Page 24 of Under Story

Miles and Matty arrive after midnight. Miles wears a T-shirt under his parka; his lean arms are blue with tattoos. Laurel thinks of the sound of his laugh, its depth and rustiness. When he walks past, she grabs his wrist. She knows her eyes are red. He kisses her, his tongue muscular and full, and for a moment, she is paralyzed, thinking cheating, thinking Eli. Then she remembers the divorce, and the fact that she is doing nothing wrong makes her feel both free and devastated.

She finds Louis at the bar, nursing a negroni. His eyeliner is smeared.

“He’ll only use you,” Louis says.

“Miles?” Laurel raises her eyebrows. “Maybe I’ll use him. I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

Against the wall, a man with cropped blond hair kisses a second man. Louis is watching them. “What if I am?”

Laurel has only to see the look on his face to know that the blond is Patrick. She hugs Louis until he softens. The song is “Black Hole Sun,” not something to dance to, but she pulls him onto the floor anyway, and they stay there, swaying, his eyes in her dampening shoulder, for as long as the music plays.

—

Laurel wakes up in a Thrasher hoodie on someone else’s twin bed. A male stranger sits at the room’s single desk.

“Miles left,” he says. “Work. He said to tell you”—the man adopts Miles’s grainy voice and lowered eyelids—“ ‘Hey.’ ”

“Thanks,” Laurel says, with as much self-respect as she can muster. She’s still wearing her flannel shirt, but her bra is looped around the bed frame. Her corsage dangles from a lock of hair.

Mercifully, Miles’s roommate stands. “I’ll get breakfast.”

As the door closes, Laurel puts her face in her hands. She feels like laughing again. There’s still a trace of the weed in her system, the world blurred to a glow. She feels, if not infinitely free, a few degrees more so.

Through the window, she catches a flash of movement. The Terra Bus, ferrying newcomers, has just arrived from the airfield. Most travelers disembark with confidence; it’s clear that they’ve been here before. But Laurel is drawn to one person: a tall, dark-haired man who looks as bewildered as she felt four months earlier. He might as well be walking on the moon.

She puts a hand on the wall. It isn’t possible. He must be a mirage; Laurel must be projecting. When she finds her balance, she looks out of the window again.

The man has turned to face the mountains, but Laurel knows him even from the back. Briefly her vision goes white. Eli is walking across the ice.

5

Duoverse

Gloria had described it as a city on a hill, but it turned out that San Francisco was a city on many: as soon as Laurel reached the bottom of one, she peered over the top of another. No one else seemed to notice the constant feeling of precipice, hide-and-seek, the whole tableau laid out from one angle and obscured from the next. Wisconsin, of course, was known for being horizontal: unending rows of soybeans and corn, highways carved through fields. Now Laurel stood on a block so steep that stairs had been cut into the sidewalk. A minivan zoomed cheerily downward, toddlers waving from their car seats.

The bay winked below her like a beacon. Laurel picked her way down the steps, carefully at first, then more quickly. She continued past Union Street and into the Marina. At Crissy Field, she left her shoes on the grass and ran into the water, the cold so shocking she laughed.

Laurel’s submission to Other Worlds had been accepted. It was her first time in California—her first time west of the Mississippi—and she soon realized that her expectations did not apply to this part of the state. The beach was veiled in fog. No one went into the ocean without a wet suit. Microclimates cohabitated in seven square miles: the Richmond’s chilly damp, the Mission’s clear sun. Homeless encampments stood mere blocks from mansions. The entire city felt contradictory and vertiginous.

On the fourth night of her trip, Laurel walked through Nob Hill, holding a map that Gloria had drawn. She emerged in front of a Queen Anne with a steep roof and an octagonal tower, the windows glowing Halloweenish orange. Before she could lift the brass knocker, the door withdrew to reveal a trim, elderly man with a froth of white hair.

He said, “You must be Laurel.”

“How did you know?” she asked.

Seymour wore a pale blue suit. He nodded at the slip of paper in Laurel’s hand. “Gloria’s map. Many years ago, I drew the same one for her.”

“You drew her a map? But Gloria was from San Francisco.”

“One San Francisco. There are three dozen neighborhoods here, and at least as many versions of the city. Now, come inside and get warm—didn’t Gloria tell you the Twain quote?”

It was the beginning of September. Laurel had spent the afternoon at Dolores Park, eating a burrito in the sun. Four hours later and three neighborhoods north, the temperature was fifteen degrees cooler, mocking her slip dress and the thin purple cardigan she wore over it.

“ ‘The coldest winter I ever spent,’ ” she recited, “ ‘was the summer I spent in’—”

But she did not finish, for Seymour’s house was the kind she’d thought existed only in storybooks: curlicued crown molding, stained glass windows. Brass lighting fixtures hung from ceiling medallions as intricate as snowflakes. Every room seemed to have a fireplace, every fireplace surrounded by people who were eating candied nuts and drinking out of crystal tumblers. As she passed a woman in a silver suit, Laurel thought she herself might as well have worn a sign that read WISCONSIN. Seymour showed her to the kitchen, where she drained a glass of champagne.

“Who’s this?” asked another man, dapper, bald.