Abhijat made a note on the pad of paper he kept in the breast pocket of his blazer. Most of the other foreign scientists at the Lab were there temporarily—they and their families were housed on the Lab campus or, like he and Sarala, in small hotel-style efficiency apartments. However, as Abhijat was to be a permanent hire, he and Sarala would need to find a permanent home.
The realtor had a pleasant voice, Sarala thought, noting also her delicate perfume, hair the color of straw, sculpted and set, flipping up at the collar of the shirt she wore under her muted, neutral suit. Sarala ran her hand over the smooth beige velour of the seat as they drove, the realtor pointing out here and there the benefits and drawbacks of each neighborhood.
“Well, of course, you’ll want to be close to the Lab,” the realtor continued, “which makes Eagle’s Crest an excellent choice. Just across Route 12, and one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the community.”
By the second day in the realtor’s car, Sarala was certain they had been inside every home for sale in Nicolet. And how strange it had seemed to her, to be allowed to walk right into the homes of these strangers, to wander through their rooms, imagining her own future there, her clothes hanging in the closet.
At the first house, Sarala and Abhijat had stood uncomfortably in the foyer, even as the realtor strode off into the living room, assuming they would follow. Finding herself alone in the room, and looking back to find Abhijat and Sarala still standing, rooted in the entry, she’d had to explain: “It’s okay to come in and look around.”
Sarala knew she was supposed to be imagining her own life in each of the houses the realtor pulled up to, fiddling with the lockbox on the front door, then leading them through the rooms one by one, each house a different possible world for her and Abhijat, but Sarala found herself distracted again and again, instead trying to piece together the clues left out—family photos, a child’s drawing on the refrigerator. Trying to imagine the lives of the people who lived there, for now at least.
In some houses—pristine bathroom counters, kitchen sinks that gleamed with polishing—she had the feeling no one really lived there. In others, it seemed the owners had dashed out only moments before, something of their movement suspended in the air.
“And to your left we have Heritage Village,” the realtor announced, turning her head a little in acknowledgement of Sarala, who, alone in the back seat, had begun to feel a bit like a child. “It’s one of the most notable living history museums in the area,” the realtor continued.
Sarala looked out the window as they passed. Women in long skirts and bonnets walked among rustic buildings. In front of a rough wooden shed, a man in a leather apron tended a blazing fire.
What Sarala liked about Nicolet: Heritage Village. It had been what decided her as she weighed their options: school systems, property taxes, expanses of wide green lawns, and subdivisions where the streets turned in on themselves like mazes. Riding in the real estate agent’s car she had sometimes forgotten entirely which suburb of Chicago she was in.
When she’d seen Heritage Village, though, she knew this was the place for them.
Here was America. Here was where they would raise Meena, the baby she could already feel growing within her, though she was months from being conceived. The America she’d read about: a place of pastures, animals grazing, frontiers stretching ever westward. Here was Paul Revere Road circling around, branching off at Independence Drive. Here was a worried Martha Washington waiting for George to cross the Delaware, Betsy Ross on her porch sewing the first American flag, log cabins from which each morning these pilgrims might set out to discover, each day, a newer America.
Back at the hotel that night, Abhijat sat at the desk beside the television making a list of pros and cons for each of the houses they had considered. On the other side of the kitchenette’s half wall, Sarala folded the dishtowel and draped it over the faucet.
Eagle’s Crest subdivision. Sarala wanted a house there. She loved the sound of it, and the way Eagle’s Crest separated the two parts of the town—on one side, the Lab, where scientists crashed subatomic particles into each other hoping to reveal the tiniest building blocks of the universe; on the other, Heritage Village, where costumed reenactors bent low over kettles, settling day after day this new country—the neighborhood itself like a literal threshold in time, holding apart the past and the future.
Abhijat took out a long legal pad, on which he began to draw an elaborate decision-making matrix. But Sarala had already decided. She held her tongue and waited for him to finish.
