The God Particle (5 page)

“It might look weird to someone who’d never seen it that way before,” Kelly says. “But if that’s how you’d always seen it, it wouldn’t look weird, right?”

“That’s a very good point,” Mike says.

“Okay, but the tree is still there. I still don’t see what the big deal is with how my brain chooses to interpret it. I can still touch it.”

“I just think it’s amazing how much is out there that you don’t see. That to see anything at all, you have to sit around and wait for photons to bounce off something and hit your retina. I think it’s amazing that evolution created mechanisms powerful enough to extract a coherent reality out of the real world of particles bouncing and jiggling all around us. Right now, billions of really tiny particles called neutrinos are passing through you. They’re so tiny they can pass all the way through the Earth without touching another particle. The only way we even know that is because of math, and because of the kind of work done at particle accelerators. Maybe that’s the best example I can give you. That particles of matter, real stuff, are passing through you that you can’t see. It’s reality that you can’t see—because you don’t need to see it. Somehow our bodies can detect certain photons and create a useful picture of the world. Somehow we have tiny little bones in our ears that detect vibrating air molecules—sound waves. It’s amazing.”

“Amazing?” Kelly asks, a smile finally crossing her lips. She picks up her book again, apparently signaling the end of their discussion. “Or a miracle?”

3

What an idiot he is. What a moron. Manages to strike up a conversation with a gorgeous woman—who happens to be a captive audience—and he ridicules her religious beliefs. Bores her with particle physics. What a brilliant strategist he is.

Except there shouldn’t be a strategy, should there? You shouldn’t have a plan to meet someone. And even if you do, you can’t shoehorn a mismatch into your life just because she happens to be pretty. Can you? Would you want to?

On his right, Kelly shuts her book again and abandons it in her lap. “Okay. Explain this Higgs field to me, Mike. Why is it so important?”

“Well, we have this theory, the Standard—”

“Right, you told me that. If the Higgs field isn’t there, your Standard Model might be wrong. And this field might explain how the universe got started or whatever. But what
is
the Higgs field? What does it do now?”

Now she’s exasperated. He can forget about that phone number. “The Higgs field is made up of particles—boson is the technical name for this kind of particle, so really you’d call them Higgs bosons. Just like water molecules make up a swimming pool, these bosons comprise the Higgs field.”

“All right.”

“All right. And other particles, those with mass like quarks and leptons—particles that compose matter—they exist within this Higgs field. Or you could say the Higgs field sort of permeates everything. It’s all around us, everywhere. And the degree to which particles of matter interact with this field determines their mass.”

Kelly shakes her head. “But when I think of a swimming pool, I don’t imagine densities of water based on who’s in the pool.”

“Try this analogy then. Imagine a Hollywood party. At this party, your mass is determined by your popularity. So some unknown guy walks into the room and heads for the bar. He’ll have no trouble getting there, because no one bothers talking to him on the way. He’s a photon, which is appropriate, since you find photons boring. He has no mass at all.”

Kelly laughs. Mike pushes on.

“Now imagine a B-movie actor entering the room. He was in one picture about a giant scorpion and maybe something else with deadly asteroids. He gets a little attention, has to stop once or twice on his way to the bar. He’s got a tiny bit of mass. He’s an electron.

“Finally, Madonna walks into the room. Everyone wants to be next to her, talk to her, see what naughty tricks she can perform with a water bottle. Takes her half an hour to reach the bar. She’s the top quark—the particle with the biggest mass.

“All those partygoers following her around, the few who talked to our B-movie actor, the entire room of them that ignored our unknown guy, they’re the Higgs field. The more of them you interact with, the more mass you have.”

“That’s a good analogy. Did you come up with that?”

“Can’t take credit for that one, no.”

“But can I ask a really dumb question?”

“There aren’t any dumb questions in physics,” he says automatically.

“Right. So tell me why I care if a quark is heavier than an electron.”

“Obviously, not everyone does. But some of us want to understand the underlying structure of the universe.”

