The God Particle (11 page)

“You do when you’re thirty-four and I’m twenty-five and everyone in the company thinks we’ve slept together.”

“They do not think that.”

“Yes, they do, because of your womanizing past and my . . . reputation.”

“Serena, look. You can act tough and puff out your chest, but the fact is that no company policy has been violated here.”

“Still—”

“Still,” he agrees, “it’s obvious that anything you say now could affect my bid for the VP position. So why don’t you tell me what I can do to make this right?”

“You can start by staying out of my e-mail.”

“Done.”

“And,” she says softly, glancing briefly at the floor and then back at him. “You can have dinner with me tonight.”

“Serena.”

“Look,” she says, “I’m not mad or anything. And I’m not trying to move in on Janine. But your reading my e-mail is proof that you think about me, even if just a little bit, and I think you owe it to yourself to at least
see
what this could be, what it might be like to be with someone who would completely
devote
herself to you.”

The aroma of her, he swears it’s getting stronger, but isn’t such a thing impossible? To smell her at all? Field or no field, noise or no noise, is this what it feels like to lose one’s mind?

“Serena—”

“Or I could always go talk to Mr. Mannheim. Tell him you’ve been acting weird, falling asleep at your desk, reading my e-mail.”

Steve glares at her. Wonders what her neck would feel like between his squeezing fingers.

“Just come over,” she says. “I’ll e-mail you directions. Just come over and we’ll forget everything that happened this morning, okay?”

“Fine,” he says at last.

“And you’re feeling okay, right? You didn’t look so hot when I came in.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Maybe you should go home and get some rest.”

“I think I will after I get caught up here.”

She sashays out of his office. Steve’s hands again find his temples, massaging them as the day stretches on toward infinity.

9

Donovan in his office, feet on his desk, door closed. His tinted window looks out over the parking lot and the vast, brown plain upon which the administrative complex sits. Asphalt roads crisscross the fields at regular intervals, roads that were red dirt before he arrived with money to pave and widen them. The road that forms a T at Texas 251 is one he remembers particularly well. Just east of that intersection stood an old graveyard, True Cemetery, and it seemed like a good idea to move it. He couldn’t very well have visitors to the administrative complex driving by headstones on the way. But it hadn’t been easy finding survivors of the individuals buried there, and securing their approval to have the caskets dug up proved even more difficult.

Then there was Rose Corley’s standoff. For emergency egress and tunnel ventilation, there were shafts located every 2.7 miles that descended to the ring, and the old woman’s house stood right on top of one of these locations. Her property had been valued at less than ninety thousand dollars, and when Donovan offered twice that, he thought for sure the deal was done. What he didn’t anticipate was the house being over one hundred and twenty years old, that it had been in her family for generations. He was forced to go all the way to three hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars before the woman’s children stepped in and convinced her to sign the agreement, and still, when the crew arrived to demolish the house, they found Rose Corley standing on her porch with a twelve-gauge shotgun pointed at them. It took the sheriff and nine deputies fourteen hours to get her out of there.

The telephone rings, dragging him back to the present.

“This is Landon.”

“Mr. Donovan,” Karsten Allgäuer says. “Ms. Aizen is in place, yes?”

Donovan’s hand tightens around the handset. Every time he talks to this Swiss fuck it pisses him off. “She is.”

“And Mr. McNair is willing to accommodate her?”

“Of course. But I’m still not convinced it’s necessary to replace him.”

“That is not your decision to make.”

“I know that, but I need some latitude here. I’m the one managing these people, and you have to understand that in America our culture is to—”

“Mr. Donovan, I do not give one shit about your American culture,” Allgäuer remarks. “You have been instructed to follow my directions.”

“And I am,” Donovan says. “But the search for Higgs will be delayed if we push Mike out the door. Is that what Lange wants?”

“I do not think it is your business to guess what Mr. Lange wants.”

“I could help, you know. If you guys would just tell me what’s going on, I could probably make things easier. After all, I’m here at the facility.”

“I may be joining you soon enough.”

And the line goes dead. Donovan slams down the phone.

