The God Particle (3 page)

“You speak German?” Steve asks.

“Yes,” she says. “But only a small amount.”

“What country are you from?”

“Russia. I come from Novosibirsk. Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“America! I am speaking some English.”

“Okay,” he says in his native tongue. “Then we can speak English.”

“Yes, we speak English.”

They sit there for a moment, not speaking in any language. Steve knows this isn’t a singles bar, and that the woman sitting beside him probably wants more than stimulating conversation, but he doesn’t want to do this. Doesn’t want to need to.

“You are maybe buying some champagne? So we can enjoy some talking?”

Steve could leave, sure, but then he’d have to venture into the rain again. “How much?”

From nowhere she produces a small card with a list of champagnes and prices. They begin at 180 francs and make gradual steps all the way to 500.

“This one is quite good,” she says, pointing to something at price point CHF 240. “Not having too much hangover.”

“What about that one?” he asks, pointing at the cheapest selection.

“Ooh, not so good. Make stomach hurt.”

“You sell champagne that makes my stomach hurt?”

The sparkle in her eyes fades a little with that comment, and the evaporating smile seems to acknowledge the weakness of her calculated sex appeal in the presence of a jaded American. Or perhaps she’s wondering how she’ll continue to pay the exorbitant rent on her one-room Zurich flat when every single customer only wants to buy the cheapest champagne. Either way, Steve, a little drunk now, decides to give her a reason to smile.

“I guess I’ll take this one,” he says, and points to the CHF 500 bottle.

“Very much!” she cries. “You are liking that one very much, Mr. American.”

She signals the bar, and the waitress brings the champagne almost immediately. It comes in ice with two slender glasses. The label is gold and green, the words on it in French. He doesn’t recognize the brand.

“What is your name, Mr. American?”

“Steve,” he says. “Steve Keeley.”

“Very nice to meet you, Steve. We are making a toast to Steve Keeley.”

He watches her lips against the rim of the glass, red and sensual, and catches just the briefest pink glimpse of her tongue.

“And your name?” he asks her.

“I am Anna.”

“Like the tennis—”

“No, no,” she interrupts with mock offense. “I am much prettier than her.”

Steve laughs, and Anna joins him. She puts her arm around his shoulder.

“Don’t you think so?”

He can smell her, light perfume on her neck, lipstick and champagne. Her fountain of brown hair tickles his cheek.

“You are much more beautiful than her,” he admits.

Generic pop music floats around them, something Steve doesn’t recognize. Another dancer takes the stage. He thinks there may be someone watching her from one of the other booths, but he can’t be sure, not with such murky interior lighting.

“You like the dancing girl?” Anna asks him. “More than me?”

“No. I just noticed there aren’t many customers here.”

“Da. Slow night. That is why Steve Keeley gets extra-special attention.”

The arm around his shoulder tightens, pulling him closer, and her other arm disappears beneath the table. She takes his hand and guides it between her legs.

“You seem to have forgotten your underwear,” he breathes. The alcohol is really working on him now.

“I forget nothing. Should we order more champagne?”

“Perhaps we should.”

He doesn’t notice any sort of communication between Anna and the waitress, but another bottle seems to instantly arrive.

“You have Visa?” Anna asks him. “The waitress would like to make sure payment is good.”

Steve finds his wallet and hands over his platinum card. At 350 dollars a bottle, he’s surprised they haven’t already asked for it. Anna seems pleased, though, because as the waitress fades into the darkness she opens her legs farther apart, allowing Steve more room for exploration.

Distantly he wonders where all the champagne is going, because the next time he looks, the bottle is nearly empty. He thinks he hears The Doors playing on the sound system. Anna’s hand is squeezing his dick, which is only sluggishly responding, and his fingers are slippery with her. She’s kissing him on the neck, on the cheek, tickling his ear with her tongue. Steve has no idea what time it is. He has no idea how long he’s been in this place. He wonders if he’s ever going to make it to the airport in time to catch his plane, in time to find his seat beside Serena and endure thirteen hours of ferocious silence. He wonders what Janine is doing back in L.A. Anna whispers into his ear, sometimes in English, sometimes in Russian, and he can alternate between one and two fingers if he wants, she doesn’t seem to mind, she even leans forward when one of his fingers creeps a little farther back. He thinks she invites him upstairs, because the next thing he knows they
are
upstairs, at the third-floor landing, staggering down a narrow hallway, floorboards creaking, passing by closed doors labeled with letter combinations like CA and CB and CC. Someone is arguing in one of the rooms, rapid German accusations he can’t understand, and then Anna leads him into CD, a tiny room with a single bed and one beaten chest of drawers. Her dress disappears. Her shapely form is nearly flawless. She undresses him quickly and then pulls him down on top of her.

