Table Of ContentAcclaim for Jonathan Lethem’s
As She Climbed
Across the Table
“A bravura send-up of academic foibles.”
—The New Yorker
“[It] has the disorienting quality of a fourth-dimension dream on a three-
dimensional bed, interrupted by comic, down-to-earth rousings.”
—Newsday
“Entertaining, intelligently constructed, mind-bending.”
—San Antonio Current
“Bittersweet and often hilarious.”
—Hartford Courant
“Crisp, ecstatic chapters and wonderfully likable characters make this parody of
academia wickedly fun.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“An extraordinary, fresh piece of fiction.”
—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“Readers are destined to fall in love with both Alice and Lethem’s sentences as
they embrace in this comic, cosmic novel.”
—Carol De Chellis Hill,
author of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer
and Henry James’ Midnight Song
“Never afraid to tweak genre, Jonathan Lethem is one of the most inventive
writers in America.”
—Cathryn Alpert, author of Rocket City
Jonathan Lethem is the author of the novels Gun, with Occasional Music;
Amnesia Moon; Girl in Landscape; and Motherless Brooklyn, for which he won
the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written a collection of
stories, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. His latest novel, The Fortress of
Solitude, will be available from Doubleday in fall 2003. He lives in Brooklyn,
New York.
Jonathan Lethem
Books by
Gun, with Occasional Music
Amnesia Moon
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
As She Climbed Across the Table
Girl in Landscape
Motherless Brooklyn
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 1998
Copyright © 1997 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Doubleday, New York, in 1997. This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lethem, Jonathan.
As she climbed across the table / Jonathan Lethem.
p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)
eISBN: 978-0-307-79149-8
1. Physicists—California—Fiction.
2. Discoveries in science—California—Fiction.
3. Occupational neuroses—Fiction.
4. Black holes (Astronomy)—Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3562.E8544A9 1998]
813′.54—dc21 97-36287
Author photograph © Ken Kobayashi
Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
To
Shelley Jackson
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
I knew my way to Alice. I knew where to find her. I walked across campus that
night writing a love plan in my head, a map across her body to follow later,
when we were back in our apartment. It wouldn’t be long. She was working late
hours in the particle accelerator, studying minute bodies, pushing them together
in collisions of unusual force and cataloging the results. I knew I’d find her
there. I could see the swell of the cyclotron on the scrubby, sun-bleached hill as I
walked the path to its tucked-away entrance. I was minutes away.
Unlike the physicists, my workday was over. My department couldn’t pretend
it was on the verge of something epochal. When the sun set we freed our
graduate students to scatter to movie theaters, bowling alleys, pizza parlors.
What hurry? We were studying local phenomena, recent affairs. The physicists
were studying the beginning, so they rushed to describe or bring about the end.
As I hurtled toward her, carving shortcuts across the grass, violating the grid
of concrete walkways, my heart was light. I was in orbit around Alice. I was a
fizzy, spinning particle. I wanted to penetrate her field, see myself caught in her
science gaze. Her Paradigm Eyes.
The supercollider stretched out, a lazy arm, across the piebald hills above
campus. The old cyclotron was like a beehive on top. Underneath, a network of
labs was dug into the hill. The complex grew, experiment by costly experiment,
an architectural Frankenstein’s Monster to crush the human spirit. But as I
approached the entrance, double doors of scratched Plexiglas, I felt immune. I
knew what lay at the heart of the heartless labyrinth. No immensity was enough
to dwarf me.
So I stepped inside. The facility was made of bland slabs of concrete, as if to
refute the hyperactive instability of the atomic world. The walls were run
through at random with pipes and electric cables, painted gray to match the
concrete. The floor thrummed slightly. The facility might have been a giant
ventilation system, and I a speck or mote. But I had my target. I walked
undaunted.
Alice’s wing was empty, though. Alice was gone, and so were her students
and colleagues. My footsteps echoing, I wandered the dingy concrete halls,
