Charmed Particles (3 page)

The realtor had arranged to pick them up at the hotel to begin
house hunting
, as she called it when Abhijat phoned to make an appointment. Her car was a plush, champagne-colored Cadillac. Abhijat sat in the front seat, and Sarala, in the back, leaned forward to hear them speaking.

“Whatever neighborhood you settle on, the schools will be great,” the realtor said. “District 220 schools are all top of the line. Some of the best in the state.”

Abhijat made a note on the pad of paper he kept in the breast pocket of his blazer. Most of the other foreign scientists at the Lab were there temporarily—they and their families were housed on the Lab campus or, like he and Sarala, in small hotel-style efficiency apartments. However, as Abhijat was to be a permanent hire, he and Sarala would need to find a permanent home.

The realtor had a pleasant voice, Sarala thought, noting also her delicate perfume, hair the color of straw, sculpted and set, flipping up at the collar of the shirt she wore under her muted, neutral suit. Sarala ran her hand over the smooth beige velour of the seat as they drove, the realtor pointing out here and there the benefits and drawbacks of each neighborhood.

“Well, of course, you'll want to be close to the Lab,” the realtor continued, “which makes Eagle's Crest an excellent choice. Just across Route 12, and one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the community.”

By the second day in the realtor's car, Sarala was certain they had been inside every home for sale in Nicolet. And how strange it had seemed to her, to be allowed to walk right into the homes of these strangers, to wander through their rooms, imagining her own future there, her clothes hanging in the closet.

At the first house, Sarala and Abhijat had stood uncomfortably in the foyer, even as the realtor strode off into the living room, assuming they would follow. Finding herself alone in the room, and looking back to find Abhijat and Sarala still standing, rooted in the entry, she'd had to explain: “It's okay to come in and look around.”

Sarala knew she was supposed to be imagining her own life in each of the houses the realtor pulled up to, fiddling with the lockbox on the front door, then leading them through the rooms one by one, each house a different possible world for her and Abhijat, but Sarala found herself distracted again and again, instead trying to piece together the clues left out—family photos, a child's drawing on the refrigerator. Trying to imagine the lives of the people who lived there, for now at least.

In some houses—pristine bathroom counters, kitchen sinks that gleamed with polishing—she had the feeling no one really lived there. In others, it seemed the owners had dashed out only moments before, something of their movement suspended in the air.

“And to your left we have Heritage Village,” the realtor announced, turning her head a little in acknowledgement of Sarala, who, alone in the back seat, had begun to feel a bit like a child. “It's one of the most notable living history museums in the area,” the realtor continued.

Sarala looked out the window as they passed. Women in long skirts and bonnets walked among rustic buildings. In front of a rough wooden shed, a man in a leather apron tended a blazing fire.

What Sarala liked about Nicolet: Heritage Village. It had been what decided her as she weighed their options: school systems, property taxes, expanses of wide green lawns, and subdivisions where the streets turned in on themselves like mazes. Riding in the real estate agent's car she had sometimes forgotten entirely which suburb of Chicago she was in.

When she'd seen Heritage Village, though, she knew this was the place for them.

Here was America. Here was where they would raise Meena, the baby she could already feel growing within her, though she was months from being conceived. The America she'd read about: a place of pastures, animals grazing, frontiers stretching ever westward. Here was Paul Revere Road circling around, branching off at Independence Drive. Here was a worried Martha Washington waiting for George to cross the Delaware, Betsy Ross on her porch sewing the first American flag, log cabins from which each morning these pilgrims might set out to discover, each day, a newer America.

Back at the hotel that night, Abhijat sat at the desk beside the television making a list of pros and cons for each of the houses they had considered. On the other side of the kitchenette's half wall, Sarala folded the dishtowel and draped it over the faucet.

Eagle's Crest subdivision. Sarala wanted a house there. She loved the sound of it, and the way Eagle's Crest separated the two parts of the town—on one side, the Lab, where scientists crashed subatomic particles into each other hoping to reveal the tiniest building blocks of the universe; on the other, Heritage Village, where costumed reenactors bent low over kettles, settling day after day this new country—the neighborhood itself like a literal threshold in time, holding apart the past and the future.

Abhijat took out a long legal pad, on which he began to draw an elaborate decision-making matrix. But Sarala had already decided. She held her tongue and waited for him to finish.