They made an offer on the only house available in Eagle’s Crest. A gray two-story—four bedrooms, a study, three bathrooms, and a finished basement. When their offer was accepted, they celebrated with a modest dinner Sarala prepared in the kitchenette of the hotel room and which they ate on trays balanced on their knees while watching Let’s Make a Deal on the television. The woman who stood before the prizes, revealing them to the exuberant contestants, reminded Sarala of the realtor, all hairspray and makeup and hands gesturing.
On the day of the closing, Sarala signed her name over and over again to pieces of paper she hadn’t even read. Each time, she looked to Abhijat, who had already read them over carefully, totaling the figures in his head, and he would nod, yes and yes and yes, it’s okay.
CHAPTER 2
Unveiling the Wild: Being an Account of the Expeditions of Randolph Winchester, the Last Great Gentleman Explorer
It is useless to tell me of civilization. Take the word of one who has tried both, there is charm in the wild life.
—WILLIAM COTTON OSWELL
1972-1974
RANDOLPH LIKED ROSE TO TRAVEL WITH HIM. IN HER SAFARI khakis she looked like Katharine Hepburn, her long chestnut hair wound into a loose bun, pith helmet shading her pale pink skin, kerchief knotted loosely around her neck.
In the early days of their marriage, Rose had accompanied Randolph on all of his assignments. He was a journalist, traveling sometimes with a photographer, but more often, as he preferred, on his own, to the far corners of the world. From these distant places, he crafted for Popular Explorer Magazine mesmerizing stories of the people and places he found, stories that allowed his readers—largely sedentary Midwestern folk—to imagine themselves there with him on his wild adventures. Randolph’s ability to make readers feel as though they were journeying right along with him accounted for the popularity of his pieces in the magazine, where they were accompanied by striking photographs, many of which he had taken himself.
He was proud of the distances Rose had hiked in Borneo. “She’s the equal of any man I know,” he would say to anyone who might doubt her fitness for such an expedition.
In Arabia, they rode dromedary camels across the desert, and Randolph watched her, slim torso swaying back and forth on the animal before him, her hand reaching up to shade her eyes as she peered off into the horizon line, sand meeting sky, sun hanging overhead.
Threading their way through the narrow passes of the Alai Mountains along the Isfairan River valley along with their pack horses, Rose and Randolph spent their nights side by side in a yurt, eyes tracing the elaborate pattern of latticed framework over which a thick felt covering was stretched. It was avalanche season, and how thrilling it was to know that, as they slumbered, they might at any moment be buried under a new small mountain of snow. How thrilling then, also, to awaken in the morning, to step out of the yurt, and to see that it had not, after all, happened—not that night, at least.
In Sri Lanka, during Esala Perahera, they watched the procession of elaborately decorated elephants to honor and venerate the sacred tooth of Buddha.
In Tanzania they hiked Kilimanjaro. Rose made it only three-quarters of the way up before being stricken with altitude sickness, and Randolph spent a long night beside her as she shivered, wrapped in both of their sleeping bags.
Rose had been ashamed that she’d taken ill; it meant neither of them would summit the mountain. But their guide assured her
it might happen to anyone, insisting that, were they to try the climb again, it might be Randolph who was struck down and Rose utterly unaffected—yet another of the mysteries of the world.
Randolph was a polymath, dabbling in everything, lucking into doing nearly all things well. As a child growing up in the English countryside, his heroes had been William Burchell, who, it was said, had set off on history’s first safari after being jilted by his fiancée, and Cornwallis Harris, whose safari paintings and drawings Randolph had pored over as a boy. He’d read Rider Haggard’s Allen Quatermain series again and again, conjuring wild worlds, darkest Africa, determined to live a life of adventure.
His favorite tales were those in which the natural world triumphed over hubristic attempts to ignore or pave over them entirely, as in the story of the old Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where patronage of the golf course dropped precipitously after a player was mauled by a lion on the fairway.
