Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 8 - Red

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“Why are you crying?” Tabitha’s father asked when he found her.  She was maybe five years old at the time and sobbing uncontrollably, alone in her room.  

“No one sees me!” 

“What are you talking about?”

“No one sees me!” Tabitha repeated.  She was frantic.  “They just see my hair!”

It made no sense, of course, but again, she was only five.  

This was her earliest strong memory, of being embarrassed about her brilliantly red hair.

“Your hair is beautiful,” her father said and sat next to her on the bed. He stroked the back of her head.  “It’s special because it’s unlike anyone else’s in our family.”

“I don’t want that!” she said and cried against her father’s shoulders.

She couldn’t put it in words at that young age, but how could she?  How could she explain that the crux of the entire issue was that somehow she already knew that she wanted to be seen for something more than just the stupid color of her hair? 

“That hair!” everyone would say.  “Look at that gorgeous hair!”

She should have been pleased, but as she grew the praise only angered her.  She felt an outcast within her own home and family, a curiosity brought out of the closet to amuse visitors.  She soon stopped complaining out loud but would remind her reflection in the mirror as she brushed her hair.

“Nobody sees you,” she’d say.  

When she was twelve years old, an early summer lightning storm redirected the trajectory of her life.  She woke from a deep sleep as silence unexpectedly fell upon the house.  

Her bedroom was the smallest, the walls painted pink and decorated in a way her mother thought all girls should decorate their rooms.  There were toy horses and dollhouses she hadn’t touched in years.  Silly animal calendars she’d long outgrown.  On the wall next to her bed was the latest unwanted calendar.  Each year her mother gave her a calendar for Christmas, and Tabitha tried to gain her approval by dutifully crossing off the days.  She had successfully crossed off every passing day without exception for the past four years.  

On that particular summer night, Tabitha slept without disturbance, despite rain pelting the windows and the sky flashing white under the rippling currents of lightning outside.  As the storm intensified, Tabitha continued to sleep, completely oblivious until a bolt of lightning struck a nearby conductor.  A loud bang echoed through the night and the power went out everywhere within a half-mile radius.

It wasn’t the sound of the explosion that finally woke her, nor the storm itself. It was the sudden silence that followed, of the air conditioning going quiet and the oscillating fan falling still, that brought Tabitha out of her dreams.

After a few minutes, the door opened to her bedroom.

“You okay?” her dad asked.  

“What happened?” Tabitha asked.

“Power’s out. Looks like the whole street’s dark.”

“I’m okay.”

“I hope nothing got fried,” he said and closed the door.

She awoke early the next morning to her dad swearing from down the hall. 

“I work my tail off to buy just a few nice things and this happens every time!” he shouted.  

Tabitha slid out of bed and down towards the kitchen.  She heard the front screen door slam shut, and her father continued yelling outside.

Through the large living room window, she saw him outside at the curb, still cursing as he shoved his prized stereo speakers into the trash.

“What happened?” Tabitha asked.

“The storm fried out his radio,” her mom said.

Tabitha watched as her father stomped away from the trash cans and climbed into his car.  The automobile’s radio blasted as he started the car, startling him. He snapped it off and they could hear him continue to yell while he backed out of the driveway and headed to work.

As she ate her cereal, Tabitha kept looking out the window at the stereo speakers peeking out from the top of the trash cans waiting to be picked up.  She cleared her dishes, changed out of her pajamas, and when she was certain her mother wasn’t looking, she ran out to the curb and snagged one of the speakers out of the trash can.

Taking it to the garage out of sight of her mother, she proceeded to dismantle the unit screw by screw.  She removed the black foam grill and the dust cap and gasket attached to the speaker cone. The cone was made of a smooth material almost like cardboard that was connected to a coil.  She saw then what she’d later learn was called the spider and basket, which itself led to the electronic terminals, voice coils, and a large circular magnet, slate grey and smooth.  

It was the biggest magnet Tabitha had ever seen.  She’d seen magnets before, shaped like letters of the alphabet on her family refrigerator, but she intuitively knew this was something different. 

