Chrissy Kolaya - Charmed Particles

The sound of geese each morning meant he had arrived. They congregated in the reflecting pond just outside the Research Tower, honking loudly at the arrival of each scientist. In the parking lot, Abhijat threaded his way through rows of old cars, Volvos and Subarus in need of a wash, university bumper stickers announcing their academic pedigree. On his first day he had parked next to a car with a personalized license plate reading QUARK, and as he made his way into the building, his heart swelled with a sense of being, finally, at long last, at home in the world.

One of the proudest moments of Abhijat’s life had been the day he had announced to his colleagues at the university that he would be taking a position at the Lab. For his family, even for Sarala, some degree of explanation had been necessary to help them understand the importance of such a position, but his academic colleagues understood immediately and responded just as Abhijat might have hoped: mouths agape, eyes wide, hearty handshakes and pats on his back. Among physicists, the Lab was a place they dreamed of visiting, perhaps conducting research there for a summer. They had understood what it meant to be offered such a position.

In the lobby, over the bank of elevators, two clocks displayed the time at the Lab and the time at CERN, their greatest competitor. Among the Lab’s physicists, the consensus was that it was wise to begin the day imagining what those rascals in Geneva might be up to.

The theory group’s offices were on the nineteenth floor, near the library, where many of the theorists spent the mornings poring over the latest journals. Abhijat had been given his choice of offices — one that looked out into the Research Tower’s atrium, or one that looked out across the eastern arc of the accelerator, over which the land had been returned to its original prairie grasses. Abhijat hadn’t liked the sense in those atrium offices of being on display, great floor-to-ceiling windows through which anyone in the lobby or cafeteria might watch you working, so he had selected an office looking out over the campus of the Lab toward Chicago. On clear days, as he puzzled over an equation or the proofs of his latest paper, he could make out the skyline of the city and watch planes rising and descending from the airports.

Sarala spent her days carefully unpacking and arranging their new lives in the house on Patriot Place, room by room — first the kitchen, then the master bedroom, then the living room, family room, and a study for Abhijat just off the foyer.

In the hallway, she hung the framed blessing her mother had sent as a housewarming gift:

Here may delight be thine

through wealth and progeny .

Give this house thy watchful care .

May man and beast increase and prosper .

Free from the evil eye ,

not lacking wedded love ,

bring good luck even to the four-footed beasts .

Live with thy husband and in old age

mayest thou still rule thy household .

Be glad of heart within thy home .

Remain here, do not depart from it ,

but pass your lives together ,

happy in your home ,

playing with your children and grandchildren .

O generous Indra, make her fortunate!

May she have a beautiful family;

may she give her husband ten children!

May he himself be like the eleventh!

Here in the States, people always and only wanted to know if she and Abhijat had an arranged marriage. But Sarala didn’t like to think of it like that. Rather, she thought of it as a thoughtful introduction made by their parents, and who better to know the best possible mate for their child? She kept a contented tally of the ways in which she and Abhijat had begun to love one another, Sarala marveling at Abhijat’s dedication to his work, Abhijat admiring Sarala’s social ease.

“Everyone likes to talk to you,” he said to her one night, and Sarala furrowed her brow, bemused.

“But that is nothing difficult, nothing to be proud of,” she said.

Sarala sat at the kitchen table to write a letter to her mother, the house silent as it always was in the afternoon, the clock over the sink ticking quietly. You asked how I find it here , she wrote. There are, of course, many things that I miss, many things that feel strange and unfamiliar, but this is my home now, and it is of no use to dwell on a thing that might make one unhappy. Rather, I have determined to do everything I can to help us both make the best of our new home . She’d sealed the letter and mailed it off the next morning.

In response, a few weeks later, she’d received an envelope full of the same small blue pieces of paper as in the recipe box, her mother’s same feathery hand in delicate pencil strokes.

For when you miss the warmth and joy of your home , and here a recipe for vada pav.

For when newness feels no longer thrilling, but instead fatiguing , and here her recipe for suji ka halwa.

No, Sarala thought, reminding herself that one must not dwell in sadness or longing. She tucked the pieces of paper into the recipe box and pushed it to the back of the cupboard above the oven.

One weekend afternoon, Abhijat proposed that he give Sarala a tour of the Lab’s campus. She had been delighted to accept, curious to see the place where he spent his days. As they neared the security booth, she watched Abhijat stiffen with pride as the guard recognized him and waved him through the gate. Together they drove along the curving, tree-lined drive, and when they emerged, as though from a tunnel, the twenty-story Research Tower rose up before them, mirrored in a reflecting pool dotted with geese.

Winding, smoothly paved roads cut through the tall prairie grasses growing all around the grounds. Abhijat drove around the circumference of the accelerator, first in the direction of the protons, then of the antiprotons, the sunlight reflected in the cooling pond which, Abhijat explained, had once been necessary to maintain the temperature of the first generation of magnets used in the accelerator, but was now mainly aesthetic, and, as if to illustrate this, a family of ducks made their way home across the water.

He drove along the path of the old fixed-target experiment, squat blue buildings punctuating the berm that had once housed the linear accelerator, a now nearly obsolete technology whose facilities, rusting with disuse, had been abandoned or used for storage. Abhijat pointed out the power lines stretching off into the prairie along the path of the fixed-target accelerator. “Energy in and protons out,” he explained as he traced their path with his finger to the horizon line and back. The future, he explained, was in the circular accelerators, and the Lab was home to the largest, highest-energy accelerator in the world. It was what made the Lab such an important place for his work, he explained. Here, they were working on the very frontier of high-energy particle physics.

But what Sarala noticed was the herd of buffalo in the distance. “That, I’m afraid, I cannot explain,” Abhijat said. “A quirk of the Lab’s first director,” he offered, and Sarala laughed at the idea of these enormous animals living among the scientists and their tiny, hypothetical fragments of the universe. Abhijat, smiling, began to laugh with her.

Like much of Nicolet, Abhijat explained, the Lab had been built on land that had once been farmland. In recent years, though, the Lab director had begun a project to return the land under which the tunnels ran from its geometrically arranged agricultural fields to the wild chaos of native prairie grasses. The addition of the herd of buffalo had been part of the prairie restoration project. There was speculation, though, among some local residents, that the buffalo were there less for aesthetic reasons and more as canaries in a coal mine — that their demise would be the first warning sign of something amiss at the Lab, of some nefarious plot afoot in the tunnels of the accelerator. Abhijat had only recently begun to apprehend the uncertainties many of his new neighbors harbored about what went on at the Lab.