Arty seemed to know what I was thinking. “He must be under orders to keep it to himself before it’s official,” he said. In addition to the American detectors in Louisiana and Washington, and the Italian site outside of Pisa, the collaboration also included teams in Germany and Japan. There was even a project in the early stages in India; the more interferometers there were, the larger cross-section of the sky they could survey. If Neel had wanted a change of scene, there were plenty of places he could have gone; instead, he had chosen the one lab that happened to be at my university.
“He’ll be supervising some of the preparations for India, too,” Arty said. “IndiGO, they’re calling it, for LIGO-India—that’s clever. I once met a man in a restaurant in Athens who’d made a fortune in indigo—the blue stuff. He’d been orphaned as a teenager and just shipped out to Bombay. He ended up as the Greek ambassador there—fascinating guy.”
“They’re moving one of the Hanford interferometers to India,” Jason said. “Not building a new one, right?” He seemed accustomed to Arty’s digressions, and what was necessary to get him back on track.
Arty nodded. “Somewhere in Maharashtra, as far as I understand. Oh, and he’s getting married over there, so that’s convenient!”
It was as if a wave passed through my body. A dizzying swish, such that if you told me I had been squeezed in one direction while being stretched in the other, according to the principles of relativity, I would have believed you. That’s where the metaphor falls apart, though, because real gravitational waves aren’t something we feel.
“Neel is getting married?”
“He didn’t tell you that either? Don’t let him know I put my foot in my mouth!”
“Married to whom?”
Arty shook his head. “I don’t know, I can’t remember. He did tell me, I’m sure, but we were also talking about their NSF funding, that whole saga, and…”
If we’d been alone, I might have pushed him. But Jason was eager to get back to his chirp masses. We returned to his paper, and then I talked about the possibility of primordial black holes—black holes created during the Big Bang—actually becoming dark matter, as suggested by a recent paper from Johns Hopkins. I talked while Arty nodded and smiled, and once got up to modify an equation of Jason’s on the whiteboard. Both of them had forgotten Neel’s move, and his upcoming marriage. I could keep up with the numbers they were tossing back and forth, but at the same time there was another data set preoccupying me, one with which neither of them was likely to be familiar.
Last year was the first in which unmarried Americans outnumbered married ones; and yet, even with all of these single people, we still don’t have a word for the person who was your most important person—if you don’t wind up with him or her. Neel was that person for me, and so the person he’d chosen took on a mythic dimension—was she also a physicist? Or a pianist, or a kindergarten teacher, or a director of marketing? Did the fact that they were getting married in India mean that she was Indian, as Neel’s parents had always hoped for him? Was she younger, or the same age we were? Was she okay with Neel’s well-established position on children? Was she pretty?
We had to wrap up before three, when Arty was teaching his famous Inflationary Cosmology lecture. Arty was one of those rare professors who could remain interested in explaining his work to each new generation of students, and there was no doubt that his lecture would be packed as usual. The three of us walked outside together, and Arty observed that I’d taken his parking spot.
“I always do.”
“Why not walk, in this weather?” he teased me.
“I have to get Jack,” I said. The truth, which Arty knew well, is that I can’t stand walking—it’s so slow. “When he’s older, we’ll bike.”
“How old is he?” Jason asked, to be polite.
We chatted for a minute about Jack. I told them that it was now possible to buy your child a Cosmic Microwave Background stuffed toy.
“Now I remember,” Arty said suddenly. Jason and I both looked at him.
“She’s a cardiothoracic surgeon,” he said, bobbing his head as he does whenever we’ve reached some kind of conclusion. “From Mumbai, I believe. She’s been working with Doctors Without Borders—wonderful organization. But now she’s got a new job here, at the Brigham.”
Understandably bored by details about people he didn’t know, Jason was pulling out his bike. I noticed that Arty was looking at me anxiously, as if even he could understand why this news might be upsetting. It seemed important to reassure him, not only for his sake.
“That sounds exactly right for Neel,” I said. “Someone smart, but practical.”
Arty smiled at me, relieved. “Exactly.”
17.
My own parents didn’t get married at first. When they moved in together, in Manhattan in 1965, my mother was a receptionist at the hair salon at Lord & Taylor (a job she says she got only because of her long red hair, which she used to iron straight). My father was working his way through college, and neither one of them had any interest in children. They insist that I wasn’t an accident, but a gradual change of heart, and that they had my sister to keep me company.
I was born in ’71 and then Amy arrived in ’73, after which they decided to move to California. My father left Con Ed in Manhattan for a construction management job in L.A., and my mother stayed home with us. When I was five, they got married in our backyard, “for you girls,” not because they had any newfound faith in the institution. Doing it the other way, the marriage without the children, has never made sense to me—or that’s what I said to the few friends with whom I discussed Neel’s engagement. What it really made me feel was that there was some magic I’d never experienced, which might make two people decide to yoke themselves together in that official way, for no practical reason at all.
