Should I have known sooner?

Love is self-deception, remember. And my compet.i.tion was so improbable.

But now that it was named, Alice's Lack-love seemed obvious, a foregone conclusion. Probably the whole campus buzzed with it, and I was the last to know.

"The way you loved me?" I squeaked.

"No. Yes."

I studied her. She sat with a leg up on the chair, her hair wild, her eyes glowing from tired sockets. Her mouth was drawn defiantly tight. Her Lack-love was real, I saw. She looked crushed under the weight of her impossible love. I felt an admiration, despite myself.

"Does anyone else know?"

"I hadn't even admitted it to myself until just now." A tear painted a reflective stripe down her cheek.

"Does Soft?"

"You would know better than I would."

Yes, Alice had been living on the brink of the void, but it wasn't some singular, icy, inhuman place. In fact, the same void yawned out underneath me, too. Unrequited love.

It seemed reasonable to call hers unrequited. If Alice had really climbed up on Lack's table, then he'd turned her down, hadn't he? Making things disappear was the only I love you I love you in his binary vocabulary. in his binary vocabulary.

Had she, though? I was afraid to ask. Instead I got up and cleared the dishes into the sink. I wanted to buy a plane ticket, fly away, make my claims to Cynthia Jalter true. Leave my colleagues with a mystery. Professor X.

In the sink the coffee grounds rose up, swirling out of the bottoms of our cups, and were washed down the drain.

"All this time down there," I said, not facing her. "You were slipping away from me. Feeling communion with this thing, unable to talk about it."

"Yes."

I realized, too late, that I'd used a forbidden p.r.o.noun. Me Me. Distracted, I'd pled guilty to possession of a self.

"So it's simple, then," I said. "No mystery. You don't love me because you love Lack."

"Yes."

"But he doesn't love you back."

"Yes."

"You tried, then. You offered yourself."

No answer. But when I turned from the sink she stared at me hollowly, and nodded.

"We've drifted a long way past physics here, Philip. I'd like to try to get us back on course."

Soft's office was surprisingly intimate. It was easy to imagine it as a blown-up model of the interior of his skull. The walls were lined with texts, a decade's issues of Physics Letters Physics Letters and and Physical Review Physical Review. The desks were heaped. On the wall was a water-stained certificate, subtly crooked inside its frame. Yellowing fireproof ceiling, ancient fluorescent desk lamp. Soft always seemed reptilian inside the physics lab, and out of place everywhere else, but this office was an intermediate, a human s.p.a.ce he could credibly inhabit.

Soft sat behind his desk. In the rotting chair to his right sat an Italian physicist, just off the plane. He was tall and ruddy, and wore a wrinkled, lemon yellow suit. His collar was open and his tie was bundled into his jacket pocket, where it stuck out like a tongue. Soft introduced him with a name that began morphing so crazily the moment I heard it-Crubbio Raxia? Carbino Toxia? Arbino Cruxia?-that I didn't dare try to say it aloud.

He sat watching me intently while Soft spoke.

"We're dividing up the Lack hours," Soft said. "I'm reclaiming a portion of the schedule myself. A team of our graduate students has submitted an impressive proposal, and they'll be awarded a s.h.i.+ft. Most exciting to me personally is the exchange we've negotiated with the Italian team. Carmo and his staff will be given access to Lack, in return for a share of hours at their supercollider in Pisa, something we've craved for years. Lack is a considerable bargaining chip."

The Italian pursed his lips. "We have been following your results very closely. It is important work. Cannot be monopolized, you see? The international community has claims."

"Carmo's team has some very interesting theories, and they're eager to put them to the test."

"Hah! Yes. It's a very narrow interpretation, so far."

Soft winced. The Italian's enthusiasm obviously irritated him. Maybe there was a political side to this exchange, some debt being paid.

"The reason I called you here," continued Soft, "is that I'd like to ask you to administer Professor Coombs' hours. Be her, ah, chaperone. I wouldn't dream of disrupting her work, but I am looking to tighten up our sense of procedure here. I want to develop a variety of approaches, foster a little give-and-take among the various teams. And naturally there's going to be some downtime, when one team is breaking down equipment or cleaning up the observation area. There's only one Lack. So we're all going to have to move forward in a spirit of cooperation. I'm looking to you, Philip, as someone who's really an expert on how we do things around here, to help apply the subtle brakes and levers that can make this thing go. Especially with Professor Coombs. Because it's not an easy thing, but in effect we're downgrading her status in this situation, cutting into her time. Not that there aren't compensations, of course, but still. I'm sure you're cognizant of my drift."

Soft smiled at Carmo-Texaco? Relaxo? Ataxia?-and folded his hands across his desk.

"But Alice-" I began.

"I don't think this is really the time and place and time to talk about Professor Coombs' recent difficulties, Philip. Professor Braxia isn't interested in our petty little disputes or eccentricities. There's a difference of opinion between myself and Professor Coombs. That's no secret, I'm not hiding that from the Italian team. The point is to open this thing up to a variety of approaches."

