Page 29 of Under Story

And that brings us back to anesthesia—because anesthesia inhibits collectivity. It inhibits electricity, and it inhibits collectivity.

Meiller: Now, speaking of electricity, do we have a sound bite? Let’s go ahead and queue that up. Dr. Bhattacharya, can you describe what we’re going to be hearing?

Bhattacharya: Okay, so this is a clip from brain surgery. And what we can do in neurosurgery, crazy as it sounds, is to insert a piece of wire and listen to the signaling.

(faint crackling)

Bhattacharya: So what you hear are these little crackles, like a fire. Every crackle is a message, sent by one neuron to thousands of others. In our parlance, the neurons are talking. And although we don’t know how, it’s from this chatter that selfhood is born.

“That’s what got me,” said Laurel. “The crackle.”

“The crackle,” said Eli.

The side door opened. Attendees emerged in clumps; their shiny conference badges flickered in the wind.

Laurel steeled herself. “You probably have to get going.”

“Actually,” said Eli, “do you want to take a walk?”

—

They looped through Golden Gate Park, where bison shouldered coolly through the mist, as if transferred from prehistoric times unfazed. In the Haight, Painted Ladies wore their gingerbread trim like jewelry, and Laurel and Eli selected their favorites as she told him about life in Madison. Eli described Palo Alto, where researchers were celebrities and winter weather rarely dipped below the fifties. When she voiced surprise that he’d gone into physics—not engineering, as he’d planned—he looked sheepish.

“I realized I was better at thinking,” he said, “than doing,” with an expression that discouraged her from probing further.

Laurel was acutely aware of their bodies in space. Crossing the street, they walked a foot apart; on the sidewalk, there were six or eight inches between them, and then, as a woman with a stroller passed, just two…their shoulders brushed. They ebbed apart. Laurel’s heart thumped. By the time they reached the Mission, it was five o’clock, and drizzle had given way to steady rain. They ran, holding their jackets like umbrellas, and laughed beneath the awning of a tapas restaurant on Valencia, as if they’d gotten away with something. The door opened; a host emerged, who told them they had better get their names on the list if they wanted a chance at a table. Laurel looked at Eli. The only answer was yes.

They waited twenty minutes for a corner nook. A potted plant pressed against one side, so they had to sit diagonally instead of across from each other. Of course, the host had assumed. All around them were couples, leaning forward over candles, eating with their hands. Laurel felt torn between guilt—why was she having dinner with someone else’s fiancé?—and wary hope: for Eli, this could be nothing but a whim before marriage. Then her reason did a wild death leap and she sank into the music, the scent of saffron and lime, the proximity to him.

“Well, we have to get the mushrooms,” Eli said. “Do you want to share something? Paella?”

“Yes,” said Laurel. “And wine?”

“Good.” He grinned. “You pick.”

When the waiter came, she chose a Tempranillo. They ordered warm green olives, too, and grilled artichokes, because Laurel had never tried one. Food arrived at a neighboring table: crimped empanadas, Manchego cheese that trembled on its base of stewed tomatoes. You’re having dinner with a friend, she told herself. You saw him at a conference, and you took a walk. It was true, so why didn’t she believe a word? A drop of rain slid into her eye. Under the table, their shins performed a complicated dance of avoidance. At one point, a guitar player began to walk through the restaurant, stopping to play and collect tips at each table. The noise was impossible to speak over, but to sit together silently was intolerable, an intimacy greater than conversation. Laurel averted her eyes.

It seemed safest to talk about work, so she asked Eli why he’d come to the conference. He had presented the morning of Seymour’s party, he said; later she learned that the National Science Foundation had granted him a rare graduate fellowship, and that his audience that week had numbered in the hundreds.

“What was it about?” asked Laurel.

“Do you remember much from high school physics?” Eli asked, as the paella arrived. “I don’t want to talk your ear off.”

“A little,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be. Start at the beginning.”

Eli pointed at the skillet.

“This pan,” he said. “It’s hot. By the time we leave, it will have cooled. That’s because heat—like time—only moves in one direction. A cold plate will never get hotter, microwaves and ovens notwithstanding. And we wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”

“Right,” said Laurel.

“The problem is that physicists like symmetry. Mainly we like it because the universe seems to like it, too. The laws of physics are supposed to hold even if you turn a particle into an antiparticle, or you reverse the direction of its spin, or you find a way to send it back in time instead of forward. A mirror universe, in other words, should look and feel like ours.”

Eli gestured for Laurel to serve herself first.

“But if the universe likes symmetry,” she said, spooning paella onto her plate, “then why doesn’t time move in both directions?”

“Exactly,” Eli said, and Laurel felt a little thrill. She had been worried that she wouldn’t be able to follow him—not like Angela could.