So I climbed up onto the table. It was so simple. I would be the first lover in history to receive an absolute answer, a yes or no notarized as cosmic fact. I gripped the sides of the table and vaulted up, first on my knees, then flat on my stomach. Or almost flat. I had an erection. It was rock-hard and almost insensate. Some part of me had mistaken this for a sexual event. I ignored it. I held the table tight and slid myself forward, until my weight was centered just inches from the line that signified Lack’s boundary. I tucked my legs underneath my stomach, making myself a human bullet, and reached for the far edge of the table. Then I closed my eyes and pulled myself through, across the boundary, into Lack, and beyond the edge of the table, to tumble onto the floor of the chamber.
I landed on my hands, and flopped over backward, flat on my back, my head under the table. Like Wile E. Coyote tricked over the edge of a cliff in a defective Acme parachute. But there wasn’t even a sound effect, or a cloud of dust. My impact went unrecorded. One small step for nothing, one giant leap for nobody. The floor was cold. The physics facility ignored me, humming. My erection slackened. I felt it untwist from my undershorts. My head rang. When I opened my eyes my visual field was spattered with phosphenes, like a bad action painting. I closed my eyes.
Do what you have to do.
So I passed out there on the floor in an alcoholic swoon, until morning.
36
I woke up and stumbled out of the chamber, into what should have been the observation room. Instead I walked into a new world.
I wasn’t underground, for one thing. I was outdoors. The sky was orange, and cloudless. The buildings on the horizon were familiar but wrong. Skewed. Strange.
My foot sank into the earth. I looked down. The ground was ball bearings, heaped in drifts. Spread over the top was a tangle of green and yellow wool, which created the superficial impression of a lawn.
I turned. The door I’d passed through led out of the base of a gigantic onyx replica of the Statue of Liberty, which leaned on a drift of bearings, like a cooler on the beach. Through the doorway I saw Lack’s table, where I’d spent the night.
I took another step and sank in to my ankles. When I lifted my foot I dragged off a tangle of wool. I trudged away from the base of the oversize souvenir, leaving the door open behind me.
Ahead was the administration building, but it looked wrong. The building had been robbed of its color, texture, vitality. It looked like it had been reproduced in chewing gum.
I went closer. It wasn’t chewing gum. It was clay. Unglazed terra-cotta. There weren’t windows in the frames. Inside, the rooms were dark and empty. I put my hand on the wall. It was cool and chalky, perfectly smooth.
I waded on. I had to stop every few yards to clear my ankles of wool. I saw now that what I’d taken for buildings were fac-similies of the various campus structures. Some were made of clay, like the administration building, others of porcelain, or bowling-shoe leather, zigzagged with stitching. They rode the desert of ball bearings at various angles, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, or half-buried, or lying on their sides. They stretched on to the horizon in all directions. The hills above campus were gone. There wasn’t any sun. The sky glowed as if some upper layer of the atmosphere were fluorescent.
I made my way to the side of a strawberry-scented wax replica of the Helen Neufkaller Arch. It wasn’t in the right place. The facsimile campus didn’t correspond to the original (if mine was the original). I’d have to mark a trail if I wanted to find my way back to Lack’s chamber. I kicked at the wool to mark my spot here. My foot caught on something submerged in the bearings. I pulled it out. A pomegranate. I started groping around. I found a fountain pen, an eight ball, and an argyle sock. A boxed edition of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. At the base of a math-department building made out of glass ashtrays, I fished up a bunch of paper slips bearing my handwriting. They read, DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I LOVE HER?
A duck came hopping along over the bearings. At the sight of me it flapped its wings and quacked, then flew away.
I found a facsimile of my apartment, made of coiled bed-springs. The orange sky glowed through the wire. I looked inside. The structure was hollow. There weren’t furnishings. There weren’t even floors. In the center, on a heap of bearings, was the charred remains of a fire.
I went inside. The ashes were cool. I found the blackened spines of several copies of the Carroll, and a few burnt duck or chicken bones. I dug in the bearings near the fire, looking for clues. I found a Coke bottle, another pomegranate, and the key to my apartment.
I climbed out of the bedspring structure, and walked back out toward the Neufkaller Arch, which I still associated with the entrance to campus.
Braxia was right. The new universe was clinging to its parent reality. The results were poor. Lack was trying to make a world, but he couldn’t get the parts. He’d manufactured a version of campus made only of the elements Alice found charming or harmless. Another example of rotten collaborative scholarship.
Publish or perish, I guess.
The most important thing was, Lack had taken me. I’d passed the Lack test, along with the ducks and pomegranates. Lack loved me. He’d taken my key, and my words, inscribed on slips of paper bearing my personal scissor marks. And now he’d taken Engstrand, in the flesh.
She loves me. She doesn’t love me not.
I waded through the bearings, my heart beating. I just had to get back now, and tell her. Explain that she loved me, actually. Since she didn’t seem to know.
I found the fountain that stood at the entrance to campus. It was made of crushed aluminum foil, which glinted brilliantly in the orange light. It was full of melted pistachio ice cream. The aluminum-foil cherub at the top gushed ice cream, green nuts dribbling one at a time from its lips.
Sleeping at the base of the fountain were dozens of identical peach-colored cats. A few were awake, and grooming themselves, or lapping at the ice cream. The cats were all fat, grizzled, and oblivious. It was B-84, the lab animal, photocopied into many cats by Lack. It didn’t seem to care about its multiple selfhood. Cats don’t look in mirrors.
I sat on the edge of the fountain and peeled a pomegranate. A few cats wandered over, half-interested, and rubbed against my ankles. I looked at the empty facsimilies against the orange sky. It was a beautiful ruin, a haunted Zen garden. Alice’s, but she wasn’t allowed to visit it herself. I’d tell her about it.
I sucked the fruit from a few pomegranate seeds, but my mouth was parched from drinking, and the acidity made my teeth hurt. I put the pomegranate on the side of the fountain. A few cats sniffed at it, but they were spoiled, weaned onto ice cream. I took a cat in my arms—picking at random, since there was no way to distinguish the original—and made my way back through the maze of facsimiles, to Lack’s chamber.
Everything was as I’d left it. I went inside, put the cat on the table, and pushed it through. Then I climbed up onto the table and pulled myself across.
37
I tumbled into darkness. I landed on the familiar tile floor of the chamber, but the lights were out. Fortunately I didn’t crush the cat. It must have scampered into a corner. I righted myself and squinted into the blackness, trying to find some hint of light.
There wasn’t any. The darkness was hintless, perfect. The power in the building hadn’t gone out, though. I could still hear the hum of the generators, and feel the floor vibrate slightly. It was just the lights.