As She Climbed Across the Table

28

I went back down the next day, to watch as the graduate group introduced their custom-built probe to Lack. The faculty heavyweights were all present: Braxia, Soft, De Tooth, myself. All except Alice. The fresh-faced graduate students set up their experiment around us, taping cables and cords to the floor, testing transmitters and recording devices. At the last minute they unveiled their probe.

At first I thought it was too big for Lack. But they had his measurements, based on the particle screen hits, and this thing must have been made to fit. It resembled a cube of compacted garbage, or an assignment by an eccentric art teacher. Construct an interplanetary probe exclusively from the following list of materials: first baseman’s mitt, two-dollar bill, French horn, salad spinner, cotton swab. It had treads for negotiating terrain, like a moon buggy, a robot arm for righting itself or seizing objects, and dishes and antennae pointed in every direction, hoping for a signal.

They brought it in on its own steel table. It was like a reply to Lack, a presence to equal the absence, a Frankenstein’s Monster to master the Invisible Man. I could hear a fan inside, humming ominously. The students pushed the table up to Lack’s and then backed away. They seemed a little awed by their own hurried, patchwork creation.

Soft looked the most optimistic. These were his students, after all. A triumph for them would vindicate the department. He stood closest, on the fringe of the students, hovering like an older brother. Braxia, on the other hand, stood to one side, his crossed arms and sour expression underlining his prediction of failure. This was not only a waste of Lack-time, his expression seemed to say, but a personal affront, an abuse of precious Braxia-hours.

And then there was De Tooth. What a roomful of Frankensteins, I thought, with our monsters all in attendance! Soft had Lack and Braxia, the students had their ungainly probe, and I had De Tooth. The deconstructionist had undone his briefcase, and papers were spilled out all around him. He scribbled frantically into a pad propped awkwardly on his knees, pausing only to cast accusatory glances in every direction. Two days before I’d received a letter from him, a manifesto, declaring his independence from me in his work with Lack, decrying my status as “false auteur.” He’d insisted on a complete blackout of communication between us. When he caught my eye now he scowled, then crumpled the page in his lap and tossed it aside, as if it had been polluted by my gaze.

Alice was Frankenstein and Monster, I supposed. Creator first, in that vibrant period when she’d seized Soft’s project away. Now, mute, tormented, and crew-cut, she was a monster. And Lack was her creator.

After interminable spot checks, test signals, and huddled conferences, the team abandoned the paired tables, leaving their machine alone to face its invisible twin. There was a modest countdown, and the device began to crawl on its treads toward Lack, to attempt to carry off the incestuous union. I was horrified. Wasn’t the device as much of a scientific aberration as Lack? They were definitely siblings. They might as well use Lack to investigate the mystery of the probe.

The object wobbled perilously at the joint of the two tables. We held our breath. Then a foot descended from the interior of the probe, to steady it, and the treads reengaged. The machine rolled on. We breathed again. The students stood ready to receive signals from the other side, from inside Lack, or beyond Lack, whichever it was. From un-Lack. We all stared as the probe lumbered up to Lack’s entrance. Hoping, despite ourselves. Even Braxia, I imagine. We forgave it existing long after it really should have disappeared.

Soon, though, it was unmistakably past Lack, and still in awkward grinding evidence on the table. For that moment when it drove on toward the far edge it seemed full of misguided valor, an object of beauty, a Quixote in full armor, but as its treads jutted idiotically over the rim of the table, and especially once it plopped stupidly off the end to crash in a heap on the tiles, treads spinning hopelessly in the air, arm fighting loose of the wreckage to grope hopelessly for orientation, it was only an embarrassment. The students turned from their monitors, clicked off their instruments, hitched their thumbs in the belt loops of their corduroys or adjusted their eyeglasses, but nobody approached the wreck. Soft coughed. Braxia rubbed at his chin. De Tooth went on scribbling. I left.