As She Climbed Across the Table

3

I woke in the grip of a terrifying dream, involving tribesmen, clouds of dust, my answering machine. I was actually on a cot in the curved hallway outside the Cauchy-space lab. Alone. Finding myself in the bowels of the chilly, humming complex was stranger than the dream, and worse. It was like I’d been sleeping in the safe of a sunken ocean liner.

I’d fallen asleep at four in the morning. Professor Soft’s inflationary universe had still been perversely refusing to perform. The bubble wouldn’t detach. I’d gotten bored waiting and climbed onto one of the cots. Now I heard Alice’s voice inside the observation room.

I went inside. The floor of the lab was littered with wax paper, empty pint containers, and crumpled printouts. The physicists had mostly curled on cots, or slumped home. Only a few remained, sore-eyed, waiting. Soft was scribbling notes at his portable workbench. His graduate student was still at his side. The pixels oscillated serenely overhead. Alice stood where I’d left her. How long had I slept?

I took her hand. “What time is it?” I whispered.

“Out here it’s eight-thirty,” she said. “Inside the Cauchy-space it’s still six yesterday. Time collapsed around the bubble event.”

“Did it happen?”

“The wormhole dilated,” she said.

“That’s good.”

Alice shook her head, still watching the screen. “It sounds good, but it isn’t actually good. The bubble may actually have detached, as planned. But there shouldn’t be an aneurysm.”

“A wound?” I said.

“A hole.”

“What does it mean?”

Alice shook her head.

“Is Soft very upset?”

“Look at his student.”

I looked. It was true. Soft was a pillar of strength, but his graduate student was a mess, hair matted with nervous sweat, eyes shrunken from weeping. I looked up at the screen, and tried to make out the aneurysm. I couldn’t see anything. The physicist in me was a blind, stunted thing.

I held Alice’s cool hand and watched her watching the screen. She still couldn’t spare a look to meet my eyes, couldn’t tear herself from the impossibly boring experiment.

“Alice.” I squeezed her hand.

She turned and kissed me. A small, measured kiss that landed on the edge of my mouth.

I put my thumbs under her eyes, where the flesh was gray and tender, and kissed her again.

“You have a class,” she said.

“There’s time to have breakfast.”

She looked up at the screen, then down at the floor. I could tell she didn’t want to talk here. “I have to stay,” she said.

“This is important?”

“Very.”

I smiled, but I wasn’t happy. I wanted Philip to be playing on her screen now.

In the corner several physicists had gathered at Soft’s desk, drinking at his murmured explanations like animals at a desert hole. Alice saw me looking and turned. She obviously wanted to join them.

I put my hands in her hair, and gently tilted her head to mine.

“I’ll call you after your class,” she whispered.

“Okay.”

“I do want to see you.”

“I know.”

“I have to see this through. It’s how I am. I like to be on the edge of the territory.”

“The horizon of the real,” I whispered.

Alice and I were the same size. We displaced the same amount of air. But when we embraced she became elusive and darting, like a remora fish. When I held her I imagined that I could crane my neck and kiss the small of her back, or reach around to clasp my own shoulders in my hands.

“Okay,” I said. “Call me after class.”

“You’ll be at the apartment?”

I nodded. “I’ll be defrosting something.”

“I’ll call you.”

“With a bubble update. I’m genuinely interested.”

We detached. She joined the confluence at Soft’s desk. I felt a rustle of jealousy, but couldn’t fix it to a target. It blurred and vanished.

As I came up out of the gray, timeless physics facility, into the nine o’clock light of campus, my heart lightened. I should have been exhausted, but I felt like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. I had an edge on the bleary students on the grass-fringed paths. I alone knew of the aneurysm, the puckered bubble that lurked below. Here windows in white clapboard buildings squeaked open to admit the light, here the groundsmen plucked rubbish off the vast, waking lawns, here freshmen blinked away Zima hangovers. For them another day, but I knew time had stopped in its place.

A new universe. I pictured it twisting away from this one, kicking free of the umbilical wormhole in Soft’s lab. The notion shed an odd, fresh light on the morning, on the twittering birds overhead, the chalk-slash of cloud, the student-council election flyers taped everywhere. Maybe this was the new universe, and Soft’s monster had sucked away all staleness to the far ends of the galaxy.

Vowing to impart some hint of this vision in my lecture, I skipped toward the cafeteria, for a breakfast of Team, or Total.