He finds her mouth with his, absently wondering if she’s going to produce a condom. Really he should insist upon it, has always insisted upon it with one-night stands and new girlfriends, but right now he can’t be bothered to ask. He just keeps kissing her and reaching between her legs with delicate hands. At some point they must turn over, because now she’s straddling his knees, taking him into her mouth, hair playing over his belly. But the plumbing down there won’t function properly. The alcohol that has erased his newfound maturity, that has led him into this third-floor room with a Russian prostitute, won’t let him cross the finish line. She works valiantly to stimulate him, and Steve tries to relax, because even through the cloud of vodka and champagne he is embarrassed for himself and Anna that neither of them can find success.

Finally she gives up. Collapses next to him, panting and sweating.

“Too much champagne,” she says.

“Too much,” he agrees.

“Or maybe you don’t find me pretty.”

She may be paid to do this, but he feels guilty anyway.

“You are beautiful, Anna. Alcohol always gives me this problem.”

Steve thinks he dozes for a moment, he must, because a little while later he wakes up to voices. The bed is a sunken mess of old sheets and lumpy, foreign pillows. The wrongness of the moment is overpowering. And those voices, they’re in the room with him, and one of them sounds like Anna, except that her previously stilted German is now flawless. Who in the hell is she talking to?

Steve is facing a window. A window that appears to be moving on some kind of curved path. When he turns over, the whole room seems to spin, and nausea blooms in his stomach. There is a man standing beside his bed. Short and muscular and glaring at him.

“No,” Anna says in German. “He is a good man. Please do not—”

The short fellow reaches for him. Steve shrinks instinctively away, turning toward the window, looking for his clothes. A hand grabs his shoulder. Jerks him back. Steve reaches again toward the window, straining to get away from this man, finding fistfuls of damp sheet. What the hell is going on?

“Please,” Anna says. “Let him get dressed. He is not a bad man. He should not—”

The man must be a bouncer, some kind of strong arm who throws out fellows who have stayed past their welcome. He grabs Steve by both shoulders now and pulls him back. Throws arms around his torso, wrenching him off the bed. The room spins faster. This is too much. He doesn’t deserve this.

“Let me go,” he breathes. “I’ll pay her and go. Just tell me how much.”

But the man doesn’t let go. Doesn’t respond at all, in fact.

“Let me go!” Steve yells. He struggles to slide out of the man’s grip, and the two of them stumble backward, into the wall.

Something falls to the ground. Something that causes the man to relax his grip. Steve drives him into the wall harder, thrusts elbows at him, and manages to finally wriggle free.

Now he spins around, looking for the door. But the man is blocking his way. The room spins, whips around him.

“Please,” Steve says. “Just let me pay and go.”

The muscular man responds by rushing him again. Steve puts up his hands, but it’s no use, he can barely tell up from down at this point. The man holds him with one hand and punches him in the face with the other. Pain flowers in his cheek and nose, flaring agony tempered by the haze of alcohol. Steve wonders when the man will realize his opponent is bested and stop punching him. He wonders how he got himself into this mess. And then, as the man grabs him yet again, as they stumble into some kind of breakaway wall, he wonders what that shattering sound is, wonders what that slashing pain in his neck is, wonders why he seems to be falling, why rain again patters his face, and then, just as everything becomes obvious to him—not just that he has fallen out the window, but everything—just when
everything
becomes obvious, one last, powerful impact administers a knockout blow and sends him into an endless, swelling world of thrumming darkness.

1

If you were to ask Mike McNair, chief physicist and director of the North Texas Superconducting Super Collider, to discuss something as profoundly important as Einstein’s special theory of relativity, he could charm you with a witty and informative discourse about the far-reaching consequences of relatively simple but grandly beautiful concepts of physics. No problem.

But if you were to ask him about the best way to approach a woman in an Atlanta airline terminal, specifically about the blonde in the white blazer and black skirt seated at the end of his row here in American Airlines gate T11, Mike would have nothing intelligent to say. No insightful nuggets of wisdom to share with a curious observer. Nothing.

Until a few moments ago, he’d been suffering over the GEM printouts in his lap, looking for something, anything, any kind of idea that might help him find Higgs before Donovan decides to replace him.

Now he can’t stop looking at the woman in the white blazer. She’s hunched over a laptop computer, and while he can’t see her face from here, Mike is fascinated by her well-proportioned thighs and sculpted calves. By her golden hair. Her butterscotch skin.

