Page 75 of Under Story

“I’m keeping my bra and underwear on,” says Nita.

“Me, too,” says Laurel.

As Eli strips down to his boxers, they both avert their eyes. Ahead, the ocean pleats and shifts. Only Louis is stark naked. He seizes Laurel’s hand, then Nita’s.

“Hallelujah!” Louis screams, running in.

—

After the sauna has rendered Laurel a human temperature, she watches the Arc from bed. As always, there is a busyness to the light, a sense of fathomless industry. She isn’t ready to say goodbye to it. In the drawer of her bedside table, she found a cell phone, wiped like Eli’s. Now she uses it to take a video, but the result is a poor approximation. Laurel deletes the file. She’d rather remember the Arc like this: as a luminous dome with life inside, like a greenhouse at night.

In the morning, Laurel and Eli carry their bags to the Terra Bus. Well-wishers crowd on the ice.

Louis kisses her cheek. “Don’t forget me.”

“I never could,” says Laurel.

“People move on. You’ll see,” he says, his mouth in her scarf.

Laurel tucks a curl behind his ear. “Not me.”

Louis tells her to write, and she promises she will. When he leaves, she finds Nita.

“Thank you for everything,” Laurel says. She hopes that, somehow, Nita One will hear this, too. “You didn’t have to trust me, but you did.”

“I could say the same to you.” Nita presses a folded piece of paper into Laurel’s hands. “Here’s my contact information. If you need anything, get in touch. We’ll save the placemakers for an emergency, like Louis said.”

Laurel responds with a salute.

“One more thing,” says Nita. “Since Sam is leaving, I’m going to have a new roommate, and I just found out who she is: an illustrator, and kind of famous, too. Charlie Morrison. Ring a bell?”

Laurel grins. “You’re going to love her.”

—

Laurel and Eli climb into a cargo aircraft.

In addition to the passports, Eli found two wallets in the blue-and-yellow backpack. They examine the driver’s licenses while the other passengers board. The addresses match their old house in Madison, the one Laurel sold before she flew south. Under date of birth, though, are unfamiliar numbers.

“Two thousand sixty-eight,” Laurel says. “What’s yours?”

“Two thousand seventy,” says Eli.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, we know that time is inverted here. October comes before September, and night comes before morning, at least to our way of thinking, but cause still precedes effect. Maybe people get older as the years go backward.”

“But that would put the other Laurel and Eli in their fifties.”

“True,” says Eli, frowning. “And they certainly don’t look like it.”

—

Five hours later—or, Laurel corrects herself, earlier—they deplane in Christchurch. Everywhere is convenience: duty-free shops and food courts and a Dunkin’ Donuts where Laurel and Eli get coffee with real dairy, dispensed as though it isn’t precious. After customs, they stop at the Clothing Distribution Center. Laurel turns in her Big Red with unexpected emotion. An employee hands each of them a silver fern: a symbol of New Zealand, and the first plant she’s touched since leaving Wisconsin.

Outside, Laurel braces for cold by instinct, but the air is sixty-five degrees and humid. Compared to volcanic rock, the sidewalk feels soft. Billboards and cars, stoplights, houses, trees—they come flooding back, these facts of the world, a cacophony after so many months of water and ice. Laurel misses McMurdo already, and with a sharpness she didn’t expect. A shuttle takes them to the hotel where they’ll stay overnight.

“Mr. and Mrs. Rosen?” says the concierge, his eyes on the computer monitor.