God Particle

It took half the day for Grayson and his sister Selma to reach what was left of their father’s lab, a cavernous shell of a sanctuary cradled between the filed-down fang of mountaintops just west of Yukon Territory.

Strewn across the snow in all directions were pieces of debris, unmoved from where they lay a year ago—a scattering of shrapnel shaved from the unhinged door, clumps of stripped wire cocooned like silkworms in ice, and blackened bits of machinery as unidentifiable as the body that once occupied it.

The last time Grayson visited the site now serving as their father Victor’s gravestone was shortly after five men in neon hazmat suits stressed the importance of being as far from the premises as possible.

This is a highly-radiated area, son, they warned him. No telling what damage this will do down the line.

“Bastard,” Selma said, the word jutting out like a toothpick between her thinned lips.

“We wore suits,” Grayson assured her. “We were protected.”

Side by side. Father and son. They built a machine that could manipulate of the Higgs Field, tap into the complementing dark matter of any living organism on earth and direct its energy along a quantum pathway to produce a state of hyper-functionality and absolute clarity unlike anything imaginable by the human mind. Well, theoretically, as no further experiments have been conducted beyond the initial failed one.

“Ah, you wore suits. Cancer-protecting suits. And yet…” Selma sighed and tunneled the snow with the tip of her boot. “What are we even doing here? I vaguely remember a pact made to leave this all behind, or has the tumor started affecting your memory yet? Because it might soon if, you know, you don’t start treatment.”

Grayson moved towards the rails to peer past shreds of mangled steel. He aimed his flashlight down at the melted laminate tops of overturned tables, the litter of broken glass and disassembled beam scales, and the shattered frame of the hydrogen-powered mass-converting blimp that once swelled with the promise of new purpose.

“I just need to find out what went wrong before…” He died. I die. We all die. Grayson wasn’t quite sure.

“Everything went to hell,” Selma said, finishing the thought.

She kicked a stone down the mouth of the metal monstrosity burrowed beneath their feet as Grayson leaned further in, hypnotized by its abstracted scowl. The sound of the rubble rattling against the stairs reminded him of his father’s slow but daily descent downwards and Grayson wanted nothing more than to pull some part of him out.

“To hell with it,” Selma said, and Grayson turned to see her desperately trying to wipe the tears from her eyes.

***

They planned a week's stay in their father's cabin, now Grayson's, though it might as well have been a stranger's. Over the years, it had transformed from childhood retreat to secluded quarters to haunted mausoleum. Taking his first step through the front door was like walking into a fishbowl, everything a watery distortion. The grains of the oak-paneled walls seemed both distant and all-consuming, like satellite snapshots of mud-eating cyclones. Even the mantle portrait of Victor’s ageless face lit by a small unremembered joy on the outskirts, a playful moment between him and his children and the woman he loved, seemed to drown under the glare of a now grimy frame.

Grayson moved through each room like a patron in an antique shop, with uneasy attention to the overvalued proof of another time. Instinctively, he rounded his shoulders and tucked his hands in his pockets, as if even a slight brush of his skin against the abandoned objects would cause them to disintegrate. He stopped short of the shirt his father put on then changed out of the day he died.

It was the kind of shirt his father hardly wore; stiff-collared, pin-striped, button-up. And yet he remembered his father working hard to loop the buttons through the holes, determined to alter the pattern of his life if only for one day, before giving up, tossing it aside, and pulling over his head the faded long-sleeve polo he wore the day before.

No need to get up, Victor said, I’ll be back.

He tried to remember if his father’s hands shook as he struggled to close the shirt over his chest, if even a tinge of nervous energy radiated from his usually steady joints, but he could only recall the liquid calm of his voice, rolling out of him like marbles on an oil slick.

I’ll be back, he said. And there was no doubt, at the time, that he would be.

Grayson draped the shirt over his knee to smooth out the wrinkles and trace an invisible line down one of the shirt’s thin gray ones. He then slipped the dress shirt over his sweater and fastened it just below his neck, leaving the top button to hang against his chest.

“Looking sharp,” Selma said.

Grayson turned to find her leaning against the door frame.

“Dad’s lucky shirt,” he said.

“Not lucky enough to save him.”

“No.”

He folded the sleeves up to his elbows and bent down to pick through the rest of Victor’s drawers until all his possessions were amassed into a mountainous pile in the middle of the floor that nearly swallowed him from sight.

“For the bonfire, I assume?” Selma said, craning her neck to catch a glimpse over the highland.

Grayson only grunted in response as he sorted through the entire catalogue of Victor’s past life. Following the accident, he couldn’t bring himself to rifle through what was now his inheritance. It was the first time he considered all that was left behind and now passed on; the supplies, the letters, the photographs, and, of course, the stack of black Moleskine journals riddled with the theories that powered their existence for so long.

