The God Particle (21 page)

“Me, either. It’s not usually so fast for me.”

“That makes two of us,” Larry says.

“But hey, there’s something else I need to ask you about.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I got in early this morning, and I was evaluating the code that builds the rejection sample, and I found something interesting.”

Larry just stares at her. He wonders if she can see the hangover in his eyes, in the pallor of his skin.

“You were thorough, Larry. I have to give you that. Instructing the Grid to ignore Higgs events even in the
rejection
sample? I mean, what’s the chance that one of them would make it in there?”

What is this? She comes in here smiling like a little girl, tells him how nice it was last night, and then springs this on him?

“What I don’t understand,” she continues, “is how you’ve managed to fool your entire team this long. The super collider has been running for almost a year.”

He considers saying something like
I don’t know what you’re talking about,
but come on. The Crown is really calling to him now. Singing to him.

“I guess no one was looking for a saboteur. I guess that’s how.”

He wonders what it feels like to dissolve in front of another human being, what it feels like for the human operating system to crash.

“So,” she says.

He could strangle her. But then. What?

“I didn’t have to look back very far,” Samantha tells him. “The detector has been registering possible Higgs events for months. Probably since the whole damn facility went operational. And you’ve been hiding it from everyone. Why?”

Now. Finally. He. Shrugs.

“You must have it in for Mike. It’s the only thing I can come up with. Because I think you lied to me about him. I don’t think he said those things about me. I think he would do anything to find Higgs, even if it meant giving me part of the credit.”

Fuckhole. Bitch.

“I can tell this is freaking you out. I don’t know how you expected to get away with it forever, but in any case you don’t have to worry anymore. You unwittingly helped me, Larry. Because now I can have Higgs whenever I like. You show me how to disable all your handiwork—because I’m sure there’s plenty of redundancy in the code—and I’ll let you keep your little secret. We can even keep playing at night if you like.”

“What do you think?” he finally growls. “You’ll convince Donovan to get rid of Mike and then announce your ‘discovery’?”

Her dark eyes smile. Sparkle. “Sounds like a good plan, don’t you think?”

6

Kelly is about to go on set for the ten o’clock show when her phone rings. It’s James. He wants her opinion about the climactic scene in his newest screenplay, an apocalyptic story about the destruction of all human technology. He reads her a few lines, and she tells him they’re too melodramatic. He says he was afraid of that. Wishes her luck on the newscast. She walks to the set and finds her chair. Presses the IFB into her ear.

People thinks she’s weak because she still talks to James.

They tell her to get over him. Get over
it,
as if the relationship was a
thing,
as if it were something you could own for a while, and then toss over your shoulder when you were done with it.

People can think whatever the hell they want. They may be able to say
I’ll always love you
and
I don’t ever want to be with anyone else
and so on, they may be able to say this to five or ten people in their lifetimes. Say it to boyfriends and girlfriends and second wives and third husbands. Get over him. Move on. Grow up.

Kelly isn’t stupid. She knows there isn’t just one person for her. But she believes in truth, and truth is not dismissing emotions because of a stretch of bumpy road. A girlfriend told her once that it was okay to renege on promises if you didn’t feel the emotion anymore. It might have been true then, she said, but that doesn’t mean it’s true now.

So what does the word
never
mean, then, in the phrase
I will never leave you
? I will never leave you as long as you don’t fuck it up? Is that an understood qualifier? Isn’t the whole point of
never
to leave room for the other person to fuck up? Is love contingent on perfection?
I’ll never leave you so long as you remain upbeat about not selling screenplays.
Is that what she should have said?

Get over him. Start the whole process over after six years. Courting again. First kiss again (okay, so that one might be fun). First sex, first time to say
I love you,
and then what? More empty promises? The same fucking phrases all over again, the same moving in together and the same settling in phase and then, Whoops! Sorry! I didn’t mean
forever.
It just sounded good at the time.

