Something, however, just didn’t seem right. She’d known he’d gone to the dermatologist. She’d wanted to accompany him then, scared and worried, but he’d refused, playing the role of martyr, unwilling to be vulnerable. When he hadn’t returned she would’ve called the doctor’s office. They would’ve told her about the surgery. She would’ve contacted the hospital. She would’ve found out what room he was in. She would’ve been here. It just didn’t make any sense. There must have been a mistake along the way. The receptionist at the dermatologist’s office must have told Sara he’d never shown for the appointment or that he had been treated and left and nothing else.
Poor girl, he thought. She must be panicking.
The nurse returned. She looked confused. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “But your wife is not at this number.” She repeated the phone number back to him.
“No. That’s it. That’s her number.”
“The woman said she’s not married, sir.”
“You spoke to Sara?”
“Yes. Her name was Sara, but she denied knowing you, sir. Is there someone else I can call?”
“There’s some mistake.”
“Maybe we can try again in the morning. The morphine and anesthesia together will make you groggy.”
“Call her back,” he pleaded. “Let me talk to her.”
“It’s late, sir.” She patted him on the shin. He flinched at the contact. “We’ll sort everything out in the morning.”
“Please,” he said. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Here,” she said. “Let me get you something to help you sleep.” She fiddled with the IV, and the morphine dripped at an increasing rate. “There,” she said. “This should do the trick.”
He wanted to stop her, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy. His eyelids drooped. He felt himself drifting off into sleep. “Please,” he said. “Please. Please. Please.” But she didn’t listen. The nurse patted him on the forehead. There, she said. All better now.
The collider was impressive. It had 9,300 magnets, all pre-cooled to negative 193.2°C, making just one eighth of its cryogenic system the world’s largest refrigerator. During the experiment, trillions of protons would lap the LHC 11,245 times per second, and approximately six hundred million collisions would occur every second. The beams flew through an ultra-high vacuum, the emptiest space in the solar system. The internal pressure measured 10 to 13 atm. When the two beams of ions collided, they generated temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun. It encompassed all the extremes of the universe.
Touring it before the experiment, however, I was distracted. Dr. Thomas led us through the tunnels, along the steel reinforced tubes that accelerated the particles and discussed the history of the project, the financial backing by various European countries, the thousands of independent contractors, engineering firms and university scientists and politicians and regulating bodies that had a hand in creating the largest experiment in the history of mankind, and I could not shake the feeling that I was walking underwater, doped by the medication prescribed to me by Dr. White. My brain felt heavy, my extremities weighty, my tongue non-responsive. I had to concentrate to walk in a straight line, and when asked a question I simply smiled, nodded, and gave clipped, curt answers. Are you enjoying your visit so far, Coulter? Yes. Would you like something to drink? No. Are you sure you’re feeling all right? Yes.
Dozens of workers checked and rechecked the tube. If the integrity of one bracket were compromised, the result would be devastating. Even though the tunnels were so far underground, the resulting explosion would be catastrophic, many times the power of an atomic bomb, and I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like if such an event occurred. Earthquakes would devastate the area for many miles. Buildings would crumble, avalanches would pulverize highways, and monstrous waves would crash the beaches of the nearby lakes. Thousands of people would die instantly. Some would drown. Some would be crushed. Some would suffocate. Some would burn. Some would fall. Some would bleed out. Some may even kill each other, panicking and trying to evacuate. They would trample colleagues while trying to escape down a flight of stairs. Afraid of jagged mountain rocks, a driver would accelerate too quickly around a curve and hit a pedestrian, attempting to flee a smashed SUV. After being trapped in rubble for several days, one survivor might kill another so that he may eat and survive himself, extending even the slightest hope that he, miraculously, may one day be saved.
“We first fired it up September 2008,” Dr. Thomas said as he patted the tube like it was his pet. “I bet you remember all the hullabaloo surrounding it.”
“Yes,” Dr. Brinkman said. “The protestors. They thought the collider would create a black hole that would swallow up the earth.”
“It didn’t matter that it was impossible.”
“Some people refuse to listen to reason. They grasp onto the irrational and hold onto it.”
Going out like that, in a devastating catastrophe, wouldn’t be so bad. It may be painful. It may be unbearable. It may even be the worst moment of your life, but, in the end, it would occur in a moment encased in history. People would debate the causes, mourn the tragedy, and declare your death and the many hundreds of others that died alongside you as unnecessary. They would stir a movement, and create change. New safety measures would be taken, technologies built, research opportunities to be had. There would be cause and effect. Your death would be an indispensible link in the progress of mankind, and that’s all that anybody ever wants—to have mattered.
“We should get back up to the lab,” Dr. Thomas said. “We’re about to get started.”
He awoke the next morning feeling as if he’d gone on a drinking binge. He hurt everywhere. His teeth hurt. His toenails hurt. Even his hair hurt. At some point in the night, his catheter had malfunctioned, and urine soaked his bed sheets and gown. A rash burned his inner thighs. His ears seemed plugged, from an infection maybe, or a drop in barometric pressure. The blanket had wrapped around his feet, and blood caked the inside of his remaining elbow. What had happened there? he thought. And how did I keep from waking up?