In the distance, she heard the rumbling and periodic squeal of a garbage truck lumbering down the street. 

She sprang from her place on the cold garage floor and bolted to the front yard just as a garbage man jumped from the back of the truck and grabbed hold of their trash.

“Wait!” Tabitha screamed. 

She ran toward the man, snagged the other speaker from the top of the trash, and darted back to the garage where she quickly retrieved a second magnet. 

Photo by John de Jong on Unsplash

The gravitational pull between the two magnets was stronger than anything Tabitha had ever seen.  In her hands, it was like controlling some sort of dark magic, an unseen force that could either attract or repel with a mere twist of her wrist.  

She turned them over and over, mesmerized by the way they responded to each other.  With one turn, the magnets acted as polar opposites so divergent that no matter how hard she tried, they refused to bind together.  When she flipped one of the magnets around, they snapped together so fiercely that the first time she did it the tip of her middle finger pinched between the two magnets so hard that it caused a deep purple blister. 

After poking around at the other speaker parts and not finding anything as useful as those two magnets, she left the remaining components on the floor of the garage and brought the two magnets into the house.  

She thought of how angry her father had been that morning and thought perhaps he’d be pleased to discover his daughter managed to find something good from the tragedy of his lightning-fried stereo.

Sitting at her father’s desk in the corner of the living room, she wrote a note. 

“Dad,” Tabitha scribbled.  She grinned to herself while she continued to scrawl.  “Your brilliant daughter discovered treasure in your trash.”

She then took the note and, with one of the two magnets she’d excised from her father’s ruined and discarded stereo speakers, attached it to the monitor of the computer he’d proudly purchased just the year before. 

Her father worked late that evening, which was a rarity.  He most always was home for dinner.  Instead, Tabitha ate silently as her mother paged through the latest McCall’s.  After dinner, Tabitha excused herself — though her mother wasn’t really paying attention anyway — and retired to her bedroom to read.  

She drifted off at some point, not even realizing she was drowsy.  She had a hard time falling back asleep the night before in the hours between power returning and being woken up by her father’s swearing that morning and the lack of sleep had caught up.

This time, she was awoken not by silence, but by her father screaming her name from down the hall.

“Tabitha!”

Her first thought was that she was in trouble for removing the speakers from the trash.  Or perhaps because she’d left all the spare parts on the floor of the garage.  Her father busted into her room. 

“What is this?” he yelled at her.  One of the magnets was in his hand.  

“It’s a magnet,” she answered.  “From the speakers you threw away.”

“You’ve destroyed my computer!” he bellowed.  “You can’t put magnets on a computer!  They wipe out everything!”

Tabitha felt her face grow flush with heat.  Embarrassment always made her cheeks glow red. This, too, she blamed on her red hair and pale skin.

Her father screamed at her so loudly and for so long that he brought her to tears.  

He slammed the door when he finally left, still screaming about the money he’d spent only to have whatever he bought destroyed.  Tabitha pushed her face into her pillow so hard that she almost couldn’t breathe.  She tried to see how long she could keep her face there.  To see if she could just smother everything out of her life once and for all.

Twenty minutes later, her father returned.  This time, he knocked.

“It’s all still there,” he said.  

“What?” Tabitha asked.  Her nose was stuffy and her eyes were raw.

“The data,” her dad said.  “All my files and stuff are still there.  I guess they don’t destroy computers, after all.”

“Oh.”

“But just in case, well, maybe don’t do that again.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry I yelled.”

“Okay.”

That fall she wrote her first scientific paper, “Debunking Myths of Magnets,” for her school science fair.  Throughout the rest of middle and high school, whenever she was assigned a science project, Tabitha wrote about magnets.  

Her first paper on myths evolved into another paper titled, “How Speakers Use Magnets to Amplify Sound.” After that, she wrote, “Manipulation of Magnetic Fields via Electric Current Regulation,” which helped her win a full-ride scholarship to the University of Chicago.  

