The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.
“Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.
It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.
I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.
“It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The spin of a particle, the color or flavor of a quark. A field or horizon. Beauty, truth, and strangeness. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”
Some instinct led me to pause. I let the microphone drop to my waist. The audience looked up at Alice and Soft, searching their faces for response.
I am the Lorax, I thought. I speak for the trees.
“I have to question the assumption that Lack’s preference is for particles, in and of themselves,” I continued. “Why do we assume that our visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H’s to M’s. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose? Bebop or swing? I think we’re leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we’re—pardon me—failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror.”
My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallow it, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. For that’s when I played my part, with Soft and Alice, in our collective Dr. Frankenstein. That was how I conspired in the creation of my own monstrous rival, my personal Stanley Toothbrush.
Would it have occurred without my help? I’ll never know. But until then I’d been passive, a victim of fate. Now I was as much to blame as anyone.
11
The next day the microactivity detectors were dismantled, and the proton gun wheeled away. In their place a small lab table was rolled up to the bottom edge of Lack’s particle strike zone. Otherwise Lack was left bare. Alice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.
The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side.
Alice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile on the other side of the table, and each item clattered to the lab floor, refused.
Alice went and gathered her belongings. One was missing. She searched the floor, frisked herself, reloaded her pockets, conducted an inventory. It was nowhere.
Lack had gobbled the key to our apartment.
12
In the weeks that followed it was as impossible to avoid updates on Lack’s tastes as it was to catch a glimpse of Alice. Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter’s helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck’s egg, fertilized, refused a duck’s egg, scrambled.
Some items were measured, weighed, evaluated, before going over Lack’s table. Others were just giddily tossed across. Nobody understood Lack’s system for choosing. He was consistent in never accepting something previously refused. Electric beater-blades tumbled off the table nine days in a row. He was inconsistent in sometimes growing bored with a previously favored item. The lists in the campus paper, under the heading Lackwatch, served as a daily dose of found poetry: hole punch, rosin bag, cue ball.
Everyone had a theory. We were all physicists now, thanks to Lack. Anyone could win the Prize—at least until the following morning, when some contradicting item was consumed. Lack seemed to have a fondness for disproving each new system of prediction at his first chance, as though theories themselves were to his taste.
Life went on. Pumpkins were purchased, mutilated, and left to rot on porches and windowsills. The team lost the Big Game. My hair grew out. Alice, living as she was “on the edge of the territory,” was excused from teaching, and a graduate student took over her classes.
I missed her, terribly. I yearned, heart big and tender as a ripe eggplant. At the same time I played at indifference, my heart squeezed small and hard as an uncooked chestnut. The day she strolled into my office I felt my heart opt for chestnut size.
Her expression was gentle, her hair mussed into a halo. She took a seat across from me at my desk. I leaned back and compressed my lips, pretending she was a remiss student.
She looked past me to the bookshelves, the tattered notices and rusty thumbtacks that littered the walls. “I remember this office.”
“You never came here,” I said.
“I remember it. I sat here, you sat there.”
“Maybe you picked me up here once. You never sat down.”
“I sat while I waited. You had to finish something.”
“I never work here. I can’t imagine a time when I would have had something to finish in this office.”
“I remember it.”
“I hardly ever sit here, it’s amazing you caught me here now. I was just coming in and sitting down for a minute. I certainly wouldn’t just suddenly start finishing something here. It’s a false memory.”
“It doesn’t matter, Philip. It still reminds me of you.”
“Me sitting here now, you mean. Me sitting here now reminds you of me. I remind you of myself.”
Alice sighed. I realized how angry I sounded.
“You threw away the food,” Alice said.
“You were in the apartment?”
“I needed clothes. I was just looking around, and I saw the food was in the garbage.”
“It went bad.”
“Well, there’s something about the apartment I wanted to talk to you about.”
My heart twitched like a stone with a frog underneath. “Go ahead,” I said.
“It’s just sitting there. I can’t use it right now, but I’m still paying rent.”
“I’m still living there,” I said bitterly.
“I know, Philip. But I keep wondering if you’d be better off with some company. So, when I suggest this you shouldn’t just automatically say no. You should consider it. It would make me very happy.”
“Who?”
“Evan and Garth. Just for a month.”
“No.”
“It’s only a month. They’re being kicked out and they didn’t find another place.”
Was she offering me a chance to even the score, to refuse her something? Or was it a test, to see if her charm could still sway me?