As She Climbed Across the Table

20

Alice sat, slumped, elbows on knees, against the padlocked doors of Lack’s chamber. She was a human mite in the machine, an insect sucked up in a vacuum cleaner. Her head was ducked between her shoulders, blond hair shining in the dim, steely light of the corridor. She looked up forlornly when she heard me coming.

“Alice.” I panted. “I’m here.”

“I see.”

“You’re okay.”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“So.” I peered around the curve of the hallway. We were alone. The doors to the lab were still locked, and I had Alice’s copy of the key. “So, I guess you’re just waiting here, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Sort of staking out a position, is that it? An encampment?”

“I don’t know, Philip.”

“Resting. A siesta.”

“If you like.”

I sagged. The air had gone out of my rescue already. Alice stared at me, plainly resenting the intrusion.

“Well, I think we need to talk.”

“We could talk in the apartment.”

“But that’s just it,” I said, trying to get some momemtum. “We never do.”

“You came here to talk?”

I concealed my panting. “Yes.” I slumped down across from her, against the opposite wall, one knee up, the other leg stretched out. If she’d taken the same position our feet could have touched across the width of the corridor. The fluorescent light above us flickered and blinked. “I want to pin some things down.”

“What things?”

“You love Lack. The way you used to love me, but don’t anymore.”

She sighed. “You keep repeating it, Philip.”

“Then it’s true.”

“Yes. I love Lack.” She didn’t flinch or falter. She was comfortable saying it now.

“I was too real for you. You wanted to meet someone imaginary.”

“Lack is real, Philip. He’s a visitor. An alien.”

“Lack’s an idea, Alice. He’s your projection.”

She stared at me defiantly. “Well, he’s a much better idea than a lot of others I can think of. He’s the idea of perfection, the idea of love, of perfect love.”

“Love of pomegranates, you mean. Love of slide rules.”

“Love of what Lack loves, yes. Pure love.”

“He’s gobbling things, Alice. That’s all. Even if you’re guessing right, even if he’s loving them, what does that have to do with you? Why is that something to fall in love with?”

“It’s a basic response to something alien,” she said. “Lack comes here, seeking contact, one hundred percent receptivity, and I have the same impulse in return. To embrace the alien. Why can’t you understand? It’s a very high-minded thing. I’m an evolutionary paragon, Philip. And you would be too. I know you well enough. If it had been you in my place you’d be in love.”

“I am in love,” I said, with a defiance of my own.

I thought about the key in my pocket, unknown to Alice. For all her talk she was stuck out here in the chilly corridor, locked out of the room where the object of her desire rested in darkness, silence, indifference.

“So you’re sitting here in the cold, an evolutionary paragon,” I said.

“The first shift is at midnight,” she said quietly. “The Italian team. That’s when Soft opens it up. I wanted to be here.”

“Like a teenager on line for front-row seats.”

She didn’t speak. Maybe she flushed—it was hard to tell in this light.

“You know I’ve been asked to administer your lab time,” I said. “Soft’s worried about what you’ll do with Lack.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I couldn’t care less about Soft. Under normal circumstances I’d prefer your approach. If it didn’t involve the love thing.”

“And under these circumstances?” she said, harsh, unrelenting.

Our eyes locked. Hers fierce, mine searching.

“I want to be your friend,” I said.

No reply.

“Forget what went before,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. You need support. That’s obvious.”

Her eyes were still hard. “I can’t believe you all of a sudden understand about Lack.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’m going to help you climb up onto the table and disappear. But understand the feelings, generally, yes.”

She looked at me warily. She brushed her hair back, and I saw her chin was trembling. “I’m under a lot of pressure right now, Philip.”

“I understand.”

“The kind of friend I need now is one who doesn’t put a lot of demands on me. Someone I wouldn’t have to answer to or make justifications to, or even necessarily see or talk to when I didn’t want to.”

“Right,” I said.

“I don’t have room for anything else in my life right now.”

“Right.”

I couldn’t keep from thinking, she wants me to be as invisible as Lack. If I left her completely alone she would do me the favor of envisioning me as her friend. Another one of her theoretical cohorts.

As I sat there, smiling weakly at Alice, the two of us bracketing the empty space of the hallway, I hallucinated vividly that we were in the bowels of some vast interstellar vehicle, a futuristic ark that had fallen into disuse yet still drifted through the gulf of stars, and that we had lost our way, Alice and I, in our search for the control room. Or found it securely locked, like Lack’s chamber. That this vast drifting thing we were so helpless to command had, somewhere, an ignition key, a steering wheel. But we couldn’t find them.

The vision faded. Once upon a time I would have described it to Alice.

“You want me to go, don’t you,” I said. “I’m not helping, I’m not even entertaining you. You want me to leave.”

She nodded in a helpless way.

“I can’t possibly compete. I could never offer you as little as Lack does. He’s playing hard to perceive.”

Alice stared at me through red-rimmed eyes.

“I’ll just leave you down here,” I said. “Crying alone in this place. I’ll go back to the apartment and be alone there, in the same state. Alike, but exiled from each other, islands of misery. You down here and me up there.”

“Evan and Garth are there,” she said.

It wasn’t cruel humor. She honestly thought they were a consolation.

“They’re—,” I almost said Cynthia Jalter’s name. “They’re at their therapist’s.”

We were both crying. Invoking the blind men, and the apartment, had drawn us back to earth somehow, out of the searing, empty sky of our pain. That plain configuration of rooms and beds. Finally there were always objects—the car and the apartment, Lack’s tuning forks and terra-cotta ashtrays, the blind men’s clattering canes—ballast to drag us away from the void.

“Philip, hold me.”

I crawled across the margin of floor and held her. I put my arms around her shoulders, my face in her hair. We cried together. Our bodies made one perfect thing, a topological whole, immutable, complete, hollows turned to each other, hollows in alliance. We made a system, a universe. For a moment.

Then I left her to her vigil. I went to pace the campus, to be under the stars, fog, and pollution with my thoughts, circling only gradually on the apartment. By the time I got back to my couch Evan and Garth were returned from their therapy, and peacefully asleep.