Page 142 of Under Story

Yet how could they communicate? Partitioned by the Duoverse, Laurel couldn’t call or send an email. She set the question aside as the month continued. She taught seminars, met with students, processed data in the Rhizotron. The answer came to her as she walked home from campus. Perhaps she could use a different, private technology—one that belonged to Laurel and her double alone. She would try to reach the other Laurel with her mind.

That night, Laurel conjured the vision from the cave. She called on all the details she remembered, and then she tried to animate them. The difference was clear. Her vision had been a living thing; this one was only a reproduction.

Laurel had long suspected that information passed between universes. If that was true, there had to be places where the membrane became permeable. Maybe what she needed to find was a location: some inner void, a chasm deep below her consciousness. One evening in November, she nestled in the bedroom’s dormer nook. Eli had gone to his parents’ house for dinner. A late-winter snowfall drifted past the window.

She closed her eyes and breathed slowly. When her thoughts became quiet, so did her ego. What remained was a probing awareness. She looked up at a wall of compartments. They were roughly one foot square, the contents visible through glass. Each was locked. Laurel had a key. She held it in her right hand; in her left was a Post-it. She opened a compartment and put the Post-it there.

Laurel gasped, which broke the spell. She sat in the bedroom again. A thin fleece of snow had settled on the ground.

She waited for the next overlap, for that was how they felt: a second reality laid over hers like a piece of tracing paper. One morning, while eating breakfast, Laurel looked across the table and saw Kenji’s face instead of Eli’s. He wore a rumpled T-shirt, and his smile was tender.

“Laurel?”

The illusion collapsed. Eli had risen out of his chair.

“What happened?” she asked. The sight of Kenji made her feel confused, even guilty.

“Your eyes got unfocused. Are you feeling okay?”

“I think so,” Laurel said, but she wasn’t. The visions felt like a game that she’d taken too far. She felt overly perceptive, attuned not just to the other Laurel but to other forces. Days later, while walking to the Rhizotron with Gloria, she felt an urge to go home. There was no reason to turn around—nothing except a nagging pull, as though a hand were in her hand, or a voice were saying Don’t.

“I forgot my laptop,” Laurel said.

“That’s okay,” said Gloria. “We can use mine.”

“Didn’t you say it’s been buggy?” asked Laurel. “You keep going. I’ll run home.”

The clouds were low and silver. Gloria watched, open-mouthed, as Laurel caught the next bus west. Some tension was forming, as pressure builds before a storm. No one else seemed to notice: a teenager looked out the window, and an older woman fiddled with her iPod Nano.

The temperature was typically mild for early fall, but Laurel felt overheated. At home, she took off her clothes and ran a cool shower. The garage door opened as she stepped into the tub. Odd, she thought: Eli usually spent all day on campus. Next came a familiar succession of sounds: the car door popping open; a chipper beep, as it was locked; footsteps in the entrance by the kitchen; the whine of the staircase; a knock.

“Yes?”

Laurel drew the curtain back just barely, enough to shield her body. Eli cracked the door.

“Hi.” He looked troubled. “You okay?”

“Fine,” said Laurel. “Why?”

“I’m not sure how to explain it. I was sitting in my office, but then I got this feeling that I needed to come home. I didn’t know what it meant. I thought something might be wrong.”

“I had that feeling, too.”

Eli looked at her keenly. “Did you?”

“I couldn’t parse it, either. But I don’t think something is wrong, exactly. More like…”

Laurel paused. She had cracked the window so the mirror didn’t fog, and a breeze swelled behind the curtain.

“Something is happening,” said Eli.

The water was still running.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Still holding the curtain, with self-protection and some pride, Laurel watched him take off his clothes. Then she opened it just enough for him to join her. She still felt wounded, and held herself back, but her resistance dropped away when he opened his arms. His hardness, so immediate, aroused her. It had been months. She braced against a cleft of porcelain, the built-in soap dish. Slippery, he found her opening.

His urgency was contagious. He kept his face close to hers, his mouth at her ear. No matter what their bodies were doing, noises excited her most: the grunts and gasps, the little groans. They felt like missives from another world, his inner one. Emitted helplessly, they disclosed. In them she took possessive pleasure, but she listened soberly, too. Sometimes he almost sounded like a boy.