They made an offer on the only house available in Eagle's Crest. A gray two-story—four bedrooms, a study, three bathrooms, and a finished basement. When their offer was accepted, they celebrated with a modest dinner Sarala prepared in the kitchenette of the hotel room and which they ate on trays balanced on their knees while watching
Let's Make a Deal
on the television. The woman who stood before the prizes, revealing them to the exuberant contestants, reminded Sarala of the realtor, all hairspray and makeup and hands gesturing.

On the day of the closing, Sarala signed her name over and over again to pieces of paper she hadn't even read. Each time, she looked to Abhijat, who had already read them over carefully, totaling the figures in his head, and he would nod, yes and yes and yes, it's okay.

CHAPTER 2

Unveiling the Wild: Being an Account of the Expeditions of Randolph Winchester, the Last Great Gentleman Explorer

It is useless to tell me of civilization. Take the word of one who has tried both, there is charm in the wild life
.

—W
ILLIAM
C
OTTON
O
SWELL

1972-1974

R
ANDOLPH
LIKED
R
OSE TO
TRAVEL WITH
HIM
. I
N
HER
SAFARI
khakis she looked like Katharine Hepburn, her long chestnut hair wound into a loose bun, pith helmet shading her pale pink skin, kerchief knotted loosely around her neck.

In the early days of their marriage, Rose had accompanied Randolph on all of his assignments. He was a journalist, traveling sometimes with a photographer, but more often, as he preferred, on his own, to the far corners of the world. From these distant places, he crafted for
Popular Explorer Magazine
mesmerizing stories of the people and places he found, stories that allowed his readers—largely sedentary Midwestern folk—to imagine themselves there with him on his wild adventures. Randolph's ability to make readers feel as though they were journeying right along with him accounted for the popularity of his pieces in the magazine, where they were accompanied by striking photographs, many of which he had taken himself.

He was proud of the distances Rose had hiked in Borneo. “She's the equal of any man I know,” he would say to anyone who might doubt her fitness for such an expedition.

In Arabia, they rode dromedary camels across the desert, and Randolph watched her, slim torso swaying back and forth on the animal before him, her hand reaching up to shade her eyes as she peered off into the horizon line, sand meeting sky, sun hanging overhead.

Threading their way through the narrow passes of the Alai Mountains along the Isfairan River valley along with their pack horses, Rose and Randolph spent their nights side by side in a yurt, eyes tracing the elaborate pattern of latticed framework over which a thick felt covering was stretched. It was avalanche season, and how thrilling it was to know that, as they slumbered, they might at any moment be buried under a new small mountain of snow. How thrilling then, also, to awaken in the morning, to step out of the yurt, and to see that it had not, after all, happened—not that night, at least.

In Sri Lanka, during Esala Perahera, they watched the procession of elaborately decorated elephants to honor and venerate the sacred tooth of Buddha.

In Tanzania they hiked Kilimanjaro. Rose made it only three-quarters of the way up before being stricken with altitude sickness, and Randolph spent a long night beside her as she shivered, wrapped in both of their sleeping bags.

Rose had been ashamed that she'd taken ill; it meant neither of them would summit the mountain. But their guide assured her it might happen to anyone, insisting that, were they to try the climb again, it might be Randolph who was struck down and Rose utterly unaffected—yet another of the mysteries of the world.

Randolph was a polymath, dabbling in everything, lucking into doing nearly all things well. As a child growing up in the English countryside, his heroes had been William Burchell, who, it was said, had set off on history's first safari after being jilted by his fiancée, and Cornwallis Harris, whose safari paintings and drawings Randolph had pored over as a boy. He'd read Rider Haggard's Allen Quatermain series again and again, conjuring wild worlds, darkest Africa, determined to live a life of adventure.

His favorite tales were those in which the natural world triumphed over hubristic attempts to ignore or pave over them entirely, as in the story of the old Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where patronage of the golf course dropped precipitously after a player was mauled by a lion on the fairway.

Randolph's parents had been decidedly unadventurous. Careful and protective of their only son, the most adventurous thing he'd been permitted to do as a child was to attend boarding school.

His interest in adventure and exploration had begun when he had seen advertised in the back of his father's
Popular Mechanics
a strange and mysterious book—
The Secret Museum of Mankind
—for which he immediately sent away. It arrived a few weeks later, a hefty volume filled with dusky mimeograph-quality photo reproductions.