As She Climbed Across the Table

25

Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig. He could be seen hurrying between the English department and his car, an enormous leather briefcase gripped in both arms as if it were the cover of a manhole from which he had just emerged. Or sitting in faculty meetings, silent and pensive, chewing on the stem of an unloaded pipe, often held with the bowl facing sideways or down. The library housed a dozen or so of his slim, unreadable volumes, as well as a thick anthology of savage attacks by his enemies. He lived in a room at the YMCA. He had for fifteen years.

When I ushered De Tooth into Soft’s office it was, as far as I knew, the first meeting between the two great men. It wasn’t auspicious. They clutched quickly at each other’s hands, mumbled in unison, and retreated together into silence. I offered De Tooth a seat and he took it, trapping himself underneath his briefcase, his nose and wig peeking out over the top, his feet dangling above the floor. Soft leaned back in his chair, caught my eye, and screwed up his eyebrows in a frown. I smiled back.

De Tooth was my version of Braxia. The European surrogate, the trump card. I’d spent the past week wooing him, baiting his interest in Lack. When I captured it I began priming him for this encounter. This was my own particle collision, my chance to bump together incompatible fields. Now I would observe the event.

“Professor De Tooth and I have conceived an approach to Lack,” I said. “As I said on the phone, I wanted to run it by you. Otherwise we’re all ready to go. We just need some lab time.”

“You know you have my support, Philip. You know I want to see you in there.”

“Yes, well. We’re proposing something unorthodox, but very exciting. It’s not as though we’ll be in the way of the other teams. There shouldn’t be any problem.”

“Unorthodox.”

“Yes.” I turned to look at De Tooth. He’d slid the briefcase to his knees, though he still gripped the handle with both hands. He was studying Soft. “A contemporary critical approach,” I went on. “Very fertile. We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him.”

Soft paled slightly.

“In this field we speak of the text, in this case Lack, as possessing an independent life, free of context,” I went on. “We derive our descriptive standards, our critical vocabulary, from the source. Lack again. The idea is that any given text contains its own decryption kit, if we approach it free of bias.”

“Interesting,” said Soft. He closed his eyes.

“Have you heard,” said De Tooth, “of the death of the author?” When he spoke he arched his eyebrows, and they disappeared into the yellow wig.

Soft looked at De Tooth. I could practically see the interference pattern in the space between the two men. The bad splice.

“I may have,” said Soft.

“It’s quite simple,” said De Tooth. “We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. We discard biography, psychology, historicism—these things impede clear vision. We admit nothing outside of the text. Lack is no different. In his case the irrelevant genre is physics, and the irrelevant author is yourself. We will study Lack as if he authored himself.”

Soft smiled weakly. “Your study consisting of what?”

“More text,” said De Tooth. “The only possible response.”

“Georges will create a corresponding artifact,” I explained. “The correct approach to a text as dense and self-consistent and original as Lack is a criticism with all the same qualities.”

“You mean you’ll sit in the chamber and write?” Soft sounded uncomfortable.

De Tooth shrugged. “In or out of the chamber, I will compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will only consist of the word Lack. And my students, in turn, will study my text. Without access to Lack. We should use up a minimum of your precious time.”

“With all due respect,” said Soft, “Lack isn’t exactly a work of art.”

“Leave that to me to determine. Meaning accrues in unexpected places. And drains unexpectedly out of others. Your physics, for example, has proven insufficient.”

I had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe we can offer the new text to Lack, to see if he’ll take it in.”

“Lack is physics,” protested Soft feebly. “You can’t separate the two.”

“Lack, Mr. Soft, is a singular monument transcending any banal explanation. Lack has a prodigious propensity to meaning. He seems to attract it like a lightning rod. For a lover of signification like myself, an irresistible phenomenon. Pure signifier. Lack is a verb both active and passive; an object and a space at once, a symbol. He is no single thing. Physics seeks to dismantle the surface, perceive beyond it, to a truth comprised of particles; I argue against depth wherever I find it. Lack’s meaning is all on the surface, and his surface appears to be infinite. Your approach is useless.”

De Tooth rattled on, his distended lips forming the brittle sentences. Soft withered, and turned pea yellow. I started to feel protective. I wanted to hurry De Tooth away. The point had been made. But the little man, his tiny knuckles clenched white on the handle of his briefcase, was unstoppable.

“Perhaps my text and yours will cancel each other out. They so often do, you know. It is possible Lack is no more than an assertion that has gone, until now, unanswered. Or perhaps Lack is a tool, a method, whose use has so far remained undiscovered. Certainly, in fact, Lack is all of these, and more. Lack is the inevitable: the virtually empty sign. The sign that means everything it is possible to mean, to any reader.”

Soft put his hand against his pale, sticky forehead. “Does it seem a little warm in here?”

There was no reply. Soft tugged at the knot of his tie. “Go on,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Perhaps we shall prove that Lack does not exist,” said De Tooth. Soft looked at me plaintively from beneath his hand. “And perhaps we shall prove that we ourselves do not exist. Perhaps Lack is editing the world for us, sorting it into those things that truly exist and those that do not; we who fail to exist may only peer with nostalgia across the threshold into reality; we may not cross.”

Soft got out of his seat and went to the open window. He was breathing through his mouth.

“Are you okay?” I said.

Soft shook his head.

I got up and took him by the shoulder, and guided him through the door and into the hallway, where he slumped against the wall. He slid his hand from his panic-stricken eyes and used it to cover his mouth. His face had turned a brackish green. De Tooth hopped off his chair and dragged his briefcase out to where we stood in the hall.

“Perhaps Lack has dreamed us, and we are only now, due to some scientific blunder, encountering the mind’s eye of our dreamer.”

Soft choked and doubled up, pencils spilling from his shirt pocket and scattering on the floor. When he straightened there was spittle hanging from between his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. He hobbled down the hall, into the men’s room. I heard a retching sound echoing faintly off the tile.

I looked at De Tooth. He arched his eyebrows into his wig.