Soon, though, it was unmistakably past Lack, and still in awkward grinding evidence on the table. For that moment when it drove on toward the far edge it seemed full of misguided valor, an object of beauty, a Quixote in full armor, but as its treads jutted idiotically over the rim of the table, and especially once it plopped stupidly off the end to crash in a heap on the tiles, treads spinning hopelessly in the air, arm fighting loose of the wreckage to grope hopelessly for orientation, it was only an embarrassment. The students turned from their monitors, clicked off their instruments, hitched their thumbs in the belt loops of their corduroys or adjusted their eyeglasses, but nobody approached the wreck. Soft coughed. Braxia rubbed at his chin. De Tooth went on scribbling. I left.
29
The next night I found Alice alone in the apartment. The blind men were at Cynthia Jalter’s. Alice was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, drawing in a spiral-bound notebook. She’d cleaned up the painting supplies. The lamp by the bed was the only light on in the apartment. Alice’s boyish, lopsided haircut had been growing out its worst irregularities, and I found myself actually charmed by the androgynous curve of her neck and scalp.
The apartment was quiet. We were quiet. I stood in the doorway and she looked up at me. If I didn’t talk, her silence wasn’t anything abnormal. Maybe we were about to touch. As I recalled that kind of mutual, affectionate silence I stared, and she stared back.
My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
“Do you want some coffee?” I said.
She stared.
“I guess that’s a bit naive, thinking you’ll break your silence to ask for coffee. Anyway, you probably just had coffee, just now.”
She continued to stare.
“Tea?” I said. “We could have tea. I heard someone say tea builds bridges between people. Coffee is more isolationist.”
Alice smiled. My head flushed with blood.
“I’ll make tea, then. I’ll go out and get some. You stay there. Keep smiling.”
“Philip,” she said.
“You spoke.”
“Stop talking,” she said. “Stop for a minute.”
I nodded, which she missed.
“Why do you keep trying to talk to me, Philip?”
“That’s it? You open your mouth to ask me why I talk to you? That’s what you have to say?”
She nodded.
The mad scientist dumped both test tubes on the floor, and the contents ran down the drain marked EMBITTERED.
“I’ve thought about shutting up, believe it or not. But I think the solution is more talk, not less. I could learn ventriloquism. Ask questions and answer them myself. After Evan and Garth move out we could get some cats and dogs, and I could make up funny voices for them.”
No reaction.
“I talk to offer some contrast to Lack, to help you understand your options. I talk, he doesn’t. I talk because I’ve been consulting with an expert in ontological breakdown and he prescribes inane chatter. Doctor’s orders. You think I like this? It’s a living nightmare. I hear my voice in dreams, offering you coffee. This is a bedside vigil, an act of faith. And now the patient rouses to ask if I would please pull the plug on the respirator.”
I heard footsteps. And cane taps, outside. A car door slamming. The blind men were back.
“I talk because—listen, before they get inside, let me ask you a question: Do you think Garth would make a good blues singer? Or is that racist? I’m thinking of buying him a guitar for Christmas. You can write your answer down on a piece of paper.”
The blind men clattered through the front door, into the darkened apartment. Alice looked away from me. Garth buzzed straight through to the kitchen, to the humming refrigerator, which spilled light into the living room. Evan walked a tight circle at the doorway until he stood facing me, approximately.
“Philip?” he said. “Cynthia wants to talk to you. She’s waiting outside.”
I looked at Alice again. Her eyes were stony. The moment of connection was over. If it had happened at all. Perhaps “Alice,” as previously formulated, resided more in my memory than in the depleted original container.
“Stay there,” I said to her. “We’ll talk more in a minute. Practice moving your lips and tongue while I’m gone.”
A car horn tooted. I went out. Cynthia sat waiting inside her rumbling, steaming Pontiac. I went to the passenger window. She powered it down a crack from her place behind the wheel. “Get in,” she said.
I slid in beside her. “Are you with the mob?”
“Close the door.”
She rolled up the window and clicked on the overhead light. Our breath fogged the windows. Seated, her long legs tucked under the dash, Cynthia Jalter was the same size as me. The car was spacious, but I still felt huddled in a tiny place with her, like titillated children playing in a cardboard box.
She dug for something in her purse. “Here.” She appeared with a thin, hand-rolled cigarette in her mouth, a lighter in her hand.
“What’s that?”
“Drugs,” she said, muffled through pressed-together lips. She ignited the cigarette. The surplus paper flared, then died, and the tip pulsed orange.
“Don’t set your hair on fire. I’ve forgotten how to smother the flames of a burning woman inside a car. What’s that called, the Leibnitz Maneuver? Anyway, I’ve forgotten it.”
“Come here,” she said, squeezing the words out airlessly. She crooked her finger and bugged her eyes.
“I am here. You know, I have to go back inside in a minute and carry on both ends of a very important conversation—”
Cynthia Jalter put her hand behind my neck, caught my mouth in an open, passionate kiss, and blew a lungful of smoke down my throat. I gulped, swallowing some of it, rerouting a measure through my nose, and inhaling the rest.
“You’re not going back in there,” she said. “You’re coming with me.” She wiped a porthole in the foggy windshield, and shifted the car out of neutral.
I spewed my smoke into the tiny airspace of the car, filling it completely. “You are with the mob, I knew it. This is a hit.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have my coat.” I hiccupped out more smoke.
“You’ll be fine.” She steered us out of my driveway, meanwhile drawing on the joint again, then passing it to me. I inhaled a smaller, more manageable portion. My head was already swimming, probably just from holding my breath. As I puffed inexpertly, the sealed space of the car continued to fill with smoke, becoming a kind of iron lung.
“Where are we going?”
“To my office. Give me that.” She smoked aggressively, her eyes on the road. “Take this.” She handed it back.
“Why are we smoking this?” I asked between breaths.
“To relax.”
“Why do we want to relax?”
She didn’t answer. We pulled up outside her office and got out in what must have appeared to be a minor explosion of smoke. The streets of Beauchamp were oddly quiet. Cynthia Jalter unlocked the door and we went in.
When she switched on the lights the Muzak appeared too, surprisingly loud. I noticed how intricate and well-played it was. Cynthia Jalter unlocked her office and drew me inside.