As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  The students who were only curious littered the fringes, exchanging disinformation. I pushed past them, to the front. The most defiant and outraged protesters were clustered under a bed-sheet banner, unreadable except in fragments. UNIVERSITY, DOLLARS, RESPONSIBLE, DEATH. I threaded my way deeper into the crowd, to the base of the microphones. The grass under my feet was already torn.

  The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman’s shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

  “We’re obligated to demand an answer, to question this thing in our midst now. By all appearances it’s a rampant scientific development, and we have to develop some consciousness, some overview, because it isn’t being provided. We have the responsibility to ask some questions.”

  He stopped and peered out over his audience.

  “The Lack is just a raping, uh, gaping rent in the fabric of the universe. It’s been opened up right under our feet. The scientists can’t even agree on it, there’s disagreement in the scientific community, yet the experiments just go on. I for one think that maybe it’s time we said wait a minute, let’s have a serious look at this thing, decide what we have on our hands here, before we go throwing any more cats into it!”

  Jeers of support from the crowd.

  “The earth is just a small oasis in an endless desert of nothingness,” he went on, encouraged. “We don’t need more nothingness here on earth. There’s plenty in outer space. If they want to study the Lack they don’t have to bring it here to our campus.”

  “Send Lack back where he came from!” someone shouted from behind me.

  “We want to send a message,” said the student at the microphone. “We want to establish a forum where these issues can be properly debated. If the scientific community can’t provide oversight in this case we’ll be happy to provide it for them. We want to examine the Lack and any other development in the light of appropriate human values. That’s all we ask.”

  Suddenly there was a bustling behind the banner. Some kind of confrontation. The student at the microphone turned, and the public-address system issued a whine of feedback.

  “What’s going to happen, Professor Engstrand?” said a voice directly behind me.

  I turned. The voice belonged to one of my students. I couldn’t remember his name.

  “It’s the authorities, isn’t it?” he said. “The science police.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Alice and her graduate student appeared at the microphone, looking small and out of place. Hardly the science police. Alice’s student conferred with the protest leaders while Alice stood, gazing blankly over the crowd. She looked like a thing dragged unwillingly into the light. The brightness of the day was on the side of the protesters, and the cat.

  Alice stepped up to the microphone, sweeping the hair back from her eyes. She didn’t see me.

  “I’d like to say a few things,” she said. “This is a misunderstanding. You’re creating a false dichotomy, something and nothing, life and entropy, the cat and Lack. We’ve been granted a chance to transcend those old distinctions. The void is making a gesture, trying to establish contact with life, trying to communicate with us. It would be tragic to turn down the offer. Lack is where life and entropy can reconcile their differences—”

  The crowd began to boo.

  You don’t understand, I wanted to tell her. They’re afraid. They’re not like you, Alice. Not drawn to the void. They want insulation.

  “Knowledge is very precious,” she went on, quavering, defiant. She was playing the weakest card of a losing hand. “As precious as any living thing—”

  She was drowned out in the booing, and though she went on I couldn’t make it out. The group behind her tried to retake the microphone. I shouldered my way to the front, got a footing on the nubby hillock where the microphone rested, and hoisted myself into the public eye.

  I planted myself at the microphone and squinted out into the crowd, and past them, to the oblivious Frisbee throwers on the sun-drenched lawn. I was quiet for a long moment. I let authority gather on me like a crown.

  “The universe is always swallowing cats,” I said finally. “It’s forever swallowing cats. There’s nothing new here.” I let a weariness creep into my voice, a tone I knew was infectious. “To protest it like this, in isolation … well, it’s an act of enormous irrelevance. I’m touched, actually. There’s a futile beauty to this gathering. Pick a death at random, come out in force.”

  Someone coughed.

