Page 128 of Under Story

Silas runs ahead, and Eli follows him. Smiling, Laurel hangs back to take her jacket off. If there is one similarity between Wisconsin and Antarctica, she thinks, it’s that forty-five degrees qualifies as T-shirt weather.

She startles at the sound of a nasal whinny. Eh-eh. Two albatrosses sit in a field to her left. They have downy white heads and button-black eyes. Like Laurel, they must have separated from their group.

She veers right, to give the pair a wide berth. They bray at her a moment more; then, assured that she poses no threat, they return to their ritual.

On the Astralis, Laurel learned that the albatross flies in its sleep, that it can circle the globe without stopping. Mates remain faithful for life. The birds nip fondly at each other, their putty-colored beaks making clicking noises. One perches slightly higher than the other. It might be positioned on a nest, though Laurel can’t be sure. Her view is obscured by grass.

Then, as she watches, the elevated bird stands. For their privacy, as well as her own peace, Laurel should keep walking. She knows this, and she cannot explain why she doesn’t. Some fathomless instinct. The old, cunning desire to know. As the albatross shifts from foot to foot, adjusting its wings, Laurel looks down at the nest.

It is a cup-shaped mound: stable, if not quite tidy, and made of grass and soil. Inside is a very small, very young bird. The creature has mauve skin and yellow hair so pale it glows, the beak curved and bobbing with breath.

Laurel can only see its head and shoulders. The rest is enclosed in matter: a brownish-tan paste casing, spackled evenly around. The effect is of a shell-like swaddle. Inside, the infant’s wings are folded down.

“Oh my God,” Laurel says.

For the parents are making an egg.

In most places, the paste has hardened. At the ragged top edge, it is softer, and the adults use their beaks to press it tenderly in place. Smoothed, the substance creeps higher; soon, it will surround the baby’s neck. The adults trade places, so that the second bird is poised over the nest. As it descends, the baby makes a peaceful little shudder.

Laurel staggers backward. In shock. Some horror. And a brutal, base respect—for the life cycle, the dying infant, and for the effort of the parents, charged with this shared duty, which they must carry out until the end. When she leaves them, the two are sitting wing to wing, their feathers moving with the grasses in the wind.

—

She loves something different about every age.

At six, Silas is always crafting: a purse out of a cracker box, or a medallion to wear around his neck. A section of the bookshelf in his room is now devoted to his own creations. Laurel staples small pieces of paper, and he colors on each page. After he can’t write his own text, Silas dictates the words to her.

Five is the age of enthusiasm. When they return home from an outing, he walks to the front door, bends down, and shouts “Hello, house!” through the mail slot. He is sick throughout the winter, with chicken pox and pneumonia back to back. Even so, he loves to dance nude around the Christmas tree. He sings throughout the day, mostly made-up songs.

In June, the orchard comes on the market. Laurel, Eli, and Clare pool their savings. After the sale goes through, they walk the property together. Laurel tries to keep her tears back, worried that the other Clare won’t understand, but Clare puts an arm around her shoulders. The shape of the land is the same, and Laurel recognizes some of the varieties as heirlooms. Still, they’ll have to make changes over years. The previous owner packed trees together to increase production, and the orchard is showing signs of stress.

Clare moves into the farmhouse in April. On the first night, all four of them sleep there together. Memories spring up in 3-D: Laurel can see things, touch things, that she thought she never would again. She takes Silas to the attic, her old bedroom. After they put him to sleep, Laurel leaves a note for Eli and walks to Upper Orchard alone. She settles on the ground with two blankets, putting one under her body and one on top. She used to do this as a teenager, back when her joints didn’t mind. This time, she suffers for a week, but it’s worth it to fall asleep under the trees, her old friends.

—

Eli begins the next year with renewed energy: IceCube has hired him to run the project at UW–Madison. Their goal is to explore the link between neutrinos and dark matter.

Every second, billions of neutrinos stream from the sun toward Earth. As they travel, their masses oscillate. IceCube is sensitive enough to detect unusual oscillation patterns, and these could indicate the presence of high-energy neutrinos. Eli will interpret the results from Wisconsin.

For him, of course, the project is also personal. “Eighty-five percent of all matter is dark: the stuff that we can’t see, can’t touch,” he tells Laurel, on a walk. “If ANITA was right, then the neutrinos we found at the Arc are dark matter, pouring into our universe from this one. But eighty-five percent is a huge amount of matter. There would have to be more than one source. I’ve been looking for a portal the size of the basin—but there could be tiny ones everywhere, popping in and out of existence.”

It’s February, the sky at four a grayish lilac; snow descends in fleets. Laurel pulls her hat over her ears. “What would we do with a mini portal?”

“If we can understand how portals are created, maybe we can engineer a bigger one,” says Eli.

Laurel smiles at him. She wants to hold her hand around his hopefulness as one protects a flame. That year, he works as hard as ever, but he never sacrifices time with Laurel and Silas. She, too, is trying to soak in the present, absorb every bead of nectar; there is no time to waste by rushing. Now she looks at Silas Two believing that she’ll lose him.

And maybe she’s wrong. Maybe Eli will find another portal. She won’t regret living this way until then.

Sticky, barefoot berry-eating. Reading Silas’s favorite book aloud while he rests his head on her lap. She no longer thinks of him as Silas Two. It is not that he has replaced Silas One, but that they’ve lost their numbers: both boys are simply Laurel and Eli’s children.

As Silas Two becomes Silas, his world becomes hers. Until now, Laurel and Eli have been travelers, not citizens. They assumed that Barack Obama’s term would follow Donald Trump’s, and that George W. Bush’s would follow Obama’s. But they can’t be certain—and in many ways, Laurel prays that the past she knows is not the future here. If the antiuniverse’s hat trick is inversion, it could arc back to the worst of history: people in slavery, women as property, religious persecution. Laurel feels ashamed of her former passivity. The answer is both as simple and as complex as it is in her world. She must act as though the future isn’t fated. She must vote as though it matters.

Once a month, she drives north to volunteer in the Menominee Forest, a part of the tribal reservation. Western foresters are taught to cut the strongest trees for timber. The Menominee do the reverse: they harvest those that are dying, leaving the most robust to thrive and reproduce. The tribe has logged here for centuries, but the forest—so lush it can be seen, dark green, from space—has more trees than it did when they began.

The expertise of Wisconsin tribes was honed over millennia. The Oneida restored their waterways to health after pollution deformed fish and birds. The Ojibwe, stewards of the rice wetlands, are experts in the uses of fire. The Potawatomi’s circular farm, Bodwéwadmi Ktëgan, provides food to tribes throughout Wisconsin.

The Indigenous tribes of Laurel’s universe were the earliest recorded peoples here, too. It makes sense to her that those who see nature as kin would outlast more mercenary cultures, and that the latter would sooner die, or flee. In both directions, then, the First Nations must be the last to leave.