I felt my defenses leak away. It was a kind of masochistic thrill. Come back into my life, a part of me cried. Build an ant farm in the apartment, sprinkle German yeast. Anything. Just fill the lack there.
“I don’t even know them,” I said.
“They like you. They’ll do the dishes, clean, cook. They go out during the day. You’ll hardly see them.”
“Go out where?”
“They wander around. Evan teaches braille three times a week. They go to the library. They go to their therapist.”
“Together?”
“It’s a special thing. They get paid for it. Some woman is studying them, the way they are, like those twins that make up private languages.”
“Are they lovers?”
“I don’t think so. They seem very interested in women.”
“Women?”
“Not me, Philip. Just women, the idea of women.”
I sighed.
“Say yes. It’ll be good for all three of you.”
“Bring them over and we’ll talk about it.” Come back to the apartment, I meant.
“We’ll come by tonight.”
“So you’re still working with them, on seeing particles.”
“Not exactly. I’m not really focused on that right now. But they got very excited, so I still give them things to do.”
“You’re more focused on Lack.”
“Yes.”
She got edgy. She didn’t like the change of subject.
“How is Lack, then?” I asked.
“That’s a silly question, Philip. Lack isn’t how.”
“I thought your whole point was that he was. That he had a personality.”
“Not a personality like ‘how are you?’ He doesn’t have good days and bad days.”
“You sound a little frustrated.”
“I don’t mean to lump you in with everyone else, but there’s a degree of sensational interest—”
“He’s a fad.”
“Yes.”
“It makes you feel protective. Possessive.”
She recoiled at the last word. I suddenly saw how tired and frightened she was, her eyes rimmed with red, her cheeks sallow. I thought of her sleeping on a cot in the subterranean gloom, kept awake by the beeping detectors.
“Maybe I am,” she said quietly.
13
Agreeing to think it over was the same as saying yes, of course. It brought Alice temporarily into the apartment, anyway. She ferried the blind men in and out with their belongings, cardboard boxes of utensils and condiments, heaps of braille magazines, black suits in dry-cleaner plastic.
Alice and I didn’t talk, though. We listened to Evan and Garth. “Correction,” Evan would say, “Tuesday, the appointment. The potluck dinner.”
“There isn’t any appointment Tuesday,” Garth replied smugly. “It was moved to Wednesday. The application deadline was moved back a week. It has to be postmarked by midnight Thursday.” Smiling mysteriously, his voice full of pride, he delivered the payoff. “The potluck dinner stands alone.”
Alice and I were left alone just once, and then our talk was wound down, entropic.
“There are calls for you on the machine,” I said.
“You mean the students with the tutorial thing?”
“Yes.”
“I called them.”
Silence. “So they have to be driven everywhere,” I said. “The blind men.”
“Only with their stuff. They take the bus.”
“Or walk, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“The city is like a giant maze to them.”
“Yes.”
Silence. “You’re listed in the winter catalog for a course called ‘The Physics of Silence.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Lack, I guess.”
“Yes.”
Her yes was a wall. I had lived inside the circle of Alice’s silence, before. Now I stood utterly outside.
When Evan and Garth were installed she vanished again. The blind men took over, began redefining the apartment. Everything was knocked over, handled, repositioned. Dishes started piling up precariously, unrinsed, scabby with bits of egg, jam, and mustard. Briefcases full of braille were unpacked across the couch. Conversations rattled away over my head.
“What would you do if you found out I’d been lying to you?” said Garth suddenly.
Evan turned. “What do you mean?”
“What if I’d been lying about the precise location of certain objects?”
“Have you been?” Evan sounded a little panicky.
“What if I had? You’d be living in a world of my imagination. Huh. Think of that.”
“We already discussed this. Ms. Jalter had a word for it. Delusive conditioning. It’s not fair.”
“I didn’t say it was fair.”
“Well, it’s not.”
Evenings Evan usually dug in with a braille physics textbook on the couch, while Garth sat on the guest-room bed and listened to his portable radio on headphones. I washed the dishes and paced onto the porch, to contemplate the night. I couldn’t relax with them in the apartment. The blind men listened too hard. It made me too aware of my sounds, the scuffling of chair legs on hardwood, the flutter of turned pages. Each visit to the bathroom was a disaster, urine pounding into the bowl, ear-shattering flush.
If I’m lonely, I thought, I should at least be alone.
Lack, that week, refused a ski cap, a conical washer, and a pair of pinking shears. A curly lasagne, a twist of macaroni, a strand of nonskid spaghetti. A volume of Plutarch and a postcard of Copenhagen. A Robertson-tip screwdriver, a ball peen hammer, and a sundae spoon. Blueberries, oysters, calamine lotion. A photograph of the Rosetta stone, a gold-leaf cigarette case, and a concrete block. A lens cap, a hat tree, and a slice of chocolate cake.
He did, though, accept a slide rule, a bowling shoe, and an unglazed terra-cotta ashtray. A felt hat, a fountain pen, and a pomegranate. A Heritage Press reprint of The Hunting of the Snark, and an onyx replica of the Statue of Liberty. Pistachio ice cream in a porcelain dish. A bead of mercury.
Also a spayed female cat—a grizzled lab veteran, piebald from scratching at taped-on electrodes, named B-84.
14
B-84 had friends. They were massing angrily at the entrance of the physics complex, clogging the pathways, spilling out onto the lawn. The day was one of those California sports, summer in November, and I’d been strolling, avoiding my work. Then I met a student carrying a hand-lettered placard reading WHERE’S LACK’S HEART? I followed him to the rally.
The students who were only curious littered the fringes, exchanging disinformation. I pushed past them, to the front. The most defiant and outraged protesters were clustered under a bed-sheet banner, unreadable except in fragments. UNIVERSITY, DOLLARS, RESPONSIBLE, DEATH. I threaded my way deeper into the crowd, to the base of the microphones. The grass under my feet was already torn.
The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman’s shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.
“We’re obligated to demand an answer, to question this thing in our midst now. By all appearances it’s a rampant scientific development, and we have to develop some consciousness, some overview, because it isn’t being provided. We have the responsibility to ask some questions.”
He stopped and peered out over his audience.
“The Lack is just a raping, uh, gaping rent in the fabric of the universe. It’s been opened up right under our feet. The scientists can’t even agree on it, there’s disagreement in the scientific community, yet the experiments just go on. I for one think that maybe it’s time we said wait a minute, let’s have a serious look at this thing, decide what we have on our hands here, before we go throwing any more cats into it!”