Just days before leaving home for college, Tabitha disastrously decided to dye her hair for the first and only time.  

“Why on earth would you want to dye your hair?” the old woman at the pharmacy asked.

“I want a change for college,” Tabitha said.

“If I had hair as beautiful as yours I wouldn’t ever change a thing,” the woman said.

Tabitha ignored the woman and purchased a box of dark brown hair dye that promised “rich luminous conditioning.”

Later that night, after her parents were asleep, Tabitha snuck the dye into the bathroom and locked the door. To her horror, despite carefully reading the instructions, the dye somehow imbued her beautiful red hair with a hideous purplish-brown hue the color of an eggplant left too long on the vine. 

“Tabitha!” her mother cried when her daughter walked into the kitchen the next morning.  “What have you done to yourself?”

In a panic, her mother dragged her to the first hairdresser that could help on such short notice and paid fifty dollars to bleach out Tabitha’s botched dye job.  This, of course, only made it catastrophically worse.  After first being infused with artificial color and then immediately shocked dry with harsh bleach, Tabitha’s hair frizzed out in all directions with yellowish and dark brown streaks that somehow curled unnaturally inward, as if the over-treatment and chemical burn caused her hair to recoil upon itself. 

Before heading for college just a few days later, Tabitha chopped her hair into a tomboyish pixie cut and left home.  As classes began, she felt more invisible than ever before in her life.

Throughout her freshman and sophomore years her hair slowly grew out. Tabitha would snip off a little of the bleached white ends each month as her hair lengthened.  As soon as her original color finally reached her shoulders again, the unwelcome compliments returned, though now with the even more obnoxious leering of college-aged men.

“I’ve always had a thing for redheads,” she was told far too often.  Once again, she yearned to instead be seen for the way she excelled through all of her courses.

Despite the many ways she’d managed to mangle her beautiful locks, she continued her evolution into an ever more strikingly attractive woman who nevertheless continued to see herself as a hideous wretch. 

Graduation brought with it a fellowship and overseas graduate work in the development of a quantum spin-current generator in England, which was followed two years later with a doctoral dissertation on Heusler-alloy films for nano-spintronic devices and an internship at CERN in Switzerland, working directly on the Large Hadron Collider.  

There she met Dr. James Harbash. A kind and quiet-spoken man whose generous white beard hid a roadmap of wrinkles, Dr. Harbash was undeniably brilliant, yet prone to rambling sentences as his thoughts took him in a myriad of directions seemingly all at once. He was tall and bent, with thin arms and legs, yet he retained a rotund belly that spilled over his belt. He shuffled along everywhere he went, pushing a walker to keep his balance as he made his way from one laboratory to the next, always followed close behind by his full-time nurse who diligently stayed two steps behind him wherever he went.

“I feel like a spoiled old fool to have to hire someone to make sure I don’t fall,” he’d often complain.  “But I’d rather be a fool than dead.”

For Tabitha, the most noteworthy thing about first meeting — and then being mentored by — Dr. Harbash was that never once did he make even so much as a side remark about Tabitha’s beauty, let alone ever mention the color of her hair.  Like Tabitha, Dr. Harbash was more entranced by the scientific path upon which they found themselves than he was by how he looked while on that path.

“It’s amazing what they’ve accomplished here,” Dr. Harbash told her.  He and a handful of scientists from ENH in the United States visited CERN’s Large Hadron Collider several times a year.  Tabitha looked forward to each of his visits.

“Look at what we get to study,” he’d say with childlike glee.  “Thousands upon thousands of various-sized dipole and quadrupole magnets smashing together. These two amazing high-energy particle beams — BAM! — almost at the speed of light.  Marvelous!  And you’re here for it!  At your young age, you’re making it happen! And soon we’ll finish our own back in the states.”

Five years after meeting him, Dr. Harbash visited once again, still limping yet still very much alive. It was on that visit that Tabitha saw the first signs that his demeanor had darkened.  

“What we wanted this for back home is taking too long,” he told her.  “And of course what we’re trying to do is not for the same reasons.  That’s why CERN has been so gracious, I think.  But they’ve become leery of us, it seems.”

