As She Climbed Across the Table

“I’m glad we got this time to talk.”

“Yes.”

We all smiled. Our packet of heads was happy now, normalized, made like the others around it, the tittering bunches. The women nodded and smiled. They would permit us to crawl away. I signaled to Soft, who grinned and raised his drink, lifting it into the bridge of hair that connected him to Ms. Abracadabra. As he backed away, stripping the hair from his sweater, several strands slid across his arm and through the drink, falling back into place beaded with eggnog.

I grunted my way back to the bar, Soft at my heel. We found a spot there, an empty pocket, and lodged ourselves.

“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” I said. I handed our cups to my student for refilling.

“Things went wrong?” said Soft.

“A little wrong, yes.”

He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know if I agree one hundred percent with what she was saying. About Alice and Lack.”

I handed him his cup. “I didn’t believe a word of it,” I said.

“Good. Because, really.”

“Exactly. We’re in complete agreement.”

“Good, good.”

“But she was very forceful,” I said. “Very, uh, compelling.”

“Yes,” said Soft. He lowered his eyes, looking glum and intense. Overhead a gong sounded, and a horrific voice said, “Open, sesame!” Soft and I both drank furiously. We were alienated from each other, our plan to tip the party on its ear in tatters. My other plans loomed, dangerously close.

“Philip?”

“Yes?”

“Is it true what you said? That you and Alice have been separated for months? That it’s ancient history?”

“Yes and no.”

Soft nodded. Even drunk he was too polite to ask more. We stood in silence. I felt the alcohol numbing the flesh of my face, making my tongue fat and cloddish, blurring my vision. The music pounded through me from the floor. If I gritted my teeth I could feel the beat in my jaw. Possibly the music was eroding my teeth. I slackened my jaw to protect them.

“So,” I said, changing the subject, sort of. “No more Lack.”

“That’s right.” I’d reminded Soft of his happiness. He grinned.

“So you’re rid of us now. The Lack people.”

Soft frowned. “I didn’t say that, Philip.”

“No, it’s true. We’re always throwing ourselves at him. We’re an embarrassment.”

Soft crinkled up his face. He leaned in to whisper, but his voice warbled. And we swayed, our heads dipping together like a doo-wop group, the Satins or Royales. “To tell you the truth, Philip, I tried it myself. I don’t know why. I guess I thought that since I created him I should be the one. He should take me. But it didn’t work.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Soon it’ll all be a bad dream.”

“Braxia tried too,” I said. I silently tried to count the table jumpers. “He told me. And De Tooth. I caught him at it.”

Soft raised his eyebrows. Giggled. “I guess everybody’s tried it.”

“Yes.”

This was quite funny, and we laughed for a good long time. Then Soft got hushed and conspiratorial again.

“Did you try?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I lied.

We laughed a bit more, slapping at parts of our own and each other’s bodies.

“Let’s go find some more women,” I said.

Soft’s face reenacted Terran evolution, from early carbon stages up through Nobel Prize–winning physicists. “Okay,” he said when he was finished. “But I just realized just now that I have to use the bathroom very badly. Very suddenly. I’m very sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. “Do what you do. Have to.”

“Are you coming?”

“No, I’ll here. Stay.”

He handed me his drink and fled. I hoped he could find the bathroom in time. The way the room was bucking it wouldn’t be easy. I had trouble even standing in one place, with only two legs for support. How flimsy they were. I recalled that mountain climbers never lifted more than one of four limbs from the earth. Always kept three planted. I wondered why this rule didn’t apply generally. It was so reasonable. But I was hemmed in by people I didn’t recognize. No one to hand a drink to, no way to free a third limb and apply this sensible, obvious rule.

I had no choice. I finished the smaller of the two drinks I held, slid the full cup into the empty one, then knelt to plant my free hand on the floor.

Much better. The floor was the way to go. It was cooler and quieter there, in the well of bodies. A whole new world. Dark and clever and strange. Nobody seemed to miss me, up above. Or if they did they were too polite to mention it.

How easy it was to disappear. Nothing to be afraid of.

Drink seekers swarmed around me, jostling me away from the bar, toward the undifferentiated middle of the party. I shuffled with them in a crouch, my knees bobbing in front of my chin, my drink held aloft like a flag, marking my column of space, my other hand on the floor, a rudder. The costumed waitress passed over me, her tray darkening my patch of sky. I saw now that she wore a fluffy tail. I followed her, scooting in my crouch, fixing her calves in my sights like a driver behind a distinctive truck on a dull highway. Then she dropped the empty tray to her side, nearly dashing it against my forehead, and slipped away. I was stranded. “The point about my dream,” said a man above me, “is that every woman who kissed me and died went straight to heaven. Immortal life. The happy hunting ground.”

I scooted off to an empty spot and drank the last of the eggnog. I wanted to stand again. I had things to do up there, an agenda. The party was supposed to be my farewell to the human realm. The floor was too marginal. I put the cup aside and rubbed my hands together, mixing dust and eggnog. The moment was right. I stood up. Or tried to. My knees unfolded horizontally, and I lurched onto my hands and knees, my face pressed into fishnet thighs. Female thighs, naked behind fishnet.

“Hello,” someone said.

I’d catapulted myself into the midst of a group of tall, attractive women, judging by the legs. The newly formed emasculation department, possibly. I was on my hands and knees in what I could only call their midst.

There was one pair of pinstriped pants in the cage of legs otherwise made up of fishnet, sheen, or goose- pimpled, neatly shaved flesh. Pinstriped pants worn by vastly shorter legs. The waist of the pants was at the level of the women’s knees. Thus a tiny man. Or massive women.

“Do you know him?” said a woman.

I stood, rising on my wobbly knees like the Indian rope trick. The pinstriped legs were Georges De Tooth. I towered over him. The women were a variety of ordinary sizes. They smiled and blinked at me. Students. A gaggle. De Tooth frowned at me from beneath his wig, eyes steely, jaw set. He was drinking something clear over ice.

“Georges,” I said.

He flared his tiny nostrils. His entire face looked like it was machine-tooled. He lifted his drink to his lips and tipped it back, without opening his mouth. Maybe he just wanted to rinse his lips before speaking. I smiled. He didn’t smile back. He got up on tiptoe and whispered, or mimed whispering, into the ear of the woman at his right. She laughed and rolled her eyes. Then, by some mysterious process, all the women began laughing and rolling their eyes, and then they all went away to another part of the room, leaving me alone with De Tooth.

“I’m Soft,” I said. “With. He’ll be anytime now. Along.”