Page 98 of Under Story

She hears a snapping noise.

“Who’s there?” she shouts.

Her voice sounds strangled, paranoid. No one responds.

As she turns, the headlamp sweeps through the chamber. It lands on another object: a tripod, algae-covered, has been propped against the wall. On top is a trail camera, its glass eye a marble of mold.

Laurel’s vision dims. It occurs to her that she should sit, but first, she needs to record what she’s found. She cuts a sample of the rhizomorphs and takes pictures of the cave. From the metal box, she takes a voltmeter. The trail camera won’t turn on, but she still puts it in her bag.

Finally she removes a handful of pins from the rhizomorphs. Wrapped around them are tape labels, with dates written in pen. Some have been blurred by water and dirt, but others are legible. If not for that now familiar slant, the handwriting could be her own.

Déjà vu consumes her—at least, that seems to be the best description, though it feels less like her memory than that of someone else. She has no agency, feels like a pair of eyes. Checking the pins, she moves along the rhizomorphs.

Her mind is a flurry of activity. She has not come here in months, and there is a great deal of data to transfer to the hard drive. Which cords have grown? Which are shrinking? She wants to know where the current is strongest, and how the network in the rhizomorphs relates to the tree.

These thoughts transmit automatically. What registers at a delay is the feeling underneath them. Her scientific interest is a scrim over distress. As a curtain hides a window, it obscures something else.

Laurel wants to understand what lies behind the curtain. To do this, she must trade the role of viewer for participant. Her mind is the growing tip. She tries to fill the moment, to colonize it.

The sadness is her guide. She follows it like a thread. Now the setting changes: Laurel looks into her own home office. But the furniture is different, and a second person lies inside. A current growing weaker, no matter what she tries.

—

Laurel drives as if for the first time. Her right foot is shaky on the pedals, and a Range Rover honks when she veers into the next lane. Somehow, it is already evening.

She calls Eli as soon as her service returns, but he doesn’t answer.

Nor is he in the apartment. In the kitchen, she finds the ingredients for his vegetarian shrimp scampi: lemons and garlic, mushrooms, a bottle of Muscadet. Parsley wilts in a water glass. He must have walked to the grocery store while she was in the cave.

Laurel’s body doesn’t feel like hers. To prove that she didn’t imagine the maze of roots—or the pins with the other Laurel’s handwriting—she removes the contents of her bag. On the coffee table, she unloads the voltmeter and the camera. She finds plastic bags in the kitchen for the rhizomorphs and pins. The sandwich she bought that morning sits uneaten in the car, and she feels queasy with hunger.

She checks her phone again, but Eli hasn’t called. When she texts him, his phone chirps from a side table. The sound brings Laurel back to her life: the cave fades in her mind, and shame replaces it. Nothing is more important than tomorrow—than Silas. On today, of all days, how could she have focused on anything else?

The screen door opens. Eli appears in his swimsuit, a towel thrown over one shoulder.

Laurel stands. “Eli, thank God. Where were you?”

“At the park.”

His tone is cool, and he only glances at her—until he notices her knees, which are raw, one trickling with blood.

“Are you okay?” Eli asks. “What is all this stuff?”

If Laurel can explain what happened, maybe she’ll be able to understand it. She takes a breath, and then she tells him all of it. Her gnawing confusion about the gap between the other Laurel’s research and hers. Samir’s comment about electricity. At the mention of the beach, Eli stiffens. She forges on, describing the tree, but she can see that she’s already lost him. She doesn’t mention what she found inside the cave.

“You went to the beach,” Eli says. “The beach where it happened.”

“I didn’t go down to the water.”

Laurel knows how feeble it sounds.

“I don’t care whether you went down to the water. I care that you went there at all. I care that you didn’t ask if I’d mind, that you didn’t wait to go together,” he says. “I care that you’ve been working.”

“I needed to distract myself.”

“You could have talked to me.”

“But we’ve gone through the plan, over and over! I was starting to lose my mind.”