Free As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem Page A

in the east, an eerie morning sunset. The gray flecks settled in a fine coat over windshields, 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 class, 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
, 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 wiperscleaned 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
, 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 shingle or plaque