Garth ripped out a tuft of grass, held it to his nose, wrinkled his brow.
“That’s what it’s like for us,” Evan went on. “Everything is dark matter. We’re always setting up experiments, trying to confirm the existence of the dark matter. But we can’t. We just have to trust that it’s there.”
Garth picked up his cane, and used the tip to root in the earth.
“And then I was wondering,” said Evan. “Maybe Garth and I are in the wrong universe. Maybe in some other universe there’s a form of matter that’s visible to us. Maybe if we were much smaller. Subatomic.”
“Huh,” said Garth suddenly. “I was supposed to see the particles. I didn’t see anything.”
Garth, characteristically, was trying to drag Evan out of talking to me, back into their neurotic loop. Evan hesitated. I could see he wanted to resist the gravitational pull of Garth’s bitterness. But he was drawn by habit.
Garth stopped digging, and waited for a response, his nostrils flared.
“But we do see things,” said Evan, to me. “We talk about it when we’re alone. Retinal patterns. We see them all the time, you know. We can’t close our eyes and stop. Maybe that’s the dark matter. Maybe you see ten percent of reality, and Garth and I see ninety percent.”
“Huh,” said Garth.
“Cynthia calls them forms and colors,” said Evan. “She says that’s what we’re seeing.”
“You don’t even know which one is a form and which one is a color,” said Garth.
“I do too. Remember what Cynthia said: Forms are like sounds, and colors are like smells. So a red cloud, for instance, might be a certain sound combined with a certain smell.”
“But you can’t know. Cynthia can’t see what you see.”
Evan cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But you can’t know,” said Garth, pounding it home.
I hated Garth suddenly. He was a dead weight around the neck of the world. Around Evan’s neck, anyway. Cynthia should pry them apart.
We fell silent. Evan sat dejectedly. Garth digged determinedly in the moist ground with his cane. I watched the winter clouds, and my thoughts drifted to Alice.
“What is see?” said Garth.
“What?” said Evan.
“What is see? What is see?”
The marching band approached us, still in formation, still miming their playing. Evan and Garth looked up and trained their ears on the disturbance. The band marched past us, the only sound their quiet synchronized tramping on the grass, and a soft clicking as the horn players opened and closed their valves.
“See is just a movie in your eyes,” said Garth. “It’s not out in the world.”
“A movie?”
“It’s not out there, it’s not dark matter or anything else. It’s just in your eyes. A movie. And the only difference is that everyone else has the same movie playing. Cynthia, Philip, Alice, their movies agree. So they can see. You and I are watching the wrong movie, so we’re blind.”
Evan and I were silent.
“See is a dream,” said Garth. “There isn’t anything to see. Real things come one at a time. They come into your hand, and then disappear. Huh.” He felt at the end of his cane, then put his hand to his chin and left a smear of mud there. “See is a movie. But when something goes wrong in their movie, when something is odd, they don’t question themselves. They don’t say, gee, things are disappearing in this laboratory, something must be wrong with my eyes or my brain, I must be blind. They put it outside of themselves, they say, gee, something is wrong with the world. There must be a Lack. Well, I say we’re not blind anymore. I say something is wrong with the world. People talk about things that aren’t there. And they never talk about what’s in their hands.”
“But that’s exactly what I was saying,” said Evan.
“Exactly,” said Garth.
“But you contradicted me.”
“But now you see I didn’t.”
I looked at Evan. If he’d had eyes, he would have looked at me. We would have shared a knowing look, one that excluded Garth. But he couldn’t enter my glance. I was the one excluded. Evan and Garth were alone together, in another world.
They belonged together, I thought now. Cynthia should help them to see that.
“Do you remember when I said I might be lying about the precise location of certain objects?” said Garth.
“Yes,” said Evan.
“Well, don’t worry,” said Garth. “I don’t know where they are either.”
28
I went back down the next day, to watch as the graduate group introduced their custom-built probe to Lack. The faculty heavyweights were all present: Braxia, Soft, De Tooth, myself. All except Alice. The fresh-faced graduate students set up their experiment around us, taping cables and cords to the floor, testing transmitters and recording devices. At the last minute they unveiled their probe.
At first I thought it was too big for Lack. But they had his measurements, based on the particle screen hits, and this thing must have been made to fit. It resembled a cube of compacted garbage, or an assignment by an eccentric art teacher. Construct an interplanetary probe exclusively from the following list of materials: first baseman’s mitt, two-dollar bill, French horn, salad spinner, cotton swab. It had treads for negotiating terrain, like a moon buggy, a robot arm for righting itself or seizing objects, and dishes and antennae pointed in every direction, hoping for a signal.
They brought it in on its own steel table. It was like a reply to Lack, a presence to equal the absence, a Frankenstein’s Monster to master the Invisible Man. I could hear a fan inside, humming ominously. The students pushed the table up to Lack’s and then backed away. They seemed a little awed by their own hurried, patchwork creation.
Soft looked the most optimistic. These were his students, after all. A triumph for them would vindicate the department. He stood closest, on the fringe of the students, hovering like an older brother. Braxia, on the other hand, stood to one side, his crossed arms and sour expression underlining his prediction of failure. This was not only a waste of Lack-time, his expression seemed to say, but a personal affront, an abuse of precious Braxia-hours.
And then there was De Tooth. What a roomful of Frankensteins, I thought, with our monsters all in attendance! Soft had Lack and Braxia, the students had their ungainly probe, and I had De Tooth. The deconstructionist had undone his briefcase, and papers were spilled out all around him. He scribbled frantically into a pad propped awkwardly on his knees, pausing only to cast accusatory glances in every direction. Two days before I’d received a letter from him, a manifesto, declaring his independence from me in his work with Lack, decrying my status as “false auteur.” He’d insisted on a complete blackout of communication between us. When he caught my eye now he scowled, then crumpled the page in his lap and tossed it aside, as if it had been polluted by my gaze.
Alice was Frankenstein and Monster, I supposed. Creator first, in that vibrant period when she’d seized Soft’s project away. Now, mute, tormented, and crew-cut, she was a monster. And Lack was her creator.
After interminable spot checks, test signals, and huddled conferences, the team abandoned the paired tables, leaving their machine alone to face its invisible twin. There was a modest countdown, and the device began to crawl on its treads toward Lack, to attempt to carry off the incestuous union. I was horrified. Wasn’t the device as much of a scientific aberration as Lack? They were definitely siblings. They might as well use Lack to investigate the mystery of the probe.
The object wobbled perilously at the joint of the two tables. We held our breath. Then a foot descended from the interior of the probe, to steady it, and the treads reengaged. The machine rolled on. We breathed again. The students stood ready to receive signals from the other side, from inside Lack, or beyond Lack, whichever it was. From un-Lack. We all stared as the probe lumbered up to Lack’s entrance. Hoping, despite ourselves. Even Braxia, I imagine. We forgave it existing long after it really should have disappeared.