Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  Into the dark, cool dirt she pressed her fingers, making space for each of the tiny constellations of roots. As she loosened the sprouting plants from the flats and settled them into their places in the ground, she covered their delicate roots with earth and marveled that she and the sun and the water had been all that was needed to coax them into life. She thought of the tunnels that might be built under these homes, imagined the particles circling somewhere down below. She thought of the small army of flowering plants that would bloom here as her own response to the signs that had begun to crop up along their street, emboldened by the arrival of the first. She wondered if Abhijat would notice the changes to the front yard. She realized, half smiling, half sad, how unlikely it was.

  Each night at dinner he was there in body, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Even Meena seemed to notice, no longer working on her schoolwork there in the kitchen after dinner, peppering her father with questions, but instead withdrawing to her room to work on her schoolwork alone. The house had grown so silent it had begun to press in on Sarala, and some nights she turned on the television just for the sound of another voice.

  “Why don’t you talk with Abhijat about this, about how distant he seems?” Carol had suggested.

  Once, this might have seemed possible, but not lately, Sarala thought. “Some conversations aren’t worth having,” she said. Carol looked at her sadly.

  Sarala remembered how, in the early days of their marriage, she had kept a mental list of the ways she and Abhijat had begun to love one another. It had been a long time since she’d added to that list, she realized, feeling like she had failed at this.

  New articles appeared in the Herald-Gleaner on the issues of ground-water contamination and on the potential for radioactivity to be released into the atmosphere. Letters to the editor urged officials to consider what they had begun calling the No-Action Alternative, which advocated not constructing the super collider. These, Lily carefully clipped from the newspaper and included in her letters to her father, annotating them with her own observations, most of which were expressions of exasperated frustration at how boneheaded, obstinate, and unwilling to listen to reason, to science, the citizens of Nicolet seemed to be on the matter.

  Sarala was proud that the flowers along the front walk had come in nicely, petals unfolding with the warm days. She imagined the roots stretching deep into the dark black soil. In the mornings, when the ground was still wet from the dew, Sarala liked to kneel at the edges of the lawn, pulling budding weeds and stubborn blades of grass from among the flowers, her fingers working deep into the soil, loosening them from the earth.

  Stepping back to admire her work, she thought of how carefully, in the early years of their marriage, she’d attended to the project of adapting and adjusting to their new home—and of how little attention Abhijat seemed to have devoted to this.

  The scientists and other staff at the Lab had begun to worry that if the super collider wasn’t built there, it would be built somewhere else, meaning that the Lab’s technology would be surpassed, all but guaranteeing its demise.

  Abhijat explained this to Lily, Meena, and Sarala one night over dinner, noting with a deep sense of sadness that the best physicists, who had for years been drawn to the Lab by virtue of its position at the forefront of high-energy particle physics, would, if the Lab were to lose its bid for the collider, almost certainly begin to make their way to other facilities. He could envision a time—he said this haltingly, as though not wanting to admit it, as though by saying it aloud he might invest this possibility with a sort of dangerous power—when the Lab might be shut down entirely.

  This went on through the summer, through the long, cold winter, and through the spring, by which point the very fact that now, a year after news of it had leaked, the project was still only “under consideration” itself became part of the frustration.

  In most cases, the citizens of Nicolet were assured, the planned tunnels could be built under existing structures, the land returned, after construction, to its original use. But in a handful of cases, where they might need to construct an access shaft or a maintenance facility, the land would have to be bought and the owners relocated, and soon, the letters to the editor that Sarala read each morning began to focus on the frustration of being left in this limbo.

  We don’t know from one day to the next if we’ll lose our home. My wife and I saved for years to buy this house and now we’re being told we may have to start all over again. Until a decision is made, our lives are on hold. We don’t dare make any plans because we don’t know what the future will have for us here.

  And though the prospect of relocation, of being forced to sell their land and homes was troubling to those who faced it, equally troubled were those who were assured that they could remain where they were, the tunnel snaking its way in a long loop below their neighborhoods.

  My husband and I used our hard-earned savings to build our house. It has been a home for our family and an investment in our future. But now we are left wondering, if we want to sell our home sometime in the future, will we have to disclose that this atom smasher runs underneath it? And if so, well, then frankly, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would buy such a home. Leaving us holding the bag. This project is nothing more than welfare for the overeducated.

  Sarala thought back to their own period of house hunting when she had arrived in Nicolet. Would she have felt comfortable buying such a home, she wondered.

  In his own letter to the editor, Dr. Palmer, the Lab director, noted that his own home, one of the old white clapboard farmhouses that had been removed from their original homesteads and trucked to the village on the grounds of the Lab, sat right on top of the current accelerator’s neutrino beam. “Do you think I would live here if there were something to be afraid of?” he asked.

  But from the citizens of Nicolet, there was no response.

