As She Climbed Across the Table

32

The apartment spilled over with sunlight. I was still alone, still on the couch. I looked at the clock. I’d slept all night and morning, through most of the last meeting of my freshman class.

I struggled back into my preworn clothing, my pretied shoes, ran to the anthropology building, and rushed upstairs to the airless classroom. Only one of my sixteen students remained. He sat alone at his desk, writing in his notebook with a ballpoint pen. He looked up, astonished at my arrival.

“Professor Engstrand.”

“Angus.”

“I’m almost done.”

“Done with what? Where did they all go?”

He blinked twice. He looked frightened.

“Tell me what happened, Angus.”

“We met and waited for you, sir. Sat in our places. But you didn’t come. No one said anything. Half an hour passed. Then someone suggested that your absence might represent some new form of final exam. Some arcane and menacing form, I believe those were the exact words. We laughed nervously at first. But one by one we opened our notebooks. Began attempting to answer the question you were posing. That’s why it’s a little unsettling to see you here, sir. I was almost finished. The others handed in their papers to the department secretary. May I ask you a question, sir?”

“Yes, Angus.”

“Does this mean I failed?”

“No, Angus. There’s no time limit. Hand it in when you’re done.”

“Thank you, sir. Also Professor Soft was here looking for you a little while ago.”

“Thank you, Angus.”

I went downstairs to the faculty lounge, looking for coffee and a pastry. The place was empty, designer aluminum chairs stacked in an awkward, helix-shaped tower. The professors were all out drinking quietly in off-campus bars, unable to wait for the end-term Christmas party. I went to the snack tray and fed on crumb cake and hot black coffee.

Soft hurried in, looking pinched. He saw me and exhaled through his nostrils.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

He sighed. “Let’s talk outside.”

“I missed my class,” I said, crumb cake clinging to my lip. “I need breakfast and a shower. I didn’t sleep well.”

“Let’s talk outside.”

I followed him out of the building, onto the lawn. The day was bright, the winter rinsed out of the air by the insistent sunlight. Students were back out on the grass, lolling, as if after sex, their work finished or abandoned. Walking with Soft among them reminded me of our earlier talk, the day of our haircuts, the day Lack was named. We both needed haircuts again. It was only one of the many differences between that innocent, orderly time and now.

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s blood in the chamber.”

I looked at Soft, hoping to see the signs that accompany cruel humor. Dancing eyes, et cetera. I didn’t find any. His brow was knit.

“De Tooth,” I suggested meekly.

“I’ve already located De Tooth.” Soft’s voice was reproving. “He’s fine. It isn’t his blood.”

“But it’s his shift. He’s supposed to be down there. He’s in charge.”

“No it isn’t. You haven’t looked at your schedule.” Soft pulled out his from his pocket, held it too close to my face. “It’s Alice’s shift as of midnight last night. De Tooth flies back to Belgium after tomorrow, for Christmas. We gave the winter break to Alice.”

I started to panic, but I didn’t let it show.

“And now there’s blood in the chamber,” he went on. “Lots of it, all over the table and the floor. Drips in the hallway. You were supposed to take care of this kind of thing, Philip. You were supposed to keep track of her shifts. I was counting on you.”

Adrenalin sped through my tollgates without paying. When I spoke it came in a flood.

“Alice is a grown woman Soft. She and I haven’t been together for months. I can’t tell her not to bleed. She’s free to bleed if she wants. And I never made any specifically blood-related commitment to you, that I can recall. Anyway, you’re assuming that it is Alice’s blood, or blood or some simulation of blood that Alice for some reason distributed. We can’t make that assumption.”

“I’m not making any assumptions,” said Soft defensively. “I’m making an observation. It looks like somebody committed a murder down there.”

“Murders produce pints and pints of blood. The floor would be slippery with the blood of a whole person. When the police come upon the scene of a murder the rookies vomit, involuntarily. Did you involuntarily vomit? If not, I find it hard to believe that it resembled the scene of a murder, or at least the murder of a full-sized person.”

“I didn’t vomit,” Soft confessed, looking bedazzled. He squinted into the sun, thinking. “It does look like somebody had a pretty serious accident down there, Philip. I don’t mean to worry you.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. Alice is her own woman. If I’m concerned at all it’s in a friendly, interfaculty sort of way. I mean, she and I shared some good times. But there’s no special worry.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“What say you get back down there and wait around and make sure nobody, Alice or anyone else, gets back into the chamber? That might be important. I’ll take a look around and see if I can scare up Alice, and when I do I’ll give you a call. I’m sure it’s just some little thing. We’ll all have a good laugh over it at the party.”

“What?” Soft looked punctured.

“The Christmas party. You’re going, aren’t you?” I chucked him on the shoulder. “Go back to the lab. I’ll give you a call.”

