As She Climbed Across the Table

34

“Philip! I was afraid you weren’t coming. Have a drink.”

It was Soft. Unaccountably gleeful, he grabbed my arm and led me to the makeshift bar. The room was already brimming, the air filled with a gabble of overlapping conversations that peaked and ebbed like automatic gunfire. I entered a maze of bobbing and ducking heads, with faces that crunched up with ironic anguish or jawed open wide with laughter, nostrils flaring, ears burning red, cigarettes and glasses and food shifted from orifices to holders and back again by subservient hands. Every head made up the maze, the remorseless consensual nightmare, and every head wandered through it, lost, frightened, alone.

Here I’d find a parting taste of the human world, perhaps even a voice to call me back from the brink. At the very least, a chance to stall.

“No,” I said. “I’ve had a drink already.”

“It’s Christmas.”

“Yes.”

“Eggnog, Philip.”

He handed me a plastic cup full of frothy nog and hollow cylindrical ice cubes. I tasted it, to be polite, and a surprising amount entered my mouth. Soft grinned, happy to see me drink. I grinned back, happy to see him happy.

“What’s the good word?” I said.

“It’s almost over.”

“It is over.”

“I don’t mean the term.” He grinned again, as if that were sufficient explanation. I wondered if I’d missed something in the din.

“What do you mean?” I said finally.

“Lack. He’s closing up. Going away.”

We were attacked by a costumed waitress with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, tiny wrinkled crackers spackled with phosphorescent pink mortar. She wore a dewy black nose. She was forced to carry the tray so high that her face appeared situated there itself, offered with the food. Soft turned and the tray came up under his chin. He reached around and guided a cracker into his mouth. With their chins each resting on the tray it looked like a sexual act, the pink smears surrogate tongues.

She turned to me. “No, thank you,” I said. I ducked to open a route of escape for her tray. She jostled past us. I looked at Soft, who was chewing with his mouth open. “You were saying something about Lack.”

“Yes,” he said, swallowing. “Braxia told me this afternoon that he thought it would close up. Lack, that is. So I went down an hour ago and took some measurements. Sure enough. He’s attenuating. I estimate another week or so.”

He lifted his cup, beaming. I raised mine, and we drank.

“Attenuating,” I said.

Soft nodded.

So Braxia was right. Lack would go away. It didn’t change my plan, only made it more urgent and absolute. A shudder of fear went through me. I tipped my cup back, and drained away the last of my eggnog, then let a piece of ice slip into my mouth and sucked it clean of the sweet residue.

Soft finished his own nog and smiled at me dizzily, a smear of cream on his upper lip. It clearly wasn’t his first glass. He was drunker than I was. And happier. Maybe that was the answer for now. I should be as drunk and happy as Soft.

“He’s fabulous when he gets behind the wheel,” came a voice out of the crowd. Then a roar of admiring laughter. I took Soft’s cup away with mine, to get a refill. The bartender was one of my students. He filled the cups from a bowl, then made a show of splashing in an extra portion of rum from a concealed bottle. He winked, and I winked back. I was planning to fail him. He handed me the cups. They were too full to carry. I took a sip from the top of each and inadvertently slurped off the two mouthfuls of undiluted rum that floated there.

I brought them back to Soft. He smiled. I leaned in close to his pale, small face, and whispered, “Let’s turn this party on its ear.”

He raised his eyebrows, looking stricken. “I don’t know how,” he said.

“Just follow me.”

“Okay.”

“The key is women. To talk to women.”

“Women.”

“Yes, the largest possible group of women. The male personality expands in the company of women.”

“Okay.”

“Then once we’ve become large we can take on mixed groups, or just men. But only after we’ve expanded.”

Soft nodded.

I stood on tiptoe and surveyed the party. It was thickening, becoming insoluble. There was a bustle at the door as a series of students entered costumed as sheep. A woman behind me whined, “Where? I can’t even see him. How can I fuck him if I can’t even see him?” Laughter bubbled up like clouds of smoke. The music switched to something relentless, the soundtrack to a robot’s headache. A female literature professor danced in a corner, sweaty and self-absorbed, ringed by men in suits who clapped and cheered viciously. Her T-shirt read MY HEART IS FILLED WITH LOVE FOR ALL CREATURES. Smoke bubbled up like clouds of laughter. A strobe flickered briefly, reducing all movement to Keatonesque tableau. Bubbles smoked up like the laughter of clouds. I imagined the bobbing heads that made up the maze as balloons, tied to the floor by the strings of our bodies. Then I pictured them cut loose, to bob and roll, still laughing and smoking, along the surface of the ceiling.

