As She Climbed Across the Table (14 page)

“Yes, well. We’re proposing something unorthodox, but very exciting. It’s not as though we’ll be in the way of the other teams. There shouldn’t be any problem.”

“Unorthodox.”

“Yes.” I turned to look at De Tooth. He’d slid the briefcase to his knees, though he still gripped the handle with both hands. He was studying Soft. “A contemporary critical approach,” I went on. “Very fertile. We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him.”

Soft paled slightly.

“In this field we speak of the text, in this case Lack, as possessing an independent life, free of context,” I went on. “We derive our descriptive standards, our critical vocabulary, from the source. Lack again. The idea is that any given text contains its own decryption kit, if we approach it free of bias.”

“Interesting,” said Soft. He closed his eyes.

“Have you heard,” said De Tooth, “of the death of the author?” When he spoke he arched his eyebrows, and they disappeared into the yellow wig.

Soft looked at De Tooth. I could practically see the interference pattern in the space between the two men. The bad splice.

“I may have,” said Soft.

“It’s quite simple,” said De Tooth. “We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. We discard biography, psychology, historicism—these things impede clear vision. We admit nothing outside of the text. Lack is no different. In his case the irrelevant genre is physics, and the irrelevant author is yourself. We will study Lack as if he authored himself.”

Soft smiled weakly. “Your study consisting of what?”

“More text,” said De Tooth. “The only possible response.”

“Georges will create a corresponding artifact,” I explained. “The correct approach to a text as dense and self-consistent and original as Lack is a criticism with all the same qualities.”

“You mean you’ll sit in the chamber and write?” Soft sounded uncomfortable.

De Tooth shrugged. “In or out of the chamber, I will compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will only consist of the word
Lack
. And my students, in turn, will study my text. Without access to Lack. We should use up a minimum of your precious time.”

“With all due respect,” said Soft, “Lack isn’t exactly a work of art.”

“Leave that to me to determine. Meaning accrues in unexpected places. And drains unexpectedly out of others. Your physics, for example, has proven insufficient.”

I had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe we can offer the new text to Lack, to see if he’ll take it in.”

“Lack
is
physics,” protested Soft feebly. “You can’t separate the two.”

“Lack, Mr. Soft, is a singular monument transcending any banal explanation. Lack has a prodigious propensity to meaning. He seems to attract it like a lightning rod. For a lover of signification like myself, an irresistible phenomenon. Pure signifier. Lack is a verb both active and passive; an object and a space at once, a symbol. He is no single thing. Physics seeks to dismantle the surface, perceive beyond it, to a truth comprised of particles; I argue against depth wherever I find it. Lack’s meaning is all on the surface, and his surface appears to be infinite. Your approach is useless.”

De Tooth rattled on, his distended lips forming the brittle sentences. Soft withered, and turned pea yellow. I started to feel protective. I wanted to hurry De Tooth away. The point had been made. But the little man, his tiny knuckles clenched white on the handle of his briefcase, was unstoppable.

“Perhaps my text and yours will cancel each other out. They so often do, you know. It is possible Lack is no more than an assertion that has gone, until now, unanswered. Or perhaps Lack is a tool, a method, whose use has so far remained undiscovered. Certainly, in fact, Lack is all of these, and more. Lack is the inevitable: the virtually empty sign. The sign that means everything it is possible to mean, to any reader.”

Soft put his hand against his pale, sticky forehead. “Does it seem a little warm in here?”

There was no reply. Soft tugged at the knot of his tie. “Go on,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Perhaps we shall prove that Lack does not exist,” said De
Tooth. Soft looked at me plaintively from beneath his hand. “And perhaps we shall prove that we ourselves do not exist. Perhaps Lack is editing the world for us, sorting it into those things that truly exist and those that do not; we who fail to exist may only peer with nostalgia across the threshold into reality; we may not cross.”

Soft got out of his seat and went to the open window. He was breathing through his mouth.

“Are you okay?” I said.

Soft shook his head.

I got up and took him by the shoulder, and guided him through the door and into the hallway, where he slumped against the wall. He slid his hand from his panic-stricken eyes and used it to cover his mouth. His face had turned a brackish green. De Tooth hopped off his chair and dragged his briefcase out to where we stood in the hall.

“Perhaps Lack has dreamed us, and we are only now, due to some scientific blunder, encountering the mind’s eye of our dreamer.”

Soft choked and doubled up, pencils spilling from his shirt pocket and scattering on the floor. When he straightened there was spittle hanging from between his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. He hobbled down the hall, into the men’s room. I heard a retching sound echoing faintly off the tile.

I looked at De Tooth. He arched his eyebrows into his wig.

Three nights later, Alice loaded up the back of her Toyota with fifteen or twenty dashed-off paintings, and drove the short distance to the physics facility. She parked in the faculty lot, then piled the paintings through the main entrance and into the elevator.

I followed at a safe distance in my Datsun, and then on foot. Unseen.

The canvases were mostly self-portraits, painted in nervous, choppy brush strokes, images hacked out of the murk. There were a few abstractions, and a few still lifes. One painting of Evan and Garth. I liked her new work, actually. It was better than the earlier stuff. Maybe the emotional strain had freed her inhibitions, pushed her closer to the edge where art occurs. She’d certainly perfected a kind of 1950s painter’s temperament: surly, nonverbal, and permanently strung out.

But would Lack like them?

We were going to find out.

