As She Climbed Across the Table

35

I used the elevator to descend.

The lights inside Lack’s chamber were already on. They were always on. A stage always set, where nothing ever actually happened. There wasn’t any sound, apart from a ringing in my ears and the hum of sleeping machines.

I shut the door behind me. Lack’s table glowed in the spotlight, and my drunken eyes contributed a blurry halo. The room had been professionally cleaned. There was no sign of blood.

Lack was abandoned, I realized. Braxia was gone. The students were partying, or already headed home for Christmas. It was Alice’s shift, but Alice had fled. Soft had turned his back. Soft was so happy Lack was vanishing that he was pretending it had already happened. Lack had been spoiled with attention, but now he would wither and die alone. I might be his last visitor.

I circled the table drunkenly, squinting into the glare. I was killing time. I think I expected Braxia to appear, the way he always did, and pull me away from the threshold. But Braxia was on a plane, over an ocean. Nobody was going to stop me. Nobody had even seen me leave the party.

Do what you have to do. Those were Alice’s words.

I circled the table, hypnotizing myself. I was a question mark in orbit around an answer. I felt the urge to speak, but whom would I be addressing? Alice, or Lack? The two had canceled each other out, become one, then zero. There was nothing on the table, nothing at all, except it was a nothing that somehow included Alice and Lack, and a nothing that I wanted to include me, too. Lack was a hole that had sucked away my love by refusing to suck it away, a nullity. Now I wanted to be nullified.

Do what you have to do.

So I climbed up onto the table. It was so simple. I would be the first lover in history to receive an absolute answer, a yes or no notarized as cosmic fact. I gripped the sides of the table and vaulted up, first on my knees, then flat on my stomach. Or almost flat. I had an erection. It was rock-hard and almost insensate. Some part of me had mistaken this for a sexual event. I ignored it. I held the table tight and slid myself forward, until my weight was centered just inches from the line that signified Lack’s boundary. I tucked my legs underneath my stomach, making myself a human bullet, and reached for the far edge of the table. Then I closed my eyes and pulled myself through, across the boundary, into Lack, and beyond the edge of the table, to tumble onto the floor of the chamber.

I landed on my hands, and flopped over backward, flat on my back, my head under the table. Like Wile E. Coyote tricked over the edge of a cliff in a defective Acme parachute. But there wasn’t even a sound effect, or a cloud of dust. My impact went unrecorded. One small step for nothing, one giant leap for nobody. The floor was cold. The physics facility ignored me, humming. My erection slackened. I felt it untwist from my undershorts. My head rang. When I opened my eyes my visual field was spattered with phosphenes, like a bad action painting. I closed my eyes.

Do what you have to do.

So I passed out there on the floor in an alcoholic swoon, until morning.