“Not my business,” he says under his breath. “We’ll see about that, you creepy fuck.”

10

Steve manages to wade through a couple of hundred e-mails before his jump-cut consciousness finally reaches its limit. Around 2:30 he decides to head home, and hopes he’ll be able to successfully navigate the rushing, video-game grid of the 405.

In Nebraska his biggest gripe with traffic was grandmas and grandpas waiting at stop signs on intersecting farm roads. Invariably they saw you approaching on the two-lane blacktop and decided, when you were almost upon them, that indeed there
was
time to go ahead and pull into your lane, which they invaded and then proceeded to accelerate, over a period of minutes, all the way up to the breathtaking speed of fifty miles per hour. As a young man bent on getting the hell out of Nebraska, Steve could not tolerate slow drivers. He honked and yelled and, yes, occasionally brandished his middle finger. He hated the very idea of conservatism and conformism and traditionalism, whether it was affecting him directly or not, and this is why he refuses to be irritated by L.A. drivers treating him the same way right now, on the 405, even though he is all the way over in the farthest right lane.

A used-car commercial ends the song he was enjoying, and Steve browses radio stations until he finds something else more pleasant. Music seems to dispel the field somewhat, or at least distracts him from its abstract and truly infinite population of points. Although as time passes he is more and more convinced that these points are not points at all, that they are conductors of some kind, relaying information or perhaps energy that he can only begin to appreciate. At least this is how it seems when he is observing the field from a certain perspective. Other times it seems as if there is no field at all, but rather the presence as he felt it in the hospital, and for the first time he considers defining the two sensations as separate phenomena, although he lacks sufficient proof to say anything with certainty.

Driving this way, operating his Infiniti with only a fraction of normal focus, is sort of like driving drunk. Steve isn’t quite sure if the choices and maneuvers he makes on the way to Valencia are appropriate, but eventually he arrives in front of his house intact. Inside he finds a note from his mother.
Call us if you need anything, Stevie. Your father’s knee is acting up again. We’ll be calling Dr. Koetter tomorrow morning.
And at the bottom, a message from his father scrawled in slanted strokes instructing Steve to
knock ’em dead in the interview like I know you can. You’re always one step ahead of everyone around you.

Perhaps. Because not everyone can lay claim to this goddamned thrumming in his head, after all. Steve can count on one finger the number of people he knows who have made a reasonable attempt to defy gravity and float around a hospital room. And he’s definitely one step ahead of any guy who wants to have dinner tonight with Serena Reed, that’s for sure.

Then again, he certainly didn’t anticipate Janine fucking another man. Where was his step ahead on that one?

But the field’s effect on his splintering mind, that’s where his focus is right now. Like what happened with Serena this morning. The voices, the name of Simon Slater, the nervous whispering. Steve has seen the same movies as everyone else. He knows, like anyone would, that hearing voices in your head is a classic symptom of mental illness. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that a head injury and whispering, inner voices indicate some kind of physiological problem. He could call Dobbelfeld about the symptoms. Clearly, he
should
call him. But he doesn’t really feel like it.

He doesn’t feel like anything.

It’s nearly four o’clock now. Three hours to negotiate before he leaves for Serena’s apartment in Santa Monica. His growling stomach convinces him to make something to eat, and because he doesn’t want to completely spoil his appetite before dinner, Steve decides on soup. Thankfully, the finger-intensive work of chopping vegetables consumes an agreeable stretch of time. Dripping celery, pungent onions, brittle green beans, knobby carrots, florets of broccoli, all this he pours into a boiling pot of beef broth, along with salted bites of seared beef, cans of tomato sauce, and a whole lot of pepper. He doesn’t think about Janine, not at all, not her smell still in the house, not the clothes now gone from his closet, not the stray blond hairs he keeps finding on his pillow. And he can’t go near her side of the bed. He keeps himself awake at night worrying that he might roll over there and fall into the canyon-size emptiness. So instead of thinking about Janine, instead of obsessing over Serena’s phantom whispers, he just watches the roiling universe of the soup, precisely chopped vegetables appearing and disappearing at the uneven surface of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, excited as they are by flames licking at the pot below. He inhales the salty aroma of steam, little wisps of more hydrogen and oxygen atoms, these with enough energy to escape the pot altogether, which once again become liquid on the surface of his skin.

