“MacArthur likes the new model for radiatively induced symmetry breaking I introduced last year.” The words were bitter in Sal’s mouth. He tried again. “The model plays,” he said, hoping a joke would remove the taste, but his father didn’t respond. Sal wondered if he could slip away unnoticed. Outside, a car honked, and Professor Brennan leaned into the glass, straining toward the sound. Sal noticed for the first time that the room smelled like old man. He looked around at the bursting bookcases, the crystal awards, the framed degrees; the photo of Sal as a boy in a baseball uniform, his hair a mass of red-blond curls, his smile a series of gaps.
Sal saw, then, that his father had turned from the window and was looking at him. His eyes were clear. They were fixed on Sal’s face. Sal gazed back at the strong jaw, the broad, deeply lined forehead, the prominent but structurally perfect nose. He wanted nothing more at that moment than for his father to embrace him. Then the horn honked again, and the interstice dissolved.
Sal went down to South Pole for Kavli that fall, the fall of 1999, to work on Viper, the telescope run by the guys at the University of Chicago. Sal knew then that this would be the last time he’d look for proof that the standard model of the universe was correct. Later, when the first installment of the MacArthur money was deposited into his account, he wrote a check for the entire amount, made out to the Kavli Foundation. Now he was free.
Two days after writing that check, four months after returning from his first research season at Pole, eight months after Professor Brennan had quietly retired, and sixteen months after talking to Sokoloff that night in Princeton, Sal left Stanford. When his mother asked him where he was going, he told her he was following the phoenix.
*
Sal didn’t hear Cooper come into the lab. He must have fallen asleep, because she was squatting down next to him, her fur-lined hood framing her beautiful face. “They’ve been trying to get you over All-Call for the last fifteen minutes. Something’s happened.” She looked over at Alek, who had awakened and resumed his silent weeping. “What’s going on? Why’s Alek crying?”
Sal rolled over on his side and from his back pocket pulled the folded paper Alek had given him ten hours earlier. He handed it to Cooper and watched her scan it, her dark eyes moving from word to word. He knew it would mean nothing to her, and he was envious of her ignorance—Alek’s tears would do more than anything to tell her what was on this piece of paper.
Cooper sat down next to Sal and looked at him questioningly. He pointed to the symbol that Alek had circled three times in brown marker, the color of each ring growing deeper as his fury strengthened his grip. Together, they looked at it.
5
∑
Sal looked again and again and, as before, he couldn’t stop. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life, and it was also the most disappointing. “This is why Alek’s crying and you’re on the floor,” Cooper said.
“Short of finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, it’s the most important discovery in astronomy. It supports a lifetime of theoretical work. And it eliminates my model.”
As she absorbed this, Sal thought of her question that day she came to his lab, the one he’d dismissed because it was inconvenient: No, I mean how it started before it started. He thought, too, of her paintings, which she’d begun photographing for her NSF portfolio before handing them over to everyone: the one of Pearl, how her golden hair—always hidden under that filthy pink bandanna—coiled around her neck; how her eyes laughed, but how they also clearly belonged to a woman with insatiable ambitions. Doc Carla, startling without her Yankees cap, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance, her entire life, somehow, in those eyes. Bozer, stripped to pith. Denise’s unmistakable sadness. Everyone else, even Alek, even Floyd and Dwight. Everyone else but him.
But he didn’t wonder why his likeness was not among the portraits; it was obvious that he had not allowed Cooper to truly look at him. He had never minded if the others looked—they couldn’t see like she could. Post-docs, research assistants, waitresses, lawyers. Some understood the work, or pretended to. Some didn’t, and some didn’t even feign interest. It was fine. It was all fine. He took what he needed without being a dick about it, and they got whatever they wanted in return. This history made Sal notorious at Kavli for what was regarded as his “charm”—though in the world of cosmology and particle physics, the bar for charm was admittedly low.
It helped that he’d taken after his father, with his strong features and tall build, and that from his mother he had inherited the sort of face that women considered attractive (though one girlfriend had assured him that “beauty is neutral”). But what set Sal apart from other cosmologists, particle physicists, astronomers, and all the others who so desperately wanted the world to understand the implications of their work, was that he was bold. He said nothing until he could say it with authority. He hated hedging—framing ideas with conditionals that annihilated them. Margins of error as wide as crevasses, and therefore too dangerous to attempt a crossing. These were the inviolable commandments of science, but they were also the reason that the public paid science so little attention. Scientists were lame messengers, often handing off their findings to their weakest practitioners to share with the world, celebrity scientists who performed a kind of homeopathy that distilled them to nothing, or nearly nothing. He refused to be like them.
Then Cooper pushed his stupid petition away that day in the cafeteria. Disdainful. Solitary. Like a particle that was also a wave, Sal’s heart was both closed and open. He tried to ignore it, but then she was everywhere. She was in the lab, she was in the equations that Sal still did by hand, she was at the telescope, blotting out the cosmic microwaves. She was outside, walking alone, looking at the sky. Looking. Each day that passed changed something about her, made her more beautiful. A glance in the cafeteria. A very slight smile. A smudge of paint on her cheek. A smart remark. Nothing rational. None of it precise.
First, he laid her out for Alek, like she was a cadaver in a nineteenth-century medical theater, to prod and insult in every way imaginable. Alek soon tired of this; he felt Cooper was ordinary and therefore inoffensive. Still Sal’s heart thundered for her. You’re distracted, he heard his father saying to him, and now you’re proving a distraction. He could not afford a distraction. Not this season.
When the feelings persisted, Sal eventually declared that his intense attraction to Cooper must be evolutionary biology at work. There could be no other explanation. Alek felt strongly that Sal’s vow of chastity for the season was to blame. No, Sal insisted, it had to be biology—millennia ago, he and Cooper must have been part of the same tribe. They would simply have to fuck so he could get back to work. Masturbation would cure this reptilian-brain desire, he thought. But it didn’t.