  “But it’s a poor choice. There’s a real confusion of symbolism here. Science, death, dollars. Lack isn’t any of those things. Lack is a mistake, a backfire. He wasn’t predicted, he’s irksome. No military application. He’s the human face poking back up out of the void, a pie in the face of physics. He’s mixed up, he can’t make up his mind. He likes pomegranates, except when he doesn’t. My friends, Lack is here to help you take science less seriously.”

  The protest evaporated. The mob began to chatter, then wander away. Even as the students drifted off I felt their gratitude toward me. I’d relieved them of their unmanageable crusade. They could get back to skipping class.

  I turned and saw Alice walking toward the entrance of the physics facility.

  I chased her. She disappeared through the doors, but I caught her at the elevator, tapping impatiently at down.

  “Alice.” I was a little drunk with myself. “Alice, wait.”

  She stood facing the elevator.

  I was panting. “Don’t I deserve some thanks?” I said. “I did it. I broke up the lynch mob. Like Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln.”

  She turned to me. Her expression was furious. “You want to make Lack yours,” she said. “You think if you describe him he’ll suddenly belong to you. Just like everything else.”

  The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. I stared, struck dumb.

  “But this time you’re wrong,” she said. “Lack is mine.” The doors closed over her ravaged face.

  I paced campus until dark, then stalked back to the apartment. When I saw the blind men were home I got into my car and drove off campus, found a bar, and deliberately had a drink with a woman.

  An interesting woman, as it happened. She was dark-haired and tall, with a penetrating gaze and a smile that didn’t show her teeth. She was sitting alone, sheltering a glass of red wine. I told her my name was Dale Overling, and asked if I could sit at her table. She said yes.

  “You’re not from the campus,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Not affiliated.”

  “No.”

  “Not a graduate of the school.”

  “No. No connection.”

  “You can’t imagine how that turns me on.”

  “Buy me a drink.”

  The bar was tame and suburban, a fifties cocktail lounge not yet refurbished by student irony. It was nearly empty, a weekend place on a weeknight. I’d picked it for its distance from campus. But when I flagged the waitress it was a girl I recognized, a dizzy undergraduate, costumed in a yellow apron. Her eyes met mine and I froze her with a look of dread, willing her not to blow my cover.

  “Take this wine away,” I said. “Bring us drinks. Margaritas, salt on the glass. Bring us six of them. Line them up on the table.”

  “I can bring you a pitcher.”

  “I want a line of drinks. I want to see the glasses accumulate. Don’t take away the empties, either.”

  She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.

  “You’re a very self-assured man, Mr. Overling,” said my companion, her smile flickering.

  “Dale, please. And you’re a very perceptive woman, Ms.…?”

  “Jalter, Cynthia Jalter.”

  “May I call you Cynthia? You’re a very perceptive woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I like to walk into a bar and find a perceptive woman sitting alone. It excites me. It doesn’t
happen that often.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “And the fact that you’re not from the campus, that takes it over the top. Because there’s nothing that excites me quite like the idea of perceptive, intelligent women living in a university town yet having no connection with the school. Just living in the same town, right there, not needing to have anything to do with it. The idea of the intelligent woman in the university town. What is she? Why is she there? It’s a stimulating idea.”

  “You must be from the school.”

  “Me? No, no. It’s true, I’m visiting the campus, I’m a consultant. They fly me in. I spend a lot of time in towns like this, being flown in, flown out. I’ve got enough frequent-flyer points to send quintuplets around the world. But I hate these big university schools. They’re big rotting carcasses. Rotten in the center. If I didn’t just fly in, consult, fly out, I couldn’t live with myself. As it is I take a hotel off campus, eat off campus, and go to bars and look for intelligent people who have nothing to do with the school. Those are the people to talk to in any situation. The ones on the edge, the outside.”

  “Like me.”

  “Exactly. They offer me a room on campus, you know. But I take a hotel. And I rent a big shiny car so I stand out. The American campus is crawling with these little brown and gray and buff-colored Peugeot cars and little Japanese cars. I get a big bright American car so they know I don’t care. Bright red if I can.”