A couple of televisions in the area are tuned to American’s corporate news network. Hidden speakers bark stories about politics and terrorism and NFL preseason highlights. A few seats to Mike’s left sits a breathy, overweight man in a cheap gray suit, and to his right, a smarmy salesman in a striped polo branded with an AT&T logo seems to be talking to himself. Gate attendants mingle around the information desk. The digital monitor tells anyone who cares to look that Flight 1479, non-stop service to Dallas/Ft. Worth, will depart on time at 4:45
PM
. He wonders what the blonde is working on, intent as she is on the laptop’s display. Mike knows he should get up and move closer to her, close enough to inquire politely about her work. But he can also guess how a move like that will appear from her point of view—the typical airport predator hunting for a woman trapped by her gate assignment—and even if he could push aside his self-respect, if he could somehow summon the nerve to go over there and speak to her, what would he say? Ask questions about her, sure, but when it came time to hold up his end of the conversation, what would he talk about? Physics? The illusory nature of human reality? Yeah, she’d really dig a chat like that.

Special relativity can be expressed mathematically by E=mc
²
, an elegant equation with profound implications.

Mike’s theory of courting, on the other hand, is burdened by a chaotic maze of incompatible equations that produce nonsensical answers.

And still he keeps looking over at her, unable to concentrate on the data in his lap. He doesn’t want to think about Donovan. He doesn’t want to worry about the rumors that have been flying for weeks now, stories of Mike’s impending demise, stories that he hopes are nothing more than entertaining gossip.

The super collider has only been operational for nine months, after all. Nine months, which isn’t a long time when you’re a high-energy physicist, when the visionaries in your field have spent the last century observing and cataloging the particles that have emerged from accelerators in the United States and Europe. It’s not a trivial matter, trying to pick apart the stuff of the universe, but Donovan isn’t a patient man. And it’s not like Mike didn’t explain this to him before he took this job, that it could take years to identify Higgs. Somehow, though, Donovan’s selective memory has chosen to delete those particular conversations.

It doesn’t help that every time Mike encounters an attractive woman, his mind eventually turns to Carrie. Because just as the equations of relativity break down under extreme conditions, so does the nature of relationships. What did they think was going to happen when he left her in Chicago, when he was awarded the job in Texas just as she was about to secure tenure at UIC? A couple of smart people like themselves shouldn’t have tried so hard to avoid the obvious, the inevitable, but try they did. For three years. So here he is, reduced to this business again, walking through life with that one open eye, checking out women in airports and grocery stores and gas stations. And not talking to them.

The gate attendant opens the intercom and invites first-class passengers to board the aircraft. Mike looks toward the gate entrance as he reaches for his briefcase. A small group of passengers has already converged on the ticket agent, and the blonde—her back to him now—is one of them.

2

At the plane entrance a traffic jam forms as a fat executive tries to squeeze his carry-on into the closet meant for suit jackets and winter coats. The blonde is still up ahead, maybe five six and standing perfectly upright except for the slight tug of a laptop bag on her right shoulder. He wonders what she looks like. He wonders if other men do the same thing, imagine a beautiful face on every woman they can’t quite see. He wonders if this unfounded optimism is genetic predisposition or a learned behavior.

The executive finishes with his luggage and steps onto the plane. Behind him the rest of first class climb aboard, stowing briefcases and laptop bags and small suitcases. Mike glances again at his ticket: seat 4A. He likes to sit by the window so he can rest his face on the glass and pick out landmarks and geological formations on the earth’s crust below. Ahead of him, near the back of first class, the blonde pushes her laptop bag beneath the aisle seat in front of her own. Then she sits, notices him looking at her, and smiles.

Mike’s love of the scientific method, of logic and proofs and truth, induces resentment for humankind’s general lack of precision. Grandiose announcements of the strongest and fastest and most beautiful often irritate him, because people generally have short memories and tend to assign superlatives to individuals and situations with a frequency that is statistically invalid. There can be only one strongest, after all, only one fastest, and only one (per beholder, anyway) most beautiful.

And yet this woman, this blonde with whom he has just accidentally made eye contact, is, by a wide margin, the most attractive person Mike can remember seeing in all of his thirty-two years.

He shuffles forward, wondering if his hair is presentable, and fights off an urge to smooth his shirt for visible wrinkles. The passenger walking in front of him, an elderly woman dressed in a severe blue business suit, veers to the left and slips into the last open aisle seat. There is, in fact, only one remaining seat in first class—against the window, next to the dazzling blonde. He looks at his ticket, just to make sure. 4A. The blonde is seated in 4B.

“This must be yours,” she says, nodding toward the window.

“That’s me,” he replies.

She stands, allowing him to enter the row. Mike thanks her with a polite smile and slides into his seat. Ahead, a flight attendant is already taking beverage requests. None of the passengers are talking to each other, not that Mike can hear, and besides, the blonde is already reaching again for her bag. He takes this cue and retrieves the GEM data from his briefcase. Not that he’s actually going to read the data, not that he could possibly concentrate on tables and diagrams while this stunning woman sits twelve inches away from him.

My God,
he thinks.
What the hell can I possibly say to her?

