Lily blushed and felt as though she were dining with President Reagan himself.
Throughout the meal, she peppered Abhijat with questions about his work, his research, his daily routine at the Lab, and the difference between an experimental and a theoretical physicist. Abhijat was delighted by her animated curiosity. (This was one of the few traits she shared with her mother, favoring Randolph in appearance and temperament.) She was a perfect companion for Meena, Abhijat thought.
For Meena, it was — as this moment is for nearly all children who find themselves seeing a parent through the eyes of another — startling. Watching her father grow spirited and enthusiastic as he talked about his work, she felt as though she, too, had met someone new that night.
“And your father?” Sarala asked, turning the conversation to Lily. “What does he do, if I may ask?”
“Of course,” Lily nodded. “He’s an explorer.”
Sarala looked at her for a moment, and decided there must be some meaning lost in the translation. She resolved to look it up in the Webster’s Unabridged in Abhijat’s study after dinner.
CODES AND CIPHERS
Although Lily’s status in the social hierarchy of elementary school suffered for her awkwardness (which Meena often tried to mitigate with her more nuanced grasp of elementary-age social cues), her impatience with the intellects of her classmates (which Meena privately shared but was savvy enough not to display), and her often eccentric taste in personal attire (showing up, for example, one morning, in a kitenge topped with a Hello Kitty T-shirt her mother had insisted on adding to the ensemble for reasons of both warmth — for it was winter in Illinois — and modesty), when it came to show and tell, even the students who thought Lily was a weirdo had to admit that she aced it.
“My dad brought me this teddy bear back from a business trip. I forget where,” Abby Johnson mumbled, holding the stuffed animal aloft listlessly by the ear and sounding bored, even by herself. “He got my mom one, too.”
Lily, however, had requested that Mrs. Hamilton make available to her a slide projector and had informed her teacher that she expected to require thirty minutes for her presentation, not including Q&A. Had Mrs. Hamilton not been so exhausted at this point in the school year, having had her fill of wiping noses and breaking up scuffles on the playground, and having been kept up the night before by her husband’s snoring, she might not have allowed it, but as it was, she chose to see it as a blessing, as thirty minutes of class time she did not have to fill.
Lily shared with them slides of her father’s most recent expeditions. From New Guinea he had brought Lily a ceremonial drum made with lizard skin and human blood, which she had passed around the room and which the children held in their hands reverentially, equally horrified and curious, just as she’d known they would be.
ANIMALS OF THE GRASSLANDS
It was field trip season — spring — by which it was understood that the teachers were exhausted and the children were restless, and thus any excuse to get everyone out of the classroom was leapt upon. Mrs. Hamilton, upon learning that Meena’s father worked at the Lab, asked him to give the class a personal tour of the facility, and Abhijat had been more than pleased to oblige, consulting in advance with Meena and Lily about what their classmates would find most intriguing.
On the appointed day, the children, jostling and chattering, spilled in an unruly crowd from the bright yellow school bus, which idled noisily in front of the Lab’s education center, a low building surrounded by prairie grasses and a reproduction Conestoga wagon. Here they were met by Abhijat and a docent, who had been dispatched by the education center to translate theoretical physicist to layperson, as needed.
The docent introduced Abhijat to Mrs. Hamilton. “Dr. Mital.” Mrs. Hamilton took his hand in hers to shake it, beckoning the children who had begun to stray back to the fold. “We are so grateful to you for taking time out of your busy schedule to show us around the Lab.”
“Not at all,” Abhijat said. “It is my great pleasure to have you all here as our distinguished guests.”
“Perhaps you know our chaperone, Mrs. Winchester? Lily’s mother.”
Abhijat took Rose’s hand in his. “Very honored to meet you, Madame Alderperson.”
“Please. Rose,” she corrected. During all of her interactions with the Mitals, dropping off and picking up Lily and Meena from their many activities together, Rose had only ever met Sarala. She’d been curious about Meena’s father.
“I understand our daughters have taken quite a liking to each other,” Abhijat said.
“Yes, I’ve been so pleased to see that.” Rose smiled.
Together they looked at the girls, who stood a bit away from the rest of the children, notebooks and pencils already in their eager hands.
“Children, may I have your attention, please?” Mrs. Hamilton’s voice rang out over the chatter, her hand held up in the air as she spoke. “I’d like to introduce Meena’s father, Dr. Mital. Dr. Mital will be our expert guide today and will tell us all about his work here at the Lab.”
The children gathered in a squirmy half circle around Abhijat. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you all,” Abhijat began, nodding at the children. He was astonished by the way Mrs. Hamilton had so quickly brought order and quiet to the crowd of children, who now looked up at him in anticipation. “To begin, I wonder how many of you are familiar with what it is we do here at the Lab?”
Lily’s hand shot up into the air.
“Yes, Miss Winchester, but perhaps one of your other colleagues?”
Abhijat waited for a long moment, but no other hands rose.
“Well, then, Miss Winchester, perhaps you will provide an explanation?”
“At the Lab,” Lily began, “you’re studying elementary particles that are the building blocks of the universe,” sounding as though she were reading from a textbook, “as well as the forces that hold those particles together or push them apart. The particle accelerator and its detectors are like a giant microscope that helps you see these particles. Well, not really see them — they’re much too small to be seen,” she corrected herself, already beginning, Abhijat saw, to grasp the difficulty of explaining this work simply.
“Thank you, Miss Winchester. Very informative,” Abhijat said, a smile lingering on his face, proud of how carefully she must have listened to his own description of his work. “Now, will you all please come this way?”
He led them in a long, wriggling line toward the Research Tower, the noise of the children, who had again resumed their chattering, rivaling that of the geese that eyed them suspiciously as they made their way past the reflecting pond, up the stairs, and into the atrium.
Rose looked up toward the ceiling of the atrium, its interior walls lined with glass, reaching up to the heavens. While on the surface the building couldn’t have been more different, it reminded her, somehow, of the great cathedrals of France.
“The accelerator,” Abhijat continued, turning to speak to the children as they paused in the atrium, “of which I will give you an aerial view in just a moment, is, some believe, the most important instrument for physics that exists in the world today. Why?, you may be wondering. Because of speed. Because in order to answer today’s most pressing, most exciting questions in physics, one must have the fastest accelerator operating at the highest energy level. And here, at the Lab, we are fortunate to have just such an instrument.”
The elevators carried them to the top of the Research Tower. On the highest floor, large plate-glass windows looked out over the prairie; from here, visitors could observe the surrounding land as it had been before the beginning of its transformation into farmland, into suburbia. The children lined up before the windows, noses pressed against the glass. Rose looked out over the great expanse of the Lab’s campus, thinking of how she had never before seen Nicolet from this height, so much of it visible all at once, arranged just beyond the borders of the Lab’s grounds.