When the elevator doors closed, I took the stairs, feeling like a spy. The stairwell, with its bare concrete walls, fallout-shelter notices, and unadorned light bulbs glaring from within iron cages, was perfect for espionage fantasies. It went on and on. There were three landings, three twists of stair, for every numbered floor. The building had extra depths, layers the elevator skipped. I wondered if the building contained its own opposite, an anti-building where anti-physicists collided anti-particles. Anti-men who paused only to wonder at the odd sounds coming from the floors and ceilings.

At Lack’s floor I opened the emergency exit. I was alone in the corridor—no Alice. I went into the observation room and found Braxia, dressed in a lab coat, eating an apple, chewing with his mouth open.

He tilted his head to indicate the chamber. “She wants privacy,” he said.

“She took the paintings in?”

He nodded.

So Alice was alone inside, with Lack. The fundamental situation. This was the closest I’d come to it. I was annoyed to have Braxia there.

“She’s offering the paintings to Lack,” I said. “They’re self-portraits. Surrogate selves.”

Braxia smiled, crunched, swallowed. “Is something like physics, I think. To paint a self-portrait. You look at this thing, and it moves. You try to portray it, and it changes. You look out of the corner of your eye, it eludes you. You stare straight, you widen your eyes, and it makes a face at you.”

I slumped down against the wall, across from the entrance to the chamber, fixing my gaze on Braxia’s kneecaps.

“Okay,” he said. “You can’t talk now, about interesting things. You have to be worried and serious. I understand. So, if you will stay and be worried, I will go home and take a nap. You think I want to stay down here all night? I’ll watch television.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“It could be a long time,” he said. “You want to get some dinner, come back? I’ll wait.”

“I’m fine.”

Braxia shrugged, and went out. A moment later I heard the gurgle of the elevator as it ferried him up to the lobby.

Leaving me alone, on AliceWatch.

I stretched out my legs, checked the time, took a deep breath. This was what I wanted, supposedly, to have her under my care. So I settled down to wait.

I started by listening intently, then realized there was nothing to hear.

I tensed my body for action. Then untensed it. There wasn’t any action.

My brain composed another bright dialogue. But I knew Alice wouldn’t provide the responses needed to cue my witticisms.

Alice was alone with her Lack. I was alone with mine. Mine was less interesting than hers, I realized. She was obsessed, and I was bored. Bored and hungry and lonely.

I was lonely for anyone, lonely for a human voice. Cynthia Jalter, maybe. Or Evan and Garth. I was lonely enough to wish Braxia would come back and jabber at me.

The pay phone was just out of sight around the curve of the
hallway. I could order food. I’d only abandon Alice for a moment. I went to the phone. The directory had been half-shredded out of its protective binder, but I found the number of a pizzeria near campus.

“I want a small pizza and a bottle of beer,” I explained to the boyish voice on the other end of the line. “But no cheese. Can you give me a small pizza without cheese?”

“That’s unusual,” said the voice. “Let me check. I’ll put you on hold.”

He came back. “One small pizza, no cheese. Any specials?”

“Specials?”

“Special aspects, you know. Things. Mushroom, garlic, pineapple.”

“Mushrooms.”

“Just one? You get a discount if you get three.”

I thought about it. “What if we consider no cheese a special?”

“Um, okay. So let’s see, that’s one small pizza, mushrooms, no cheese. Pick one more.”

“How about no pineapple?”

There was a pause. “Let me check.”

“Forget it,” I said when he came back. “I don’t want a pizza. No cheese was the giveaway. Can you just bring me the beer? Talking about pizza made me thirsty.”

“I don’t think I can do that, sir. I think just beer is against the rules, and it might even be illegal. I might get fired or arrested.”

“Check,” I said. “Put me on hold.”

“I think I’ll do that, sir.”

I heard footsteps in the corridor, moving toward the elevator. Startled, I dropped the phone, and ran to look. A woman
was just disappearing around the curve. Alice’s height, and blond, but with hair cut close to her scalp, in a ragged, amateur crew cut. Someone else, in other words. But where had she come from? I dashed back to the chamber, baffled.

The door was open. I looked inside. No Alice. The spotlight glared against Lack’s bare table, creating a blinding reflection. The room was like a set for a Beckett play. A pair of scissors lay on the floor, and a stack of Alice’s paintings leaned against the far wall. Otherwise the room was empty. I went to the paintings. They were the self-portraits, Alice’s tortured menagerie of selves.

The other paintings were gone, the still lifes and abstractions, the painting of Evan and Garth. Lack had taken those.

He’d found her other work to his liking, apparently. But not the self-portraits.

Then I saw the yellow shadow scattered across the floor, beside the scissors. It was Alice’s hair. Her blond hair. My pillow, once. I’d stained it with tears. Now it was on a lab floor. I reached down and gathered up a handful, and held it to my nose. Alice’s smell. I remembered her brushing her hair, head lowered. I remembered yanking on it as we fucked. Here it was, hacked off, tossed at Lack, and refused. I dropped it and ran out into the hallway. She was gone.

“I was reading about the dark matter,” said Evan.

We were sitting on a sunny patch of lawn in front of the library. The ground was cool and wet and the monolithic school buildings seemed like a distant hallucination. Evan was at my right, his legs folded underneath him, his head lolled onto one shoulder, like a schoolgirl. Garth, at my left, sat on his haunches like a baseball catcher, his tongue out, hands gripping fistfuls of the damp grass. At the other end of the field a marching band practiced making turns in step, their instruments, heavy tubas and kettledrums, all silent.