He attempted to rise to a sitting position, but this feat proved too difficult. The panel to his bed came equipped with a button to call the nurse; however, he couldn’t reach it. Every time he attempted to move his good arm, pain shot through his bones. It was paralysis without the paralysis, which, to Coulter, seemed even more infuriating. He knew to have full faculty of his limbs, the remaining ones anyway, but he could not control them due to the immense pain in trying.
Accepting his fate, he yelled. Or tried to. His throat was raspy and dry, and his attempts to shout for the nurse seemed more like a whimper than a plea for help. He coughed and choked on his own saliva, exacerbating his despair. He had no recourse for his predicament, instead imprisoned in a bed unable to move or speak.
The sun filtered in through sheer curtains, cheap things made of cotton. It was winter, but it felt as if the air conditioner was on, blasting cold air through the vents. Soon he started shivering. Mucous drained from his nostrils. He could feel it clog his throat. He choked on it. It obstructed his air passageways. He thought he was going to drown. Panic kicked in. His blood pressure rose, and he strained to pull up to a sitting position, but each time he moved, the pain drove him back down. He was going to die. He was going to drown in a pool of his own snot.
But then a nurse came in.
She opened the curtains and then picked up a remote. It had a cord running into the bed, and when she pressed the red button near the top, the bed raised to a sitting position. All of a sudden, Coulter could breathe again. He indicated he needed a drink of water, and the nurse obliged.
“How’re we feeling this morning?” She wasn’t the same nurse as from the night before. This one was younger, spunkier. She bobbed when she spoke, and she perpetually smiled. “On a scale of one to ten, could you rate your pain for me?”
“Ten.”
“Is it sharp or
dull? How would you describe it?”
“Unbearable.”
“Do you need more pain meds? I could talk to the doctor, see if we could increase your dosage.”
“I want to speak with my wife.”
“I see,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”
She averted her gaze when he asked, busied herself by checking his chart, scraping imaginary dust from the foot of his bed. She was hiding something.
“Please,” he said. “I’m begging you.”
She appeared to take pity on him. She licked her lips and looked away, as if trying to locate her resolve. Her lips were dry and chapped. Bits of flesh flaked off of them like a dried and peeled sticker.
“Listen,” she said. “The doctor had us order a psych eval. We checked public records. There’s no indication that you were ever married.”
The news settled in slowly. At first, what she’d said didn’t quite register. It was too preposterous. He’d seen Sara right before going to the doctor the day before. She had tried to go with him but he refused. You have more important things to do, he’d said. When they had said goodbye, they hugged, and she grabbed his hand and said, “Be careful, Coulter. I can’t raise Isaac alone.”
“The doctor is actually on her way right now,” the nurse said. “She should be able to help you.”
As if on cue, a knock came at the door. In walked a short woman, a woman with disproportionate facial features, too large a nose, too large of ears, too large of eyes, a woman with a comforting and warming presence, a familiar woman.
“Hello, Coulter,” Dr. White said. “Do you remember me?”
The lab consisted of several workstations in six rows, each having four computer monitors. There was a space for engineering, monitoring the integrity of the collider, one for modeling the movement and collision of the particles, one that tracked the temperature of the cryogenic system, another that monitored the magnets, and another the carbon beam dump. Engineers double and triple checked the integrity of the structure, the welding, the joints, the sensors and magnets, making absolutely, positively sure everything was up to specifications. The place crawled with people, IT gurus and quantum specialists and Big Bang experts and political benefactors and string theorist proponents, so that if I didn’t focus my vision, the entire room appeared to move with their activity as if in waves, giving me vertigo. Like my students back in Boston, they even began to look alike, melding into a single person with the same pasty white complexion, the same stringy brown hair, the same cheerful eyes, everyone with the same wave and wink and voice and the same hopeful tone each time they bid me a good morning, good morning, isn’t it such a Goddamn great morning?
Dr. Brinkman and I had a spot especially reserved for us near the back of the room, right in the middle with a great view of the monitors. The director sat near us, as did Dr. Thomas. A shared tension precluded us from having any meaningful conversation. We each had our own tics. The director cradled his cup of coffee in front of him, what could be seen as a posture of supplication or of prayer. Dr. Thomas chattered endlessly about banal topics, the harsh winters here in Switzerland, updates on the Patriots—there’s just not enough NFL news here like back in the States—the average precipitation in Switzerland versus Massachusetts. Dr. Brinkman rubbed his chin raw so that pieces of dried skin flaked off his face. I gnawed my cuticles until they bled.
The room was abuzz with activity. Millions of working parts had to come together for a short amount of time for all this to work. There was zero room for error. Teams of three to five huddled over various monitors discussing the intricacies of what would transpire, how the mechanics should integrate, how much mass they anticipated should disappear. They had rehearsed this hundreds of times before. They moved with a synchronicity of an organism, almost without thought but in perfect harmony. It was breathtaking, really, a sight I was glad I got to see.