Without any other new particles, the Higgs is unstable and temporary and, since the Higgs holds everything together, if the Higgs goes everything goes. Higgs is both the creator and the destroyer.

The years they spent on calculated control over the Higgs Boson. The proclaimed “God Particle”. This discovery that left the world suspended amid two cosmological works of art; one paint-by-number and one Pollack, swinging like a pendulum between the promise of supersymmetry and the chaos of the multiverse. Surely it wasn’t all for nothing.

He considered this just as two envelopes fell from the pages of the notebook he held in his now shaky hands; one addressed to Grayson and one to his father Victor.

Without hesitation, he went straight for the letter with his name on it, recognizing his father’s handwriting even in its most erratic form.

To my son, my partner, my most trusted colleague. I know it seems there couldn’t possibly be anything left to ask of you but, if inclined, please grant me this last bit of assistance. I’m afraid the last leg of our scientific venture requires some heavy lifting on your part. If all goes as expected, you will undergo an extreme altercation of consciousness. I’m appointing you as the primary vessel. You need not be alarmed. Think if it as a guiding force. I’ve discussed future plans for the next phase of the Higgs Boson project with reputable CERN physicist Marcus Brunner. Attached to this note you will find his address. He is instructed to continue following my departure. We will both be awaiting your arrival.

As if echoing his own thoughts, Selma said, “I can’t believe it.”

“What?” He responded. Only then did he realize that Selma had picked up the envelope addressed to Victor.

Just another thing Dad hid from us,” Selma said, waving the piece of paper in front him. “It’s a letter from mom and a cashier’s check for $20,000."

Selma waited but Grayson couldn't find the air to speak.

"It’s all here," she said and swallowed to seal the cracks in her voice."Her address, phone number, contact list, travel plans, everything. I didn’t even know he was still in contact with her. My God, Grayson. A whole five years since she left, and we didn’t know. Or did you?”

“No, of course not,” Grayson was quick to reply, though with less certainty than he meant.

“Who knows if she’s even there anymore. And what she probably thinks of us?" Selma took a breath and cleared her throat. "Well, I guess it’s up to us to find out. I assume we’re done here?”

One revelation after another. Grayson’s brain was ablaze.

“Why is it up to us to find her? She knows where we are. Why isn’t she taking the first plane out?” Grayson said.

A sharp bolt of pain needled the back of his eyes sending tremors through his hands and a pounding in his head that forced him to bow against his knees. Selma rushed to his side as soon as he lifted a hand to massage his temples.

“The way things ended, maybe she didn’t want to force it. We both said some things…” Selma said, her voice softening a bit as rubbed circles on his back. “I bet she thought about it. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a reason…”

If there was one, neither of them could articulate it. They stood in silent consideration of their fateful discoveries; Selma’s lingering in the open space between them, Grayson’s still rising to the surface.

***

His findings weren't exactly a surprise. After his father’s accident, Grayson had sensed a change in his consciousness, a multiplicity in his awareness, a familiar presence surging against the banks of his skull. For a while, he dismissed it as the phantom itch of disbelief convincing his mind that what was gone couldn’t be. Then the itch became a pinch and the pinch a cut and the cut a piercing stab right through his frontal cortex. He suddenly felt his father in every nerve ending from the tip of ears to the space between his toes. His synapses set fire to his brain, hurtling it through time and space like a flaming meteor soaring past stars to kiss the earth and birth new life. He recalled something his father once told him.

Many believe dark matter to be the scaffolding surrounding the assembly sites of stars and galaxies over billions of years, a theory supported by evidence that these galaxies would quickly fall apart if the only mass available was that of the visible world. This is because dark matter and energy accounts for roughly 95% of the known universe with normal matter, largely in the form of galaxies, accumulating along its densest concentrations. Think about what that means. Our lives depend on a mysterious and seemingly ominous force that could easily destroy us, but, instead, centers our entire existence.

Grayson used to fear the idea of dark matter; this entity that surrounded his whole world but left it irrelevant, like a whisker of a mouse pricking the inner skin of a sleeping anaconda. Now, he relished the idea of being perched into space by a force so all-consuming and powerful, and at such an exact position from the sun. How then, could he be without purpose?

Sitting up awake on the edge of his bed at 2 am, he eyed Victor’s old Rover from his window, peeking past Selma’s Outback. A store of reserve gas in the woodshed. His passport on his person. All the planets aligned.

He memorized the address his father had gifted to him then pocketed the check from their mother, exchanging it for his own offering of reconciliation.

Selma, I’m leaving you the deed to the cabin and all the possessions inside. Sell what you must to do what you must. Sorry to leave so unexpectedly. Tell Mom....

Nothing created is ever really destroyed.

I’ll be back, he concluded. Though when and where and how, he was no longer sure.