Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  “I’ll just check on her, then,” Sarala said, and she turned and was gone, her footsteps on the stairs.

  I should have apologized, Abhijat repeated to himself as he sat down again on the sofa. Distantly, he could hear Meena and Sarala talking.

  He should go upstairs and apologize, he knew. But instead, he listened, discerning the sounds of Sarala changing out of her clothes, the scrape of a hanger against the rod in the closet, water running in the bathroom, then the sounds of her settling into bed, the television in their room tuned to one of the shows she followed—all of them, it seemed to him, about rich and impossibly good-looking American families.

  Abhijat spent the night awake long into the small hours, worrying. As the date of the hearing approached, he’d found it increasingly difficult to sleep, focused on the idea that the hearing would be where the matter of his legacy was decided. Where it would either be held out to him or snatched away.

  Sarala and Meena had long since gone to bed, and the house hummed with silence. He found himself searching the living room bookshelves in hopes of finding a text that might—what? he chided himself. Offer some guess about how things might turn out, about what decision would be made? Provide some prophecy about how this mess with the collider would all turn out?

  He ran his fingers along the spines of the books, stopping at the copy of de Toqueville’s Democracy in America he had purchased for Sarala so many years ago. He pulled at it, tugging it gently from the other books and letting it fall open, heavy in his palm.

  He flipped backward to the book’s table of contents, his eyes wandering over the chapters he remembered from his own reading. He turned, expectantly, to Book 1, Chapter 10: “Why the Americans Are More Addicted to Practical than to Theoretical Science.” But he found no solace in it, no explanation of the situation in which the town and the Lab now found themselves, no suggestions about how one might resolve this impasse. Leafing through the book’s pages, though, what he did find was the inscription he had made inside the book when he had given it to Sarala so many years before. There, on the dark blue paper of the flyleaf, was his inscription. He ran his finger over his own handwriting.

  For my beautiful and beloved wife—

  It felt as though he had discovered the private, secret correspondence of two strangers.

  Abhijat sat at his desk, his lamp glowing out into the otherwise dark house. He realized how very little he knew about Sarala’s interests anymore, how infrequently he asked her about her world. It had been a habit so easy to slip into—busy with work, busy with Meena—that he’d hardly noticed how long it had been since they’d had a proper conversation, one that did not involve Meena’s schedule, her school-work, or, he realized, the situation at the Lab.

  Upstairs, Sarala had fallen asleep. Abhijat turned off the television and watched as she shifted under the comforter in sleep.

  In the morning, Abhijat watched Sarala for signs that her irritation at his comment had blown over. But she was quiet, and even as she prepared breakfast and packed Meena’s lunch, she avoided looking at him.

  Meena noticed this too, the strange silence of the kitchen. She watched a small frown of concern bloom on father’s forehead, his face bent low over his breakfast.

  Sarala went out to the driveway to collect the newspaper. She hadn’t yet talked with Abhijat about her plan. She thought it would be best to wait until after the matter of the collider was decided. Even then, though, she wasn’t sure it was something he was ready to hear.

  After arriving at the Lab and giving Dr. Cardiff what he hoped was enough time to settle in for the day, Abhijat knocked gently on the open door of his friend’s office. Though Dr. Cardiff always kept his door open and welcomed his colleagues to drop in, Abhijat maintained the careful protocol of knocking first.

  “Come in, come in,” Dr. Cardiff called, still looking down at the papers on his desk as Abhijat entered. “Have a seat, old friend.” Dr. Cardiff indicated one of the two chairs that sat opposite his desk.

  Dr. Cardiff’s office looked out into the atrium of the Research Tower, and Abhijat looked down at the small people making their way across the lobby. Across the atrium, he could see into the other offices, his colleagues in profile at their desks or standing to chalk out an equation on the slate walls. Dr. Cardiff followed his gaze.

  “It’s an inspiring view,” he said, and waited for Abhijat to speak.

  “Gerald,” Abhijat began. He took a seat in the chair Dr. Cardiff had indicated. Abhijat’s hands began to beat a nervous staccato in his lap. “In your opinion, if I may ask, what do you believe will happen to the Lab, to us, if the collider does not go forward?”

  Dr. Cardiff took a breath, rolling away from his desk and settling more comfortably into his chair. “Well,” he said, “they may consider building it somewhere else in the U.S.”

  Abhijat nodded. He had already considered this possibility.

  “But I think it’s far more likely,” here Dr. Cardiff took a deep breath, “that it, or something like it, would be built in another country. It may mean the end of this country’s dominance at truly high energy levels.”

  Abhijat thought for a moment about this. If the Lab were no longer the preeminent facility, then, in terms of his career advancement, it would set him back to stay. He wondered whether Sarala and Meena would agree to a move. Early on, he thought, Sarala could perhaps have been more easily convinced, but now? “And where would you go, Dr. Cardiff, in that event?” he asked.

  Dr. Cardiff smiled at his friend, imagining something of the thoughts Abhijat must be turning over in his mind. “Oh, I imagine I’ll stay right here. At my age, being at the top facility no longer seems as imperative as it once did.”

