Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  There would be, over the course of the next year, he realized, a slow trickle of young, ambitious physicists from the Lab. There was still work to be done, but Abhijat and Dr. Cardiff knew, as did the younger physicists, that the Lab was no longer the place from which the most groundbreaking work would emerge.

  One by one the staff filtered down to the cafeteria, taking places at the long tables that lined the atrium. The sun shone in through the windows, but inside, the mood was glum. Abhijat took a seat at a table with Dr. Cardiff and Dr. Cohen. The cafeteria ladies, who knew how badly the scientists had hoped for the collider, brought over plates of cookies, which the physicists picked at halfheartedly.

  “This will be the end of the Lab,” Dr. Cohen said, breaking the heavy silence.

  “Don’t be hyperbolic, Adam,” said one of their colleagues.

  “There’s still much to be found in the lower energy levels we’ve got here now.”

  “Oh, please,” Dr. Cohen answered. “That will be wrapped up in a matter of years. And then where will we be?”

  “We’ll be off to another lab,” answered another colleague, as he took a seat.

  That, they all knew, was likely true. Most would head to Europe or Japan. There were rumors of CERN trying for a super collider. Perhaps they would end up there.

  Some would leave physics entirely, Dr. Cardiff thought, though he didn’t say this.

  “Now I’m going to have to wait until I’m fifty to understand what breaks electroweak symmetry,” one of their young colleagues said, looking up from the napkin he’d torn into tiny pieces.

  “If then,” Dr. Cohen added. “I think this may be the death knell for our field.”

  “Entire fields of academic inquiry don’t just die out, Adam,” another colleague said.

  “Of course they do.”

  Alone now in his office, Abhijat looked again, as he had so many times before, out the window and over the great prairie.

  He felt tired, he realized. Tired of the constant striving that had been the focus of his attentions for as long as he could remember, the most important part of his world. Tired of attending to a professional legacy, of contributing, critiquing, keeping up, being first. But he was afraid, too, of living without those things. Who would he be without them? Was there, as his mother had always insisted, happiness in contentment with what one had?

  Instead of driving home, he decided, that evening, to walk, following the paths laid out through the Lab’s prairie grasses, toward town, toward his home.

  He felt angry with ambition, he realized as he made his way home. It had, after all, come to nothing. Had seduced him with promises undelivered, and perhaps, he thought, undeliverable.

  He had been an unwise man, he realized—no, worse, a stupid man, he decided, angry with himself.

  For a week after the announcement, Abhijat stayed in bed, venturing out only to graze, listlessly, in the kitchen when his body reminded him to feed it. Each night when Sarala joined him, she felt his head for fever, but she knew what this was. She brought him cups of tea that grew cold on the nightstand, chicken soup at Carol’s suggestion, but this, too, grew cold and gelatinous in the bowl beside his bed.

  “What will this mean for his work?” Carol had asked, and Sarala realized that she didn’t know.

  When he emerged, finally, a week later, dressed again in a suit and tie, appearing at the breakfast table as though nothing had changed, Sarala and Meena exchanged looks. Once again he loaded his briefcase and made his way, for the first time in days, back to the Lab.

  What to do now, he had asked himself. There was only going forward, letting go, embracing.

  By the time of Randolph’s return, Lily had only a few days until her application to the Academy was due. She’d turned it in just under the wire, which was unlike her, but understandable given the circumstances. Meena had ignored the deadline entirely, something she had not yet had the heart to tell Lily.

  CHAPTER 23

  Field Guide to the North American Household

  DUANE BANTAM, A MAN WHO, THOUGH COMFORTABLE AND successful in his role as the high school’s wrestling coach, did not harbor finer academic ambitions, had, that spring, inexplicably been assigned to teach the Nicolet Public High School’s Advanced Placement U.S. History class. As they neared the end of the school year, Mr. Bantam, in what was either an act of desperation or of genius—his students and colleagues had not yet decided—announced that the class would participate as reenactors during Heritage Village’s annual Revolutionary War Days, a hands-on learning activity, he explained. Mrs. Schuster, the director of Heritage Village, was thrilled by the idea. She assigned each of the AP U.S. History students a character, and they had thrown themselves into their preparations, studying and designing period-appropriate costumes with the attention to detail she usually saw only in the “career” living-history buffs.

  The students, the majority of whom had been Lily and Meena’s classmates in the Free Learning Zone, now spent class periods poring over information on colonial-era field gear and weaponry, cookware, soap making, blacksmithing, indentured servitude, medicine, spinning, needlework, and woodworking, leaving Mr. Bantam to peruse his coaching manuals in peace.

  Along with their newfound enthusiasm for reenacting, the AP students, with the zealotry of the recently converted, had also acquired a passion for the careful monitoring of accuracy above all else, and this had manifested in an awkward conversation (one Mrs. Schuster would have preferred to avoid) over Meena’s participation in the reenactment.

  “It’s inauthentic,” Tom Hebert argued. “There wouldn’t be a housemaid in the period who looked like Meena.”

  Lily glared at him. Meena rolled her eyes, tired of her classmates’ seemingly never-ending arguments over historically accurate footwear and undergarments.