  Once Rose announced her candidacy for the mayor’s office, she’d been pressed to take a stand on the collider almost immediately. This will be the issue that wins or loses the election, her campaign advisors cautioned her. Whatever position Mayor Callahan, the incumbent, takes, they warned, you’ll have to take the other. And it would be best to get out ahead of him on this, they pointed out. It would put you in a position of power.

  Rose understood this, and agreed. She had set about trying to educate herself on the issue and its potential impact on Nicolet. But as she delved into the many volumes of the Environmental Impact Statement, she realized that it was not an issue around which one could easily wrap one’s mind.

  Watching the electorate carefully, Rose had noted that, on the matter of property values, even those who believed there wasn’t any real danger in the collider had to admit to knowing enough of human nature, enough of their fellow citizens, to understand that it wouldn’t matter in the end—that this fear, however unfounded, would, in fact, damage their property values. “If two homes of equal value were for sale,” the argument went, “and one was located on top of this experiment, I think it’s easy to recognize that most prospective home buyers would choose the one not located on top of such a facility.”

  As she made her way through the materials, weighing each side carefully, her advisors pressed her to come to a decision. They prepared press releases for both possible decisions so they’d be ready to move as soon as she made her choice. But in the end, Mayor Callahan beat her to it.

  Lily woke one morning to find her mother asleep at her father’s desk, highlighter in hand, the Environmental Impact Statement spread open before her, head resting in the crook of her arm. When Lily collected the paper and brought it to the kitchen table, the headline marching across the top of the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner caught her eye: MAYOR COMES OUT IN FAVOR OF THE SUPER COLLIDER.

  Well, thought Rose, he’d beaten her to it. And he’d surprised her. She’d felt certain Mayor Callahan would come out against it.

  “Yes, go ahead and send ours,” Rose told her advisors. She felt at once bot
h apologetic and defeated as she put down the phone. She’d understood the importance of making the first move. She’d been leaning toward supporting the project, but that wouldn’t matter now. Her advisors felt certain that, given the direction public sentiment was heading, she’d ended up on the right side. She would chalk it up to a lesson learned—that sometimes an important decision must be made quickly rather than thoroughly.

  Lily, being now a teenager, and attempting to make sense of the world by dividing it into neat and orderly categories—right and wrong, valid and invalid, useful and not useful—had been horrified when she’d learned about the public position Rose had taken on the issue of the collider.

  “What were you thinking?” Lily asked the next morning, the paper spread open on the table, its headline announcing: LEADING CHALLENGER IN MAYORAL RACE COMES OUT AGAINST SUPER COLLIDER.

  Rose, joining Lily at the breakfast table, explained that it was a political decision—that although she was sympathetic to the logic that the collider would allow scientists to answer many of the fundamental scientific questions about the origin of the universe, she had made a decision as a political figure to adopt a public opinion more in line with those of her constituents than reflective of her own understanding of the risks and rewards of the issue, something that was often required of politicians, she explained.

  “But Mom, you know better than this,” Lily protested.

  “What I know,” Rose said calmly, as though trying the line out on Lily, “is that our citizens need a leader who shares their concerns.”

  “But you don’t really believe this is dangerous, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said candidly. “But the voters need someone who understands their fear and will offer them some degree of protection.”

  “So you’re pretending that you agree with something that’s factually incorrect?”

  “Lily.” Here Rose took a deep, calming breath. “As you age, it is my firm belief that you will come to see that the world is not as black and white as you imagine it to be.”

  “But Dr. Mital says—”

  “Dr. Mital works at the Lab. It is in his interest for the collider to be built.”

  “But he also lives here. You saw the map. It could go right under their house, as well as ours. Do you think he would support this if there were any danger?”

  “Lily,” Rose continued patiently, “I think you would be surprised to learn some of the seemingly incomprehensible things people may do when their careers are at stake.”

  Only after she’d said it, only after it escaped her mouth and she heard it out loud did Rose realize that Lily had won the argument. Sometimes she wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to raise a child who was not quite so bright, though when she shared this with Randolph in her next letter, he’d teased her: But Rose, you’d be so disappointed if you didn’t think she was smarter than the both of us.

  Now, over breakfast, Lily and her mother no longer worked together on the crossword. Instead, Lily read the editorial page, her fingers worrying the amulet her father had sent her the month before from the markets of Marrakesh, while her mother fielded phone calls and worked on response letters to her constituents.

  In her letters to Randolph, Rose had never permitted herself to bore him with the mundane details of their lives. Rather, she aimed in her letters to address more important, universal themes. However, once Lily had begun to so vocally criticize her mother’s position on the collider issue, Rose found herself unable to resist noting in her next letter that Randolph really should enjoy not having to put up with being the target of contempt from such an opinionated child. You are lucky to be the one she idolizes and not the one she takes for granted, she wrote, scribbling her signature at the bottom of the page and shoving the letter into an envelope.

  Lily, meanwhile, continued her own campaign, sending her father clippings of articles and annotating the more outrageous editorials that appeared in the paper.

