recognized a lot of the faces. The physicists might have overestimated Lack’s sex appeal. Alice sat up on the dais, sipping water and paging through her notes, unperturbable, wrapped in silence. Soft was beside her, his legs crossed, pants hitched up awkwardly to reveal spindly ankles, his expression distant. The momentum in the department belonged to Alice now. Soft was just a token, a reminder of the Prize that could be had.
The lights dimmed. Alice stepped up to the podium, waiting for the crowd to fall silent, and introduced herself and Soft. Then she explained, in lucid detail, the sequence that had led to the discovery and naming of Lack. Soft’s venture, the false vacuum bubble. The aneurysm. The gravity event. The audience followed her closely.
My attention wandered. I was busy righting myself. It was useful, seeing Alice at a fixed distance, so far away. She was up there, and I was over here, she was apparently intact—maybe I was intact, too. So I sat and adjusted my own vertical hold after a week of spinning.
Alice went on to describe the state of the experiment—Lack’s gradual stabilization, and the conversion of the chamber from Cauchy-space to earth-normal. “Lack’s tastes make up his being,” she said. “His preference for certain particles is all there is to him. If he stops choosing he stops existing.” She described the attempt to define his exact boundaries, the array of detectors, meters, and photosensitive plates they had aimed at this hint, this tenuous invisible presence.
The audience applauded politely when she was done. Alice nodded her thanks and went to sit beside Soft, to field questions from the crowd.
The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.
“Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.
It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.
I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.
“It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The
Some instinct led me to pause. I let the microphone drop to my waist. The audience looked up at Alice and Soft, searching their faces for response.
I am the Lorax, I thought. I speak for the trees.
“I have to question the assumption that Lack’s preference is for particles, in and of themselves,” I continued. “Why do we assume that our visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H’s to M’s. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose? Bebop or swing? I think we’re leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we’re—pardon me—failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror.”
My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallow it, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. For that’s when I played my part, with Soft and Alice, in our collective Dr. Frankenstein. That was how I conspired in the creation of my own monstrous rival, my personal Stanley Toothbrush.
Would it have occurred without my help? I’ll never know. But until then I’d been passive, a victim of fate. Now I was as much to blame as anyone.
11
The next day the microactivity detectors were dismantled, and the proton gun wheeled away. In their place a small lab table was rolled up to the bottom edge of Lack’s particle strike zone. Otherwise Lack was left bare. Alice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.
The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side.
Alice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile on the other side of the table, and each item clattered to the lab floor, refused.
Alice went and gathered her belongings. One was missing. She searched the floor, frisked herself, reloaded her pockets, conducted an inventory. It was nowhere.
Lack had gobbled the key to our apartment.
12
In the weeks that followed it was as impossible to avoid updates on Lack’s tastes as it was to catch a glimpse of Alice. Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter’s helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck’s egg, fertilized, refused a duck’s egg, scrambled.
Some items were measured, weighed, evaluated, before going over Lack’s table. Others were just giddily tossed across. Nobody understood Lack’s system for choosing. He was consistent in never accepting something previously refused. Electric beater-blades tumbled off the table nine days in a row. He was inconsistent in sometimes growing bored with a previously favored item. The lists in the campus paper, under the heading
Everyone had a theory. We were all physicists now, thanks to Lack. Anyone could win the Prize—at least until the following morning, when some contradicting item was consumed. Lack seemed to have a fondness for disproving each new system of prediction at his first chance, as though theories themselves were to his taste.
Life went on. Pumpkins were purchased, mutilated, and left to rot on porches and windowsills. The team lost the Big Game. My hair grew out. Alice, living as she was “on the edge of the territory,” was excused from teaching, and a graduate student took over her classes.
I missed her, terribly. I yearned, heart big and tender as a ripe eggplant. At the same time I played at indifference, my heart squeezed small and hard as an uncooked chestnut. The day she strolled into my office I felt my heart opt for chestnut size.
Her expression was gentle, her hair mussed into a halo. She took a seat across from me at my desk. I leaned back and compressed my lips, pretending she was a remiss student.
She looked past me to the bookshelves, the tattered notices and rusty thumbtacks that littered the walls. “I remember this office.”
“You never came here,” I said.
“I remember it. I sat here, you sat there.”
