Page 35 of Under Story

“They brought me in,” Eli said. “To work on the…”

Laurel knows he trails off when he’s tired, and she can see the exhaustion in him now. He holds a bowl of chili, and when he shifts his weight, it lurches.

“Can we talk tomorrow?” he asks. “Lunch?”

“I’m on shift during lunch,” Laurel says. “I work in the galley.”

“You aren’t here on a grant?” Eli’s tone is incredulous, nearly irritated, as though he suspects her of lying.

She gestures to her polo shirt and uniform shoes. “Do I look like it?”

Eli hesitates. Maybe Laurel has been sharper than necessary, but she still feels rankled that he asked if she came after him—as if she’s lovesick, or insane.

“I get off at eight,” she says. “Let’s meet in the lounge.”

—

The next morning, Laurel wakes before her alarm. She lies very still, facing the ceiling, with her eyes open.

In the galley, Jules asks for volunteers to help unload food from a supply ship. Laurel is relieved to spend the day outside. The wind forces her to concentrate. She’s even glad to avoid Louis and Charlie, their questioning glances, and Nita, who, catching sight of Laurel at lunch, mouths: Have you seen him?

At eight, she walks from the loading dock to the dorms. Darkness is slowly returning: the sun now sets completely between one and three in the morning. Laurel has finished knitting her shawl. Today she wears it her favorite way: crossed in the front and knotted in back, like armor.

When she enters the lounge, Eli is sitting alone on the couch.

Until yesterday, she hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He’s thinner, and his face—formerly so open to her—is guarded. Laurel wonders how she looks to him, then stops. She could drive herself crazy, thinking those thoughts.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she says, sitting on the opposite end of the couch. “It must have been a shock to see me. It was a shock for me, too, seeing you.”

“What I said, about following me…” Eli shakes his head. “That was stupid. I just couldn’t imagine what you were doing at McMurdo. Does Antarctica even have fungi?”

Laurel smiles. “Not the kind I study.”

“So why are you here?”

She can’t think of a reason to lie. “I had to get away.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. Their burden hangs between them. An empty beer bottle sits beside Eli’s foot. There is something restless and edgy about him, something barely contained. But Laurel can’t stop herself: she asks the question that has gripped her since she saw him on the ice.

“Your theory,” she says. “It fits. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because of the Duoverse?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it. And I wouldn’t say it fits.”

She’s never seen him so ambivalent. “What do you mean? ANITA must have hired you for a reason.”

“There isn’t proof. There’s a hypothesis based on a fluke, one possible explanation for a particle behaving strangely, and you know what, Laurel”—Eli’s eyes glitter dangerously, like a child about to say something he knows he shouldn’t—“I think it’s all bullshit.”

She tries to read him: whether he’s being provocative, whether he’s drunk.

“What are you doing here,” she says, “if you think it’s all bullshit?”

Eli laughs. She recognizes it now, what she saw in his eyes: the lunatic glee of truth-telling.

“I’m getting paid,” he says.

“You could do that at home.”

“And so could you. But we’re both here. That says something, doesn’t it?” He smiles at her, but it looks wrong, the sad smile of a clown or a comic. “You know, when I got off the plane, I looked around and thought: I’ve done it. The ice, and the anomaly—they were so surreal, so unlike my life until now, that I thought I’d finally outrun it. And then I saw you. God may not play dice, but he does have a sense of humor.”