Past Soft’s shoulder I spotted a group of three women, standing, holding drinks, looking bored. I recognized one, the new professor of macroeconomics. She met my eye. I nodded, gulped, and smiled. I was still on tiptoe. I dropped down. Soft looked at me quizzically. “Don’t look now,” I said. “But right behind us. But ixnay on the ooklay.”

Soft seemed baffled. I took his shoulder and turned him, so he broke into the group of women. “Here,” I said. “You—” I waved my cup at the macroeconomist, my eye-contactee. She was thirtyish, with glasses that reflected bluish light. “I forgot your name,” I said, making it sound like it was her fault.

“Umdoris Umfield,” she said. Sounding like she accepted the blame.

“Umfield, of course. You’re in economics.”

“Field. Umright.”

I leaned in, smiled dangerously. “I can’t hear you,” I said. “This is Professor Soft.”

Field or Umfield took his hand and smiled. Her two companions shifted their weight back and forth, waiting either to be included, so that they could finally join the general gabbling and barking, or else be freed to wander the maze. The one facing Soft was tall and limber, almost knock-kneed. Her long blond hair fell around her face like a hospital bed-curtain. When Soft got too close the hair reached up, drawn by static electricity, and clung to the front of his turtleneck. The third woman, nearer to me, was shorter, and fat or thin according to how she stood, with black hair that was pulled into a knot, and a ring on every visible finger. She wore an orange scarf, not a decorative scarf, but a long, woolen skier’s scarf. Blue eyeshadow. Her face was severe and enthralling.

“Work at the university?” I said, gesturing to include us all. Nog sloshed to the edge of my cup, almost over. I switched hands and tried again, but confused, I gestured a second time with the drink, my empty hand in my pocket.

“Athabasca,” said the woman in the scarf. “Gender studies. And this is Ms. Anderfander, admissions.”

“Gender, admissions,” I said and nodded, avoiding their troubling, indistinct names. “This is Professor Soft, of hard sciences. And Professor Hard, of floppy, or more properly, flaccid sciences.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Soft of hard. Hard of flaccid. The study of the flaccid. How do you do.”

“You’re not Professor Hard,” said the woman in the scarf.

“Yes I am,” said Soft.

“No, I mean you. You’re not Hard. You’re Engstrand. The one with Alice Coombs.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “That’s ancient history.”

“Do you teach ancient history?”

“No it isn’t,” said the woman in the scarf. “Not from what I understand. You won’t leave her alone, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“Where is Alice, anyway?” said Soft woozily. He made it sound like he’d finally worked up the nerve to pinch her ass.

“Oh, she’s around here someplace,” I lied. I stood on tiptoe again to mime a search. But then, victim of my own charade, I thought I saw her, slipping away through the maze. My heart lurched.

But the hair I’d spotted was long, and Alice’s long hair was gone, chopped off. I was wrong.

I rejoined Soft and the women. “Who told you that?” I said. “Anyway, how do you know she wants to be left alone?”

The woman with the scarf gave me a frank and confident smile. “I know more than you think. I’ve become quite interested in Alice’s story.”

“How intensely horrible,” I said. I looked to the others for help. Addlemaddle stood wobbling on her odd knees, listening attentively, her hair accumulating strand by strand on Soft’s seemingly electromagnetic chest. Umfield was sipping at her drink patiently, her gaze distant. And Soft? He looked hopeless, his eyes spongy, his mouth limp.

“Yes, Alice’s hegira is quite remarkable,” said the woman with the scarf. “She’s echoed a profound archetype, I think, with her silence. Her refusal. The language we use is constructed by males, you know, for male use. Female powerlessness is built in, it’s intrinsic. So the language can’t be reclaimed. To even speak it, as I am, is to employ the instrument of repression against myself. Understand?”