The day after I went to see Arty, I taught my first seminar of the semester, for second- and third-year undergraduates: Introduction to Special Relativity. When I checked my phone afterward, there was a text message from Charlie. I did not believe, and yet my breathing and my heartbeat sped up. My skin was hot, then clammy. The message read simply—Where does the universe END?—not the kind of question that normally interested Charlie, but employing capitalization just the way she did, to reproduce her own animated manner of speaking. The following evening there was another email, blank except for the attachment: an article in which I was mentioned as one of ten female physicists “to watch.” It was nine years old and of course I’d seen it at the time; it was as if “Charlie” had just noticed it.
My first thought was that Terrence might believe me now. There was no ghost, but there was someone who was, as he had said, screwing with me—it wasn’t an anonymous spammer. I thought that if a health care worker or a delivery person had really picked up Charlie’s phone and guessed the lazy password, my name would’ve been easy to find in her contacts. I wasn’t under any delusions about being famous, but there had been times since the books were published that I had been recognized—usually in a bookstore, by a clerk who was excited about science, and once on the playground with Jack. A woman had approached me and said, “Are you Helen Clapp?” and we had talked for half an hour, while our children climbed and slid together.
There is a certain kind of person—usually male, but not always—who makes physics into a hobby, who reads all the popular books and makes an honest effort to understand. Sometimes all these people want to do is show you how much they know, but many of them (the woman on the playground included) are really curious. It doesn’t have to do with education, necessarily; there are just some people who get pleasure from considering abstract questions about forces and cosmology. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but sitting in my office after the seminar that afternoon—having just met eleven students with that type of brain, who’d also had the luck and drive to make their way to MIT—I thought it was possible that the pe
rson on the other end didn’t know whose phone they’d taken. Even if you had come into the house to provide some service, seen a phone on a counter, and pocketed it, there was no reason to assume it belonged to the dying woman upstairs—in fact, “Charlie’s iPhone” didn’t suggest that it belonged to a woman at all. And if she’d really used 1234 as a passcode, anyone who felt like it could’ve gotten in; Terrence was just fortunate that there hadn’t been a credit card or other financial information stored there.
I had thought that I would call Terrence right away, to tell him about the message. By the time I got home, though, I’d changed my mind. If it was shocking for me to receive these things digitally, how much more disturbing would it be for him? Simmi had suggested to her father that she wanted to see Jack again, and I hoped that the next time we got together, I could bring it up in a natural way. I took screenshots of the two messages and emailed them to myself. Then I went back to work. My responsibilities that day were mostly bureaucratic—having to do with the resumption of classes—and I completed them with only half my attention.
I didn’t answer the text about the end of the universe, but I did think about it. Having a child Jack’s age challenges me to put what I do into the most basic terms, something I always tell my students is a valuable exercise. As far as universe formation goes, I am partial to Andrei Linde’s “balloons producing balloons producing balloons” model: the idea that there are many universes pressing up against each other, each having expanded from a tiny region of space. There is also Paul Steinhardt’s Cyclic Universe: growing, collapsing in on itself, and being born again as a new entity. Neither of these were ideas I could explain in a text message, however.
What I used to say—that we don’t know for sure where the universe ends, because none of us was around to see its beginnings—is not exactly true anymore. Ever since the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe’s data was published, in 2012, we have actually been able to see a real picture of the oldest light in the universe. This brightly colored pattern—the googly-eyed version of which usually rests against Jack’s pillow alongside a hypoallergenic polar bear named Bruce—is like any temperature map. The fact that there are an equal number of hot and cold spots confirms the simplest and most beautiful version of inflation. We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than a trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life. The tiny variations created during that wild beginning are the seeds of the galaxies we see today.
That’s what I would have told Charlie about the universe’s origins, if it had really been Charlie asking. She had a way of nodding when I talked about physics, in college or even after we lived on separate coasts. Her eyes would get just slightly wider than usual, and she would do a convincing impression of someone who was really paying attention. Once we were at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston seeing Alfred Stieglitz photographs with her mother—this might have been in our sophomore or junior year—and Adelaide had given us a little lecture about Stieglitz’s landscapes (which I’m ashamed to say I later reproduced, almost word for word, on the exam for the class I took to fulfill my Literature and Arts B requirement). Charlie listened to her mother in the same way she listened to me talk about neutrino mass parameters, and then joked with me later that she found Stieglitz’s bare tree branches as boring as O’Keefe’s flowers.
“I can’t really get interested unless there are people in it,” she said.
