“Portal or breach? There seems to be some blurriness.”
“Soft calls it a breach,” she said. “I call it a portal.”
“It’s Soft’s thing.”
“If I describe it it’s my thing. I’m getting interested.” She was turned away from me, slicing avocado, crushing herbs. Inside I heard the blind men talking of bus stops and pay phones.
“I thought you already were interested.”
“When it was going to detach it was more Soft’s kind of thing,” she said. “But it’s still here. That’s my kind of thing.”
“You like perceptible things,” I suggested. “You like to make measurements.”
“Not easily perceptible,” she pointed out. “Just barely present.”
“It’s all colors,” I said.
“What?”
“The food. You’re cooking for blind men, and it’s all colors. Green peas, blueberry ice cream, salmon. Avocado.”
We stared at each other.
“Will they feel like they’re missing something?” she whispered.
“It must happen sometimes. I mean, they are missing something.”
We took dinner out and set the table hastily around it. The blind men, led to the table, became formal and quiet. I could see them browsing the collage of smells and sounds, the gentle clinking of silverware and ice. Alice filled the plates, and we ate, the blind men leaning over their plates, forking up unknown quantities to meet trembling lips. Peas and rice tumbled back to the table.
Alice began to talk. “In physics we have an observer problem,” she said. “Suppose we take a spinning electron and observe which direction its spin axis lies along. We find, oddly enough, that it lies along whatever direction we choose to observe from.”
“An observer problem, huh,” said Garth, with disturbing emphasis.
“This chicken is very good,” said Evan.
“We rarely have chicken,” said Garth.
We were eating fish. I said nothing.
“Some people think the observer’s consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron.”
“I believe the salt is three, maybe four inches to the right of your plate.”
“More like five.”
“That’s probably closer to my plate, then.”
“It’s a problem of subjectivity, really. How can the observer make an objective observation? It’s impossible.”
“A problem of subjectivity. Huh.”
I wanted to interrupt. Alice’s effort seemed hopeless. I hadn’t learned yet that Evan and Garth were listening.
“We spoke about this before, didn’t we?” said Garth. “In her office, last Friday.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Evan. A grain of rice clung to his upper lip. “In her office.”
“About what time?”
“About three in the afternoon.”
“Roughly ninety-six hours ago. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s about right.”
“Huh.” Garth raised his head, aimed his eyes at the ceiling. Alice and I looked at him.
“Well,” he said, “we got a book.”
“From the library,” said Evan.
“We read about it. The observer problem.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Alice.
“She says it’s wonderful,” said Evan, as if Garth couldn’t hear anyone but him.
“I think I understand,” said Garth. “It’s a problem of subjectivity, knowing. Thinking. Observing is like thinking.”
“Yes.”
“Except for me. I can see without thinking. That’s what they mean by blindsight. Not that it’s doing me any good. Huh.”
“Yes,” said Alice again. The white man and the black man smiled. Some kind of understanding had been reached. I was alone in my confusion.
“What’s blindsight?” I said.
“He wants to know what blindsight is.” They snorted over private ironies. “Do you want to tell him?”
“I’ll tell him. What time is it?”
“Five-fifty-seven. What time is the last bus?”
“Eleven. I’ve got five-fifty-eight.”
They reset and corroborated the bulky braille watches. Garth leaned back in his chair and fixed his ungaze on a point a foot or so to the left of my face. “Evan and I are blind in different ways,” he said. “Evan has eyes that don’t work. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”
“I’m amaurotic,” said Evan, with a hint of pride.
“My eyes work fine,” said Garth. “But I have an atrophy of a part of my brain associated with visual awareness.” He was quoting some text, I could tell. “My eyes work fine. I can see. I just don’t know I can see.”
“He can’t know.”
“My brain doesn’t understand sight.”
“Blindsight,” said Alice excitedly, “is when you trick Garth into forgetting he doesn’t know he can see. The doctor commands him to reach for an object. He grabs it without hesitation. When the doctors trace the vectors of his hands, arms, fingers, and the movement of his eyes, they’re all precise. He still doesn’t experience sight, but he’s unquestionably seeing. Making an observation.”
“Not that it does me any good. Huh.”
It slowly sank in. “Observation without consciousness,” I said.
“Observation without subjective judgment,” said Alice.
“The spin of a particle,” I said.
“Physics,” said Alice.
“Your office is in the physics building,” said Evan.
“We were there,” said Garth. “It’s about five blocks from the bus stop.”
5
Alice and I had sex that night. For a long time afterward we didn’t talk. The bedroom was dark and cool. Light leaked in from the hall and outlined our bodies in the darkness as we lay still, sweating where we overlapped, goose-pimpled where we didn’t. The quiet was rich with things unsaid.
We didn’t speak of Soft’s experiment, the breach or portal. We didn’t mention the blind men, or Alice’s dream of a perfect, sightless physicist.
Soon Alice was falling asleep, and I wasn’t. I heard the air flutter between her lips.
“Alice.”
“Philip?”
“Where do I stop and you begin?”
She hesitated. “You mean what is the cut-off point?”
“I mean if you went away what would be left of me?”
“I’m not going away.” Her voice was very quiet.
“But answer anyway.”
“All of you would be left,” she said. “None of me. I would be gone and you would still be here.”
I could tell she wanted to sleep. But it was as though letting her sleep tonight was the same as losing her.
“You complete me,” I said. “I’m not sure I really exist, except under your observation.”
She didn’t say anything.
“If you left me,” I said, “you’d take so much of me with you that I’d be inside you, looking back at what was left—the husk of Philip Engstrand we’d abandoned.”
She stared at me across the pillow. “That’s actually beautiful,” she said.
“So when I feel distance between us it’s like there’s something wrong between me and myself. I feel a gulf in myself.”
Alice closed her eyes. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.
“No?” I said.
“I was up all night. I have to sleep. That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. “I just—”
“Philip, stop, please.”
I held her while she cried. When her body stopped trembling, she was asleep.
6
Days passed. Classes were taught, seminars held. Papers were handed in, graded, and returned. The team won something, and the trees filled with garlands of toilet paper. It rained, and the toilet paper dripped to the pathways, and into the wiper blades of parked cars. A group of students seized the Frank J. Bellhope Memorial Aquarium to protest the treatment of Roberta, the manatee savant. The protest was a failure. I called a symposium on the history of student seizure of campus buildings. The symposium was a success. In the larger world, the team invaded something, some hapless island or isthmus. A letter of protest by the faculty was drafted, revised, and scrapped. Bins of swollen pumpkins appeared in the produce sections of Fastway and Look ’n’ Like.