Steve didn’t bother much with science in high school or college. He determined the easiest courses that would satisfy his core requirements and ignored the rest. But what he sees and senses now is more than anything he could have ever learned in a classroom. He lacks the training and context to accurately portray the structure of it, to himself or anyone else, but the essential truth of the field and how everything works so efficiently and perfectly within it can only be described as transcendental. He can appreciate—and even enjoy—the field when he can devote sufficient mental capacity to its magnitude. But like a computer whose resources have been marshaled to perform an enormously complex task, when he tries to launch another application, like deciding to stop watching the soup and eat some of it, and later picking which clothes to wear to Serena’s, the whole goddamned processor wants to shut down.

11

Serena answers the door in the same clothes she wore to work: black miniskirt, gauzy, metallic-gray top. She isn’t wearing shoes. Her perfect toenails are the same shade of red as Svetlana’s dress.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” she says, not quite making eye contact with him.

“I lost track of time,” Steve tells her. “Sorry about that.”

“No harm done. Good timing, anyway—the garlic bread just came out of the oven.”

He steps inside and looks around her apartment. Decorated with androgynous colors—tan sofa, white curtains, gray carpet—and generic paintings of wildlife and famous European landmarks, it’s not at all the powder room of femininity he expected.

And here is the noise again, invisible and silent, swimming up from nowhere.

“You can take off your shoes if you like,” she tells him. “It’s
so
much more comfortable.”

In the breakfast nook a bowl of spaghetti towers before a steaming pot of red sauce. Serena pads into her pantry-size kitchen and retrieves a plate of sliced, buttered bread, and Steve waits for her to sit down before he does. Then she grabs a pair of tongs and begins filling her plate with spaghetti.

“So how was your first day back?”

“Weird,” he says. The amount of pasta Serena loads onto her plate is staggering. She adds three slices of French bread and begins to eat while Steve is still negotiating spaghetti from the bowl to his plate.

“You looked a little freaked out when I came into your office. I thought for a second you were dead.”

“I don’t know what happened there. I think I had a headache and wanted to put my head down for a moment. I guess I must have fallen asleep.”

Thrumming conductors.

“And then you left early. Did you get some rest?”

A pulsating network of points. Waves of them.

“Not really. Just sort of caught up on bills and other housekeeping stuff.”

She takes him through a round of typical questions, almost naÏvely, as if she didn’t, in fact, coerce him into coming here this evening. Steve listens and nods and occasionally responds, but really what he’s thinking of is the drive over, how he pushed back the field by picturing himself with her. Like ripping the clothes from her curvy body. Or pushing his mouth into that shaved and slippery place between her legs, legs that are not toned but shapely with the voluptuous fat of a young girl that will someday become the cottage cheese thighs of an aging woman. It doesn’t make any sense, this ridiculous urge he has to ravage her. She is attractive but not exceedingly so. She dresses provocatively but hides her face under layers of cream-color spackle. And still he can barely sit here and listen to her drone on about her overbearing father and her ailing grandmother and how her air conditioner is making some kind of funny noise. All he can see are her heavy breasts in his hands, her torso writhing.

When they are done eating she invites him to turn on the television. He chooses something neutral—a television news magazine, an undercover sting operation—but Serena immediately grabs the remote and finds a show about dating.

“This is my favorite!” she squeals, scooting closer, laughing forcibly as pedantic matchmaking stories unfold on the small screen.

The heat is building in him now, in his legs, in his swollen dick as he considers looting her, as he contemplates grabbing her round ass and bending her over right here on the couch. No amount of Zurich rain could put out this all-consuming fire, no amount of apology could dissipate the pulsing field of his hunger. And after a while Serena finally begins to sense this. Or perhaps she has simply been waiting for him to make a move. Or perhaps she has been—