As She Climbed Across the Table

“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.

4

The phone in our apartment was portable, and it was too nice a day to sit and wait for it to ring indoors. I set it out on the patio. I brought along iced tea and a book I knew I didn’t want to read. But as soon as I sat down I heard voices, odd voices, at the front of the building.

“We’ve been here before,” said the first voice.

“This is the place,” said the second.

“We’re three blocks from the pay phone,” said the first.

“Correction,” said the second. “Four blocks from the bus stop.”

“The pay phone and the bus stop are two blocks apart.”

“I think we’re speaking of two different pay phones.”

“There’s only one pay phone. I mean, we only speak of one pay phone.”

“Correction. Today is Tuesday. On Tuesday evenings we see Cynthia Jalter. We change buses. The second pay phone is two blocks from the transfer point. On Tuesday there are two pay phones.”

“You mean on Tuesday we speak of two pay phones.”

“Right. Today is Tuesday. We are currently three blocks from the pay phone and five blocks from the pay phone. What time is it?”

There was a long pause.

“Four-thirty-seven,” said the second voice. “Check your watch.”

“Four-thirty-seven,” said the first.

“Good. We’re on time. This is the place.”

“Yes, we’ve been here before. Shall we ring the bell?”

“Do you want to do it?”

“All right.”

Again, a long silence. Finally, the doorbell. I stayed put. I couldn’t imagine that these comedians had any real business on our doorstep.

“No answer,” said the second voice.

“Are we late?”

A pause. “It’s four-thirty-eight. This is the right time. Is it the right place?”

“It’s the right place. We’ve been here before. We walked from the bus stop.”

“Where is Miss Coombs?”

“Correction. Professor Coombs.”

“Is she late?”

“We might be early. What time is it?”

Now I got out of my deck chair. I wanted to break the loop of their talk, save all three of us from going through any more of it.

“Hello,” I said, as I rounded the corner of the building. Then, seeing them, I stopped and shut up. At the door stood two blind men, one black, one white, both in wrinkled black two-piece suits, both with canes. They turned their heads as I arrived, not to face me with their useless eyes, but to cock their ears, like German shepherds.

The blindness explained the lag reading watches and ringing doorbells, and some of the oddness of their talk.

“Hello,” answered the black man, who’d been the first voice. “Could you tell us if this is where Professor Coombs resides?”

I had them wait inside while I collected the telephone from the patio. Our apartment was simple enough: two bedrooms off a central kitchen and living room, divided by a counter. They inhabited it like oversize windup toys, scuttling into corners and rebounding to meet in the middle, canes dueling. They ran their hands everywhere, mapping frantically, too frantically. I eventually had to lead them each to the couch, though they’d both touched it more than once in their survey.

“We’re roommates,” explained the white man, the second voice. “I’m Evan Robart.”

“Philip Engstrand,” I said, and took his hand.

“Garth Poys,” said the other. I tugged free of one handshake and entered another.

“Alice should be back soon,” I said. “Can I offer either of you a drink?”

“No,” said Evan Robart. “I had something to drink before I left the house.”

“We both did,” said Garth Poys.

“We’re here to talk to Professor Coombs about an experiment,” Evan said. “It involves Garth.”

“I apparently possess blindsight,” said Garth. “Not that it’s doing me much good.” He delivered this like the