  The phrase “at my age” struck Abhijat. He and Dr. Cardiff were contemporaries. Abhijat had not yet begun to feel old, to feel like the sort of man who might use this expression “at my age,” the sort of scientist who might imagine the endpoint of his career as not very far away. But, he realized, this was, in fact, precisely what he was.

  “I see.” Abhijat thought for a moment. “Thank you,” he said, rising and making his way quickly toward the doorway, “for sharing your thoughts.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Cardiff said. Then, gently, “Try not to worry too much about this, Abhijat. Really, at this point, it’s quite out of our hands.”

  “Yes,” Abhijat agreed softly. “Yes, I think you are right.”

  Dr. Cardiff did not tell Abhijat that he had begun to think it was unlikely they would prevail. That it seemed to him doubtful that the collider would be built in Nicolet or, indeed, anywhere in the U.S.

  CHAPTER 18

  Prairie Burn

  The gladdest moment in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.

  —RICHARD BURTON

  BY TUESDAY MORNING, MOST OF THE TOWN WAS BUZZING ABOUT the public hearing, which would begin at 8 a.m. the following day. And with the event looming, the tension had begun to rise among the town’s residents. Many of them, unaccustomed to public speaking, were now poring over their notes, spending long nights at their kitchen tables deciding what would best fit into their allotted five-minute time slot, what would be most effective, what they might say to sway the decision in one direction or another.

  At the Lab, Abhijat spent most of the afternoon in a meeting in a conference room that looked out over the atrium; with a lull in the conversation, he could hear the quiet hum of the Research Tower’s central air. It was only when he returned to his own office, caught the smell of it creeping into the building, and looked out over the prairie that he saw it.

  The orange flames had spread quickly through the dry prairie grasses, sending up a cloud of smoke that rose slowly into the air. From his office on the nineteenth floor, Abhijat watched the glow from the grass now ablaze and looked out over the flame-red prairie.

  From town, Sarala smelled the smoke. It reminded her of the campfires around which reenactors arranged their tents during
Heritage Village’s annual Revolutionary War Days.

  She stepped out onto the porch. From far off, billowing gray clouds of smoke rose up from the grounds of the Lab.

  As she turned to go back inside, she noticed a flyer that had been rolled up and tucked between the front door and the screen. She pulled it out and unrolled it.

  “Don’t forget to join us tomorrow at the public hearing. This is your last chance to protect your homes and families. Bring your friends. Wear your T-shirts and buttons. Arrive early—our opponents will!”

  The phone at the emergency response dispatch unit had already begun to ring off the hook.

  The prairie burn was an annual event. Conducted by the Lab’s grounds crew and supervised by the Lab fire department, it was something the Lab had done every year, a way to rejuvenate the land, to allow the growth of new vegetation, clearing the way for fresh shoots of native prairie grasses through the ash. But this year, amid all of the clamor over the super collider, it had collectively slipped the minds of nearly all of the citizens of Nicolet.

  Abhijat walked to his car and began his short, winding drive home. In his rearview mirror, the smoke and heat rose up from the grasses as they turned to clouds of ash, reaching up into the evening sky and obscuring the Research Tower. At the entrance to the Lab were the usual protesters, but now they seemed angrier, louder, and Abhijat could hear them from inside his car as he passed by more slowly than usual.

  “You think you can burn us out? We won’t be intimidated by your scare tactics.”

  Abhijat drove home in silence, realizing as he did so that the prairie burn had been—this year—poorly timed.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Last Trek into the Wild

  TRAVELING THROUGHOUT SOUTHERN ASIA THAT FALL, RANDOLPH had collected a thoughtful assortment of gifts for Lily and Rose, which he looked forward to presenting to them upon his next sojourn in the States. Through Lily’s letters, he had been kept abreast of the gathering storm the super collider had become for the citizens of Nicolet, and for his wife and daughter as well.

  Randolph’s final stop on the journey would be the Andaman Islands, where he had arranged to live among the inhabitants of a small fishing village for several weeks in a hut on the beach.

  In a small cardboard jewelry box, swaddled in cotton, Randolph had sent Lily the tiny corpse of a deathwatch beetle, and a note, describing to her how the small creatures bored into dead wood, and from there sent their mating calls, a repetitive tapping sound, out into the night.

  Randolph had fallen asleep soundly, a well-earned rest after a busy day working alongside the fishermen, learning their techniques for constructing and repairing the nets they used to gather the fish that had sustained their people for generations. Before bed, he’d read Lily’s most recent letter, chronicling the state of the town as the public hearing loomed, and Rose’s most recent letter, chronicling the state of Lily’s application to the new Science and Math Academy.

  He woke to the sound of shouting. The sun had just begun to rise, and when he peered out the entrance of his shelter, he was astonished to see that the ocean had receded miles and miles from shore, revealing wrinkled wet sand as far as the eye could see, as though someone had pulled a plug and the great sea had simply drained away.

  All around him, there was the sound of commotion, and when Randolph turned back to the village to make sense of it, he found the fishermen and their families frantically loading children and prized possessions onto rickety bikes, some of them already hurrying inland toward the swell of land where the mountains began.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Public Hearing

  In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.

