As She Climbed Across the Table

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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.

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