Randolph’s parents had been decidedly unadventurous. Careful and protective of their only son, the most adventurous thing he’d been permitted to do as a child was to attend boarding school.
His interest in adventure and exploration had begun when he had seen advertised in the back of his father’s Popular Mechanics a strange and mysterious book—The Secret Museum of Mankind—for which he immediately sent away. It arrived a few weeks later, a hefty volume filled with dusky mimeograph-quality photo reproductions.
He spent his nights under the covers of his bed, flashlight in hand, poring over the book’s images and captions—Smiling Mothers and Their Wooly-Headed Brood, Men of a Tribe of Sinister Reputation, Witch Doctor of Darkest Africa and His House of Fear: With keen, cunning eyes…he sits by his primitive stock of quackeries…. Expert in hypnotism, trances, and sleights of hand, he rules the village—imagining the day when he might venture out into such a world of mystery and exoticism.
This strange object, he underlined in a stubby pencil by light of his flashlight, with bits of iron, small bells, rusty nails, copper coins, and other metal rubbish dangling about him, and holding a weird drum, is a Shaman priest in ceremonial garb, ready to conduct intercourse with supernatural powers.
In the section titled The Secret Album of Africa, the young Randolph drew a careful question mark in the margin beside the caption reading: The African has not the European’s sensibility to pain.
From The Secret Museum, he had found his way to Livingstone’s accounts of his travels through the dark continent, and from there he had graduated to Thesiger’s travels in Arabia, Grant’s A Walk across Africa, and Sven Hedin’s treks through the Himalayas, having already decided that this was the life for him.
In between his expeditions and assignments for the magazine, Randolph lectured on his adventures, traveling mainly through the small towns of the American Midwest, where he seemed strikingly exotic himself. He had met Rose at one of these lectures—a young girl itching to stretch beyond the rural farm community where she had grown, confined, into a smart and curious young woman, listening with rapt attention to his presentation. Then, after the lecture, coffee at the Cozy Café and Diner, during which she had peppered him with question after question and Randolph had fallen under the spell of Rose’s bright, curious eyes.
And so at eighteen Rose had eloped with Randolph. They married aboard a steamer en route to Ceylon (she sent her parents a telegram by way of announcement), honeymooned among the Wanniyala-Aetto people, where the local women, clucking in disapproval at Rose’s shocking lack of skill as a homemaker, had taught her to gather edible roots and berries, and, alarmed to find that she had never been taught to prepare pittu, a staple of any respectable meal, had taken it upon themselves to teach her.
By the end of their honeymoon, Rose was as taken with exploration as Randolph.
During the Imilchil Betrothal Fair in Morocco, Randolph and Rose watched, transfixed, as the young men dressed in djellabas stood unmoving, displaying their silver daggers, a sign of wealth, the young women moving past, assessing this plumage, the Middle Atlas Mountains rising up around them. At the Palace of Winds in Jaipur, they turned their faces up to the small windows lining the walls, imagining the royal concubines, kept secluded there, peering out over the city. In Madhya Pradesh, they visited the sandstone temples of Khajuraho, admiring the erotic sculptures that decorated the walls.
With each expedition, Randolph felt he was unveiling a bit of the world, coy temptress, slow to reveal her secrets. He came to life on these trips—at night, around the camp’s fire, the sound of animals all around them, and later, sleeping side by side under the stars, the sound of native drums from the bush.
Two years into their travels Rose discovered she was pregnant. She told him at a Shinto temple, whispering the news into his ear over the monks’ chanting.
They decided she would go home, to the small farm town outside of Chicago where she had grown up. But the small farm town had changed during Rose’s absence. The National Accelerator Research Lab had arrived, transforming Nicolet, and so what Rose found when she returned was not the sleepy rural town she remembered, but a bustling, blooming suburb.
