Page 79 of Under Story

“They must have taken everything down for the renters,” said Eli, but he seemed distracted. His eyes had a haunted look, and he still hadn’t moved from the couch.

Laurel came to sit beside him. “We don’t have to stay here. We could sell the house and find places to rent.”

“Simpler this way,” said Eli. “You take the upstairs bedroom. I’ll sleep in my office.”

Laurel didn’t press him. She understood that he wanted distance from the second floor. When Silas died, Laurel and Eli had agreed on one thing: they would not dismantle his bedroom. Eli slept there until he moved into his own apartment. After that, Laurel couldn’t bring herself to open the door. By the time she sold the house, a shroud of dust had settled over the bed. Silas’s last Lego creation—a Jedi training diorama—still sat on the rug. Maisie and Gloria came over to help. Just as Laurel needed, they worked briskly and in quiet. Afterward, she stored a box of keepsakes. The rest she donated. Somewhere, another child could build Yoda’s planet, Dagobah, again.

Here, what had been Silas’s room was the other Laurel’s office. This room had been emptied for the renters, too. Laurel repopulated it with the contents of the boxes she found in the closet. She propped a dried reishi on the wide oak desk. On the shelves, she set fungal artifacts beside books. Last, she hung the walls with tree slices coated in varnish. Hyphae layered through the heartwood: each specimen had been preserved in a different stage of decomposition.

She found no Armillaria, in mushroom or rhizomorph form. This was both a relief and a puzzle.

Laurel put the placemaker from Louis in one of the oak desk’s many drawers. She hung her double’s shawl over the chair; to keep it close felt like a sign of respect. Laurel Two might have unnerved her, even assumed her identity—but Laurel was also a guest, living in a stranger’s home, using her clothes and her bank account.

Every day, Laurel and Eli noticed something new. One morning, a young man rang the doorbell. When Laurel answered, he produced a petition against VR headsets in the workplace. Time’s latest issue sounded the death knell of the Metaverse (“Facing Mass Depression and Anxiety, Psychologists Prescribe Physical Life”). The local grocery co-op had no meat section. As a vegetarian, Laurel found this refreshing, but she still inquired out of curiosity. The clerk stared as though she had inquired about the human heads.

Like Eli, Laurel would resume teaching in spring, when the academic year began. Until then, they agreed to pursue separate lines of inquiry. Eli’s task was antiuniverse physics. They assigned biology to Laurel.

“Thank God for Google,” Eli said.

It was late September. They lay on lawn chairs in the yard below a warm sun.

“I don’t think I want to use the internet,” said Laurel.

By Eli’s expression, she might have suggested that they swap the hybrid for a horse. “What do you mean?”

Laurel propped herself on one side. “We’re meant to learn by interacting, don’t you think? Think of a baby, a kid. I don’t think I’ll understand this place very well if all I do is read about it.”

The second reason, which she did not share, was that Google overwhelmed her. Everything she wanted to know about this universe, and anything she didn’t, was instantly accessible. Laurel had Googled something once, after her first trip to the grocery store. She had purchased a butternut squash and wanted to remind herself of the best roasting temperature. As soon as she typed the name of the vegetable, an AI summary appeared onscreen: Butternut squash originated in Argentina—then known as New Peru (Nuevo Perú)—in the late 6000s. Its first extinction occurred during the Fire Age of 5048–3772. Laurel slammed the computer shut. If she had learned anything so far, it was that titrating information kept her sane—or, at least, saner.

She and Eli worked separately until evening. Over dinner, they shared what they’d learned. There was a high to the learning curve, but sometimes, wrongness descended like a pall. One evening, Maisie called. The dissonance was overwhelming: her voice was painfully familiar, her personhood a total mystery. Laurel’s appetite faded. Afterward, she put earplugs in and lay down to mute the senses, the barrage of new.

The next morning, her cell phone rang. It was Clare Two, the other Laurel’s mother, and not for the first time. There was no one Laurel felt more nervous to meet, but to avoid her any longer would only rouse suspicion.

They made plans to meet for lunch at a café (“Your favorite,” said Clare). As she approached the blue-and-white awning, Laurel’s stomach plummeted. What mother wouldn’t know her own daughter? But when she entered the café, it was Laurel who found herself fooled. The other Clare wore her hair in a familiar braid; her posture was characteristically straight; and her face held all the careful warmth of the Clare she’d always known. Laurel could not believe that this woman was not her mother.

She sank into Clare’s arms. Clare rubbed her back as she cried.

“I know,” Clare said. “It’s been a long time.”

Even the parallels between universes were disorienting. Breakfast still came before dinner, even though the dinner of September 7 preceded breakfast on the sixth. The intervening sleep felt exactly the same as one in which time flowed forward. It was possible to see that they were moving backward only on a larger scale. In anticipation of the 2016 election, yard signs began to appear throughout the neighborhood. Most supported Barack Obama, who promised to restore hope after a second Trump presidency and the wreckage of Covid-19.

They could at least chart time by the natural world. As September moved toward August, the weather became warmer. Animals picked at caved-in pumpkins on the side of the street, and maple leaves reeled from red to green.

—

The man in the dark coat returns to Beth’s house several days later. This time, an ambulance follows, and paramedics carry someone indoors on a stretcher. Beth stands on the porch with her palm to her mouth. One year ago, in another universe, Laurel brought apples over before leaving for McMurdo.

In the following weeks, medical professionals arrive frequently, all of them wearing black scrubs. Other visitors come with food or flowers. Laurel’s curiosity escalates. At the end of August, she makes an apple crumble and knocks on the door herself.

“Oh, Laurel,” says Beth, “it’s you.” She’s barefoot in a linen dress, her orangeish hair clipped back. “I’m so sorry I haven’t come by; you’ll have to tell me all about Antarctica. It’s just that—well, I’m sure you’ve guessed. My mother was born.”

Laurel nearly drops the apple crumble. Beth ushers her inside, Laurel following hastily and certain that she can’t have heard right. Like Beth One, Beth Two must be an art teacher: an easel stands in the living room, and charcoal drawings line the hallway. In the kitchen, Laurel sets her crumble beside a Tupperware of pasta salad. Beth plates two pieces, thanking her, and leads Laurel to the garden.

“We’ll have to keep our voices down,” Beth says. “She’s sleeping—but would you like to see her?”

Laurel nods. She has the sense of standing on a cliff, and peering over.

Beth sets their plates on a small outdoor table. Facing the garden is a bedroom. The French doors stand open, and a light breeze moves between spaces.