“Leery?” Tabitha asked.

“Of ENH.  Of our investors, or whatever they should be called.  A great deal of their funding over here — not just CERN, of course, but the other exploratory laboratories — well, it comes from our investors, of course.  But who wants to be involved with that side of things? Most certainly not me. It’s the science of it all.  That’s why we’re here. But you know that, of course.  I knew that right away.”

“Me?” 

“You can tell as soon as you meet some of these wah-hoos.” Dr. Harbash laughed and shook his head at the same time.  “They’re in it for power, I suppose. For control of whatever it is they think they’ll control. Though that has never made much sense to me, either.  But you’re in it for the science.  Like me. I can tell. Always have, Dr. Small. You’re in it for the mere fact that there are things to discover.”

“And I want to discover them,” Tabitha added.  It was almost, but not quite, a question.

“Exactly,” Dr. Harbash continued.  “When I first envisioned ENH I never imagined I’d need quite as much help from the Swiss.  And others, of course.  But I do. And I certainly didn’t expect I’d need to spend so much time overseas.  And where we’re going with this — relationship, I guess you’d call it — I’m not quite sure I like.”

“With the Swiss?”

“With the power brokers over here. With the power brokers back home. All of it.  Some of them, like you and I, are here for the exploration, the science, the wonder of it all.  But there are others who are here only because they either see dollar signs at the other end of the rainbow, or something worse.”

“I guess I’ve been totally oblivious to anything like that,” Tabitha said. 

“Of course you have.  That’s the point.  But now that I’ve pointed it out, I’d bet my name that you’ll be seeing it everywhere now.”

“I’m kind of afraid of that.”  

Dr. Harbash cleared his throat.

“What would you think about coming to work for me back in Chicago?” he asked.

“What?” Tabitha said.

“You don’t miss living there?”

“I thought four years for undergrad was long enough to endure those kinds of winters.”

“What if I offered you something that would make it all worth it?”

“I’m not really concerned about the money.”

“You heard what I just said. I’m not talking money. There’s plenty of that if you want it, but that’s not what I’m offering.”

“I’m sorry,” Tabitha said.  “I’m a little embarrassed about how confused I am right now.”

Dr. Harbash chuckled.  The way his eyes squinted and his belly bounced as he laughed gave Tabitha a fleeting vision of Santa Claus.

“I tend to do that to people, as you well know,” Dr. Harbash said.  “I rush in, cause chaos, and rush back out again.  But here’s the thing: I’m a fairly strong judge of character, or at least of ability.  I suppose the fact I’m dealing with people problems shines a light on some areas where my character judgment could use improvement.  But I can see in people potential to help me achieve what I set out to achieve years ago with ENH. And for, what? Five years now? I’ve seen that in you.”

“And what exactly are you doing at ENH?”

“The Large Hadron Collider we’ve built like this one? It’s not exactly the same.”

“What do you mean?” Tabitha said.  “That’s something I’m sure everyone here would be talking about.  I haven’t heard a word about that.”

“That’s the point,” Dr. Harbash said.  “Ours will be used for other reasons.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“It’s wonderful that we can search for all the new families of particles we predict with supersymmetric theories, and that’s the kind of thing we seek through scientific purposes. That’s one of the main reasons this LHC was built in the first place.  But our studies at ENH go beyond that.”

“How so?”

“We’re not going to just change the world of knowledge,” Dr. Harbash said.  “We’re going to change reality as we know it.”

Tabitha paused and looked at the man she considered a mentor. For the first time she they first met, she saw something else.

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Exactly,” Dr. Habash said.  “It could indeed be deadly.  It could destroy humanity as we know it.  And there are some people — even some who work for me — who are reckless and in it for their own ambitions.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“Because while there is risk, there is potential. Potential to bring us to greater depths than any of us have ever imagined.  And at the same time, it’s that potential for destruction that makes me need people like you.  I need people who will watch my back.  Who will maintain the integrity of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

“Why me?” Tabitha asked.  “I’ve never been a watchdog like that.”