18.
N:
Arty told me your news (both parts). And then Mark over at LIGO basically confirmed (the move, not the wedding…I’m going to take that on faith). Belated congratulations, although I have to admit I’m surprised. If I were accepting a job at Caltech, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d be among the first to know. I can promise I’ll be more forgiving about your other big announcement, especially if you give me some details. And I promise not to spread them around among your new colleagues. I’d advise against making a confidant of Arty in the future—he’s utterly reliable in every department except secrecy. Actually I think that’s part of his fundamental decency…it probably never occurs to him why anyone would want to keep something a secret.
What’s going on in L.A.? Is everyone going to drink each other under the table at that hole on Figueroa in honor of your departure? Or do you not get a going-away party when you’re moving within the cabal? I’m busy here with the electroweak paper I mentioned (my postdocs are the best I’ve ever had) and with Jack. He’s still obsessed with Legos, and now that he’s outgrown his asthma, he’s getting pretty good at penalty kicks, too. They say he needs to volunteer more in class discussions, but I tend to be more and more on his side. Talk is cheap, which I guess is something you realized a long time ago.
Cheers,
H
I wrote that on the evening of the day I met with Arty, but it was more than two weeks before I received a response. At the time I didn’t know what was going on at LIGO; even Arty didn’t know, until a physicist at the University of Colorado started speculatively tweeting about it. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the LIGO scientists might detect a powerful gravitational wave even before the machines were officially taking data, during one of the final test runs—but that is exactly what happened. As it turned out, Neel got my email just a few days before LIGO detected its first gravitational wave. The scientists were thrown into a frenzy of activity, confirming and reconfirming the data, and for months afterward—until they published their historic paper the following February—all of those in the collaboration must have put off answering a lot of email. Because I couldn’t have known about the detection, I simply assumed that Neel was silent because he was afraid his more personal news had hurt my feelings. That made me furious—or maybe what made me furious was the fact that I couldn’t disabuse him of that idea until he deigned to write me back.
H:
I feel like I owe you an apology, though you’re hardly the last to know. I’ve told basically no one about things with Roxy, including my brother—admittedly, I try to make that a general rule where my family is concerned. I’ve only just broken the news to my parents, who are thrilled, of course. She’s not a Telugu Brahmin, but I think they’d lost hope that I would ever get married at all. Roxy’s family is Parsi—a tiny minority in India, famously successful in business. There’s also a strong tradition of service, and that’s what she’s generally been up to since medical school. (She got her MD at Stanford—we were both in California for years, but didn’t meet until last year in Mumbai.) She’s been on a two-year stint with Doctors Without Borders, running a clinic in eastern India, but now she’s ready to come back to the States.
Meanwhile, how are things in the infinite corridor? Am I throwing myself to the lions with Mark and his group? I have to admit, I’ve gotten used to the weather and am a little trepidatious about coming back to Cambridge. (Roxy’s a baby about the cold, which I find funny given her general steeliness. We’re getting married in February in India—short notice, but I hope you’ll come.)
I have something else to discuss with you, which I’ll keep to myself until I see you in person. Both interferometers should be up and running anytime now, and recent developments have made me especially optimistic. As it is, 2016 is shaping up to be a momentous year for me and for the universe in general, and I’m glad we’ll be in closer proximity to exchange notes.
Xo
Neel
19.
A few days after I received that reply, I went to retrieve Jack from a playdate. It was a beautiful fall day, and so I took Arty’s advice and walked. The air smelled like burning leaves. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie at first, but about my graduate students Jim and Chendong, and their analysis of the latest Planck satellite data. I walked from my office in Building 6 out to Mass Ave., where the mother of Jack’s playdate had asked me to meet them at Darwin’s, the
popular sandwich shop. There was a plate-glass window, and a glass door that kept swinging open and closed in the lunchtime rush.
That was when I saw her. In profile, through the glass, dressed in white, gesturing to the girl behind the counter. And this was in character, because Charlie would never pass up an opportunity for conversation with a stranger. I sometimes thought she enjoyed talking to people she didn’t know more than those she did. The girl was laughing. She passed Charlie a brown paper bag; then she moved, reflections shifted, the window was a pattern of light and dark shapes. I took a step back—it was not like what you sometimes heard, people mistaking a stranger for a lost loved one in a crowd. This was real and I was frightened.
The door opened, and I was standing in front of Adelaide Boyce, blocking her path. I almost laughed, I was so relieved. Charlie’s mother was wearing white, more of a knitted cape than a sweater. She was alive and very real, buying bread from a store. Nothing could be more normal.
“Helen!”
I almost said that I’d thought she was Charlie. I might have said it in the past, even if it wasn’t true, just to please her.
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