"We are not coming in here blind," said Braxia smoothly. "We know your Professor Coombs' work. She is pa.s.sionate, stubborn. We like that, we understand that."

"I think it goes somewhat beyond that," I said. "Alice's feeling is that we're past traditional approaches here. That this is more along the lines of, say, alien contact, first contact, and that we ought to have a heightened sensitivity to, uh, anthropological or exobiological concerns. I think she's likely to object to a strenuously hard-physics approach at this point. Speaking as her representative here."

I was winging it. Stalling. But if Soft wanted to come between Alice and Lack, did I really want to stand in the way? My wishes and hers weren't necessarily one and the same.

Carmo Braxia stretched back in his seat, and crossed his leg over his knee. "My dear fellow. It's extraordinary to me that you would oppose an exercise of the basic scientific rigorousness that the situation is demanding. Just, for example, setting up a sonar or light beam to try and bounce a signal off the interior surface of this Lack. No damage is risked. Why has this not been attempted?"

"I'm afraid he's right, Philip. There's a basic threshold of responsibility here. We're currently below it."

"Perhaps there is a corresponding Lack, an out-hole," suggested Braxia excitedly. "Undiscovered somewhere. Spewing out the junk you push into your end here. In some third-world nation perhaps. Hah! Very American."

"Professor Coombs will have her time," said Soft. "She'll have plenty of chances to vindicate her theories. We're all going to stay open and receptive. We'll all pursue our own conclusions. At some point the teams will converge on the actual truth. We'll know what we're looking at here."

"Results," said Braxia gravely.

"And so you need my help with Alice," I said.

Soft winced again. He wanted me to call her Professor Coombs Professor Coombs. "More than that," he said. "We're inviting your presence. Work closely with Professor Coombs, with Carmo and the Italians, with myself, and look for correspondences we're missing. Things we're too close to see. Your kind of thing. And use your influence to keep Professor Coombs on an even keel. Focused, but not...obsessive."

Braxia had pulled a tuft of stuffing out of the torn arm of his chair and was holding it up quizzically to the light.

"What if I were to submit a competing claim for time," I said, improvising. "Representing, say, the concerns of the interdisciplinary faction. Sociological, psychological, even literary concerns. I'd represent the community of the bewildered, the excluded. I think yesterday's demonstration proves the existence of my const.i.tuency. Would that be compatible with your time-share format?"

Soft looked like he was trying to swallow his Adam's apple. "I see no problem there," he managed to say. "Put in your claim. We'll run it through the usual review process."

"What's important, my dear fellow, is that we get some physics done. We understand your Professor Coombs is feeling unwell. We extend our best wishes. Until she is ready to utilize her time we propose to offer a further exchange." Braxia rustled in his pockets, pulled out a single folded sheet, and opened it. "For every additional weekly hour past the initial allotment," he read, "one additional square foot of observation s.p.a.ce in the Pisa facility. After an additional ten hours weekly, the rate changes to six additional inches per additional square hour."

"I don't think Alice will consider any concessions."

"Here." Braxia handed me the paper. "You will have our offer at hand. That is all I ask. The exchange is no concession. We have a very desirable facility-ask Soft. Four thousand events per run. A very nice machine. Explain it to him, Soft."

"They have a very nice machine," said Soft. "The envy of the international community."

"Not anymore," I said.

Soft had Lack's chamber sealed off during the reorganization, leaving Alice to founder in the apartment. She never went out. I would come home to find her dazedly channel-surfing, or stirring a can of condensed chowder to life on the stove, or fallen asleep on the couch, a notepad clutched to her chest, pages blank. We didn't talk. We avoided each other. I slept on the couch and was awake and out of the house before she even stirred. She and the blind men dined together, I ate separately. The apartment was a museum of unspoken words.

Finals were faintly visible on the event horizon, and students began making pilgrimages to my office to ask about their status, negotiate extra-credit a.s.signments, beg extensions on work already due, or plead for outright mercy. I started pinning notes to my door. I employed the uncertainty principle, offered only fleeting glimpses of my trajectory. The coffee machine, second floor, between three-fifteen and three-twenty, Wednesday. Walking across the east lawn toward the parking lot, eleven-forty-five, Monday. With correction fluid I shortened my phone number in the posted directories to six digits.

The Italian team appeared, led by Braxia. They took over a table in the far corner of the faculty cafeteria, chattering in the incomprehensible double language of Italian and Physics. Lackwatch vanished, or was suppressed. Soft's stature was restored. He could again be seen striding through hallways like a comet with a tail of students, his brow knit, his finger cutting a swath through the air.

That morning forest fires to the north produced a carpet of ash that reddened the skies. The sun glowed orange in the east, an eerie morning sunset. The gray flecks settled in a fine coat over winds.h.i.+elds, automatic teller machines, and public art. The entire day was dusk. When night finally came it was like a benediction.

