As She Climbed Across the Table

38

The chamber smelled of cat shit. I found the table and climbed up. My hands trembled as I gripped the cold metal. I tucked in my limbs like a frightened spider, and scooted across. Nothing. I tumbled across and onto the floor, and nothing was changed. I’d traveled nowhere.

I’d jostled the table on my way out. It didn’t face Lack anymore. I’d missed.

I heard a mechanical gulp somewhere deep in the building. Evan and Garth going up in the elevator. Then the sounds died away, replaced by the rumbling of the machines that had been copied by Lack, and left here to rumble into entropy in the dark. The blind men had probably forgotten me already. But I might have to go slinking back. I pictured the three of us living together. I would come again and again to this room to slide across the table and fail to get home. Then I’d return, stumbling and blind, to make a bed on the copy of my couch.

I counted steps from the door of the chamber, trying to fix the original location of the table. Now, too late, I finally understood Evan and Garth’s obsession with exact placement and distance. I envied their expertise.

I adjusted the table and climbed back up. More than my hands trembled now. I knelt like a dog on a veterinarian’s table, quaking under some incomprehensible hand. My mouth dry, I pitched forward.

For a moment I thought nothing had changed.

It was still dark. I waited for my other senses to chime in. The cold floor, the hum of the generators, the faint smell of ammonia and coolant. Instead, the floor gaped away beneath me. I fell past the table. The room opened into a void.

My fall ended, but not with a landing. It ended when I realized that my sense of space was illusory. There wasn’t any space, so there wasn’t any fall.

There also wasn’t anyone to be falling or not falling. I lacked, as I completed a quick inventory, legs or arms to swim or struggle with, mouth to scream with, nose, ears, etc.—i.e., the whole deal, works, caboodle. My body wasn’t there.

Blindness, which had been a flat, two-dimensional thing, a sheet of black paper suspended between me and the world, had been folded into an origami model of reality, a model that filled and replaced the very thing on which it was based. The universe. The real. And me, too. I was not only in the void, I apparently was the void. And the void was me. There wasn’t any Philip, wasn’t any Engstrand. There wasn’t any me. I’d solved the observer problem. Simply remove the observer, replace with nothing. Then, for good measure, remove the observed, replace that with nothing too. No observer, no observed, I drink, I fall down, no problem. Just a mind considering—ah, a hitch, here—itself.

I’d gotten rid of the problem of the observer only to open up the perhaps far knottier problem of the considerer.

Well, I’d have time to work it out, the problem I’d created. Plenty of time for thought. Time enough to demolish thought—as I’d proposed to De Tooth—in the miniature particle accelerator of my own disembodied consciousness.

I was wealthy with time. If it was right to say that this thing I had so much of was time. Perhaps it was space. If it was time it was certainly spacious time. Elbow room, as far as the nonexistent eye could see. And nary an elbow in the place. But it wasn’t really time or space, I realized. It was nothing. I was wealthy with nothing.

Nothing, in great rolling waves, a vast, unchartable ocean of it.

Un-nothing too. The whole array of possible nothings.

No thing.

I found myself dwelling on it, the nothing, since there was so much of it, and so little of anything else. It became harder and harder to think about the things, or rather the memory of things. Those former, and now I saw, quite tenuous inhabitants of the vast, underlying nothing. The Lack thing, the Braxia thing, even the so-called Alice thing seemed far less interesting or pertinent than this nothing that pressed in on all sides. The nothing was tangible and timely. Real. Relevant. Thing, on the other hand, was impossible, fraudulent. I let it slip quietly away, thing. Easily done. Thing seemed embarrassed, chagrined. It fell away of its own accord. It knew to go. And it was so easy, afterward, to replace it, to fill in the small hole it left, with a bit of the spare nothing lying so close at hand.

The nothing. A nothing. Nothing.

I hummed to myself. Nothing, by Philip Nothing and the Nothings. Sung to the tune of Nothing. Nothing with a bullet. Ten weeks at the top of the nothing charts.

Nothing’s greatest hits.

Supernothing. Hypernothing. Cryptonothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Goo goo ga joob.

I sent—and received—a nothing-gram. Some N-mail.

Then, unexpectedly, there came a variation in the nothing. A ripple, a flaw. A breach in the nothing. A small lack of nothing. Something. A sheet of paper, actually.

The edge of a sheet of paper was poking into the nothing. It was imminent and real. Undeniable. It poked right into the center of the nothing, which, because it wasn’t anything, couldn’t really compete, and was quickly displaced by the triumphantly real and distinct paper.

Since I was the nothing, and extended as far as the nothing did, and had the same center, the paper poked very directly into me, into my self-satisfied nothingness. The paper irked me. It was irritating. It itched. It ruined the nothing. Oh, if I had a choice between paper and nothing I would certainly choose nothing! Nothing was fuller. Nothing had depth and truth and gravity. But I wasn’t being given the choice.

Then I noticed that the paper had something written on it.

DID YOU TAKE PHILIP?

Did you take Philip. I read it over and over, incredulous. Did, you, take, Philip. Unmistakable.

This piece of paper was trying to prod me into admitting, if only to myself, that there had been something called Philip once. The question was meant for me, no doubt about that. I mean, here it was. It had been tossed over the transom of my nothing and had landed square in my eye. It wanted a reply.

Did I take Philip? Take how? Like a drug? Was I able to take him, withstand him, endure him? Well, barely. Or take away. Yes, that was it, of course. Did I take Philip away. So this was a message from the place I had been. Where, since I was here—despite, needless to say, being nothing here—I no longer was. Hey, I was nothing here, and I wasn’t there! Nothing in both places! Delightful.

