Page 53 of Under Story

“You don’t have to do that,” Laurel says, but she quickly becomes tangled.

“I took a jump rope class last summer,” says Eli. “I guess I was trying to get out of my comfort zone. Everyone else looked like they were in The Matrix, and my glasses kept flying off.”

Laurel laughs. When Eli joins in, it feels like therapy. In the opening this creates, she says something impulsive. “Where do you swim?”

Eli looks jarred, but he answers. “There’s a pool on campus.”

“Oh.” She nods. “When did you start?”

“Two years ago.”

Laurel does the math. They were still together at that point, and she never knew. Eli must have packed a swimsuit when he went to work. He might have showered at the pool. Either way, he had decided not to tell her. Then again, Laurel hadn’t noticed.

She says, “Can I ask why?”

Eli dismounts the bike. There is a faint smile on his face: part matter-of-fact, part wistful. “Because Silas loved it.”

Laurel swallows. It was simple: water had a charge. That charge had repelled her. To Eli, it did the opposite.

“I see,” she says.

When Laurel arrives at the gym the next morning, Eli is using the treadmill. After that, without discussing it, they continue to come at the same time. Some days, they only smile in acknowledgment. On others, they chat lightly, trading notes about the dive guide or how to withstand the cold showers.

One night in July, they pore through Skua for thermal layers. After that, they walk to the dive locker. PistenBullys wait outside, just like Nita said. Each has a red cab and wheels wrapped in steel tracks. A blade clears snow as it moves. Eli has offered to drive. He examines the controls, checking them against the manual that Nita slid under his door.

As they walk to the door of the locker, the mood between them becomes tense. It feels like their first true transgression. If someone found them there, they would have no logical explanation. Laurel forces herself to reach for the handle.

“Thank God,” she says, after opening it. At this hour, the locker is empty.

Dry suits hang from metal bars. Round tanks lie in rows like sleeping seals. Laurel tries on suit after suit (“It fits,” Nita told her, “if you can barely get it on”). The one she chooses is snug enough that Eli has to pull it off her feet. He yanks so hard, grunting, that Laurel slides across the ground, and then they’re laughing again, like they did at the gym.

Afterward, bundling the suit, she says, “Eli, I’ve been thinking. If time moves backward in the antiuniverse, how does that impact living things?”

Eli frowns. “It shouldn’t. When I say that time moves backward, I mean that entropy reverses on a macro scale. Instead of ending in heat death, the antiuniverse would form in some kind of cold birth.”

“But biological systems are a product of the cosmos. Doesn’t the macro exist in the micro?”

Eli throws up his hands. “All of this is theoretical. By the way,” he adds, “have you contacted the university?”

Laurel stuffs her dry suit into a cabinet. She hopes that no one else will need it first. “What about?”

“Well, you’re on leave, aren’t you? But if we can’t dive until October…”

“Shit.” Laurel was granted an entire academic year. This is unusual enough; she can’t reasonably ask for another. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

The full picture becomes clear: to stay in Antarctica, Laurel will have to leave the Rhizotron. If the basin is nothing more than rock, she will have traded her career—what’s left of it—for nothing more than a delusion.

How will she tell Gloria? After everything Gloria has done for her, will it feel like a betrayal? Laurel doesn’t need her permission, but she still wants Gloria’s blessing. The next day, she sits at the lounge computer, drafting an email. It would be easier to lie, claim she wants to stay for other reasons, but Gloria and Laurel have always been honest with each other. Still, it seems risky to put the truth online.

Miles glares from the couch. It’s his turn on the computer, and she’s already asked for extra time.

“At this point,” he says, “you might as well write a letter.”

It’s not a bad idea. Laurel begins to log out before she remembers that mail won’t leave the continent until October. She screws her face up in frustration, Miles eyeing her irritably. Her best option is to be instinctive.

There’s no good way to say this: I have to leave the university. At every step, you were my guardian. I hope you can forgive me.

You told me to make my own observations. I think I’ve found something, and I have to see it through.