Lost and Wanted(116)

“I guess. But that’s about to change.” Neel looked down at his hands, and in the instant before he said it, I knew.

“Roxy’s pregnant.”

I pulled my sweater around myself; the inside of the lab was several degrees colder than the offices had been. Neel’s expression was questioning, waiting for my reaction, and I had to look away. I focused on the oscillator bench across the lab, where Vlad’s outline was just visible behind hanging strips of plastic. It is often impossible to understand a concept in physics without an analogy, and used in that way I have no problem with them. What I dislike are scientific analogies for emotional states. Squeezing light from a filter cavity, for example, has nothing to do with what I felt in my chest, when Neel told me this piece of news.

“You’re having a baby?”

“I know,” Neel said. “I didn’t think I’d do it myself.”

    You’re not going to do it yourself, I thought.

“That’s wonderful,” I said instead. “Congratulations.”

Ever since Neel had come back into my life, I’d been determined to keep my feelings under control—but they had never gone away. They were like the polished piece of glass inside the vacuum chamber, both powerful and contained. Now it was as if the chamber had in fact imploded, dropping its glittering cargo onto the metal floor. Scientific analogies for emotional states are imprecise, but recently I’ve been finding them difficult to avoid.

“But that actually isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,” Neel said. “I have some great news about the rotor.”

“The rotor?” I asked.

“Someone just proposed installing DFGs for calibration, which could be great for our project. That means we wouldn’t have to get funding for our own rotor—we could just use LIGO’s.”

“You’re not going to have a lot of time for extracurricular projects,” I said.

“Don’t try to back out now,” he said. “We’ll make the time.”

“I’m sure you’ll find any number of people to help you with it.”

“People,” Neel said dismissively, and I had to admire the fact that LIGO’s success hadn’t gone to his head. He was just curious to see what he could do with it. “I can set up the experiment, but you’re the one who’s going to have to do the math.”

“We would definitely have to do the math together. Probably with other people helping us.”

“Granted. But you’re the only one who’s going to be able to explain it in a way that makes people understand how important it is,” Neel said.

We were quiet for a moment. “When is the baby due?”

“Beginning of June,” Neel said.

At the beginning of June, I thought, Charlie will have been dead two years. That blank fact seemed impossible.

“I’m not telling anyone about our project, at least not yet,” Neel said.

“Our project,” I repeated dumbly, but I wasn’t there. Time contracted, and I was running over wet leaves, an equation on a scrap of paper in my armband, to tell Neel what I’d discovered. I was stripping off my clothes, racing with him from the sand into the freezing sea. Then I was standing outside Aunt Penny’s house, watching through the window as Neel fed a log to the fire.

    I rapped on the glass, but there was no sound. The night was wet and dark. Then there were footsteps, sharp, unmuffled ones, and the click of the lock on the inside of the door. The door opened, but instead of Neel standing there, it was Charlie. Her whole body was wrapped in a sort of long red cloak. Come in, she said to me. Poor thing, come in, it’s so cold. She took my hand and brought me in. We sat down in front of the fire and covered ourselves with the cloak, which turned out to be a blanket—Aunt Penny’s red wool blanket. The blanket was endless, less a covering than her body itself, unspooling. I looked up and saw the source of that terrible cold: the roof was gone and there were only stars above our heads. Are you warm, she said. Are you? I lied and said yes, even though my teeth were chattering. But she could see right through me. She took my chin in her hand and turned my face toward hers, made me look into her eyes. Because that’s all that matters, in the end.

I have to be very clear. I don’t mean that I stood in the lab with Neel and remembered something about my friend. What I remembered couldn’t have happened, because Charlie and I didn’t talk to each other that way at that time. Such an honest and tender exchange was impossible, but I remembered it so clearly that even now, it has a different quality than my actual memories of her, as if it happened under floodlights, perhaps in a theater, where I was a character in a play and a member of the audience at the same time. It was something that had never happened, but felt more true than almost all the things that had.

And then it was finished. Neel was still talking to me. He had moved on to the specifications for the rotor, a titanium and tungsten disc sixty centimeters in diameter, and the effects it would have on the lasers inside LIGO’s interferometers. “If we’re really installing rotors to calibrate the lasers, I think it’ll be no problem to get permission to use one of them for our experiment—as long as I time it right.”

“Okay,” I said.

He started to tell me the ideal position for such a rotor, exactly where it would be located in relation to the laser. At one point he left to get a pencil and a pad of paper from Vlad’s workstation on the other side of the lab, so that he could draw it for me. He had been talking passionately for nearly fifteen minutes, engaged by the profound implications of the rotor’s gravitational effects on the laser, when I heard Jack calling me. Strangely, his voice seemed to be coming not from the control room, where Neel had left the kids, but from inside the lab.