A woman like this, he is certain, must be used to such behavior—men either frightened away by her beauty or induced by it to worship her. But the smart guy recognizes the dazzling woman’s dilemma and handles her with measured indifference. Speaks to her without awe. Smiles when pleased and laughs when amused. The smart guy employs standard cues of human communication that so often go out the window when a man encounters a beautiful woman.

A moment later the flight attendant appears at their row. The blonde orders a Diet Sprite, and Mike asks for a Coke. From the corner of his eye he thinks he sees her looking at him, maybe ready for small talk, quick comments about their beverage choices that might act as lift, air passing beneath wings, enough to get the lumbering fuselage of real conversation off the ground. But she doesn’t say anything, and neither does he, and soon passengers are filing into the plane clusters at a time.

The GEM data are a blur—luminosity values, collision statistics, error tracking—and Mike absently turns pages. He doesn’t realize the plane is full until it begins to back away from the gate. In his peripheral vision he notices the blonde has pulled a paperback book from her laptop bag. He sneaks a peek at the title:
Huckleberry Finn.
Perhaps he could tell her the story of being introduced to Twain by his grandmother, how the story of a boy and a runaway slave helped him understand the world of adults. Or perhaps, instead, he’ll just sit here and watch through the window as the plane idles toward the end of the runway. Either way he can’t deny the electric charge he feels sitting beside this woman, can’t ignore the attraction, the powerful attraction, like the invisible forces that hold together particles he spends his days smashing into pieces.

The plane surges forward, the brute thrust of jet engines pressing him into his seat, and Mike looks out the window. He sees another plane taking off on a parallel runway. It’s just behind his own, and the slight difference in speed and acceleration makes him think again of Einstein, his discovery that time slows down as velocity increases. He wonders if the blonde finds him attractive. Does she think it’s charming or polite or weird that he hasn’t spoken to her yet? Has she wasted even a single moment of conscious thought on him? Logic would suggest that women experience the same sort of anxiety men do upon encountering someone attractive. But is such a thing true with a woman like this? Does she fret over men? Or does she simply tolerate them, fending off their advances until she decides, randomly, to pick one as her husband?

If there is a more frustrating aspect of life than this theory of courting, Mike doesn’t know what it is. He’s a smart guy. His working life is ruled by logic, by gathering information and drawing reasonable conclusions from it. So why does his cerebral brain refuse to function in the presence of an attractive woman? Actually he knows exactly why: Reproduction of the species is not a cerebral concern. It’s a genetic instruction controlled in large part by testosterone, and apparently he doesn’t possess enough of it to negotiate romance with flair and abandon. He wants to apply logic to the situation, which is probably just the opposite of what he should do. What he should do is just open his mouth and say something. Anything. Other passengers have begun conversations now that the plane has achieved a constant, quiet acceleration. So Mike turns his head, verifies that
Huckleberry Finn
is still in her hand, and steps into the vacuum.

“Are you a big fan of Twain?”

The blonde promptly fails to respond or acknowledge him in any way.

She is facing away slightly and probably can’t see him in her peripheral vision, but Mike is sure she heard him. In fact, across the aisle, the elderly woman in the severe blue suit seems to be watching the situation with interest. In his face Mike feels the familiar rush of blood; the irrepressible, animal response to failure; and turns away. It’s obvious that everyone in first class heard his question and the silence that followed. For not only was she not interested, the blonde was
so
not interested that she didn’t feel compelled to respond to a direct question. He looks out the window, watching Atlanta fall away behind the plane, thinking of a way he can try again, pondering what he might say this time to—

“Excuse me?”

It’s the blonde. The blonde is speaking to him.

“Yes?”

“Did you just say something? I had my earphones in and I wasn’t sure if you said something to me.”

“Oh,” Mike says, pausing as relief surges through him. He glances down and sees the slender black cord snaking through her hair. “I asked if you were a fan of Mark Twain.”

She looks down at the book and then back at him with a friendly smile.

“Well,” she says. “lately I’ve been, you know, revisiting the classics. I just read
Lord of the Flies.
But Twain is my favorite. He told the truth.”

“You mean how he wrote about controversial topics?”

“Well, yeah, but what I like about him is the unique way he had of looking at the world. The way he described it that was just . . . true.”

Mike considers this for a moment and then remembers something. “I’m Mike McNair,” he says, and extends his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Mike. I’m Kelly Smith.”

Her eyes are remarkable. Hazel and yet somehow not; sparkling, spherical prisms.

“Are you stopping at DFW,” he asks, “or just connecting?”

“Stopping. I live in Dallas.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a news anchor for the ABC affiliate there.”

“Really. Evening news?”

“Yep. Six and ten.”

“So you share the desk with a male anchor? And you guys throw the stories back and forth to each other?”

Kelly smiles. “Like hot potatoes.”

“How did you get started in that?”