You Think That's Bad (16 page)

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.

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
in
capacity 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 the 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.

Once again he weathered an afternoon of unease and little progress. He'd forgotten that today was the Star Festival, one of his wife's favorites, and was beginning to wonder at which he was more adept: hurting Masano inadvertently or intentionally. He'd settled into the backseat that morning and spread onto his lap his section of the production board, glued on heavy stock and color-coded, when the driver had reminded him about the festival. The driver had noticed the paper cows and kimonos Masano had hung in their potted bamboo out front. They had to have been there when Tsuburaya had come home the night before.

The driver at that point had already turned onto the main street and Tsuburaya had considered asking to be returned to his home, but then had finally said, “Oh, keep going.” Immediately he'd understood how that compounded his offense. He imagined himself telling Masano, “I forgot. And when I remembered, I kept going anyway.”

She had signed the first love note she'd ever sent to him “Shokujo,” the name of the Weaver Princess Star, the central figure of the festival. It had been a reference to the extent to which their discipline for work had suffered in the face of their feelings. According to the legend, the princess had fallen in love with a cow-herder; and as a reward for their diligence and industry, the king had allowed them to marry, but their lovemaking had become for them such a delirium that she had neglected her weaving, and the
herder had allowed his cows to stray, so in his exasperation the king had forced them to remain on opposite sides of the Milky Way, to approach each other only once a year. Every July Masano had celebrated the festival, in recent years more and more often with only Akira, their youngest child. The previous July, while Tsuburaya had looked on, she had shown Akira through his toy telescope how on this night and this night alone the Weaver Princess Star and the Herdboy Star were allowed to meet on the banks of the river of heaven. Tsuburaya had watched as if she were having this conversation with her son in order to have it with him. And if it rained? Akira had asked. If it rained, his mother told him, the two stars had to wait an additional year.

He was falling behind everywhere: in his wife's affections and his work's responsibilities. But in the case of the latter, whether he put in fourteen- or sixteen-hour days, each evening left his production team with still more to accomplish, with principal photography set to commence one way or the other on August first.

He told his staff whenever they protested that there was no sense in blaming Tanaka, since he hadn't misled anyone. “Well, then he's the first producer who hasn't,” one of his assistants grumbled. But it was true, Tsuburaya reminded them: at the meeting at which Tsuburaya had agreed to come aboard, Tanaka had begun by saying, “The good news is: do you want to make this movie with me, or not? The bad news is, we won't have enough time.”