As She Climbed Across the Table

19

Soft had Lack’s chamber sealed off during the reorganization, leaving Alice to founder in the apartment. She never went out. I would come home to find her dazedly channel-surfing, or stirring a can of condensed chowder to life on the stove, or fallen asleep on the couch, a notepad clutched to her chest, pages blank. We didn’t talk. We avoided each other. I slept on the couch and was awake and out of the house before she even stirred. She and the blind men dined together, I ate separately. The apartment was a museum of unspoken words.

Finals were faintly visible on the event horizon, and students began making pilgrimages to my office to ask about their status, negotiate extra-credit assignments, beg extensions on work already due, or plead for outright mercy. I started pinning notes to my door. I employed the uncertainty principle, offered only fleeting glimpses of my trajectory. The coffee machine, second floor, between three-fifteen and three-twenty, Wednesday. Walking across the east lawn toward the parking lot, eleven-forty-five, Monday. With correction fluid I shortened my phone number in the posted directories to six digits.

The Italian team appeared, led by Braxia. They took over a table in the far corner of the faculty cafeteria, chattering in the incomprehensible double language of Italian and Physics. Lackwatch vanished, or was suppressed. Soft’s stature was restored. He could again be seen striding through hallways like a comet with a tail of students, his brow knit, his finger cutting a swath through the air.

That morning forest fires to the north produced a carpet of ash that reddened the skies. The sun glowed orange in the east, an eerie morning sunset. The gray flecks settled in a fine coat over windshields, automatic teller machines, and public art. The entire day was dusk. When night finally came it was like a benediction.

In the parking lot after the day’s class, the flakes still falling like snow, I felt oddly peaceful. I thought of Alice and the blind men affectionately. Forgivingly. I decided to drive home and share a meal with them, instead of going to a restaurant. So I drove to a liquor store, the flakes lit like movie-theater smoke in the beam of my headlights, and bought a bottle of red wine as evidence of my good intentions.

But when I jogged up the porch steps and went inside I found the blind men in a tizzy. Alice had left the apartment, for the first time since Soft’s rescue.

“She was supposed to be here,” Evan said. They were both dressed up in their jackets and hats. Their canes were ready. They wore expressions of exaggerated dismay, jaws clenched, noses wrinkled. “She said she’d drive us. And now she isn’t even here.”

“Where’d she go?” I said, confused. “Drive you where?”

“Therapy,” said Evan.

“Huh,” said Garth. “If we knew where she was she’d be here, and we’d be gone already. You wouldn’t be talking to us.”

“She said, ‘I’ll see you back here at five-thirty.’ ” said Evan. “ ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ Her exact words. It is five-thirty, isn’t it?”

Garth smacked at his watch. “Five-forty-seven.”

“That’s seventeen minutes late,” Evan pointed out, his voice rising. “It is Thursday, isn’t it?”

I stood holding my bottle of wine.

“My watch could be wrong,” Garth mused. “But it’s certainly Thursday. That much I know.”

Evan felt at his watch. They were going to conduct a survey of all tangible objects and irrefutable facts at hand. I stepped in.

“Oh, look,” I lied. “Note on the refrigerator.” I craned my neck and squinted, pretending to read from a distance, fooling some invisible spectator. “ ‘Philip,’ ” I pretended to quote, “ ‘will you give E. and G. lift? Emergency meeting. Don’t worry. Alice.’ So there’s your answer. Don’t worry. I’ll drive you.”

Why the ruse, when I could have suggested the ride as my own idea? Easy. I yearned for something as normal and domestic as a note on the refrigerator. Alice had never left me a note on the refrigerator.

Also, I was staking my claim as sole worrier, shutting the blind men out of this current crisis. Alice’s new disappearance would be all mine. Not Evan and Garth’s, not Soft’s.

I helped them into my car, digging seat belts out from between seats. Evan gave me directions. It wasn’t far. My wipers cleaned a window out of the newly fallen ash, and we took off, in silence.

My thoughts were with Alice. I was pretty sure I knew where she was.

But she couldn’t get into the chamber. I had the key. Soft had given it to me.

“Is time subjective or objective?” said Garth from the backseat, his voice droning in the darkness.

Evan and I were silent.

“I mean, if my watch says five-thirty, and I go around all day believing in that, and then I run into you and your watch says five o’clock, half an hour difference, and we’ve both gone around all day half an hour different—your two, my two-thirty, your four-fifteen, my four-forty-five, half an hour in the past relative to me, and certain of it, just as certain as I am, and we begin arguing, and then, at that moment, the rest of the world blows up, huh, just completely disappears, and we’re all that’s left, there’s no other reference point, no other observer, and for me it’s five-thirty and for you it’s five, isn’t that a form of time travel?”

