As She Climbed Across the Table

De Tooth didn’t say anything, just stared. His eyes were firing a continuous stream of protons, neutrons, and positrons at me. I felt them spilling over the numb flesh of my face. It felt good, actually.

“Lack is closing up,” I said, ordering the words carefully. “Did you hear?”

De Tooth almost smiled. He said nothing.

“Soft tried to go in too,” I said. I figured De Tooth was angry at me for walking in on his own attempt. “Everybody tried. It just doesn’t work, apparently.” Then I remembered the blind men. I decided not to mention them. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway, since he’s closing up.”

Nothing from De Tooth. He stared, holding his drink. Gnawing slightly behind his closed lips. As if on a pipe.

“So it’s all over, I guess,” I said. “The whole Lack thing. Or the whole Alice thing. I guess you could call it one of any other number of things. Any one of another. One of any other number. The Soft thing. The De Tooth thing. I guess nobody would call it the Engstrand thing. That’s not right. Probably it’s accurate to call it the Lack thing. Anyway, it’s over.”

De Tooth crossed his arms, his drink dangling underneath. He narrowed his eyes, studying me. The pipe was coming into focus now. There was definitely an imaginary pipe involved in his stance, his whole attitude.

“I’ve been taking a look at some other projects,” I said. “Now that we’ve got this Lack thing off our plates. I’ve got a few ideas that might interest you. So we could fire up the old collaborative thing again.”

Nothing from De Tooth. But I was rolling now.

“For instance, how about this: unifying the disciplines, the various modes of cognition, by smashing thought itself in the particle accelerator. Subjecting it to fantastic pressure and seeing what sort of basic components fly out of the collision. You and me, Georges. I think it could be big. Real big. I don’t want to be the one to say it, Georges, but N.P., you know? N. Prize. You read me? Do I have to spell it out? N-o-b Prize, Georges. I think you know what I mean. You finish it, Georges. What are the missing letters?”

Stony silence. Dartlike eyes. Imaginary pipe.

“Okay, Georges. I get the picture. I see. You’re going to do the easy thing. Stand back and watch while I self-destruct. This is fun for you, I guess. Being Mr. Big Guy. It’s your revenge. You come to a party and surround yourself with titanic women and refuse to speak to me. All because I know your secret. I know that you climb up on tables and hurl yourself at voids.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry, Georges. God, I’m sorry. You have to forgive me. I’m not myself.”

He studied me. The party flickered on around us, an alcoholic nightmare.

“I had a plan. I had it mapped out. I thought when I found someone like Alice I would know what to do. My plan was a failure, Georges. It didn’t work.”

De Tooth was the vortex of the party, the still, small presence at the center.

“I lied to you, Georges. I didn’t try. Lack, I mean. I haven’t yet. I don’t know. He might take me. I want to find out while there’s still time. Before he closes up. I have to know if she loves me.”

The tiny man pursed his lips.

“I’m hinting at something dangerous, Georges. More than hinting. Aren’t you going to try to stop me? This could be a cry for help. I’m not sure. I’m asking your opinion, Georges. Does it sound like I should be talked out of it? Talk me out of it, Georges.”

Invisible clouds of imaginary pipe smoke rising up into the green and blue lights.

“You don’t think he’ll take me, do you? So you’re not worried.”

Nothing. Behind him, dancing had started, frenzied, primitive, spasmodic. The literature professor had taken off her T-shirt. Soft was talking to the tall, knock-kneed woman from admissions, his head enclosed in her hair.

“I’m not feeling well, Georges. I think I’ll go outside and some fresh air. Get. Thanks for listening.”

“My pleasure,” said De Tooth. He put his left pinky into his ear and turned it slowly three times, like a third- base coach signaling for a steal. Then he marched away with tiny, metronome-precise steps. A vortex slipping away. Leaving me in charge. A mistake. I was less well-equipped in terms of silence and enigma. The larger chaos of the party matched the chaos inside me. I was a storm at the eye of the storm.

I stood teetering for a minute, almost sick. Then I stumbled through the crowd of dancers, to the door, and out under the tilt of stars, into the shockingly cold night.

Where, moving again and again through clouds of my own breath, I trekked up the frozen hill to the physics facility.

35

I used the elevator to descend.

The lights inside Lack’s chamber were already on. They were always on. A stage always set, where nothing ever actually happened. There wasn’t any sound, apart from a ringing in my ears and the hum of sleeping machines.

I shut the door behind me. Lack’s table glowed in the spotlight, and my drunken eyes contributed a blurry halo. The room had been professionally cleaned. There was no sign of blood.

Lack was abandoned, I realized. Braxia was gone. The students were partying, or already headed home for Christmas. It was Alice’s shift, but Alice had fled. Soft had turned his back. Soft was so happy Lack was vanishing that he was pretending it had already happened. Lack had been spoiled with attention, but now he would wither and die alone. I might be his last visitor.

I circled the table drunkenly, squinting into the glare. I was killing time. I think I expected Braxia to appear, the way he always did, and pull me away from the threshold. But Braxia was on a plane, over an ocean. Nobody was going to stop me. Nobody had even seen me leave the party.

Do what you have to do. Those were Alice’s words.

I circled the table, hypnotizing myself. I was a question mark in orbit around an answer. I felt the urge to speak, but whom would I be addressing? Alice, or Lack? The two had canceled each other out, become one, then zero. There was nothing on the table, nothing at all, except it was a nothing that somehow included Alice and Lack, and a nothing that I wanted to include me, too. Lack was a hole that had sucked away my love by refusing to suck it away, a nullity. Now I wanted to be nullified.

Do what you have to do.

So I climbed up onto the table. It was so simple. I would be the first lover in history to receive an absolute answer, a yes or no notarized as cosmic fact. I gripped the sides of the table and vaulted up, first on my knees, then flat on my stomach. Or almost flat. I had an erection. It was rock-hard and almost insensate. Some part of me had mistaken this for a sexual event. I ignored it. I held the table tight and slid myself forward, until my weight was centered just inches from the line that signified Lack’s boundary. I tucked my legs underneath my stomach, making myself a human bullet, and reached for the far edge of the table. Then I closed my eyes and pulled myself through, across the boundary, into Lack, and beyond the edge of the table, to tumble onto the floor of the chamber.

I landed on my hands, and flopped over backward, flat on my back, my head under the table. Like Wile E. Coyote tricked over the edge of a cliff in a defective Acme parachute. But there wasn’t even a sound effect, or a cloud of dust. My impact went unrecorded. One small step for nothing, one giant leap for nobody. The floor was cold. The physics facility ignored me, humming. My erection slackened. I felt it untwist from my undershorts. My head rang. When I opened my eyes my visual field was spattered with phosphenes, like a bad action painting. I closed my eyes.

Do what you have to do.

So I passed out there on the floor in an alcoholic swoon, until morning.