  It didn’t matter if Cynthia Jalter didn’t believe me. At that moment Dale Overling was truer than I was. Heartier, more substantial.

  “I sit in a bar in a different city three or four nights a week,” I said. “I always order the same things. I should write a guidebook. A browser’s guide to tequila drinks in college towns.”

  “Nonfiction bestseller list,” said Cynthia Jalter. “Position two, holding strong for months.” Her smile was pursed.

  “No. An underground guide, a photocopied thing. Little tattered copies passed from hand to hand, with annotations, disagreements scrawled into the margins.”

  “Published under a pseudonym.”

  “Right. Professor X.”

  We drank. Mostly I drank. I needed to bolster the courage I’d already shown, as if it were borrowed in advance against future drinks. Cynthia Jalter sipped.

  “Bigger gulps,” I said. “There’s a lot of drinks here.”

  She only smiled.

  “Don’t be smug. We’re in this together. I can only run the show for so long, then I’m going to need your help. Drink up.”

  I finished one and put it aside, and took up the next. The sharp salt clung to my lip. I didn’t bother wiping it away.

  “You’re probably wondering why I don’t ask you what you do,” I said. “The truth is I’d rather not know. It’s probably something pretty dry, that’s a safe guess. Despite your lack of connection to the school.”

  “It’s a safe guess.”

  “And you’d rather not tell me, am I right? You like watching me do these verbal belly flops. And the more enigmatic you are, the farther out on a limb I have to go.”

  “You’re right.”

  I raised my glass to her, then drank. The tequila was beginning to roil inside me.

  “What’s funny is I’m probably getting close. For example, I bet you’re working with funding of some kind. A grant.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, you’re definitely funded.” I feigned disappointment. “It’s all coming clear. Whatever you do wouldn’t be possible without a major-league grant.”

  She laughed. The first time I saw her teeth, I think. “You’re a very self-assured man, Dale.”

  “You said that already. You haven’t said much, and you’re already repeating yourself. I like the way you said my first name, though. Dale. I should say yours more. You’re repeating yourself, Cynthia.”

  “You’re repeating yourself, Dale.”

  “Right. Very good. That’s the kind of contribution I’ll need from you from here on. Because I can’t go on like this. It isn’t possible. You’re going to have to come down off your heavily funded pedestal and muck around in actual conversation with me here.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’re wondering how I sniffed you out about the grant. Well, I’m a consultant. I specialize in feasibility studies. Feasibility and viability, two very important words. To me they’re like pronouns or conjunctions: he, she, it, and, or, feasibility, viability. So I just sensed the aura on you, the data accumulating.”

  I’d finished a margarita. I picked up another.

  “This is actually very lucky for you, Cynthia. I could help you. I don’t mean anything has to happen between us. I just mean because I feel like it, because I like the aura.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I specialize in Nobel Prizes. Nobel consulting, I call it. Basically I come in, evaluate the work that’s being done, and grade the Nobel potential. I help the client see what’s holding it back, keeping it from breaking into Nobel-caliber work. No reason not to work with the Prize in mind. Anyway, that’s my credo.”

  “It’s fascinating,” she said. Her smile was skeptical. But sweetly skeptical.

  “For example, here in your town I’m involved in a real dilemma. What we have is a very viable experiment, something quite exciting Nobel-wise, and it’s being headed up by a known quantity, a previous winner, in fact. But the project goes awry, turns up an unexpected result. It’s still exciting work, but out of control. The Prize committee likes it clean and simple. They like you to come up with the result you predicted. So I’ve had to go in there and say, you’re off the board, guys. You’re no longer in Nobel territory. Good luck with the work, but I’m sorry. I don’t feel it. I don’t smell it. When I look at good work I can smell the Prize, I swear. And in this case, the aroma’s evaporated.”

