Chapter 6 The Whale #3
Much of motherhood was repetition. She breastfed and changed diapers and coaxed flailing limbs through onesies.
She read Pat the Zoo; she sang “Three Little Piggies.” During tantrums, she played the only YouTube video Silas deigned to sit through (“Shaun the Sheep: Food Episodes Compilation”) on repeat.
She sliced the grapes and the cheese and the sweet potato.
She thawed the corn and the berries and the peas.
She patiently endured the phase in which he played with nothing but dried beans and, less patiently, the toilet paper fixation that followed.
Yet she felt bliss as frequently as tedium.
At two months, Silas beamed with a broad, gummy smile.
Each day brought new discoveries: light through stained glass, his own feet.
Maisie and Noah bought a xylophone for his first birthday, and after striking a note with the little hammer, he paused to exclaim, round-mouthed, “Oh!” He loved to climb over Eli and Laurel, throwing his arms around their necks, kissing them.
Sometimes they lay on the floor with diapers over their faces as he came charging from across the room, panting with excitement.
By eighteen months, he disdained yogurt and Cheerios for cheese and olives—le petit snob, they called him—but when he was drowsy, he buried his head in Laurel’s neck, clutching a lock of her hair.
She had not anticipated the gravity of small children, their blend of mysticism and solemnity.
At four, his questions were thoughtful and unselfconscious: Is today tomorrow?
Who made this cracker? When I die, how will I know where the bathrooms are?
He liked to hold Laurel’s face in his hands.
“I love you so much I can’t stop loving you,” he said once, and Laurel cried because she was not sure she had ever been loved like that, certainly not by herself.
Silas idolized his father. Eli could be enchanting: he carried Silas on his shoulders in the yard or chased him down the hallway as Silas screamed with glee.
But Eli also left early, and he spent evenings in the bedroom he used as a home office.
The university had no maternity leave or childcare policies.
Eli’s salary paid for daycare, but Laurel did almost every pickup and made almost every meal.
When she felt frustrated, she reminded herself of the strain Eli was under.
What shine he’d had as a graduate student had dulled: his Duoverse model was a theoretical achievement, but he’d found no data to support it.
Now, with tenure approaching, he turned to dark matter: a grating scientific mystery, even a key to the formation of the universe.
If he could better understand it, perhaps he could apply that knowledge to the Duoverse.
He told Laurel about Vera Rubin, born in 1928, who helped to prove dark matter’s existence.
As a child, she clambered over to her sister’s side of the bed, where the window was, to track the stars.
Ignored by her high school physics teacher and advised not to go into science, she pursued astronomy at Vassar on scholarship and received a master’s from Cornell.
In December of 1950, Vera was nursing an infant and didn’t have a car.
Her parents drove her to the American Astronomical Society, where she presented her thesis on the rotation of galaxies.
The society responded with rancorous denunciation.
Vera earned her PhD through night classes and cried every time the Astrophysical Journal appeared in the mailbox.
In 1956, she found work at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism: an astronomer named Kent Ford had created a spectrometer that could peer into galaxies.
Kent and Vera focused on Andromeda. They expected to see the galaxy’s edges rotate more slowly than the center, where mass concentrated.
This would accord with Newton’s rotational laws, as well as Einstein’s theory of gravity.
But Andromeda’s dusty fringes moved at the same speed as the stars and gas at its heart.
The results called Einstein into question and overhauled Newton entirely.
Vera knew that it would jeopardize her career to present them.
Instead, she and Kent studied a second galaxy, then a third.
By 1985, they’d looked at sixty. In every case, the results were the same.
If Einstein was right, there had to be more mass than they could see, enough to hold galaxies together.
Vera argued that this was dark matter, so-called because of its invisibility.
“She should have won the Nobel,” Eli said. “Today we think that observable matter is less than five percent of the universe. The rest is dark matter. But we still don’t know what dark matter is.”
Eli had a guess: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.
These would interact with gravity instead of light and fill a crucial hole in the Standard Model.
But WIMPs were hypothetical; they had never been detected in real life.
Eli was searching for them at a particle accelerator called the Tevatron, but he hadn’t found one.
One evening, Laurel joined him in his office. On the desk was a notebook filled with numbers as arcane as his mother’s ancient languages. Below a flurry of pencil, Laurel saw a number: 480 PeV.
“You’ve found something,” she said.
Eli made a noise that suggested this was generous. “It’s a measure of energy. How aggressive a particle is—how likely it is to interact with the matter we can see. I think this might be the energy signature for the particle that makes up dark matter.”
Laurel came to stand behind him. “WIMPs?”
Eli leaned into her, and she ran her fingers over his scalp. It was one of his favorite sensations, something his mother did when he was a boy.
“It could be,” he said. “I hope so. I just have to prove it.”
Two weeks after bowling in Building 63, Miles touches Laurel’s back in the kitchen.
“Some guy looking for you,” he says. “Tall? Curly hair? Not quite as handsome as I am?”
Laurel carries a tray of pasta salad into the galley. Eli intercepts her at the buffet.
“Have you been to Southern?” he asks.
Gallagher’s is not the only bar at McMurdo.
Southern Exposure is a small beige building with the atmosphere of a seventies ski lodge: beamed ceilings, card tables with swivel chairs, a counter hung with Christmas lights.
Laurel casts Eli a look to remind him that she isn’t the newbie on station, but she agrees to meet him there after work.
In the summer, Southern is cleaned and staffed by volunteer bartenders. During winter, it runs on a slightly feral honor system. Tonight an OAE works the espresso machine. At the bar, a tub of New Zealand beer sits beside an empty Cheese Balls barrel full of bills.
Eli sits at the end of the counter, near a wall-mounted dartboard. In his eyes, Laurel sees restrained intensity. The beer tempts her, but Eli is drinking a shot of espresso. She hands a bill to the OAE and asks for the same.
Eli doesn’t bother with small talk.