  Randolph, reading their letters by candlelight in the sparse cell of the mountaintop monastery where he had stopped to collect his mail and replenish his supplies, had begun to think of the issue of the collider not as a conflict brewing among the citizens of Nicolet, but more specifically, as a conflict brewing in his home between the two women he loved most in the world, and, more importantly, as one that he was not at all sure how to solve.

  Many of the Lab’s young physicists found it difficult to take seriously the concerns voiced by the protesters who gathered at the Lab entrance. Such fear seemed, to the young scientists, to be entirely baseless and thus impossible to comprehend. Many of them believed that the only real danger of a project like this wasn’t radiation, but rather simple, old-fashioned construction accidents.

  Lunch in the Lab cafeteria often included a table at which one of the young physicists read the day’s letters to the editor aloud to his tablemates, all of them exasperated. Abhijat, however, did not feel so free to laugh at these letters. He had begun to worry that, ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the town’s fears were rational or not. Regardless of what the Lab did, it didn’t look like the protestors—or their concerns—were going away any time soon, and surely the Department of Energy would take that into account when making their decision.

  “How goes your campaign amongst the savages?” one of their younger experimentalist colleagues, Dr. Cohen, asked as he joined Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff at their table in the cafeteria.

  “It does us no credit,” Dr. Cardiff reminded him gently, “to engage in ad hominem attacks on those who see this issue in a different light than we do.”

  “I don’t think it’s an ad hominem attack,” Dr. Cohen argued, “to point out the obvious—that their fear is based on nothing more than a lack of education.” Several of his contemporaries nodded in agreement.

  Dr. Cardiff maintained his ever-patient expression. “I think it is more accurate to say that their fear is based on a difference in education,” for after speaking with many of the opponents, he knew it was far too simple to cast them as uneducated bumpkins. “It’s not that they are incapable of understanding the science. It’s simply that this is not what they’ve spent their lives doing, as we have. It does us no credit to think of them as stupid.”

  Another colleague chimed in, “If you ask me, the people who are really dangerous are the ones who understand a small amount of physics—enough to think they understand what’s going on, but really, only enough to be paranoid.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Cardiff allowed. “But then the responsibility to educate them on this issue rests with us.”

  “Really, Gerald?” Dr. Cohen’s voice was quick to take on a thick veneer of sarcasm. “I’m supposed to put my work aside so I can teach these people the basic principles of particle physics, in hopes that they’ll grasp even a portion of the issue and allow us to build this here. No. It’s too much. That is not my job.”

  Abhijat couldn’t help agreeing that it was a poor position in which to find themselves.

  “What we must understand,” Dr. Cardiff said, directing his comments at Dr. Cohen, but hoping his words would also reach his dear friend Dr. Mital, whom he knew to be both tortured by the uncertainty over the collider and full of frustration with his fellow citizens, “is that because they don’t know the science, for our neighbors this is a matter of trusting that we have no nefarious motives, that we’re not being blinded to some danger by our own career aspirations. And that sort of trust is a difficult thing to ask of people when the stakes are so high.”

  In the next issue of the Herald-Gleaner, there appeared yet another letter to the editor—this one by Dr. Abhijat Mital, theoretical physicist, National Accelerator Research Laboratory.

  To all of my friends and neighbors who ask, What good is this science? To what practical purpose? I say this: We don’t know what will be revealed to us by the experiments made possible by the Superconducting Super Collider.

  We don’t know, and that is exhilarating. It is the wors
t kind of stagnation of the imagination, of passion for life, and of curiosity to suppose that we already know everything worth knowing. What is progress, I ask, if not a belief, a faith in the idea that there is always more to know?

  And, at the home of Ms Lily Winchester, a letter bearing an airmail stamp and a postmark from Siberia arrived.

  My dearest Lily,

  While I have been impressed by and obliged to you for your very thorough reportage on the matter of the proposed super collider, I do hope that you will not overlook the opportunity to engage in all of the wonders attendant with discovering your own world as a young person growing into adulthood. This is a wondrous time of change in which you find yourself, and I trust that you will always keep your eyes open to the astonishing possibilities of your own life, your own world. I do hope, also, that you will try to go easy on your mother. She has her reasons for opposing this, and my hope for you is that as you grow, you will begin to understand the shades of grey that exist in a world that can often seem deceptively black and white. Now I must take my leave of you, for I am about to set off on a great trek across Siberia to join the Nenets people in their annual reindeer herd. I will be on the lookout for a special gift for you, to be delivered in person when I next return.

  Your loving father,

  Randolph

  CHAPTER 14

  In a Distant and Barbarous Land

  April 9, 1988

  Mr. Winchester,

  I write to you on behalf of the Nicolet Ladies’ Auxiliary in hopes that you will consider accepting our invitation to serve as the keynote speaker for our annual garden party and luncheon. Your account of your expeditions will make a thrilling addition to our program, and we would be honored by your acceptance.