As She Climbed Across the Table

27

“I was reading about the dark matter,” said Evan.

We were sitting on a sunny patch of lawn in front of the library. The ground was cool and wet and the monolithic school buildings seemed like a distant hallucination. Evan was at my right, his legs folded underneath him, his head lolled onto one shoulder, like a schoolgirl. Garth, at my left, sat on his haunches like a baseball catcher, his tongue out, hands gripping fistfuls of the damp grass. At the other end of the field a marching band practiced making turns in step, their instruments, heavy tubas and kettledrums, all silent.

“The dark matter?” I said.

“Ninety percent of the matter in the universe is impossible to detect. But they know it’s there. They need it to balance their equations. To hold up the other stuff.”

Garth ripped out a tuft of grass, held it to his nose, wrinkled his brow.

“That’s what it’s like for us,” Evan went on. “Everything is dark matter. We’re always setting up experiments, trying to confirm the existence of the dark matter. But we can’t. We just have to trust that it’s there.”

Garth picked up his cane, and used the tip to root in the earth.

“And then I was wondering,” said Evan. “Maybe Garth and I are in the wrong universe. Maybe in some other universe there’s a form of matter that’s visible to us. Maybe if we were much smaller. Subatomic.”

“Huh,” said Garth suddenly. “I was supposed to see the particles. I didn’t see anything.”

Garth, characteristically, was trying to drag Evan out of talking to me, back into their neurotic loop. Evan hesitated. I could see he wanted to resist the gravitational pull of Garth’s bitterness. But he was drawn by habit.

Garth stopped digging, and waited for a response, his nostrils flared.

“But we do see things,” said Evan, to me. “We talk about it when we’re alone. Retinal patterns. We see them all the time, you know. We can’t close our eyes and stop. Maybe that’s the dark matter. Maybe you see ten percent of reality, and Garth and I see ninety percent.”

“Huh,” said Garth.

“Cynthia calls them forms and colors,” said Evan. “She says that’s what we’re seeing.”

“You don’t even know which one is a form and which one is a color,” said Garth.

“I do too. Remember what Cynthia said: Forms are like sounds, and colors are like smells. So a red cloud, for instance, might be a certain sound combined with a certain smell.”

“But you can’t know. Cynthia can’t see what you see.”

Evan cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But you can’t know,” said Garth, pounding it home.

I hated Garth suddenly. He was a dead weight around the neck of the world. Around Evan’s neck, anyway. Cynthia should pry them apart.

We fell silent. Evan sat dejectedly. Garth digged determinedly in the moist ground with his cane. I watched the winter clouds, and my thoughts drifted to Alice.

“What is see?” said Garth.

“What?” said Evan.

“What is see? What is see?”

The marching band approached us, still in formation, still miming their playing. Evan and Garth looked up and trained their ears on the disturbance. The band marched past us, the only sound their quiet synchronized tramping on the grass, and a soft clicking as the horn players opened and closed their valves.

“See is just a movie in your eyes,” said Garth. “It’s not out in the world.”

“A movie?”

“It’s not out there, it’s not dark matter or anything else. It’s just in your eyes. A movie. And the only difference is that everyone else has the same movie playing. Cynthia, Philip, Alice, their movies agree. So they can see. You and I are watching the wrong movie, so we’re blind.”

Evan and I were silent.

“See is a dream,” said Garth. “There isn’t anything to see. Real things come one at a time. They come into your hand, and then disappear. Huh.” He felt at the end of his cane, then put his hand to his chin and left a smear of mud there. “See is a movie. But when something goes wrong in their movie, when something is odd, they don’t question themselves. They don’t say, gee, things are disappearing in this laboratory, something must be wrong with my eyes or my brain, I must be blind. They put it outside of themselves, they say, gee, something is wrong with the world. There must be a Lack. Well, I say we’re not blind anymore. I say something is wrong with the world. People talk about things that aren’t there. And they never talk about what’s in their hands.”

“But that’s exactly what I was saying,” said Evan.

“Exactly,” said Garth.

“But you contradicted me.”

“But now you see I didn’t.”

I looked at Evan. If he’d had eyes, he would have looked at me. We would have shared a knowing look, one that excluded Garth. But he couldn’t enter my glance. I was the one excluded. Evan and Garth were alone together, in another world.

They belonged together, I thought now. Cynthia should help them to see that.

“Do you remember when I said I might be lying about the precise location of certain objects?” said Garth.

“Yes,” said Evan.

“Well, don’t worry,” said Garth. “I don’t know where they are either.”