But all those people, they must know something. All those people who have gone through breakups and divorces and found new people to share their lives with, they got over it somehow. Maybe it’s just something you have to do. Maybe once you do something that seems hard, maybe it turns out not to be so hard after all.

She’ll let Mike simmer for a while. She’ll go see him, but she’ll let him wait a few days before she agrees to it. Not to torture him, but to let him know it’s not a decision she makes lightly.

And also so she can get used to the idea.

She smiles, bright and wide, and once again introduces herself to Dallas/Ft. Worth.

7

A tall, clear glass.

Seven ice cubes.

Snaps and pops as the rich, caramel-color Crown shrinks the ice. Triple shot.

Effervescent carbonation. Top the glass with Coca-Cola.

Ten swallows.

Repeat steps one through five.

Don’t even bother to sit down or go into the living room and watch TV. Just stand there in the kitchen and get trashed.

Repeat steps one through five.

’Cause that’s just great, the easy-peasy way Samantha came in and ruined his fun. Swooped in and figured out that Larry had built an app to override the triggers. That he had written instructions to toss out any event that looked remotely like the expected decay modes of a Higgs particle. Not toss them out, really, but store them in a place only he knew about.

Let’s show Mike who the boss really is, he thought when he first did it. Let’s show him who’s really in control.

Or maybe Larry is just a jealous fuckface who couldn’t stand to see someone else achieve a dream.

His own friend. Fucked over his own friend. And now some undeserving bitch is going to take all the credit. What kind of payback is that? What the hell was he trying to accomplish?

He bought Sominex at the store. Two packs of extra-strength sleeping pills.

Such a chickenshit he is. Not going to fucking kill himself. Hasn’t even opened the boxes of pills. Hasn’t even taken them out of the goddamned plastic grocery bag.

All his ranting and raving about God is God and all that crappity-ass crap. Stealing lines from electronic music, trying to sound like a freak. A fucking drunk freak, that’s what he is. [email protected]. Yeah, so original. Anybody could look up “God is God” on the Internet and figure that shit out.

He picks up the cordless phone. His ears are roaring now; nine ounces of Crown on an empty stomach, that’ll do it to you. Speed dial #1.

“Hey there, Mike,” he says, concentrating. Confident that he sounds completely sober. “I need you to come over, man.”

“Larry? What’s—”

“Just come over,” he says and hangs up. Repeats steps one through five. Stumbles into the living room.

His doorbell rings.

The light in the entryway is way too bright, as if someone stuck a 400-watt bulb in there. He can hear the screaming photons flying off the filament. The front door. Mike.

“Larry, what’s wrong, man? Have you been drinking?”

Sits down on the floor. Starts crying. Blubbers about the triggers.

“Larry, what are you talking about?”

More blubbering.

Some yelling on Mike’s part. His mouth is here, the words are over there.

Blubbers about Samantha.

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“Promised I’d give her the Higgs Mike but I can’t do that to you man.”

“Why, Larry? Why?”

Then darkness.

8

Larry wakes some time later in bed. Mike is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, a glass beside him, half-melted cubes floating near the bottom. The room in shadows, lit from the hallway.

“How are you feeling?” Mike says to him.

“Like shit,” Larry croaks. “What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“Why are you still here?”

“You passed out in the entryway. Your breathing sounded kind of funny. I was afraid you’d stop altogether, so I stayed to watch you.”

Larry tries to sit up, but his stomach immediately protests. He smells sour vomit on his shirt.

“I saw the sleeping pills.”

Larry doesn’t acknowledge this.

“Nothing’s that bad, man. I know you didn’t take them, but you shouldn’t even be thinking about something like that.”

For a while neither of them says anything. Mike picks up his glass, takes a drink.

“What are you going to do?” Larry asks.

“I guess I’ll review the events you discarded. Then we’ll run for a while without your ‘enhancements’ and see what we get. If it all works out, I suppose we’ll have an announcement to make.”

“What if Donovan pulls you off the project first? Why don’t you just review the events I discarded and then tell him what I did? Why wait?”