“The thing is, I still have to get up and go to work every day no matter how the universe is structured. People still kill each other. Little kids on bikes still get hit by cars. I don’t know. I guess I’m a little cynical.”

“Probably comes with the territory, though,” Mike says. “Having to report on stories like that every day.”

She shrugs. “It’s reality, Mike. As much as those quarks and stuff. Or more so, depending on how you look at it. How much did it cost to build the super collider again?”

“About twelve billion dollars.”

“To find this one particle, this Higgs thing.”

“There are other projects. We have all kinds of unanswered questions. About the possibility of supersymmetry, the search for dark matter—”

“But the Higgs, are you worried that you haven’t found it already?”

Mike sighs. “There are a lot of variables. When we smash particles together, it’s the shrapnel from these collisions that we examine. And there are billions of collisions. We have to use software applications to analyze the results, and tuning these tools can be tricky. It could take years to find the damn thing.”

“Sounds like you need a better set of eyes,” Kelly says.

4

He’s thirty-two years old, and he’s only been in love once, and just like any single man his eyes are always open. His radar is always on. But the shots he fires, they never seem to hit their intended target. He fires too soon, he uses missiles when simple guns would do the trick. She’s sitting next to him, and she seemed genuinely interested in speaking with him, and he’s made no progress with her whatsoever.

“So how do you like being an anchor?” he asks. “As opposed to reporting?”

“Reporting puts you in contact with a lot of incredible people,” Kelly says. “I miss that. But it’s stressful chasing lights and sirens. Sitting at the anchor desk is a nice change.”

“Instead of being so close to the tough stories?”

“Sometimes I felt like a personal injury lawyer, you know? Chasing down accidents and murders and stuff. Except I couldn’t offer the promise of million-dollar legal settlements.”

So here they are, descending into the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, and it’s time to put up or shut up. It’s time to avoid all the trite bullshit he might normally say in this situation and come up with something that will sound natural. That will sound like he hasn’t been worrying about this window of opportunity since the moment he saw her. He must force himself to ask for her phone number—but not here, of course, not where the other passengers will hear him. He’ll do it after they deplane, during their stroll through the terminal.

A couple of men flash Mike knowing looks as everyone stands to gather their carry-on luggage. The elderly woman glances at him briefly, her look as severe as the blue suit she’s wearing. Mike wonders how much of the conversation she overheard.

Passengers shuffle toward the exit, and Mike finds himself separated from Kelly by the woman in the severe suit. He doesn’t think anything of it until the old woman stops to chat with a flight attendant, blocking the aisle and allowing Kelly to continue onto the jet bridge alone. Mike watches her go, blonde hair bouncing behind her as she strides away. The elderly woman seems to know this flight attendant, a tired-looking redhead, and shows no sign of ending her conversation. Passengers back up like floodwater behind him.

Finally the elderly woman moves on, slowly, and Mike waits for an opening so he can dart past her. But he knows Kelly will already be long gone, off the jet bridge and perhaps disappearing into the river of airport patrons and—

And she’s standing just around the corner, waiting for him.

“I thought you’d be long gone.” He smiles.

“I couldn’t spend two hours talking to you and then not say good-bye.”

They march off the jet bridge and into the terminal, making small talk as the moment approaches. Mike knows it’s coming. He feels himself shying away from it.

She brushes against him once or twice as they walk through the terminal. Maybe she’s cueing him with nonverbal communication. Maybe her laptop bag is heavy. And he’d better say something quickly, because here comes the door to baggage claim, the place where she’ll bid Mike good-bye and go back to her news anchor job, and he’ll probably never see her again.

“You know,” he says. “If you like Twain, if you’re looking for truth, you should read
Letters from the Earth.
There are some essays in it that are similar to what we talked about on the plane.”

“Letters from the Earth,”
she says. “Okay. I’ll pick it up.”

Mike presses on. “I also wanted to say that I enjoyed talking to you on the plane. It was really nice to meet you.”

“It was nice to meet you, too,” Kelly replies. “I enjoyed learning about the particles.”

The moment is upon him. Say something now or regret it later.