But the first place was protesting. Or at least making a polite inquiry. It deserved an answer.

Yes, I thought, trying it on for size. Sure. I suppose I did. He came with me when I left. Of course, at that point he was most of me, was in fact the whole of me, and I—the nothing speaking to you now—was just a hint or potentiality in him. A foreshadowing. But yes, I took him. Really, you could have him back, except I don’t know where he’s gone. I’ve lost him.

But take him? Sure. That was me.

Thinking it, my eye opened. My one wide eye, looking out into the chamber. The fluorescent fixture curved away overhead, the steel table peeled away underneath. Soft, in his lab coat and goggle-eyed glasses, peered in curiously at me as I made the paper disappear.

I’d replaced Lack at his spot on the table.

Soft compressed his lips, and slicked back a thatch of black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He backed away from my fish-eye window on the world and leaned over another slip of paper at the far end of the table. He was sweating like a schoolboy cheating on an exam. This was a clandestine visit. He was here against his own better counsel. He was afraid some colleague or janitor would catch him here, resorting to primitive, unscientific methods. He looked tired. He needed a haircut.

Eyes wide, he put down his pen, and pushed another slip forward with pinched fingers. The message rolled into view under my eye.

ARE YOU CLOSING UP NOW?

Am I closing up now.

Well, heck. Why not? I could see—if I hadn’t known it already—that it was Soft’s fondest wish. I saw it in the pensive corners of his mouth, saw it written into the lines of his brow. I, mere nothing, could make a being of flesh and blood happy. He just needed the right answer. So, okay. I’m closing up, sure. I took the paper out of his trembling hand. His rabbity eyes lit up with hope. He wanted to believe. Wanted Lack to go away, badly. I knew the feeling. I could empathize.

Happy now, Soft got up from the table. He swept the remaining slips into his pocket and snuck away. Leaving me alone, to stare through my porthole at the chamber, from this new vantage point. I’d never noticed the irregular line of foam insulation that sealed the top of the door frame, for instance, or the dangling, bare-copper cables protruding from the wall.

I would make Soft happy, I decided. I’d refuse everything. Let the students come and shoot particles in my eye. I’d say no forever. Let them shove objects across the table. I’d let them all flop over the edge. I’d leave every flavor untasted, leave every form, however nubile, unmolested. Soft and his students would establish, by process of elimination, that I’d closed up, set my jaw. I could see the press conference. It wouldn’t be particularly well attended. The ends of things aren’t news. Soft would have a gleam in his eye. He’d announce that the Lack era was over. The riddle is never to be answered. Soft would act sorry, but to anyone who knew him he’d appear relieved. He would promise a final report. It would be published quietly, during a lull in the academic year, in some marginal journal.

Then they would stop coming, I realized. I’d be forgotten. They’d put the chamber to some other use.

Maybe Soft’s happiness would have to be sacrificed. Lack would bloom again. I’d yawn wide and swallow everything. A bobsled, a trench coat, a Spanish onion, a muffler, a spiny lobster, a footrest, a conveyor belt, a neon sign, a disposable jumpsuit, a pecan pie, a traffic island, a third baseman, a coal mine, a blizzard, a waterfall, a convention. I’d open my happy idiotic jaws wide and take all comers. Take laughter, take childhood, take love. I’d take all that and anything else. I’d show them all. Braxia, and Soft, and De Tooth, and especially Alice. I’d take all this stuff and make a world of it. I’d make a theme park, a garden of earthly delights. Soft would be like Old Man McGurkus, whose vacant lot was host to the mighty Circus McGurkus. He’d become involuntary St. Peter to this paradise. Forced by popular acclaim to open the gates and allow the thronging millions, the vast millions who would certainly assemble, the entry they demanded. And I’d admit them all, one by one. They’d bounce across the table gleefully, like people escaping a burning airplane on inflatable slides. I’d even take Cynthia Jalter, show her a coupling she’d never dreamed of. I’d depopulate the tired earth. All except Braxia, and Soft, and De Tooth. And especially Alice. I’d leave them there, alone together, staring into the invisible doorway, pining, embittered. Maybe then, one at a time, I’d relent, admit Braxia, then Soft, then finally De Tooth, but never, never—

At that moment the door to the chamber opened.

I expected Soft again, with another nervous question in block letters to offer me. But it wasn’t Soft. It was Alice. She’d come back from wherever she’d been. Had she heard about my disappearance? I couldn’t know. Maybe she’d just slipped onto campus and come straight here. She looked thin and tired. Her short hair was stiff, at odd angles from her head, as though she’d slept on it wet. Her eyes were rimmed with red. But her expression was calm. Her left hand was still heavily bandaged. I watched, hypnotized by her presence. She carefully and quietly closed the door behind her, then stepped up to the edge of the table and began to undress. She struggled at first, with her injured hand, to loosen the laces of her shoes, to undo the buttons of her shirt, to shrug out of her bra, but soon enough she stood completely naked in the chamber. The tendons in her neck were tensed, but her mouth was slightly open. Her breasts were goose-pimpled, nipples erect in the cool air. She put her bandaged hand onto the table and winced. Pulled it away. Slid up backward instead, lifting her buttocks, one, two, onto the cold table, then squirmed to face me, her damaged hand cradled beneath her, her good arm straining as she held herself up. I saw her eyes then, as she came across, and they were clear, and full of love.