“Like Superman trying to build his house out of kryptonite,” I suggested. I hoped it would throw her off stride.

“Right,” she said, undaunted. “So Alice’s silence is the paradigmatic feminist statement. A refusal to be co-opted.”

“There’s actually more to it than that,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

“Lack, you mean.”

“Yes, Lack. I didn’t just talk Alice to death. Something else happened.”

The scarf-woman nodded. “She fell in love with the Other. Do you want me to tell you what I think about Lack?”

“Well—”

“You’ll like this,” said Anglefangle to Soft in a stage whisper. As she leaned in she left more blond strands stuck to his chest.

“Lack is the Other,” said the scarf-woman. Her nostrils flared to capitalize the O. “Just like Alice is the Other to you. It’s natural to love the Other. By that I mean the mysterious, the silent, the withdrawn and enigmatic. The deep. It’s a significant development, I think. The discovery of a lovable Other in Lack. A third gender. You ought to be more understanding.”

“You’re saying Alice is a pioneer,” I suggested.

“She’ll be remembered.”

“She’s a success.”

“Well, yes.”

“Let’s find her,” I said. “Let’s find her and tell her. I think it’s beautiful, what you said. We should tell her we understand.”

I meant it. At that moment it seemed right and profound.

Soft gaped. I don’t think he’d set out to create a third gender. A slush of drool and eggnog shone on his tongue. I fought the urge to whisper swallow in his ear.

“She doesn’t want to hear it from you,” said the scarf-woman, shaking her head. “You have to understand. It would be nothing but an imposition for you or me or anyone else to define Alice’s experience according to some external standard. The more we intrude the more we risk closing off this entirely original experience she’s had. When she’s ready to use language she’ll create her own vocabulary. She may speak in a tongue we don’t recognize. But it’s not up to us to decide.”

“You’re right, of course,” I said, knowing it was my only chance. Anyway, I agreed with her now.

“I’m glad we got this time to talk.”

“Yes.”

We all smiled. Our packet of heads was happy now, normalized, made like the others around it, the tittering bunches. The women nodded and smiled. They would permit us to crawl away. I signaled to Soft, who grinned and raised his drink, lifting it into the bridge of hair that connected him to Ms. Abracadabra. As he backed away, stripping the hair from his sweater, several strands slid across his arm and through the drink, falling back into place beaded with eggnog.

I grunted my way back to the bar, Soft at my heel. We found a spot there, an empty pocket, and lodged ourselves.

“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” I said. I handed our cups to my student for refilling.

“Things went wrong?” said Soft.

“A little wrong, yes.”

He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know if I agree one hundred percent with what she was saying. About Alice and Lack.”

I handed him his cup. “I didn’t believe a word of it,” I said.

“Good. Because, really.”

“Exactly. We’re in complete agreement.”

“Good, good.”

“But she was very forceful,” I said. “Very, uh, compelling.”

“Yes,” said Soft. He lowered his eyes, looking glum and intense. Overhead a gong sounded, and a horrific voice said, “Open, sesame!” Soft and I both drank furiously. We were alienated from each other, our plan to tip the party on its ear in tatters. My other plans loomed, dangerously close.

“Philip?”

“Yes?”

“Is it true what you said? That you and Alice have been separated for months? That it’s ancient history?”

“Yes and no.”

Soft nodded. Even drunk he was too polite to ask more. We stood in silence. I felt the alcohol numbing the flesh of my face, making my tongue fat and cloddish, blurring my vision. The music pounded through me from the floor. If I gritted my teeth I could feel the beat in my jaw. Possibly the music was eroding my teeth. I slackened my jaw to protect them.

“So,” I said, changing the subject, sort of. “No more Lack.”

“That’s right.” I’d reminded Soft of his happiness. He grinned.

“So you’re rid of us now. The Lack people.”

Soft frowned. “I didn’t say that, Philip.”

“No, it’s true. We’re always throwing ourselves at him. We’re an embarrassment.”

Soft crinkled up his face. He leaned in to whisper, but his voice warbled. And we swayed, our heads dipping together like a doo-wop group, the Satins or Royales. “To tell you the truth, Philip, I tried it myself. I don’t know why. I guess I thought that since I created him I should be the one. He should take me. But it didn’t work.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Soon it’ll all be a bad dream.”

