You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  The following weekend we all ski down to Davos to resupply. I’m responsible for the sausage, bread, lemons, raisins, prunes, sugar, and raspberry syrup. The entire way down I’m determined not to call on Ruth and the instant I hit the valley floor I go to the rooming-house address she provided. I’m ushered into the breakfast room and watch her butter both sides of a biscuit before she glances toward me.

  The breakfast room has a view of the Jakobshorn. Filaments of snow and vapor stream from its summit in the wind. It’s foreshortened here, as opposed to how it appears from 3,500 meters. Under overcast conditions the peak splits the clouds that pass over as a boulder does a stream.

  “I was always jealous of your mother,” Ruth remarks, once I’ve settled into my chair. The wicker seat’s seen better days and every movement occasions fusillades of pops and cracks.

  “She and Willi had this tradition of summer walks,” I tell her, though she probably knows. “She called them revivifying. She told me a neighbor said to her once, ‘You have twin sons, yet I always see you with only the one.’ ”

  “It was kind of your mother to have passed that along to you,” Ruth responds. No one’s come out of the kitchen to see if there’s anything I require.

  “When I’ve dreamed of him, he’s always been with your mother and you,” she adds. She says that in the last one, he had a hold of her ear.

  “Been with us in what way?” I want to know.

  She smiles at the practicality of my question. “Could you be any more Swiss?” she asks.

  “You think I’m not forthcoming,” I tell her.

  “I think some people don’t seem to want information,” she tells me. She’s crimping the lacework under the creamer and it reminds me how, even back at school, her brain and fingers were always at work.

  “So do you know where the baby is now?” I ask.

  “I should hope so,” she says, and more comes into focus with a jolt.

  “You didn’t give it away,” I tell her.

  “Her,” she says. “Marguerite. Why would I give her away? She’s with her grandmother. Probably napping.”

  We both take a few moments to ponder this. The housemistress brings a filled coffeepot.

  “Are you bringing the baby here?” I ask.

  “I’m going to try my hand at homemaking,” she tells me. “Don’t the French have a word for a cow that at the end of the day just gives up on its own desires and returns, without being herded, to the stable?”

  “A little girl,” I say to myself.

  “Maybe I’ll end up as one of those women you see tossing hay in the upper fields,” she jokes.

  “Willi’s little girl,” I say.

  “Your mother and father both have met her,” she tells me.

  “Of course they have,” I tell her back. One of Haefeli’s most insistent bromides concerning snow safety describes how at certain altitudes, nothing might be less like a particular location than that same location under different conditions.

  . . .

  Everyone’s all bustle and efficiency in the hut when I finally labor up to it in midafternoon. While I unpack the provisions, Bader informs me that we’re going on a rescue. Down in town the group discovered that a pair of Germans have gotten themselves in a fix on the south face of the Rinerhorn, just over the ridge. From below it was apparent that they were in some sort of distress and that the easiest route to them was from our hut. Haefeli’s and Bucher’s silence while he relates all of this is unsettling.

  Once we’re ready we set out. Haefeli straps onto each of us one of his innovations: what he calls avalanche cords, thin red ropes eight meters long that will trail behind us like long tails. Each has a fisherman’s float on the end and the hope is that those, at least, would be visible on the surface should the slope let go. They’ve never been tested. He still hasn’t spoken and now he’s taken the lead. Bader, who tends to chatter when frightened, is behind me in the column and tells me more than I want to know. The south face is a vast bowl that catches the sun from all angles and channels avalanches from each side into its middle. Climbing that bowl in heavy snow will be like climbing up into a funnel. Haefeli has in Bader’s presence called that face “self-cleaning” because it avalanches so often. In the summer smashed trees and boulders spread out from its base like a river delta. Bader’s from the flat-lands and not one to panic easily—for some weeks he thought the White Death the villagers referred to was a local cheese—but even his eyes are glittery with apprehension. And the sudden rise of temperature around midday will have softened the snow.

  We follow Haefeli’s thigh-deep track through the heavy drifts and enter from our ridge halfway up the bowl. The Germans are lodged on the face only a couple of hundred meters above us. One waves and the other has perhaps broken his leg. None of us speak. Who knows why the Germans do what they do.

  We keep a gap of fifteen meters between each of us. We put our boots only in one another’s tracks. With each step we listen for the sound that indicates our weight has broken the layer between strata and that the ball bearings of the depth hoar are about to start into motion. It never comes. Haefeli has us traverse laterally, once we’ve reached the Germans, across the face to get out of the bowl as quickly as possible. Bucher and I take the injured boy’s shoulders and Bader his good leg. His broken one we bind with his snowshoe.

  The sun is setting by the time we return from having guided them down to a part of the slope from which a sledge can carry them to Davos. We’d traded off hauling the boy but we’re all still exhausted and fall into our hammocks after barely stripping off our outer garments. No one’s even lit the lamp.

  “We should have stayed down in the village,” Haefeli says out of the darkness, thinking of the slopes around and above us. Twenty centimeters have fallen in snowstorms in the last three days, and temperatures have dipped and climbed with a kind of cheerful incoherence. Bader was the last one in, and on almost his last step before regaining the hut he triggered a slab release that carried away below us a piece of the slope the breadth of a city block. It swept off an outcropping to the southwest and then was lost to sight.