“I thought of that. But you’d be ruined.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Larry, I need you to help me understand why you deliberately threw the project off track. You sabotaged the main project at a twelve-billion-dollar super collider. I’m embarrassed it happened under my watch, but . . . man, I trusted you. We all did. It never occurred to me someone would
not
want the project to succeed. It’s kind of crazy.”

Larry doesn’t know how to answer that.

“It’s kind of crazy what you did.”

He wants to tell Mike that loneliness isn’t craziness. Instead, he says, “I don’t know what to say, Mike. I can’t justify what I did.”

“Have you ever thought of. . . . Do you think you might need some help?”

“I wouldn’t feel like this if it weren’t for. . . .” He trails off, afraid of finally confronting Mike, of crystallizing sin into words.

“If it weren’t for what?”

“Come on, Mike. Carrie, remember? The only girl I ever really cared about, the one you stole from me. You think I can just forget that?”

Mike climbs to his feet. “What?”

“That’s what I figured,” Larry says. “It happened so long ago you’ve let yourself forget it ever happened.”

“Forget
what
happened?” Mike asks carefully.

“I brought her to the apartment, remember? I met her at a party, and I brought her home to meet you, and the next thing I know you two guys are in your bedroom having sex.”

“Larry, man. Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Why would I joke about something like that?”

“Larry,” Mike says again, and it’s becoming annoying, his careful and condescending voice. “That’s what
I
did.
I
met her at the party, and
I
brought her back to the apartment. You were watching television, remember? In the living room? I was embarrassed because I was about to have sex with some girl I’d just met at a keg party, and you agreed to leave so we could have some privacy.”

“You’re a liar,” Larry says. “You’re trying to make me think I’m crazy.
I
met her at the keg party. I changed the tap for her.”

“No, you didn’t. That’s what I did. I told you the whole story the next day.”

Larry just stares at him. Any minute now he’s going to throw up again, he’s so angry and confused.

“You can’t believe that,” Mike says. “Please. Please don’t tell me you sabotaged my work because you think—”

“There you go again!” Larry says. “
Your
work.
Your
project! You—”

“Enough, Larry. That’s enough.”

“Don’t tell me—”

“Listen to me, man. I’m sorry about your problems. I don’t know what to say except you need some help. Serious help. I’ve known you for a long time, so it hurts me to even say that. But I’ll tell you something. You better pull yourself together and come with me to the office—right now—and help me undo your handiwork. Undo it and give me the discarded information. If you don’t, I’ll shut the place down until we find it on our own, but the whole world is going to know what you did.”

“That’s right. Threaten me.”

“I’m serious. Come with me right now, and I will let this go. If you can figure out a way to hide what you did, help me convince everyone we found a program glitch instead of covering up your sabotage, I’ll go along with it. You’re never going to see a better deal than that, man. Especially if Landon finds out. I suggest you take it.”

Larry stares at Mike so long he almost forgets to speak. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to reconcile Mike’s lies with his own intolerable pain. But finally he agrees to go. It’s the only thing he can think to do.

9

Six thirty and still dark by the time Mike returns Larry to his house in Olney. The two of them haven’t spoken since leaving the administrative office, and they don’t speak now as Larry opens the passenger door and steps out of the car. Mike can’t find words to describe how he feels, and wouldn’t care to address Larry right now if he could. He drives to his own house a few blocks away and climbs into the shower. Grabs the soap and scrubs. Stands under the hot water for twenty minutes or more, scrubbing. Larry, man. What is he supposed to do? He can’t just abandon the guy, can he? It’s a colossal fuckup, what he did. Personal and professional betrayal almost beyond words. But it’s obvious that his friend is in pain, that something has skewed his interpretation of the world, and what kind of person is Mike if he just walks away from Larry now?

What kind of man is he if he doesn’t?

An hour later Mike is standing in Donovan’s office. By now he hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. The story is that a possible Higgs event was found in the rejection sample, and that when they realized the event selection criteria were flawed, it was obvious they could have been producing Higgs particles for months and not realized it.