Page 150 of Under Story

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Laurel carries her duffel to the edge of Big Meadow. This is the meeting time that she and Eli chose: sundown on the first of May 1999.

“I’m afraid he won’t show,” Laurel whispered to Esther when she woke up that morning.

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Esther had the bed next to Laurel’s. They faced each other: Laurel in striped pajamas, Esther in her nightgown and happy-face slippers.

“I don’t know,” Laurel said. “I keep thinking about…” She made a face.

“Angela,” Esther translated.

Now Laurel sits on the grass. She’s starting to think that she should have taken mushrooms after all. She retrieves Louis’s chocolate from her bag. Somehow, it’s still securely wrapped. She slips it into the pocket of her jeans.

When Laurel was a college student, Gloria’s most popular upper-level course was a seminar called Shrooms. It traced the use of psychedelic fungi from ancient civilizations to the 1960s, when pharmaceutical research was abandoned during Nixon’s War on Drugs. Laurel’s favorite book from the course was María Sabina: Selections, the oral autobiography of a Mazatec healer.

María Sabina was born in Huautla at the end of the nineteenth century. Her grandmother prophesied that she would be a Wise One, a healer who sang in the voice of the mushrooms. María said that they tasted like roots and spoke to her from another world. Word of her abilities spread, and the sick traveled to see her.

But these stories attracted other visitors, too. In 1953, Gordon Wasson—an American journalist—arrived with his wife and a photographer. The Wassons had studied psychedelic mushrooms, and they wanted to be the first Westerners to eat them. Wasson chronicled the ceremony for a story in Life magazine. It made María famous: hippies and rock stars flooded to Huautla, wreaking havoc. The villagers blamed her. Accused of selling drugs, María was arrested, and her house burned down. She died in poverty.

María’s story has stayed with Laurel. She didn’t want to participate in that cruel history, however distant. But there is another reason, too, why she’s avoided psychedelics. Laurel has spent her career observing fungi, but she has never been their subject. In this way, she has maintained control. To take mushrooms would be like entering her own experiment.

2005–1999

Laurel, Tess, and Gloria returned to Madison in a state of celebration. Other Worlds—the conference where Laurel had presented her maze experiment—would take place the following fall, in 2004, and their submission was accepted.

Eli felt aimless. He still had an office at the university, but he had abandoned the workspace in the basement. His belongings sat like artifacts: the Best Guesses notepad, his drawings, the materials he’d used to make the entropy device.

In July, Laurel dragged him to dinner at his favorite dim sum restaurant.

“A lot of physicists only come up with one good theory,” Eli said. “Most of the time, it happens when they’re young.” He hadn’t touched his scallion pancakes. “I just didn’t think that I would be one of them.”

“Many people never come up with one good theory,” said Laurel.

“I know,” said Eli. “It sounds obnoxious. But with my work, and Silas gone…it feels like the best years of my life are behind me.”

Sometimes Laurel wondered whether he resented her success. If he did, he knew not to say so, still remembered the long years when the scales tipped in the other direction. Still, he was often irritable in the way of a younger person—the younger person that he was becoming.

Laurel found a grief counselor and scheduled his first appointment. The therapist had been a father, and Laurel thought that his experience might resonate with Eli. At first, Eli went weekly. In June, though, Laurel realized that the bills had stopped coming.

Eli sat on a chair in the backyard. She walked outside and said, “Were you going to tell me that you stopped going to therapy?”

“That’s my business,” Eli said. “You can’t force me.”

“I’m trying to help you. At least tell me why.”

He slumped, avoiding eye contact. “Because I can’t tell him anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“What can I say? That I came here from another universe? That there were two versions of my son, and I lost both of them? The only person I can talk to is you.”

“Then talk to me. I’m here,” said Laurel, sitting.

Eli stared into the neighbor’s yard. “I don’t think more talking is the answer.”

Laurel knew what it was like to live in that abyss, and to feel that it would last forever. She felt guilty for climbing out without him. Even so, she no longer believed that the best way to mourn Silas was to suffer. Animals, like plants, bent toward light.