  At that moment my words went sour in my mouth. Invoking Lack, I’d brought Alice to mind.

  I started measuring my distance from the exits.

  “But enough about me,” I said weakly.

  Cynthia Jalter smiled, more sympathetically. She found my faltering charming. Dale was more likable tongue-tied. But in my drunken way I resented her now.

  “Is something wrong?” she said.

  “I’m fine. It’s these damn flights. I’m all screwed up. It’s four in the afternoon for me, or four in the morning. I should be running laps now, according to my schedule. Do you want to go outside and do some jumping jacks?”

  “You don’t look like you want to do jumping jacks.”

  “You’d be surprised.” I opened the shirt button at my throat. Serious trouble was close.

  “You look like something is worrying you.”

  “Actually, there’s a woman, Cynthia. If you have to know. I’m a little torn up about it, I guess. That’s why I wanted to meet someone intelligent and perceptive like yourself. I’m sorry it isn’t working out. Maybe I need a glass of water.”

  “Stay there, Dale. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  “A glass water would be nice. Of.”

  I drank in a panic, both hands around the glass, hoping to dilute the contents of my stomach to digestibility. I felt heat and pressure building up in my rib cage. A fire or disaster inside. When I looked up from the glass I seemed to be peering through the eyeholes of a loosely fitted mask. I blinked, and the air was spangled with phosphenes.

  “I’m in sort of a situation,” I explained carefully. “My heart is being broken, very gradually, so I hardly notice it, even. I mean, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it actually exactly happened. If it has yet.”

  “I’ll drive you home,” she said.

  “Not home,” I reminded her. “I wish I could remember the name of that damn hotel. All the same. Sunset … Mountainview? Bayview? Lodge? Inn? I thought I had a matchbook.” I feigned a search, turned my pockets inside out, dropping change on the floor. “No such luck. Mountain Lion? Sea Lion? Are we near the mountains
or the sea?”

  Cynthia Jalter drove me home. She powered down my window from her place in the driver’s seat, and the cool air whistled in my nostrils and blew tears out of my eyes horizontally, into my ears. I was silent, chagrined.

  We pulled up outside my apartment. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “Feel better. Don’t forget your car.”

  “Rental job,” I managed. “Let them find it. Fly out tomorrow.” I tugged on the ashtray, the cushioned arm, the window handle, finally opened the car door and got out. “They put me up on campus here. Fly out tomorrow. Another day, another city.”

  “Give me a call sometime. I’m in the book. See you later.”

  “Never again, I’m sure. Thanks profusely for everything. Fly out tomorrow.”

  She drove away, leaving me there in the dark on my wobbly legs. I was surrounded by crickets. Lights burned in the apartment. The blind men were still awake. I tested myself, shook out my limbs, kneaded my numb jaw. I beat through the ferns to find the garden spigot, and splashed water on my face and down my collar. A toad groaned. I tiptoed back to the door.

  When I went inside I found Garth, Evan, and Soft huddled around the couch. The lights in the room were dimmed. I focused, with difficulty, on the form across the couch.

  Alice.

  Her head was limp on the pillows, her hair splayed out, her forehead a pale beacon in the gloom. A blanket was tucked up to her chin. Were they admiring her, or mourning her? Or about to attack? I rushed over and saw her lips rippling gently with breath. Not dead.

  I looked up at Soft. I must have looked a bit crazy, my eyes bugged and red, my collar wet.

  “She’s fine now, she’s asleep,” said Soft. “She needs rest. Where have you been?”

  I thought for a minute. “I was involved in the demonstration,” I said.

  Soft frowned. I’m sure he thought I’d organized it. “I found her with Lack,” he said. “After the riots this afternoon she locked herself in with him. They had to call me. I have the only other key.”

  “Why is she here, not the bed?”

  “She’s hard to carry,” said Soft. “She passed out in the chamber. The recording devices were all shut off. So we have no way of reconstructing the events. I have some theories, though.”