“Time travel?” said Evan.

“Five o’clock is successfully communicating with five-thirty,” said Garth.

We pulled up in front of the address Evan had given me. It was an ivy-covered brick house, lacking a shingle or plaque to identify it as a proper site of therapy. The blind men clambered out. I followed, feeling protective. What sort of therapy was this, anyway? Evan and Garth could be duped into all kinds of abuses. Having fooled them five minutes before with the refrigerator-note gag, I knew how vulnerable they were. I’d go and meet this therapist. Then back to rescue Alice.

Garth rang the bell. A buzzer sounded and we stepped into a carpeted, high-ceilinged foyer. It smelled faintly musty. Garth turned a doorknob at the right, and he and Evan went in to a consulting room that was reassuringly bland and clean, free of instruments of torture.

As I peered in after them a voice behind me spoke my name. I wheeled to find Cynthia Jalter, holding a jet-black clipboard, still tall, still darkly attractive, still smiling knowingly.

She looked in at the blind men, who nodded together at the sound of her step, then shut the door, isolating us two in the foyer.

“I didn’t mean—,” I said.

“I understand,” she said. “You didn’t know. You were just dropping them off.”

“Yes,” I said, slowly grasping that this wasn’t the wrong house, wasn’t some dream or practical joke. Cynthia Jalter was their therapist.

“You pay them to come here,” I recalled, inserting it in the place of a thousand apologies.

“They couldn’t possibly afford it themselves,” she said. She stood, her back to the consultation room, her clipboard hugged to her chest, eyeing me curiously. “I’m well funded, as you guessed the other night, Philip.”

“Your research is into blindness, then.”

“Coupling,” she said. “Obsessive coupling.”

“Ah. The way they are together, you mean. The private world. Twins, invented languages, that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“You help them separate, I guess. A Siamese-twin surgeon of the soul.”

“I help them understand it,” she said. “They can make their own choices. The goal is to develop an awareness, from inside, of how dual cognitive systems form, how they function, how they respond to hostile or contradictory data. Threats to stability, inequal growth by one member. Cognitive dissonance. I’m sure these concepts are familiar.”

“Oh, yes.”

“In the larger sense my research is into the delusory or subjective worlds that exist in the space between the two halves of any dual cognitive system. It applies to any coupling, from obsessive twins all the way down to a chance momentary encounter in public, between two strangers.”

“Ah.”

“The therapy can serve as a catalyst for change, sure. As the inherent limitations of two-point perspective are exposed. It’s inevitable. But the research is pure. Perhaps sometime we’ll have a chance to talk at length.”

“Oh, yes.” I said this stupidly, too fast.

“Good.” Her smile was wry.

“You knew my name, just now,” I said. “Not the fake name from the bar. Dale Overling.”

“Evan and Garth—we talk about their situation, too. Daily life stuff.”

“So you knew it was me, the other night.”

“Not right away,” she said. “But it dawned on me. And I drive them home sometimes. So when I dropped you off, I knew for sure.”

I wanted to flee. I felt like an idiot. Anyway, I had to go search for Alice, rescue her.

“We’re keeping Evan and Garth waiting,” I said.

Her smile was knowing. “You have somewhere to go.”

“Actually, yes.”

She straightened, and lifted her clipboard as if to weigh it. She looked at me and I saw that she had science gaze. The look that seemed to encompass my whole life inside theoretical brackets. Paradigm Eyes.

Alice used to freeze me with that look. Before she lost it, surrendered it along with everything else, to Lack.

“Well, I hope we get that chance to talk,” she said, still smiling.

“Right.” I was panicked. I thought of last time, my jaunt from the apartment while Soft dragged Alice home. Why was I always with Cynthia Jalter at these moments? Alice’s vanishing belonged to me this time, if I hurried. I had to go claim it.

“And Philip?”

“Yes?”

“I know about Alice. They talk about her.”

“And Lack?”

“And Lack.”

I winced. I didn’t want Cynthia Jalter to take a professional interest. The possibility that she might view Alice and me, or worse, Alice and Lack, as a fascinating and absurd example of obsessive coupling was horrifying.

And yet here I was, rushing away to attend a new phase of the crisis. I felt exposed.

“Well,” I said. “I hope you take all they say with a grain of, as the saying goes, salt.”

“Yes.”

“I have to go. You’ll drive them home, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.” I slipped back through the front door, then ran stumbling down the porch steps and back to my car. I was panting, as if after some vast exertion. I seat-belted myself into place with difficulty, my fingers numb.

Dual cognitive system?

Two-point perspective?

New data, threats, unequal growth?

I drove back to campus, to the parking lot of the physics facility.