“So anyway,” Mike finally says. “I know you must get this all the time, being on television and all, but do you think I could call you sometime? If I had more time, I think I could get you to respect the photons.”

Kelly abruptly stops walking. She shoots a glance at the door to baggage claim and then looks back at Mike.

“That’s very nice of you, Mike. Really. I enjoyed talking to you, too. But I’m . . . I’m not exactly available right now.”

“Oh. Right.”

“But it was very nice to meet you. Really. I hope you find the particle, the Higgs boson. I’m sure I’ll read about it on the wire if you do.”

“Thanks.”

Mike extends his hand to her, and they shake.

“You’re not going this way?” she asks.

“In a minute. First I’d better head to the bathroom.”

“Okay,” she says. “Well, see you later.”

“Good-bye, Kelly.”

He watches her, stunned, as she disappears into a current of harried travelers. Embarrassment momentarily paralyzes him. Finally Mike finds his way to the bathroom, and later the parking garage, where he will climb into his car and make the empty, two-hour drive to Olney.

1

Death is dreaming.

You go to sleep, darkness envelops you, and then dreams come. Dreams about a wreck you saw during the day, dreams that loop the opening bars to a popular song, dreams of kissing your high school sweetheart. In life, these dreams represent random electrochemical impulses or perhaps a reshuffling and organizing of the brain’s file system. Necessary but ignored; vital but invisible.

Pain shimmers all around him, an invisible field that holds his consciousness together. At first the field appears uniform in all directions—constant, homogeneous pain—but that supposition comes before he detects fluctuations and movement. Movement that seems to localize the pain, that turns it spiteful and glassy. And if he can detect these locations, these regions within the field, he should also be able to map them. Identify his location. Identify himself.

Never before has he experienced such intimate sensory input. Pain defines this existence, nothing but pain. No touch or sight or smell. Nothing to hear and certainly nothing to taste.

But then—

Blood. He can taste blood. He can’t feel it, can’t sense a mouth or tongue from which this taste should originate, and yet there it is. Coppery and organic.

Blood.

If he can taste blood, does that mean he’s alive? Alive but suspended in some sensory-deprived limbo?

He is not a religious man. He never really believed in anything he couldn’t see, couldn’t touch. Afterlife was an attractive but unrealistic concept. But here, now, he may have to reconsider. Maybe life really is just the beginning. Maybe death is not an end. Perhaps falling out of a window onto wet cobblestone is not—

There it is. He was pushed out a window. He was in Zurich. A man attacked him. Janine cheated on him.

He is Steve. Steve Keeley. He can taste blood because certainly he must have bled everywhere, must have damaged numerous internal organs, must have broken bones and split his head wide open on the cobblestone street. No one could have survived such a fall.

And yet movement within the field seems to localize and intensify his pain. Which suggests he is alive but asleep somehow. Unconscious.

Or in a coma.

Steve remembers watching something on television about coma patients, how many of them, after waking, report having been aware of their surroundings, knowing they were alive but unable to communicate this to the outside world. Steve himself can’t see because his eyelids are closed, but why can’t he hear? Why can’t he smell?

He focuses again on the field of pain, trying to determine which areas of his body are injured the worst. There is significant pain to the south. On his east and west the pain is somewhat less intense. But by far the worst pain hovers directly over him, in him, in the center of his tiny, comatose universe. The pain in his head. The pain that signals the presence of death in the area, floating in circles above him, growing closer with each orbit.

And then ahead, on some invisible event horizon, a new field approaches, a field of pure white. He can sense its arrival and cowers before it. Fear like he has never known descends upon him. He does not want to die. He does not possess the faith to meet death with dignity. The various regions of pain begin to radiate with new intensity, torturous agony that ignites new movement, waves of movement, and Steve realizes he is convulsing. That his body is shuddering in the throes of death, attempting one last, pleading defense against impending doom. In this fleeting moment he finds himself yearning, begging, for God. He knows he should accept the spiritual world so that it will, in turn, accept him. But to do this is to release his fear, to have faith that a wonderful, golden experience awaits him on the other side.