In the parking lot after the day's cla.s.s, the flakes still falling like snow, I felt oddly peaceful. I thought of Alice and the blind men affectionately. Forgivingly. I decided to drive home and share a meal with them, instead of going to a restaurant. So I drove to a liquor store, the flakes lit like movie-theater smoke in the beam of my headlights, and bought a bottle of red wine as evidence of my good intentions.

But when I jogged up the porch steps and went inside I found the blind men in a tizzy. Alice had left the apartment, for the first time since Soft's rescue.

"She was supposed to be here," Evan said. They were both dressed up in their jackets and hats. Their canes were ready. They wore expressions of exaggerated dismay, jaws clenched, noses wrinkled. "She said she'd drive us. And now she isn't even here."

"Where'd she go?" I said, confused. "Drive you where?"

"Therapy," said Evan.

"Huh," said Garth. "If we knew where she was she'd be here here, and we'd be gone already. You wouldn't be talking to us."

"She said, 'I'll see you back here at five-thirty.'" said Evan. "'I'll give you a lift.' Her exact words. It is five-thirty, isn't it?"

Garth smacked at his watch. "Five-forty-seven."

"That's seventeen minutes late," Evan pointed out, his voice rising. "It is Thursday, isn't it?"

I stood holding my bottle of wine.

"My watch could be wrong," Garth mused. "But it's certainly Thursday. That much I know."

Evan felt at his watch. They were going to conduct a survey of all tangible objects and irrefutable facts at hand. I stepped in.

"Oh, look," I lied. "Note on the refrigerator." I craned my neck and squinted, pretending to read from a distance, fooling some invisible spectator. "'Philip,'" I pretended to quote, "'will you give E. and G. lift? Emergency meeting. Don't worry. Alice.' So there's your answer. Don't worry. I'll drive you."

Why the ruse, when I could have suggested the ride as my own idea? Easy. I yearned for something as normal and domestic as a note on the refrigerator. Alice had never left me a note on the refrigerator.

Also, I was staking my claim as sole worrier, shutting the blind men out of this current crisis. Alice's new disappearance would be all mine. Not Evan and Garth's, not Soft's.

I helped them into my car, digging seat belts out from between seats. Evan gave me directions. It wasn't far. My wipers cleaned a window out of the newly fallen ash, and we took off, in silence.

My thoughts were with Alice. I was pretty sure I knew where she was.

But she couldn't get into the chamber. I had the key. Soft had given it to me.

"Is time subjective or objective?" said Garth from the backseat, his voice droning in the darkness.

Evan and I were silent.

"I mean, if my watch says five-thirty, and I go around all day believing in that, and then I run into you and your watch says five o'clock, half an hour difference, and we've both gone around all day half an hour different-your two, my two-thirty, your four-fifteen, my four-forty-five, half an hour in the past relative to me, and certain of it, just as certain as I am, and we begin arguing, and then, at that moment, the rest of the world blows up, huh, just completely disappears, and we're all that's left, there's no other reference point, no other observer observer, and for me it's five-thirty and for you it's five, isn't that a form of time travel?"

"Time travel?" said Evan.

"Five o'clock is successfully communicating with five-thirty," said Garth.

We pulled up in front of the address Evan had given me. It was an ivy-covered brick house, lacking a s.h.i.+ngle or plaque to identify it as a proper site of therapy. The blind men clambered out. I followed, feeling protective. What sort of therapy was this, anyway? Evan and Garth could be duped into all kinds of abuses. Having fooled them five minutes before with the refrigerator-note gag, I knew how vulnerable they were. I'd go and meet this therapist. Then back to rescue Alice.

Garth rang the bell. A buzzer sounded and we stepped into a carpeted, high-ceilinged foyer. It smelled faintly musty. Garth turned a doork.n.o.b at the right, and he and Evan went in to a consulting room that was rea.s.suringly bland and clean, free of instruments of torture.

As I peered in after them a voice behind me spoke my name. I wheeled to find Cynthia Jalter, holding a jet-black clipboard, still tall, still darkly attractive, still smiling knowingly.

She looked in at the blind men, who nodded together at the sound of her step, then shut the door, isolating us two in the foyer.

"I didn't mean-," I said.

"I understand," she said. "You didn't know. You were just dropping them off."

"Yes," I said, slowly grasping that this wasn't the wrong house, wasn't some dream or practical joke. Cynthia Jalter was their therapist.

"You pay them to come here," I recalled, inserting it in the place of a thousand apologies.

"They couldn't possibly afford it themselves," she said. She stood, her back to the consultation room, her clipboard hugged to her chest, eyeing me curiously. "I'm well funded, as you guessed the other night, Philip."

"Your research is into blindness, then."

"Coupling," she said. "Obsessive coupling."

"Ah. The way they are together, you mean. The private world. Twins, invented languages, that sort of thing."

"Yes."

"You help them separate, I guess. A Siamese-twin surgeon of the soul."

"I help them understand it," she said. "They can make their own choices. The goal is to develop an awareness, from inside, of how dual cognitive systems form, how they function, how they respond to hostile or contradictory data. Threats to stability, inequal growth by one member. Cognitive dissonance. I'm sure these concepts are familiar."