“Braxia tried too,” I said. I silently tried to count the table jumpers. “He told me. And De Tooth. I caught him at it.”

Soft raised his eyebrows. Giggled. “I guess everybody’s tried it.”

“Yes.”

This was quite funny, and we laughed for a good long time. Then Soft got hushed and conspiratorial again.

“Did you try?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I lied.

We laughed a bit more, slapping at parts of our own and each other’s bodies.

“Let’s go find some more women,” I said.

Soft’s face reenacted Terran evolution, from early carbon stages up through Nobel Prize–winning physicists. “Okay,” he said when he was finished. “But I just realized just now that I have to use the bathroom very badly. Very suddenly. I’m very sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. “Do what you do. Have to.”

“Are you coming?”

“No, I’ll here. Stay.”

He handed me his drink and fled. I hoped he could find the bathroom in time. The way the room was bucking it wouldn’t be easy. I had trouble even standing in one place, with only two legs for support. How flimsy they were. I recalled that mountain climbers never lifted more than one of four limbs from the earth. Always kept three planted. I wondered why this rule didn’t apply generally. It was so reasonable. But I was hemmed in by people I didn’t recognize. No one to hand a drink to, no way to free a third limb and apply this sensible, obvious rule.

I had no choice. I finished the smaller of the two drinks I held, slid the full cup into the empty one, then knelt to plant my free hand on the floor.

Much better. The floor was the way to go. It was cooler and quieter there, in the well of bodies. A whole new world. Dark and clever and strange. Nobody seemed to miss me, up above. Or if they did they were too polite to mention it.

How easy it was to disappear. Nothing to be afraid of.

Drink seekers swarmed around me, jostling me away from the bar, toward the undifferentiated middle of the party. I shuffled with them in a crouch, my knees bobbing in front of my chin, my drink held aloft like a flag, marking my column of space, my other hand on the floor, a rudder. The costumed waitress passed over me, her tray darkening my patch of sky. I saw now that she wore a fluffy tail. I followed her, scooting in my crouch, fixing her calves in my sights like a driver behind a distinctive truck on a dull highway. Then she dropped the empty tray to her side, nearly dashing it against my forehead, and slipped away. I was stranded. “The point about my dream,” said a man above me, “is that every woman who kissed me and died went straight to heaven. Immortal life. The happy hunting ground.”

I scooted off to an empty spot and drank the last of the eggnog. I wanted to stand again. I had things to do up there, an agenda. The party was supposed to be my farewell to the human realm. The floor was too marginal. I put the cup aside and rubbed my hands together, mixing dust and eggnog. The moment was right. I stood up. Or tried to. My knees unfolded horizontally, and I lurched onto my hands and knees, my face pressed into fishnet thighs. Female thighs, naked behind fishnet.

“Hello,” someone said.

I’d catapulted myself into the midst of a group of tall, attractive women, judging by the legs. The newly formed emasculation department, possibly. I was on my hands and knees in what I could only call their midst.

There was one pair of pinstriped pants in the cage of legs otherwise made up of fishnet, sheen, or goose-pimpled, neatly shaved flesh. Pinstriped pants worn by vastly shorter legs. The waist of the pants was at the level of the women’s knees. Thus a tiny man. Or massive women.

“Do you know him?” said a woman.

I stood, rising on my wobbly knees like the Indian rope trick. The pinstriped legs were Georges De Tooth. I towered over him. The women were a variety of ordinary sizes. They smiled and blinked at me. Students. A gaggle. De Tooth frowned at me from beneath his wig, eyes steely, jaw set. He was drinking something clear over ice.

“Georges,” I said.

He flared his tiny nostrils. His entire face looked like it was machine-tooled. He lifted his drink to his lips and tipped it back, without opening his mouth. Maybe he just wanted to rinse his lips before speaking. I smiled. He didn’t smile back. He got up on tiptoe and whispered, or mimed whispering, into the ear of the woman at his right. She laughed and rolled her eyes. Then, by some mysterious process, all the women began laughing and rolling their eyes, and then they all went away to another part of the room, leaving me alone with De Tooth.

“I’m Soft,” I said. “With. He’ll be anytime now. Along.”