It’s so difficult to believe this. He wants to live.

He begins to cry.

Hears voices.

Succumbs to the terrifying light.

2

Darkness now, darkness and a kind of fleeting light. Flickering blue and yellow, a live wire in empty space. A curved tunnel. A corridor of some kind. A great presence, a force, somehow like the field of pain, only much more elemental. Extending beyond the boundary of himself, into the space around him, into everything. He marvels at the scope of this experience, the sensation of knowing, of structure, of truth.

And then pure white once more.

3

The darkness is back. And then fluttering light, like the quick strokes of a camera shutter, images of bright, blurry color. Janine’s smiling face. The furrowed brow of his father, his mother’s artificially brown perm. A roving white coat that steps between his loved ones and nearly blots out the light.

“Mr. Keeley?” a voice says. The accent is clipped, a German speaking English, perhaps.

“Stevie?” This is his mother. “Stevie? Can you hear us?”

More fluttering light, images flickering between beats of darkness, but gradually the shutter begins to stay open long enough for his eyes to focus. Because that’s where the images are coming from—his eyes. He can see.

He is alive.

“I think he is coming out of it,” the German-sounding voice says.

“Praise Jesus,” his mother says.

“I would not read much into this initial alertness,” the German voice adds. “We think the procedure was a success, but there is much we do not know.”

“But he tried to speak!” Betty Keeley shrieks. “He nearly died and now he speaks. It’s a miracle!”

“It’s not a miracle,” his father, Jack, says. “It’s medicine.”

“Oh, Stevie! Oh, baby, I can’t believe it! Janine, come here, honey. Come see our Stevie.”

Steve shifts his head downward, lowering the angle of his eyesight in order to look forward instead of straight up. He sees shadowy cabinets and blurry metal tray tables and indistinct IVs, translucent tubes disappearing into bedsheets. And his visitors: a tall doctor with bushy, black hair and similar mustache; his mother and father; Janine.

The familiar faces move forward, tentatively, while the doctor remains motionless.

“Hi, Mom,” Steve says. “Hi, Dad.” He pauses, unsure how to proceed. He remembers the hurt and anger, the shock, but seeing her now somehow blots out those horrible feelings. He is alive, the people he loves are in this room, and he smiles.

“Hi, Janine.”

Then a shower of saline, his mother and Janine flooding the room with tears.

4

“You were found on the street by a Russian woman,” the doctor says. “She called for an ambulance, and you were brought to this hospital. Apparently you were involved in some kind of struggle and fell out a window three stories high. Do you remember any of this?”

Steve remembers more than he wants to, including the fight, although he’s not quite sure how he went out the window. He wonders if anyone in the room knows the nature of the building from which he was thrown. Or if they realize what drove him there.

“I’m not really sure what happened,” he says. “The last thing I remember is having dinner with the girl from my office. Serena. Everything after that is kind of dark.”

“You were very lucky, Mr. Keeley. If you had not been brought to the hospital immediately, you most surely would have died. I think you owe this Russian woman a great debt.”

“It sounds like I do.”

“If you owe anyone, Steve, it’s Dr. Dobbelfeld,” his father says. “Before the surgery, he said your chances of living were one in three.”

“Well,” Steve sighs. “I really appreciate the work you did to save me, Doctor. It’s nice to wake up and see all these smiling faces.”

His mother grabs Janine’s hand and guides her toward the bed.

“Janine missed you as much as anyone. She got on a plane straight after we found out about you and was here before your father and me.”

“I don’t want him to strain himself,” Janine says. “He looks tired.” Still, she approaches and carefully leans against the bed next to him. “I was so scared, Baby. I thought I was going to lose you.”

Steve looks into her eyes, searching for emotion, looking for betrayal or guilt or whatever hides behind her words.

“I’m still here,” he says. “I’ve made it this far at least.”

Dr. Dobbelfeld moves closer and politely guides Janine away from the bed.

“Steve has made an important step today, but I do not think we should stress him now. It is time for Steve to rest. The family can rejoin him in a few hours.”

