Page 78 of Under Story

Outside, showers unscroll from the sky. She hasn’t seen rain since leaving Wisconsin. Fellow travelers dial into conference calls or shake the newspaper open. The scene almost feels normal. If Laurel keeps close to her purpose, maybe she can find her way here.

She pulls up the other Laurel’s email account again. For the password, she tries two more apple trees without success. Only three guesses are allowed for each verification attempt, so she opts to answer a security question.

What is your favorite fungus?

A jolt in her stomach: Laurel Two must have written this question. Laurel tries Cadophora, to no effect. Pisolithus microcarpus is the species she used for her maze experiments, and she wonders if the other Laurel has studied it, too. But when she submits that answer, the password box shakes again.

Laurel looks out of the window. A hazy orange sun struggles against clouds. Which fungi have captured her own imagination? The red-capped A. muscaria is too obvious an answer.

In Michigan, while Silas slept, a pattern of black cord beckoned from a wooded path. As if following a rope, she walked away from the beach, into the trees. The memory repels her, but could it be—?

Laurel types armillariagallica. It works like a key.

10

Anima

The cemetery near Laurel and Eli’s house exists in the antiuniverse, too, but with an unfamiliar building at its heart.

In the universe of their birth, tombstones continued unimpeded from Glenway Street to Highland Avenue. Native mounds spread through the northeast corner. The Catholic section occupied the northwest corner, the Jewish one a small southwestern plot. More recently, two sections were established for the Hmong. The Union Soldier’s Lot and Confederate Rest bracketed the mausoleum.

Here, the effigy mounds remain, built in chorus with the land. But there are no soldiers’ plots, and the mausoleum is absent. Stranger still, every tombstone is blank. In the center of the cemetery is a white building. Its shape alone is notable: an oval dome, like a half-buried egg. There is a skylight, but no windows. The entrance is flanked by guards.

Laurel wonders what happens inside. She doesn’t ask. As immigrants to this universe, Laurel and Eli are intensely aware of what they don’t know. They fear exposure as not-Eli, not-Laurel, not-of-this-place.

So she watches.

On this September morning, Laurel sits on a bench. A short distance away, workers erect a white tent. These appear at different places on the grounds, always over a tombstone. The tent is accompanied by a covered walkway, made of the same material, which leads to the white building. Both the tent and the tunnel have clearly been designed for privacy: the action inside takes place in silhouette.

Nothing distinguishes this installation until a figure emerges from the walkway. Laurel has seen him before, ducking in and out of tents: a tall Asian man with an asymmetrical haircut. He wears a long, black coat.

As he passes her bench, the man nods at Laurel. Flustered, she returns the gesture; he’s never addressed her before. Paths radiate diagonally from the white building. At the far end, they intersect with a loop that encloses the cemetery. The man takes the nearest spoke to that outer ring, which he follows before branching to the sidewalk.

Laurel stands without thinking and follows him. She reaches the loop at the same time as the man does the crosswalk. There he stops, turning his head both ways to look for cars, which puts Laurel in his peripheral vision. She ducks into the grass.

“Ma’am,” barks a guard, “please keep to the paths.”

Several people turn to look at Laurel disapprovingly. Shamed, she hustles back to the loop. Has she broken some social code? What if she’d wanted to put flowers on a grave?

By the time she reaches the crosswalk, the man in the dark coat is gone. Laurel walks briskly to discharge the sense of being chastised. A pebble slips into her sandal. She pauses behind a woman with a stroller to jiggle her foot.

When Laurel turns on to her street, she sees the man again. She shrinks back to avoid being noticed as he continues down the block. He stops at the house before hers. On the porch, a swing drifts loosely in the wind. The man lifts a hand to knock on the door of Laurel’s neighbor, Beth.

—

When Laurel and Eli landed in Madison, stiff-legged and underslept, her cell phone showed one new voicemail. She played it for him on speakerphone.

“Welcome home, you two,” someone said. “The renters are gone, and the cleaners are finished. You’re all set to move back in.”

They took a cab from the airport. As it entered their old neighborhood, Laurel seized with suspense. The oldest-looking houses were angular and made of concrete. Their Cape Cod looked new in comparison: the cedar shingles hadn’t silvered. Solar panels hopscotched on the roof, and a hybrid was parked in the driveway. The front yard had no apple trees.

Laurel carried the mushroom tote bag she’d found in the lab at McMurdo. One of her double’s keys opened the door.

Certain features of the house matched those of the one she had recently sold: the bookshelves and bay windows, the woodstove with its long black pipe. But the kitchen was a slightly darker yellow than Eli had once painted theirs, and the bedroom’s creaky floorboard had traveled two planks over.

After her walk-through, Laurel returned downstairs. “I haven’t seen a single photo in this place,” she said.

Laurel and Eli’s walls had been hung with family photos. Maisie had framed the Polaroids from their wedding. Silas’s school pictures staggered above the staircase. In the hallway, the Rosens stood in front of their Chicago brownstone, and the Salters waved from the orchard.