De Tooth didn’t say anything, just stared. His eyes were firing a continuous stream of protons, neutrons, and positrons at me. I felt them spilling over the numb flesh of my face. It felt good, actually.

“Lack is closing up,” I said, ordering the words carefully. “Did you hear?”

De Tooth almost smiled. He said nothing.

“Soft tried to go in too,” I said. I figured De Tooth was angry at me for walking in on his own attempt. “Everybody tried. It just doesn’t work, apparently.” Then I remembered the blind men. I decided not to mention them. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway, since he’s closing up.”

Nothing from De Tooth. He stared, holding his drink. Gnawing slightly behind his closed lips. As if on a pipe.

“So it’s all over, I guess,” I said. “The whole Lack thing. Or the whole Alice thing. I guess you could call it one of any other number of things. Any one of another. One of any other number. The Soft thing. The De Tooth thing. I guess nobody would call it the Engstrand thing. That’s not right. Probably it’s accurate to call it the Lack thing. Anyway, it’s over.”

De Tooth crossed his arms, his drink dangling underneath. He narrowed his eyes, studying me. The pipe was coming into focus now. There was definitely an imaginary pipe involved in his stance, his whole attitude.

“I’ve been taking a look at some other projects,” I said. “Now that we’ve got this Lack thing off our plates. I’ve got a few ideas that might interest you. So we could fire up the old collaborative thing again.”

Nothing from De Tooth. But I was rolling now.

“For instance, how about this: unifying the disciplines, the various modes of cognition, by smashing thought itself in the particle accelerator. Subjecting it to fantastic pressure and seeing what sort of basic components fly out of the collision. You and me, Georges. I think it could be big. Real big. I don’t want to be the one to say it, Georges, but N.P., you know? N. Prize. You read me? Do I have to spell it out? N-o-b Prize, Georges. I think you know what I mean. You finish it, Georges. What are the missing letters?”

Stony silence. Dartlike eyes. Imaginary pipe.

“Okay, Georges. I get the picture. I see. You’re going to do the easy thing. Stand back and watch while I self-destruct. This is fun for you, I guess. Being Mr. Big Guy. It’s your revenge. You come to a party and surround yourself with titanic women and refuse to speak to me. All because I know your secret. I know that you climb up on tables and hurl yourself at voids.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry, Georges. God, I’m sorry. You have to forgive me. I’m not myself.”

He studied me. The party flickered on around us, an alcoholic nightmare.

“I had a plan. I had it mapped out. I thought when I found someone like Alice I would know what to do. My plan was a failure, Georges. It didn’t work.”

De Tooth was the vortex of the party, the still, small presence at the center.

“I lied to you, Georges. I didn’t try. Lack, I mean. I haven’t yet. I don’t know. He might take me. I want to find out while there’s still time. Before he closes up. I have to know if she loves me.”

The tiny man pursed his lips.

“I’m hinting at something dangerous, Georges. More than hinting. Aren’t you going to try to stop me? This could be a cry for help. I’m not sure. I’m asking your opinion, Georges. Does it sound like I should be talked out of it? Talk me out of it, Georges.”

Invisible clouds of imaginary pipe smoke rising up into the green and blue lights.

“You don’t think he’ll take me, do you? So you’re not worried.”

Nothing. Behind him, dancing had started, frenzied, primitive, spasmodic. The literature professor had taken off her T-shirt. Soft was talking to the tall, knock-kneed woman from admissions, his head enclosed in her hair.

“I’m not feeling well, Georges. I think I’ll go outside and some fresh air. Get. Thanks for listening.”

“My pleasure,” said De Tooth. He put his left pinky into his ear and turned it slowly three times, like a third-base coach signaling for a steal. Then he marched away with tiny, metronome-precise steps. A vortex slipping away. Leaving me in charge. A mistake. I was less well-equipped in terms of silence and enigma. The larger chaos of the party matched the chaos inside me. I was a storm at the eye of the storm.

I stood teetering for a minute, almost sick. Then I stumbled through the crowd of dancers, to the door, and out under the tilt of stars, into the shockingly cold night.

Where, moving again and again through clouds of my own breath, I trekked up the frozen hill to the physics facility.