Lost and Wanted(12)
At the conference I talked about supersymmetry-breaking and the consequences of the Large Hadron Collider for Neel’s and my model. This was in September 2008: the conference had been organized to coincide with the inauguration of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. I had beautiful slides of the facility: the underground tunnels where the scientists sent beams of protons in opposite directions, examining the exotic by-products of their collision, as well as of the detectors, especially the five-story, fourteen-thousand-ton magnet called the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector. Some people hear “Compact Muon Solenoid” and stop listening; when I sent Charlie an image of that spectacular multicolored clockworks, she had written back: “the rose window of particle physics,” with appropriate awe.
What no one had known—not the conference organizers, not me when I accepted, and certainly not the team of physicists in the lab in Geneva, who spent their time replicating the extreme conditions we believe existed at the universe’s birth—was that a massive explosion would shut down the Collider just days after its debut. A faulty connection between two of the superconducting magnets released six metric tons of liquid hydrogen, destroying the vacuum in the beam pipe and contaminating two thousand feet of it with soot: a totally unanticipated disaster. In Geneva they went ahead with the Collider’s inauguration—the speeches, the food, and the customary champagne—but the fact was that nobody could be sure that the repairs would be successful. I couldn’t help thinking that if Congress hadn’t stopped funding for the Superconducting Super Collider (an appropriately Texan name for a machine that would’ve been located just south of Dallas), we would have had energy levels three times what the Large Hadron Collider could provide here in the U.S. already. What did it mean, I asked the audience, that the richest and most powerful country in the world had stepped away from funding high-level scientific research?
This question looks naive from where I’m standing now. But in the year Jack was born, the year Obama was elected, the decision to defund a cutting-edge research facility on which American taxpayers had already spent two billion dollars seemed more like an aberration than a sign of things to come. When I finished my talk, there was a message on my phone from Charlie, asking if I wanted to stop by that afternoon. I begged off a lunch with the conference organizers with excuses about my new baby; called and asked my mother to give Jack the one bottle I had; and reparked, next to a hedge. I covered my chest with a scarf I’d brought for the purpose, held both shields with one arm, and texted Charlie back with the other. Like every woman I’ve ever talked to about it, I hated pumping: the indignity, the surge of hormonally triggered sadness, the primitive machine’s repetitive wheeze. To me it always sounded as if it were saying, Give it up.
Once I’d zipped the plastic bottles of milk into the insulated cooler bag, though, there was an enormous sense of freedom. In the gloomy auditorium, I’d given an optimistic speech about the potential once the Collider was repaired. I’d done it in a different time zone, traveling alone with an infant. In the clothes I’d chosen for the presentation, a black suit and gray silk blouse, I felt that I looked as good as I could possibly look under the circumstances. My mother texted me that Jack was asleep, but that she would give him the bottle as soon as he woke up. I had another three hours until I absolutely had to be back.
Charlie’s house was a white, Spanish-style three-bedroom in Los Feliz, about twenty minutes from the Caltech campus. It was nothing like as luxurious as the one she and Terrence eventually bought in Santa Monica, to be closer to the beach, but it was designed in a way that made it seem bigger than it was, with a path that wound around a small, free-form pool, up terra-cotta tiled steps, past a lemon tree and a bed with birds of paradise, to the front door.
Charlie met me at the door, screaming as she grabbed me. Then she called to Terrence, “Helen’s here!” and stepped back. I hadn’t seen her since Simona was born, but she hardly looked different. She was wearing a white tank top and jeans, and appeared to have lost all the weight from the pregnancy. Nothing about her face or the way she moved suggested that she was ill.
“You didn’t bring him!”
I explained about the conference and my parents. I said that maybe I could bring Jack by before I left, but that I had to seize the opportunity to socialize when I could. I asked if I could store the milk in the fridge, and Charlie took me into the kitchen, small but with brand-new stainless steel appliances. Everything was very clean and modern, and even the colored wooden blocks on the floor looked as if they’d been arranged by a stylist. I remembered Charlie telling me that Terrence was obsessively neat.
“You don’t use formula?” Charlie asked, as she made room for the milk. “It makes it so much easier.”
“I would,” I said. “But I produce a lot.”
“Oh, I made enough,” Charlie said. “I just couldn’t deal with it. All that measuring and storing. And I never know when I’m going to be home from work.”
Terrence came into the kitchen with Simona, now sixteen months old. The few times I’d met him before the wedding, I’d found Terrence aloof and inscrutable; Charlie said that it was only shyness. His skin was lighter than Charlie’s, but not so light that you would necessarily assume he had a white parent, except for his very striking light green eyes. He had an especially strong, square chin, and his hair was in the same short dreadlocks I remembered from the wedding. In his track pants and faded T-shirt, he still looked as though he spent a lot of time at the beach, but without sacrificing the pleasures of fatherhood; as he bent down to hold the baby’s hand, his tenderness for her was obvious.