Page 45 of Under Story

“Hi,” says Laurel.

He takes the seat across from her. It is still surreal to see him here—even to see him at all. For years, his presence was a constant in her life; when they separated, she felt as though she was going through withdrawal. His hair is longer now, and he wears a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that Laurel hasn’t seen before.

She turns her Mead notebook to face him. “What if it’s not an Arc? What if it’s a circle?”

Laurel has made a drawing. A wavy horizontal line represents the ocean. Above is the Arc, in green colored pencil; below is a second semicircle.

“Does this remind you of something?” she asks.

Eli pauses. Then he says, “The Duoverse.”

Laurel nods. She writes UNIVERSE over the Arc and ANTIUNIVERSE under the lower semicircle. It’s the same image he drew for her on a napkin twelve years earlier.

“Where did you find this?” asks Eli.

“I thought of it.”

“How?”

What could she say? It came to me in a dream. She would lose him immediately.

“It’s complicated. But I confirmed the topography with a friend. She’s a marine biologist. When I described the basin, she knew what I meant.”

She has not used the word basin before but feels its rightness at once, as she did with the Arc. The sensation is of an instrument tuning to pitch. She knows that the word shouldn’t be capitalized; the basin is humbler than that.

“We have to dive there,” she says.

Eli turns his head slightly, as though he hasn’t heard her correctly.

“Nita, my friend, might help us. But no one else could know,” she continues.

“You aren’t serious,” says Eli.

“I know. It sounds crazy. But the idea of two universes is already crazy, isn’t it?”

“Laurel, the Duoverse is physics. What you’re describing is unhinged. Even at a practical level, we’d need a research project. We would have to get certified—”

“We are certified,” Laurel says. They went scuba diving on their honeymoon.

“For Michigan!” Eli is almost laughing. “You want to dive into Antarctic water, under the ice, in secret, to go through a portal we made up at a bar one night? It’s wildly dangerous and entirely speculative. Besides, if you’re right, and we make it through alive, we have no idea what’s on the other side.”

“Don’t you want to find out?”

“Not enough to risk my life.”

“So you’ll be an academic forever. That’s what you want, to write about a place you’ve never seen, never touched? What happened to the kid who wanted to be an astronaut?”

Eli takes it like a slap.

“If anyone found out about this,” he says, “our reputations would be shot. That matters to me, even if you’ve given up on yours.”

Laurel feels the impact, but she doesn’t look away.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should never have talked to you about this. I know you’re interested, but—”

“Interested? That’s what you think I am?”

Eli shifts his weight. “I don’t know what you are.”