Lost and Wanted(22)
The Higgs discovery happened in 2012, when Jack was four. We were spending a week in California with my sister. Amy and her husband, Ben, kindly offered to take the kids to the beach in Santa Monica while I sat at my computer, waiting for confirmation that the elusive particle had indeed been found. Or not found, exactly. (I explained this to a journalist who asked me to put it in terms anyone could understand.) I said that the Higgs was the final piece in a puzzle called the Standard Model—an organizational chart, I said, that describes the most fundamental particles of matter, as well as how they move and interact. We arrange the particles—quarks, leptons, and bosons—according to electric charge, as well as more exotic properties like “color charge” and “spin”; since the Higgs has none of these properties, it couldn’t actually be seen. It could only be identified by its after-effects: the more familiar particles it left behind in the frigid subterranean racecourse of the supercollider. I told the journalist that the Higgs is important because it creates a field, producing profound effects on the particles around it, while remaining invisible itself; for that reason, it has sometimes been called the “God particle”—a designation most physicists dislike. I have always thought that if a name makes people interested enough to learn more, it’s probably doing more good than harm.
The day Jack came home from school and asked where exactly hell was located, I told him that it didn’t exist, but that there was a very cool laboratory more than five hundred feet under the ground, where I would someday take him to visit. So that’s where bad people go? Jack asked. That was too good not to repeat to Neel, who said that all of LIGO Caltech now knew about good physicists going to heaven and bad ones going to CERN.
Neel and I became friends freshman year, but he didn’t meet Charlie until she and I started rooming together as sophomores. We were living in a three-room double under the blue bell tower in Lowell House, a luxurious space that she’d secured for us with a note from her immunologist. Charlie missed more classes because of illness than anyone I knew; in general she suffered from tiredness, headaches, and stomach pain. Because of her chronic fatigue syndrome, Charlie spent a lot of time in bed, reading magazines. Her bed must’ve been the same iron-frame, extra-long single that they issued to all Harvard undergraduates, but she’d added a featherbed, a white comforter, and a plethora of white-on-white decorative pillows. On the walls she’d hung film and theatrical posters, all framed—Charlie believed in framing—Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Charlotte Gainsbourg in Oleanna, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. The top of the dresser was covered with a vibrant scarf, on which she arranged cosmetics and perfume. There was also one relic from her childhood, also framed: a yarn sampler onto which one of Charlie’s aunts had embroidered A. A. Milne’s “Cottleston Pie” in green on a patterned yellow ground. I couldn’t imagine how long it would have taken, the words as well as the animals in the style of the original illustrations: Pooh, Eeyore, and Piglet, even Christopher Robin with a rainbow umbrella. Carl’s sister had made it in honor of Charlie’s birth, and put her initials at the bottom: PWB ’71.
“You know most of those immune disorders are imaginary?” Neel said, the first time he visited our room.
“Please don’t tell her you think that,” I said, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Charlie had an answer for everything. She walked in just as Neel was finishing the tour of our expansive suite—thankfully, once we were already in the living room.
“Nice place,” Neel said. He had a fierce sense of justice, coupled with his almost insane economy, and if Charlie had been white, and as adept at securing special privileges as she was, his disdain for her might have been immediate. As it was, he reserved judgment.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I went to see the dean of student services.”
“He just gave you this room?”
“We may have exchanged some services, but that’s what his office is for—right?” Then she winked. She was one of those people who could actually pull off winking.
Later, after everything had happened with Pope, I wondered if she regretted talking that way. If everyone else went up to a certain line with a joke, Charlie would be sure to cross it. This was true of her humor, her sophistication, her clothes, and even her intellectual life; she at first seemed to prefer French to American literary theory, the more impenetrable the better—de Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva—and then made a move toward black American feminists: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, and Hazel Carby. It was maybe a frustration with all of that theory—she was not interested in debates between black and white feminists—that pushed her toward popular culture. She admired Addison Gayle on blaxploitation and Barbara Creed on slasher films, but what she really loved was a period drama, anything set in another place or time. She was obsessed with the first film version of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, and especially with Glenn Close’s extravagant Merteuil; the film was what led her eventually to Laclos, with such unfortunate results.
“Your roommate seems a little unbalanced,” Neel told me, soon after they met. We were sitting on the mattress in the minuscule room he rented from the Grossmans, a retired couple in Somerville. He was the first of my friends to live off campus, to save money and because he chafed at the restrictions and ponderous tradition of dorm life at Harvard. Apart from the mattress that served as bed and couch, Neel had only a desk and a dresser (provided by his landlords) and his many piles of books. He didn’t smoke inside, but the room smelled of the Drum tobacco he rolled himself. It was a corner room on the first floor, with a separate entrance. I would knock at the door under the gingko tree, waiting for Neel to let me in. Although the atmosphere was dank (it seemed always to be overcast when I was there), there was a window onto the Grossmans’ yard, where you could see a storage shed with a padlock and, in the fall, the gingko’s yellow foliage. If Neel cracked his window during that season, you could smell the rancid odor of the round, rust-colored fruits. The gooseneck pharmacy lamp standing on the bare boards, the white paint peeling off the steam pipe in long, bark-like strips, the Grossmans’ narrow dresser with its cut-glass knobs, inside which Neel’s corduroys and wool sweaters had a temporary home: the scarcity of his possessions may make it easier for me to recall the visual details. Or it may be that the intensity of my feelings for him at that time allowed me to preserve this extraneous information—somewhat like the massive Higgs particle that announced its presence in the Standard Model long before it was discovered, as a medium for the less spectacular particles it affected.