  Mrs. Schuster, who had not before been confronted with this issue, having dealt almost universally with the white, towheaded, and corn-fed volunteers who presented themselves to her, began to fumble. “We will do our best, Tom. You are right to note that it isn’t…” Here Mrs. Schuster paused, searching for the word she wanted. “… ideal. But we will make the best of it.”

  “What a cretin,” Lily muttered. Together, the girls sat down under a tree a little away from the rest of the class to look through one of the books Mrs. Schuster had lent them.

  “Well,” Meena allowed, “he does have a point.” She expected that she might encounter similar sentiments, similar questions from the Revolutionary War Days audience. Also, I drove here in a car and had Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, she imagined replying.

  Sarala had offered to help the girls with their costumes. “I used to be quite skilled with a sewing machine when I was your age,” she told them as she laid out snacks and Lily regaled Sarala with details about their characters, both housemaids in Heritage Village’s mansion.

  “For six weeks, we’ll be in training, learning about the time period and creating costumes. The mansion is the most difficult assignment,” Lily explained, “because there are so many rooms to interpret. You have to learn millions of details about each of them.”

  Meena had been relieved by Lily’s interest in the project, for it meant a reduction in the steady stream of chatter regarding when they might finally receive news about whether they had been accepted at the Academy.

  At some point, Meena knew, she was going to have to break the news to Lily that she hadn’t applied. Until then, though, Meena negotiated these conversations with noncommittal, single-syllable responses, which Lily happily did not seem to notice amid her own growing anxiety and impatience.

  Randolph had begun his book project with dedication and enthusiasm, but had found himself unable to make any meaningful headway. Each time he sat down at the large desk in his study, prepared to regale his imagined readers with tales of his wildest exploits, he was seized, instead, with a sense of the danger and the futility of it all. Reading through his drafts at the end of the day, he began to notice that he’
d focused almost entirely on warnings: how to avoid cultural misunderstandings, the importance of preparation, the necessity of keeping one’s eye on surrounding crowds.

  He had asked Lily to read and comment on his work, and each night before bed, he presented her with his day’s efforts. As she read, she noted helpful suggestions and asked questions, but she could see that he was struggling. What was missing from the pages was the sense of her father’s enthusiasm, his curiosity, traits she had never known him to be without—indeed, traits which he had always seemed to have in abundance compared to the other adults she knew.

  She had asked him one night what it was about exploration that had so appealed to him at her age, what had drawn him to his adventures. Randolph didn’t know if she was asking because she was wise and hoped to remind him of what he had first fallen in love with, or because she was simply curious. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. As he answered, Lily in the great chair in his office, Randolph behind his desk, he found himself thinking back to his childhood, to the books that had seemed to promise that there was still adventure to be had in the world, still unknown parts of the world left to be explored. And he began to see the way forward.

  As he sat behind the polished mahogany desk from which he could survey the collection of curiosities he had acquired on his travels, he began to imagine who his audience might be, and found himself surprised that instead of writing to the intrepid adult travelers he had imagined addressing, he found himself instead remembering the nights he hid under a blanket with a flashlight, transfixed by wild tales of adventure. Perhaps a book for children might stoke that same curiosity in others, might help him remember his own curiosity rather than his fear.

  Now that the collider had, as Rose’s campaign literature noted, “been successfully defeated by our citizens standing up for their rights even when their elected officials would not,” the citizens of Nicolet turned their attention to the upcoming mayoral election.

  Rose had expected that the informal candidates’ forum held in July at City Hall would be her time to shine, for Mayor Callahan had never been renowned for his skill at extemporaneous speaking. Her campaign staff had, of course, encouraged supporters to attend, and had even suggested a handful of question topics on which “your fellow citizens might be interested in hearing Candidate Winchester’s thoughts.” As they neared election day, Rose felt certain they were nearing, also, the end of Mayor Callahan’s long run as mayor of Nicolet.

  But as the candidates’ forum progressed, the meeting room in the Nicolet Public Library packed with curious citizens, Rose had been caught off guard by one of the forum participants, who stood up to ask, “Isn’t it true that your own daughter won’t be attending Nicolet Public Schools? That she’s being shipped off to an elite boarding school for ‘exceptional’ children? What sort of investment will you have in the schools here if you don’t even trust them enough to educate your daughter?”

  Rose, not realizing that word of Lily’s application had reached the ears of the electorate, had fumbled her response, sounding as unprepared for the question as Mayor Callahan when he responded to what Rose thought were obviously questions planted by his supporters.

  “Sir,” she managed, finally, after many halting starts and stops, “where my daughter attends school has no bearing on my commitment to this community.”

  “Mrs. Winchester.” Mayor Callahan stepped out from behind his podium. “I’d just like to go on record here today as agreeing with you that personal matters should be off the table when it comes to the mayor’s race.” He nodded, as though this was, indeed, a grave and serious matter.

  Rose looked at Mayor Callahan over the top of her reading glasses, unable to decide, finally, if he was the bungling yokel she’d always pegged him for, or a far shrewder politician than she’d ever imagined.