“I disagree,” Dr. Harbash said.  “I’ve read your studies.  I’ve seen your work.  It’s very clear to me that you take science personally.  Not everyone does.  You love to study particle acceleration, but you’re also interested in the moral justification of it.”

“Again, I don’t think that sounds like me.”

“That’s completely like you,” Dr. Harbash said.  “You’re intuitive, but also cautious and creative.  You’re an ideological scientist, which is clear from every paper of yours I’ve seen.  That all makes for an amazing combination of the kind of scientist I need.”

Tabitha couldn’t disagree.

But then just three months after returning to Chicago, of beginning her work at ENH and the Large Hadron Collider that had been quietly constructed under his guidance, Dr. James Harbash dropped dead on the laboratory floor. 

It happened during one of the rare moments his ever-present nurse had excused himself to use the restroom.  When he’d returned, Dr. Harbash was beyond resuscitation.  

Tabitha was startled at her own grief.  In her short time under his mentorship, she stopped constantly berating herself.  Instead, she began to see in herself the kind of ideological scientist — thoughtful and caring and intuitive — that Dr. Harbash had seen.  He had been the mentor she never knew she wanted or needed.  He was like the excitable grandfather cheering on his granddaughter at Saturday morning soccer games.  In a similar way, in those first days at ENH, Tabitha felt constantly encouraged, challenged, and in a strange way, loved.  Dr. Harbash’s laughter and warmth were given generously, and Tabitha absorbed every bit of it. 

When Dr. Harbash died so suddenly, ENH grew instantly colder.

Before his funeral even took place, the board of directors announced his replacement so quickly it was as if they’d been waiting for him to die.  

“Dr. Becca Watts has been a leader within ENH for the last ten years,” an internal memo read in announcing her promotion.  “Under her watch and guidance we have full confidence that not only will Dr. Harbash’s visions for science and humanity come to fruition, but together we will surpass them.”

Tabitha’s stomach sank as she read the news.  

From the first day she met Becca, she knew instantly that Dr. Watts was one of the scientists about whom Dr. Harbash had expressed such concern.  In the short time she’d worked with Becca, Tabitha often found her insufferable, self-absorbed and overly impulsive, a grouse with dangerous methodologies and intentions.  

And now more than twenty years had passed since Dr. Harbash’s death, and Tabitha’s opinions regarding Becca never changed.  Nor had she ever stopped grieving over what could have been, had Dr. Harbash lived to continue her tutelage.   

As Tabitha walked into the massive conference room one morning during the first week of July, she wasn’t surprised to find it already filled to near capacity.  Overnight, Becca had sent out an emergency memo calling for an all-hands meeting first thing that morning.

Tabitha saw a single open seat near two of the newest hires, an argumentative twosome who were always squabbling about their respective colleges.  Doctors Sam Hollander and Drake Bitterman nodded toward her as she sat next to them.  Throughout the room, her colleagues either spoke in excited hushed whispers or tapped away at their phones.  

Tabitha stared straight ahead.  The way the morning had started, waking up to the unexpected urgency of Becca’s terse all-company directive to meet promptly at 8 AM, stirred uneasy emotions within her that was too eerily reminiscent of all those years ago when other unexpected news rapidly circulated through the organization upon the passing of Dr. Harbash.  

Now, as she waited for Becca to approach the podium at the front of the room, she was brought back to Dr. Harbash’s concern all those years before regarding the direction of ENH.  

In the years since he’d died, Tabitha watched as Becca redirected the mission of this organization and suspected - and was very nearly certain - that what Becca was about to reveal could bring about the dangerous end of Harbash’s dreams — and her own — once and for all.

Tabitha watched as Dr. Becca Watts entered the room, shook hands with several of their colleagues standing near the doorway, and took the stage. Becca tapped the microphone at the podium and smiled before speaking.

“My friends,” she said, her voice echoing through the room. “We’ve had a breakthrough.”

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