He nodded, his shoulders round with the weight of his confusion, and turned back toward the physics facility. I watched him go, my heart pounding. Disaster footage played on my mind’s screen. As soon as he was out of sight I ran back to the apartment.

Alice’s car was sitting in the driveway, idling, empty. The passenger seat was loaded with her clothes. There was a spot of blood on the carpet by the accelerator. Her keys dangled from the ignition, vibrating with the engine. I left the car running and went inside.

Alice was at the sink, splashing in the flow from the tap. A bloody heap of paper towels lay on the counter. She was hastily rewrapping a blood-soaked bandage around the base of her left thumb. I counted her fingers—they were all there.

She looked up at me, stricken, then grabbed the loose end of her bandage and furiously taped it down. She didn’t want me to see her helpless. She’d obviously meant to get out before I found her.

“Alice,” I said.

She looked at me like I was an entire roadblock of police. I tried to stay calm myself, to ignore the ring of crimson in the sink.

“Soft is worried,” I said. “Apparently you left some kind of mess in the chamber.”

“I cut myself.”

She swirled water in the sink, rinsing away most of the blood. I stood and watched. She balled up the paper towels, clumsily, with her one good hand, and stuffed them into the garbage pail.

She met my eye, and I saw a hint of regret, as if the absurdity and pain of her situation, of our situation, had all of a sudden become plain to her. Then her gaze fell. She tugged at her bandage once to make sure it was secure, and went to the door.

“You’re leaving,” I said.

She nodded.

“Let me walk you to the car.”

She climbed gingerly into the front seat, and tested her bandaged hand against the steering wheel. The wound was to the meat of her thumb. A bad injury for a driver. She tried to hide it from me, but I saw her wince.

I leaned in to her window. “You look terrible,” I said.

Alice nodded. She pulled her lips together, fighting tears.

“You must be worried about Evan and Garth,” I said.

She let her hands come away from the wheel, and crossed them in her lap, the wounded one resting on top.

“You’re going to your parents’ place?”

“I think so,” she said. “I have to get farther away.”

“From Lack, you mean.”

“And you.”

I was surprised. Alice blinked up at me, weakly defiant.

“You cut yourself,” I said. When we spoke it was still in a lover’s clipped code, tips standing in for icebergs.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

“You gave part of yourself to Lack.” It came out practically a whisper.

“A small part. I tried.”

“He didn’t take it, you mean.”

She nodded.

I squinted up at the winter sky. It was a beautiful day. I felt dirty, unshaven, and hopeless.

Suddenly, idiotically, I realized I’d been counting on spending Christmas with Alice. A chink in my heart’s pill-bug armor. I’d be hurt by her going away.

“You don’t have to go,” I said.

“I do.”

“I understand,” I said. “You feel bad about Evan and Garth. And everything that happened, your hand, me. But it doesn’t mean you have to run away.”

“For a while, Philip. I’m sorry.”

I struggled for words. “You still love Lack, I guess.”

She nodded.

A cold wind swept over the roof of the car, into my face. I coughed into my fist, and felt my stubbly chin and chapped lips against my hand.

“What you did down there is crazy, you know.”

She nodded again, and ran her good right hand through her short hair, front to back. She had new mannerisms to go with her short hair.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“It bleeds a lot,” she said.

“Did you disinfect it?”

“Yes.”

We fell silent. I wanted her bandage to come undone, her wound to bleed, so that she would need my help. I could carry her from the car, then come back, turn her key back out of the ignition, and pocket it.

“What should I tell Soft?” I said. I was stalling.

“About what?”

“I can’t keep covering for you. It’s too much. Questions are being asked. Soft said it looked like a murder. That’s just one example. There’s also Evan and Garth. You’re dropping everything in my lap.”

Alice looked at me sharply. “There is no more Evan and Garth,” she said. “Nothing in your lap.”

“Listen to you, you’re jealous. Lack took someone else. That’s what’s behind these suicidal gestures, these elegiac departures. Jealousy.”

“Don’t, Philip.”

“I just don’t understand—”

How you can leave me, I almost finished. But I caught myself. Her car was running, and the chances were that in a minute or two I’d have to face myself, alone. So I put together another end for my sentence, one safely shallow and bitter.

“I don’t understand why I go on making this so easy for you. Why I’m such a—what’s it called? A doormat, that’s it. Or doorman. Good morning, Ms. Coombs, watch your step, here’s the void. When one word from me and the jig, as they say, is up. No more Alice and Lack.”

That did it. Alice gripped the steering wheel, obviously fighting pain, and shifted the car into reverse. She pulsed her foot on the brake so the car rolled an inch away, as warning, then looked up at me one last time.

“Do what you have to do,” she said.

She accelerated backward in a lurch out of the driveway, then shifted and sped away, leaving me standing there, less doormat or doorman than door, slammed.