  Now everything has settled into a quiet. The night is windless and no one stirs in their hammocks. There’s no sound of snoring.

  Eventually I hear Bader’s breathing, and then Bucher’s. A hammock eyelet creaks. The mountain makes subtle, low-frequency sounds, like freight shifting.

  I ask Haefeli if he’s awake. He responds so as not to disturb the others. He says that an avalanche’s release depends on a system of factors so complicated that prediction involves as much divination as science. I offer as rebuttal that we do know some things, and he says of course: we know that gravity and temperature fluctuations together propel the settling and creep that create the stress within the layers. And that those stresses are greater or smaller depending on the slope’s steepness and the snowpack’s weight and viscosity. And that the snow’s ability to resist that stress is measured by its cohesion, or the friction between its crystals.

  For an avalanche to occur, then, he murmurs, something has to either increase the stress or decrease the cohesion. The process by which the ratio changes can be gradual, or some kind of incident.

  And then we’re silent. Does he know I’m weeping? I do my best to remain discreet, and he makes no indication that he’s heard.

  A boy makes a happy gesture in the snow that’s meant to signal We’re so close. Fractures streak away from his ski at the speed of sound, find the stress lines beneath the surface, and generate the ruptures that cause the release.

  I once refused to sit still for one of my mother and brother’s walks. I was twelve. He explained I wasn’t invited. I once again was baffled and once again unwilling to explain that I was upset. “Leave him alone,” my father counseled, indicating me. He felt as left out of my mother’s plans as I was. In his last letter to me, after I arrived at the hut, he wrote My memory is going! I’ll devote the rest of my energies to digging potatoes and other
pursuits suitable to a second childhood. My sister wrote soon after Your mother now has nothing to do with him, or with me. I’ve always been the one ignored. You always were the one who shed suffering and went off to your life. I wanted to write back that in our family the most exacting labor had been required to obtain the bleakest of essentials. I wanted to confide to her my devotion to Ruth. I wanted to ask her what it meant when women did the sorts of things Ruth had done outside the coffee shop. I wanted to tell her our father’s story about how old Balmat, having conducted Empress Eugenie around a glacier, kept for the rest of his life the piece of chocolate that, upon their return, she’d broken in half to share with him. I wanted to tell her that I was like the man who after a cataclysm tethered his horse in the snow to an odd little hitching post that revealed itself the next morning to be the top of a church steeple.

  But in the end I wrote nothing. Because mostly I wanted to write to Ruth. Because my sister was right: I had what I thought I required. I had my resentments, and my work, and I made my choices with even more ruthlessness than the rest of my family.

  Haefeli, too, is asleep now, his breathing uncertain, as though awaiting that offstage tremor. We’ve learned more than any who’ve come before us what to expect, and it will do us no more good than if we’d learned nothing at all. Tonight, or tomorrow night, or some night thereafter, the slopes above us will lose their patience and sound their release. We’ll be overwhelmed with snow as if in a flume of water, the sensation of speed fantastic. We’ll none of us cry out, for our leader has instructed us, in or out of an avalanche, to keep our mouths shut, whatever our impulses to open ourselves to the snow’s power. We’ll be uncovered, months later, gingerly, because no one likes to touch the faces when recovering the bodies. Bucher will appear as if he’s come to rest in mid-somersault. Bader as though he were still swimming freestyle, downhill. Haefeli will have his arms extended, as if having embraced what the mountain would bring. And I’ll be discovered petrified as though lunging forward, flung far from my companions’ resting place, my eyes open, my shoulders back, my expression that familiar one of perpetual astonishment.

  Low-Hanging Fruit

  When I was twelve my father bought me a sailboat, nothing America’s Cup–ish, just something he thought even I couldn’t get into trouble with—like a Sunfish, only tubbier and slower. The first day I owned it I dragged it to Long Island Sound in a thunderstorm. People were sprinting from the beach and here I was hauling this low trailer through the wet sand the other way. The rain was so heavy it knocked me to my knees. Lightning stripped the color away and left the afterimage of dune grasses and their individual shadows. It occurred to me that I should let go of the metal mast. When I did, it started this low keening and my hair lifted, as if in celebration, and even I knew something amazing was transpiring on a very fundamental level. My father, in his raincoat, dragged me off the beach by the collar. He wondered aloud then and later if his son had the brains of a walking doorknob. He was at that point interrupting his son’s first stirrings as a theorist. His son had been modeling something in his head, thinking that maybe there was already lightning inside the mast and inside his head, trying to connect with some kind of energy in the air.

  It wasn’t the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. As my father and wife would be the first to point out.

  I’m a particle physicist. Most of us here could be dumped into that hopper, in terms of category, though of course there’s the specializations-within-specializations: don’t tell the accelerator physicists that they’re particle physicists.

