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.
Acclaim for Jonathan Lethem’s
“A bravura send-up of academic foibles.”
“[It] has the disorienting quality of a fourth-dimension dream on a three-dimensional bed, interrupted by comic, down-to-earth rousings.”
“Entertaining, intelligently constructed, mind-bending.”
“Bittersweet and often hilarious.”
“Crisp, ecstatic chapters and wonderfully likable characters make this parody of academia wickedly fun.”
“An extraordinary, fresh piece of fiction.”
“Readers are destined to fall in love with both Alice and Lethem’s sentences as they embrace in this comic, cosmic novel.”
“Never afraid to tweak genre, Jonathan Lethem is one of the most inventive writers in America.”
About the Author
Jonathan Lethem is the author of the novels
Books by Jonathan Lethem