The experiment’s project manager hushed the team and stood directly in front of us. He asked for a sound off, and each team gave their okay. Electrical. Go. Engineering. Go. Sensors. Go.
The countdown began. I stared at the display monitors up on the wall. One recorded X-rays. Another sonar. Others electromagnetic radiation, intrinsic brightness, gravity. That was the one I was glued to. If my dissertation were to be proven correct, then the LHC would show the dilution of gravity over small scales, proving my hypothesis of the universe being constructed of curled-up Calabi-Yau spatial dimensions.
The countdown reached zero. I had expected to hear churning, gears grinding, joints bending, something, but the tunnel sounded eerily quiet, and for a moment there I wondered if anything had actually happened. But then, without warning, the screens erupted into colorful, kaleidoscopic fountains. They resembled a Fourth of July fireworks celebration gone horribly wrong, all the rockets exploding at once in a magnanimous, catastrophic torrent, and the entire control room burst into cheers and congratulations and hugs and back pats and whistles because we did it, we DID it, WE did IT, and I couldn’t help but wonder what next? What does it mean? Someone, please, just tell me what does it all mean?
Dr. White smiled warmly and sat in a recliner next to his bed. She leaned forward and crossed her legs and stared intently at him, as if he was the only important thing in her world.
“Tell me,” she said, “about your wife.”
“Sara?”
“Yes. Sara. Tell me about her.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Everything.”
He told her all that he could remember. She is audacious, he said. Some might call her cavalier. She introduces herself to strangers and collects business cards of men who she would never call. She lights matches and lets them burn until the flames reach her fingers. During holidays, she goes all out, decorating the entire house in reindeer and elves or little hearts for Valentine’s Day or Leprechauns for St. Patty’s Day. If she sees a homeless person, she will give him every last dime she has. She yells at mothers who spank their children in public. Take her to the bathroom and beat her ass, she says, like a normal person would do. She has to buy colorful toe socks every time she goes to Target. When bored, she plans elaborate pranks. One time, she convinced my doctor to fake a positive HIV test. She has that way with people—she can convince them to do anything. She worries constantly. If she doesn’t know exactly where I’m at, she calls. Right after class, she’ll call. Right after work. On the minute exactly. If work is over at 8:00 p.m., she calls at 8:01 p.m. It’s annoying, but it’s hard to get mad at someone over something like that, to love someone so much that she has to know where he is at all times. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with her.
I remember this one time, he continued. We were at a baseball game, watching the Redhawks, the minor league team in Oklahoma City, for like our second or third date. It was hot, really hot. We both poured sweat, and I couldn’t help but become embarrassed. My t-shirt was soaked through so that you could see my torso, my nipples looking like two pepperonis, and I knew she noticed them—she kept peering over at me in disbelief, like she couldn’t imagine a human being could sweat so much.
“I just think we’re just not all that much alike,” she said out of nowhere, like we’d been holding a conversation even though we hadn’t spoken to one another in three innings.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve had fun and all; don’t get me wrong,” she said as she took a sip of her beer. “You seem like a really nice guy.”
“There’s still a couple innings left in the game.”
The visiting team was batting, and a couple of kids behind us heckled the third base coach. Mahoooooney! they yelled. You’re full of balooooney! The coach attempted to ignore them, but he was affected by the taunts. He kept peering up into the stands, an irritated look hidden by the shadow cast by his hat brim.
“Oh, I know,” she said. “We can stay as long as you like. I still need a ride home.”
“So you’re breakin
g up with me?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘breaking up’ exactly.”
“But you no longer want to date me?”
“You’re a science guy, right?”
I nodded.
“I’m ending the experiment. Let’s say that.”
“The experiment?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Seems kind of belittling.”
“I don’t mean to offend.”
MAHONEY! You big fat phony! the kids yelled. They smelled of cheap beer and cigarettes even though they looked like they couldn’t have been out of high school. A former classmate now graduated had probably served them, or maybe they had fake IDs. Or perhaps the server didn’t even care, too hot himself to card potential consumers, just wishing he could be back home, anywhere he could find A/C, some relief.
“You seem surprised,” she continued. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, popping it into place with a satisfying thump of a rubber band.
“I suppose I am a little bit.”
“Really?”
“You did agree to come out with me.”
“I did.”
“You were just trying to be nice.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not good at nice. I was—well, like I said, experimenting.”
“Did your hypothesis prove true?”
“It did.”
“I see.”
The teenagers continued to mock the third base coach. Mahoney! they yelled. Mahoney! The pitcher delivered a fastball, and the batter dribbled a lazy grounder foul down the third base line. Mahoney bent down to field it, but the ball bounced off his hands and dribbled off to the side. Ha! the kids laughed. HA HA HA. Nice boot, cowboy! they yelled. You couldn’t catch cold naked and wet in Canada!
“What a bunch of assholes,” Sara said.
An Elegant Theory Page 29
