called Weetabix. I opened a packet and poured milk over a desolate pod.

Alice padded in and sat at her place, not saying anything.

I gave her coffee, and we ate breakfast like mimes, yawning, stirring, and chewing in exaggerated silence. Alice hit the side of her cup with her spoon and spilled out a neat pylon of sugar. The room was washed with light. Alice’s mussed hair was a backlit halo. We were a diorama labelled Philip and Alice, Breakfast. Circa two months ago. The past. Before.

“You slept about ten hours,” I said. “From the time Soft brought you.”

“It was Soft, then.”

“Yes. He thinks you belong here. As far as he knows he was putting something back in its place.”

She didn’t say anything.

“He’s worried about you,” I said. “He says you’re no longer competent to manage the project.”

I decided not to make any I statements. We would talk about Soft’s perceptions, Soft’s concerns. Or Alice’s. But not mine.

“There isn’t any project,” she said. “Just Lack. Lack and approaches to Lack. Soft’s holding on to the idea of a project. That’s his big blind spot.”

“Soft’s concerned about your approach to Lack,” I said coolly. “He feels your approach is too, um, direct.”

She looked down into her coffee. The sun sculpted hollows of light in her tired features. Tender feelings rustled in me like bat wings unfolding.

“He thinks you’re identifying too much,” I said. “Losing that essential detachment.”

She looked up sharply. “Lack doesn’t require detachment. That’s Soft’s error. Lack requires engagement, a relationship. It’s something I was able to rise to. Soft is out of his depth.”

“You’re saying that what Lack wants is a relationship.” I said, still calm.

“Right.”

“And you’re saying you can provide that.”

“Right.”

“A human relationship.”

“Right.”

I lost my cool a little. “He isn’t getting one in you, Alice. You’re moving away from the human. Lack is too powerful an influence, can’t you see? He’s changing you. You’re becoming a void to match. You’re not human if you’re no longer able to love.”

I caught myself before I added the word me.

“Love isn’t the problem,” she said weakly. “I’m not having a problem loving.”

“What are you saying?”

“You still don’t understand, do you? Why I can’t be with you anymore.”

Don’t address me, I wanted to say. Philip isn’t here. This is Omnipotent Voice you’re speaking with.

“You’re in love with someone else,” I heard myself say.

“Yes.”

A change came over me, a phase transition. A flush rose through my chest and neck.

“You’re in love with Lack,” I said.

“Yes.”

Should I have known sooner?

Love is self-deception, remember. And my competition was so improbable.

But now that it was named, Alice’s Lack-love seemed obvious, a foregone conclusion. Probably the whole campus buzzed with it, and I was the last to know.

“The way you loved me?” I squeaked.

“No. Yes.”

I studied her. She sat with a leg up on the chair, her hair wild, her eyes glowing from tired sockets. Her mouth was drawn defiantly tight. Her Lack-love was real, I saw. She looked crushed under the weight of her impossible love. I felt an admiration, despite myself.

“Does anyone else know?”

“I hadn’t even admitted it to myself until just now.” A tear painted a reflective stripe down her cheek.

“Does Soft?”

“You would know better than I would.”

Yes, Alice had been living on the brink of the void, but it wasn’t some singular, icy, inhuman place. In fact, the same void yawned out underneath me, too. Unrequited love.

It seemed reasonable to call hers unrequited. If Alice had really climbed up on Lack’s table, then he’d turned her down, hadn’t he? Making things disappear was the only I love you in his binary vocabulary.

Had she, though? I was afraid to ask. Instead I got up and cleared the dishes into the sink. I wanted to buy a plane ticket, fly away, make my claims to Cynthia Jalter true. Leave my colleagues with a mystery. Professor X.

In the sink the coffee grounds rose up, swirling out of the bottoms of our cups, and were washed down the drain.

“All this time down there,” I said, not facing her. “You were slipping away from me. Feeling communion with this thing, unable to talk about it.”

“Yes.”

I realized, too late, that I’d used a forbidden pronoun. Me. Distracted, I’d pled guilty to possession of a self.

“So it’s simple, then,” I said. “No mystery. You don’t love me because you love Lack.”

“Yes.”

“But he doesn’t love you back.”

“Yes.”

“You tried, then. You offered yourself.”

No answer. But when I turned from the sink she stared at me hollowly, and nodded.

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