  By “here” I mean in the general vicinity of the Large Hadron Collider; or, in my case, this room with that screen, that chair, and that locker for my coat. My coat doesn’t fit in it. It’s not like they didn’t warn me. When I’d wandered, stunned, out of grad school and into the job market, I’d been thinking mostly about Fermilab. And it’s not like the CERN people gave me the hard sell. They told me: you come here, your office’ll be a closet. Everyone’s here.

  They weren’t kidding. Three thousand physicists, all roaming through how many little Swiss and French towns in their off-hours? Every one of them slopping food around and breaking things. Every one of them with a different idea of what constitutes collegiality. And as for all of the different project groups: well, let’s just say we’ve got some rivalries going. Even the engineers seem well adjusted next to us, and they spend their every waking hour petrified of system failures.

  What are they worried about? Well, what could go wrong? They’ve only cobbled together the most massive and expensive and complicated piece of scientific equipment ever built. Never mind the collider itself; some of these detectors are so big that working on them requires climbing gear. Everybody’s triple- and quadruple-checked everybody else’s numbers, but so what? Tell that to the people on the Challenger. There’ve already been double-digit serious breakdowns.

  But for us—the theory people—that’s neither here nor there. We’re all like, C’mon, let’s get this thing going. We only have so much data to work with. As far as we’re concerned, an ideal world is a place where experiments happen faster.

  All of us have kids and spouses and pets and hobbies, but that’s not where we live. Where we live is that part of the cortex where we do our model building, what my advisor liked to call Adventure Travel Through Concepts. And that’s an ongoing whipsaw between exhilaration and despair. Welcome aboard, loved ones. Strap in. We call this one the Widowmaker.

  First you hope you come up with something. Then you hope that it leads to something else. Then that that something else doesn’t bore you. Then that you’re not just entertaining yourself. Theorist friends when they get uppity tell me they do real theory, not phenomenology. Me, I think that whatever’s in my intellectual playground better connect to the outside world, because I’m not doing too well there, otherwise. I have the sort of life where even computational work makes me feel closer to the human race.

  “You got that right,” my wife said when I made that joke in her presence.

  She was talking about my capacity for certain kinds of curiosities and my apparent incapacity for others. Did I notice when she barely came out of her room all weekend? Did it strike me that dinners had been a little quieter those last few weeks before I left? Those questions, among others, hadn’t seemed to have crossed my desk.

  She claims I have a dad thing going with my old advisor. She had some training in psychology and comes out with stuff like that every so often.

  She complains that theorists say they have all the ambition, but really what they’ve got is vanity. But I say: when that curiosity’s gone, what do you have left?

  Some stuff you come across and bam, you drop to your knees right there: that’s it, you think; that shifts the paradigm. Other stuff, you’re like, Why is this taking up everybody’s time? Some of the bigger-name theorists, they’re just out there hustling. They’re better salesmen.

  The key is to go after the major stuff. Otherwise, you’re one of those guys who’s looking for what we call low-hanging fruit: the questions that are the easiest to answer.

  I’m not the world’s worst husband but there’s a whole lot I’d walk away from to be a part of something even one-third as cool as this. The kind of collisions we’re going to generate should knock all sorts of stop-the-presses particles onto our screens, the way two torpedoes colliding head-on should knock some spray out of the Atlantic.

  Imagine what it’s like for us most of the time. We spend our days in front of chalkboards. Progress is slow. The tea gets cold. Our only idea of the last three weeks fizzles out.

  Anything that just confirms the standard model—as in “Oh, look, there’s a Higgs boson”—that’d be the most depressing result. We’ve been sleepwalking through the last thirty years waiting for what’s going to shake us up.

  My wife was crying next to me in bed the night before I flew to Geneva, and I put my hand on her forehead in the dark. She said, “Remember when you told me that th
e one thing physics teaches you is that the reality you think you observe doesn’t have much to do with the reality that’s out there?”

  We’re not entirely well matched emotionally. When I told my dad we were getting married, his way of putting it was, “Well, it could work for a short while, if everything breaks right.”

  She had a miscarriage and felt like I wasn’t entirely on board for the stunned-by-grief thing. She’s also been blindsided by my refusal to try again.

  The overarching lesson from science in the last century, I tell her, is that my experience isn’t going to help all that much, not in terms of providing a guide to yours.

  It’s like when she heard me sparring with an old friend who’s a string theorist about how some of the follow-up discoveries about the likelihood of the Higgs field were redefining the meaning of empty. She’d snorted. “What was that?” the string theorist asked, long-distance from Berkeley.

  They think this is even bigger for them than it is for us. This gives what they do the chance to make contact with observable physics and become an experimental science. If strings are as large as some of them think—a billionth of a billionth of a meter—that’s within reach of the LHC, and we’ll see new particles whose masses line up like harmonics in a choral piece. We’ll all be notes from a universal melody, patterns from the same object: a string. These people will go nuts with joy. As he puts it, they’ll hear the shrieks over in the humanities buildings.

  Every time you turn a corner, something gets defamiliarized. This is the elevator that’s going to take us to the next floor. Some of those nuts that have been too hard to crack are about to get pried open. “What are you really looking for?” my wife said to me, last thing, before I left. What we’re all looking for. That saving thing, I think: something that right now is beyond our ability to even imagine.