As She Climbed Across the Table

5

Alice and I had sex that night. For a long time afterward we didn’t talk. The bedroom was dark and cool. Light leaked in from the hall and outlined our bodies in the darkness as we lay still, sweating where we overlapped, goose-pimpled where we didn’t. The quiet was rich with things unsaid.

We didn’t speak of Soft’s experiment, the breach or portal. We didn’t mention the blind men, or Alice’s dream of a perfect, sightless physicist.

Soon Alice was falling asleep, and I wasn’t. I heard the air flutter between her lips.

“Alice.”

“Philip?”

“Where do I stop and you begin?”

She hesitated. “You mean what is the cut-off point?”

“I mean if you went away what would be left of me?”

“I’m not going away.” Her voice was very quiet.

“But answer anyway.”

“All of you would be left,” she said. “None of me. I would be gone and you would still be here.”

I could tell she wanted to sleep. But it was as though letting her sleep tonight was the same as losing her.

“You complete me,” I said. “I’m not sure I really exist, except under your observation.”

She didn’t say anything.

“If you left me,” I said, “you’d take so much of me with you that I’d be inside you, looking back at what was left—the husk of Philip Engstrand we’d abandoned.”

She stared at me across the pillow. “That’s actually beautiful,” she said.

“So when I feel distance between us it’s like there’s something wrong between me and myself. I feel a gulf in myself.”

Alice closed her eyes. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

“No?” I said.

“I was up all night. I have to sleep. That’s all.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just—”

“Philip, stop, please.”

I held her while she cried. When her body stopped trembling, she was asleep.