After a minute or two of reluctant good-byes, the doctor manages to herd his mother and father and Janine out of the room. Steve reaches for his head and finds, instead of hair, a large, soft bandage.

“What amazes me,” Dr. Dobbelfeld says, “is that the only major injury you sustained was the skull fracture and resulting brain trauma. No broken bones, no major internal damage, just a few lacerations from the broken glass. Frankly, this is somewhat difficult to believe.”

“But the head injury was bad enough to put me in a coma.”

“Yes, but you came out of it quickly. You were only unconscious for four days.”

“What? What day is this?”

“The twenty-fourth of August.”

“Holy shit,” Steve says. His VP interview is in three days. “How soon can I leave here?”

“You do not understand. Four days of coma is a life-threatening matter. You absolutely must remain here for a few more weeks. We will evaluate you for possible brain damage. There will be some physical therapy. If everything seems normal, I will consider releasing you. But even that would be a miracle, to leave so soon.”

“A few weeks? I can’t stay that long.”

“Mr. Keeley, you were virtually dead when you arrived at this hospital. Without immediate brain surgery, you would not have survived another day. Many coma patients do not return home for months. I think you do not comprehend the seriousness of your injuries.”

“I’m awake now, aren’t I?”

“At the moment, yes, but you could easily slip back into the coma, and maybe next time you will not come out. Sometimes coma patients must learn how to walk again, or relearn any number of routine activities. The brain is a complex and fragile organ.”

“Dr. Dobbelfeld—”

“Mr. Keeley,” the doctor says sternly. “Please understand me. I insist this only to help you. If I released you from this hospital, there is a significant chance that you would die. How can I be any more clear than that?”

“But why? You said I could slip back into a coma and not wake up. What difference will it make if I fall into the coma here or in the U.S.?”

“I performed the surgery. I am familiar with your injuries. I assure you this is normal procedure.”

Steve considers pushing harder, but decides to relent for now. Perhaps the doctor will be more willing to negotiate if he makes swift progress in the next twenty-four hours.

“In a moment a nurse will administer more painkillers and antibiotics,” Dr. Dobbelfeld tells him. “Afterward you will go to sleep again for a while. You will be able to see your parents and your girlfriend again after that.”

5

A young nurse arrives to record his vitals and hook up a new IV. She is dark-skinned and appears to be of East Indian descent.

“What’s in that?” he asks her in German.

“Painkillers and antibiotics.”

“Have I been getting this since I arrived?”

She bustles around him, not really making eye contact, and for a moment he wonders if his German was unclear. Or if she is afraid of him for some reason.

“The Russian woman visited you a couple of days after you were brought here,” the nurse finally says. “She left something in your clothes.”

“Where are they? My clothes?”

The nurse pads across the tile floor and opens a narrow closet door. She reaches into his overcoat. Steve knows what she has before he sees it.

The ring box.

“Is the ring inside?”

“It is,” the nurse admits. “This Russian, she must have liked you very much. If I saved six months’ pay, I could not afford this ring, and I think the Russian would have to work much longer.”

The nurse puts the ring box away and closes the closet door.

“If it were me,” she adds, “I would find this woman and thank her.”

Steve watches her leave and a moment later tumbles into unconsciousness.

6

He wakes, cold and alone. The hospital room seems brighter than it should, as if someone has deliberately turned up the lights. He looks around for his parents, for Janine, but appears to be alone. Except he is not alone. The unseen presence is here, the field, emerging from nowhere, thrumming as it did during his coma.

Fear gathers in the tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes. Adrenaline-laced blood surges through him. Burns through him.

Something is in the room with him. Something or someone.

She moves out of the shadows, shadows cloudy like the Zurich sky, and she is still wearing the red dress. Her dark hair is full and gorgeous, her eyes more beautiful than he remembers. She climbs onto the bed and straddles him, knees on either side of his hips. Leans forward to kiss him.

“Anna?”

“Hello, Steve Keeley.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you. I am very sorry for what happened. I think I will stay with you for a while.”