  —FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY

  OUTSIDE THE HIGH SCHOOL, PROTESTERS AND SUPPORTERS HAD gathered with signs and posters, shouting at one another and at the Department of Energy representatives as they made their way inside. As Sarala and Abhijat passed through the crowd, Sarala noted the presence of police officers near the entrance, arms crossed over their chests, watching for signs of unrest.

  Most of the crowd carried signs and wore T-shirts reading NO SSC IN NICOLET or BUILD YOUR EXPERIMENT ELSEWHERE, but there were a small number of supporters there as well, some of whom Abhijat recognized from the Lab and greeted with a nod as he and Sarala passed through the crowd. Among the opponents, Sarala recognized a number of their neighbors and some of the women from the Mary Kay party. She kept her head down, avoiding eye contact, but just as they were almost to the door, she caught sight of Carol, who broke away from the group of protesters and took her hand.

  “Sarala, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you’re in a difficult place here, but I feel like I have to take a stand on this.”

  “I understand,” Sarala said. She smiled warmly at her friend. Indeed, over the last few months she had begun to wonder whether, were she not married to Abhijat, she would be standing with Carol and the rest of their neighbors.

  Carol embraced her. “We’re still friends,” she said, her words somewhere between a statement and a question.

  “Of course.” Sarala gave Carol’s hand a squeeze and hurried to catch up to Abhijat, who stood at the door, holding it open for her.

  Earlier that morning, as she dressed for the hearing, Abhijat had brought Sarala a letter. She sat down with it, on the edge of their bed, and he watched her as she read.

  I think that I have been insensitive to your feelings, it began. She read on, Abhijat beside her on the bed, expectant, uncertain.

  She looked for a moment at the letter in her hands when she finished. It was so like Abhijat—its language scientific, analytical. She remembered how appealing Abhijat’s logical, organized mind had felt to her when they’d first married—how reassuring. But now?

  She took his hand in hers, finally. “It’s time for us to go,” she said.

  Inside the lobby, the students of Nicolet Public High School, Lily and Meena among them, had gathered during the passing period to watch the protesters. Meena caught sight of her parents making their way through the crowd and joined them.

  Lily watched the crowd for her mother, whom she found standing with a group of protestors, passing out campaign literature. They made eye contact for a brief moment before Lily looked away and made her way toward the auditorium, where she joined Meena, Abhijat, and Sarala, who sat next to Dr. Cardiff in a row of seats near the middle of the room.

  The auditorium had neatly divided itself—supporters of the super collider on one side and protesters on the other, and, as though they were all guests at a wedding, each person who entered the auditorium looked up into the crowd on either side of the long entrance tunnel that split the seats into two sides and made a choice.

  Up on the auditorium stage, which typically showcased awkward but earnest high school musicals, officials from the Department of Energy took their seats behind a long table looking out over the auditorium, their names on placards before them.

  The organizers of the hearing had scheduled a three-hour period for public comment, but 1,500 people had shown up, nearly a hundred of whom had preregistered to comment, and the auditorium soon began to overflow, audience members sitting in the aisles and standing along the entrance tunnel, where they leaned against the gray concrete walls.

  From his seat at the long table on stage, the moderator called the hearing to order, explaining the rules of conduct and pointing out the podium near the foot of the stage, from which each speaker would make his or her remarks.

  Sarala noticed that its placement, whether by design or necessity, meant that the speakers would be looking up at the stage and at the officials behind their long table, like children looking up at an adult.

  The moderator continued. “I have been retained by the Department of Energy for the purpose of facilitating today’s hearing. In this role, I am neither an advocate for nor against this
proposed project.”

  “Bullshit!” came a shout from the protestors’ side of the audience.

  “Well, then,” the moderator continued. “I suppose now is as good a time as any to remind you that this hearing is being recorded. Your comments today will become part of the public record.”

  As the hearing began, Sarala watched the parade of speakers as they made their way to the podium, one after another.

  There were speakers who, remembering the Lab’s original means of acquiring its campus, now cautioned that this was nothing more than another land grab, another abuse of eminent domain. “You hear a lot of folks going on about what a good place the Lab is, all its important contributions,” one of them noted. “But what about those folks who lost their land? They’ll sing you a different tune. And now, thirty years later, here we are again. And what about in another twenty years? They might be coming for your house, for your land then.”

  There were speakers who argued that they were sick and tired of being told why they should give up the houses they saved for and raised their families in just so “a bunch of scientists could have a fancy new toy to play with.”

  “If they want this thing so badly,” one man said, “let them build it under their own houses.”

  There were questions that revealed the depth of the fear many in the audience felt about the prospect of the collider: “Will the men in the area become sterile?” “In the event of a war, would this be the first place to be bombed?” one woman asked, and Sarala could sense Abhijat, beside her, beginning to stiffen in frustration.

  Randolph had returned to the shelter to gather his things, but as he did so, he heard the villagers’ swift walking turn to running, and Randolph—whose years of exploration had taught him nothing if not to trust the locals—took what he had in his arms and began to run, too, his eyes scouring the terrain ahead, searching for higher ground.