  Sarala had spent weeks studying the patterns and books on period-appropriate fabric Mrs. Schuster had loaned the girls. She had pulled her rarely used sewing machine from the spare bedroom closet, set it up on the dining room table, and spread the tissue-thin pattern pieces out over the living-room carpet, pinning them to the calico and cutting carefully. She wrestled with long yards of fabric that slowly, under her patient hand, transformed into petticoats and bodices.

  The level of excitement in Nicolet over the upcoming Revolutionary War Days was far greater than she remembered from past years. Perhaps, Sarala considered, it was that the town felt able to breathe again now that the specter of the super collider had evaporated. Or maybe it was just that the town, fearful of the future, had chosen, instead, to take refuge in the past.

  At the beginning of the summer, plans were announced for a large collaborative collider in Europe at CERN, and with that news it became clear that the Lab would no longer operate on the forefront of the physics community.

  In July came the announcement from the Department of Energy that within the next four years they would cease to request funding to support the Lab’s current accelerator. Was this some sort of punishment for not securing the collider, some of the staff wondered? Either way, it was clear that the department’s priorities lay elsewhere.

  The day the announcement of the defunding was made, Abhijat had taken a deep breath, gathered his energies, and began to make a list of his options. That facility, this university, yes—all of these were viable, promising possibilities, he thought, perusing the list once he had finished.

  But that evening, over dinner, Meena had asked him, her voice, he noticed, halting and uncertain, “Does this mean we’ll have to move?” Sarala watched him, waiting for his answer.

  Abhijat looked up and across the table at his wife and daughter, taking in the lines of worry on both their faces.

  He decided it then, just as he said it.

  “No.”

  He said it again, as though to test himself.

  “No. The accelerator may lose funding, but there will always be a place at the Lab for the theorists. It will just be—” he paused for a moment, imagining it “—a very different place. No longer the facility it once was.”

  He could picture it—the halls grown quiet, a skeletal staff of mostly emeritus-aged physicists still reading and occasionally publishing an article here and there. Abhijat thought of the rusting buildings of the linear collider and wondered how long until the old accelerator’s buildings, once bustling with activity, would begin to look like that. How long until the cafeteria, once filled with chattering scientists, would be populated by one or two physicists sitting together over coffee at a too-large table.

  “No,” he said again, “we will not have to leave,” and, watching the looks of relief that passed over his wife’s and his daughter’s faces, he knew he had made the right decision.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Road to Independence

  FOR REVOLUTIONARY WAR DAYS, SARALA HAD SELECTED FOR HERSELF a red, white, and blue sweater, its front decorated with an image of a group of pigs sewing an American flag.

  She had been surprised when Abhijat suggested that he join her for the event—he’d lived in Nicolet for over a decade and hadn’t once visited Heritage Village.

  As they walked together through the grounds, she turned now and then to point something out to him. Here were all the things she loved about Heritage Village—the blacksmith’s shop, exhibits on colonial life in America, the costumed villagers—but now the grounds were full of elaborately costumed Revolutionary War reenactors from all over the country, regiments and camp followers, Redcoats who imagined they might quash this young republic.

  The weekend’s reenactors had set up campsites under the canopies of trees that spotted the grounds—canvas tents arranged around campfires, and from the part of the green that functioned as the day’s battlefield came the sound of cannon blast, the sharp crack of muskets being fired.

  Sarala thought back to the times she had brought Meena here as a child, how Meena had loved the smoke and racket of the blacksmith’s shop, how this place had performed for Sara
la the America she’d imagined.

  Their first stop, she decided, leading Abhijat to it, would be the early frontier log house, surrounded by its split-rail fence.

  A junior reenactor Sarala recognized as a classmate of Meena’s was leading another group through the cabin when they arrived. It consisted of a single room—kitchen, dining room, and bedroom all at once—but the group’s attention was on the ladder in the corner that reached up to a loft. “Pioneer families built the loft for two reasons,” Meena’s classmate, in his simple frontier costume, explained. “In the winter, heat rises, so that was the warmest place in the house to sleep. Also, you’ll notice that there are no doors here—just flaps of animal hide. Well, if you were cooking something that smelled good, or your house looked toasty and warm, it wasn’t uncommon for a wild animal to wander in. And when that happened, the whole family could scramble up to the loft and pull the ladder up after them. Then they’d just wait until it wandered back out again.”

  “Fascinating,” Abhijat said, smiling. “What kind of animal?”

  Sarala, surprised by his interest, turned to observe her husband.

  “Oh, a raccoon maybe, or a bear,” the student answered.

  Sarala had not expected Abhijat’s delight at the house’s plank floors, the large stone fireplace. In one corner of the single room sat a wooden bed covered with a rough wool bedspread, and he pointed out to her a small, worn doll made of corncobs in a basket at the foot of the bed. Outside, he was intrigued by the children trying their hand at pioneer chores, grinding dry corn into meal using a wooden mortar and hollowed-out log as a pestle, or carrying buckets of water hung on a yoke they wore across their backs. It seemed to Sarala like an entirely new Abhijat who accompanied her through Heritage Village.