Rose bought a house in a neighborhood in the middle of what she remembered as the Anderson farm and which was now called Eagle’s Crest. On one side of Eagle’s Crest, there now stood Heritage Village, a living history museum where reenactors in period costumes performed the settling of the country, manifest destiny, conquering the prairie day after day for tourists and school groups. And on the other side of the neighborhood, beyond the rolling, manicured greens of the new golf club, which had been built on land that had once marked the border between the Amundson and Heggestadt farms, there now stood the imposing National Accelerator Research Lab, its twenty-story Research Tower rising up over the prairie.
The townspeople were split in their opinions regarding the purpose of the Lab. Some argued it was a secret research facility for UFOs. Some believed the scientists there were studying invisibility, the better to battle the Communists. Others swore it was a testing ground for remote viewing experimentation.
But the truth was at once more magnificent and more mundane. The Lab was a facility for the study of high-energy particle physics, where scientists employed a particle accelerator to collide protons and antiprotons, watching the detectors for signs of new, smaller particles, all the while attempting to puzzle out the mysteries of string theory, supersymmetry, gauge theories, leptons, neutrinos, and quarks.
In building the Lab, the government, noting the principle of eminent domain, had, as they put it in the official literature, annexed the surrounding land holdings, each family finding one morning on their doorstep a grim-faced government official whose job it was to break the news.
In a letter to the editor of the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner, one local farmer wrote that he considered it “dastardly to build such a facility on some of the richest farming soil in the world.”
Rose’s parents had not, like so many of their neighbors, lost their farm to the Lab. But they had seen their small rural town transform around them, swelling and sprawling as neighborhoods sprung up to accommodate both the displaced farm families and the Lab’s scientists. And so, when Rose returned to Nicolet to raise Lily, this was the town she found.
Some of the former farmers still longed for their land, refusing to attend the annual picnics the Lab put on for the displaced families, during which they were invited back into their homes, many of which had been moved via trailer to a small, clustered area the Lab called “the village” and now housed offices or the families of visiting physicists.
But not all of the families had been so resolute. Once the initial shock and surprise wore off, there were those who, recognizing the declining role of small family farms and watching their taxes rise year by year, had been pleased to accept the price the government offered, had been watching for years as the land surrounding Chicago grew from farmland to suburb and had realized that, Lab or no Lab, it was only a matter of time.
Rose pushed Li
ly up and down the aisles of the grocery store. Lily, perched in her seat in the cart, offered a running commentary on what she thought they needed. A bright and precocious child, she’d begun speaking in full sentences. There had been no preliminaries, no warm-up sounds, no baby’s babbling in imitation of adult language. “Look at that dilapidated building,” she’d said abruptly one morning, pointing from her car seat in the back of her mother’s station wagon. One day she’d been silent, regarding her mother with her wise baby eyes, and the next, she was conversant. Now she chattered on as they made their way up and down the aisles.
The woman at the checkout picked up the eggplant and the mango as they traveled down the conveyor belt, eyeing them suspiciously—a not infrequent occurrence during their shopping trips. Often, the clerk would hold up some unfamiliar produce and ask Rose what it was and how on earth one cooked with such a thing. Rose was happy to to explain, and sometimes shared one of her favorites among the many recipes she’d collected on her travels, but she suspected that these women, who regarded this strange new produce with misgivings, infrequently tried her suggestions, feeling safer, she imagined, with sensible vegetables like corn and green beans.
“It’s an eggplant,” Lily chimed in from her seat in the cart, making what the clerk considered to be a disconcerting level of eye contact. “You might know it instead as an aubergine.”
Since her return to Nicolet, few of the faces in the store, the post office, or the library were familiar to Rose. No longer bound to family farms, many of Rose’s generation had moved away, so that those left behind were mainly her parents’ age.
Back at home, Lily played with her blocks on the living room floor while Rose read aloud. They were beginning Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky.
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