Chapter 4 Infinite Degrees of Freedom #4
Gloria wore a private expression. Laurel wondered, but could not ask, whether some part of her regretted it.
“Have you ever tried to find out what happened to him?”
“Oh, no. I think it’s probably better I didn’t.” Gloria smiled instinctually, too quickly. Then she gestured to Laurel’s messenger bag. “Shall we look at your data?”
Laurel took out her laptop. Over the course of the year, she had refined her experiment and processed the results. She pulled up her Excel plot and handed the computer to Gloria, who scanned it intently.
“This is excellent, Laurel,” she murmured. “Have you considered a conference submission?”
Gloria had one in mind: a gathering, that fall, on the theme of Other Worlds. The call invited academics from a range of disciplines; Laurel could propose a dispatch from the world belowground. The conference would take place in San Francisco, where Gloria grew up.
“An old friend—Seymour—is an organizer,” Gloria said. “I lived with him and his partner, Julian, when I was young.”
The idea made Laurel giddy: if she was accepted, it would be her first major conference presentation.
She could feel Gloria’s excitement, too.
It flowed between them—a selflessness on Gloria’s part, this enthusiasm for the younger academics whose careers were all ahead.
She was proud of her ducklings, as she called them, and though it was true that she benefitted from their successes, which reflected well upon her, she seemed to feel no competition.
They stayed together, chatting, until the last log turned to embers. When Laurel left, it had just begun to snow.
In the second week of February, red construction paper hearts appear in the dorms at McMurdo.
Jules puts fake roses in the dining hall, and Diego makes cookies with pink and white icing.
Laurel spends Valentine’s Day in her room, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The next morning, she finds a notice in her mailbox: every woman who plans to winter over is required to test for pregnancy.
“I have an IUD,” she splutters.
“And I have a girlfriend,” says Nita. “It doesn’t matter.”
The station is unable to provide prenatal care, let alone abortions or deliveries. Plane travel is too dangerous in winter. After March, there will be no arrivals—and no way out—for six months.
“You’d think they’d take our word for it,” says Laurel.
“Would you, though?” asks Nita.
The red roof of the hospital has lightened, over years, to cheery fuchsia.
Inside, a nurse hands out tests. The bathroom has two stalls.
When Laurel enters with Nita, she suddenly wishes that she were alone.
She hears the tinny sound of Nita peeing.
A moment later, the toilet flushes, and Nita walks out to the sink.
“Spawnless,” she says. “Want me to wait?”
Laurel shifts in discomfort. Her bladder has seemingly latched shut.
“No need,” she says. “Go ahead.”
Having a child, her mother once said, is the one thing you can never take back.
The last time Laurel opened a pregnancy test, she thought of the fulcrum in a seesaw.
Her life would change forever in an instant—or, just as surely, it wouldn’t.
If there was a blob of embryonic cells inside her, life before that child would be as unthinkable, one day, as life after them was then.
It was like meeting a major character halfway through a novel: she would feel astonished, decades later, that she’d gone so long without them.
Her urine comes in spurts: a trickle at first, then fast and warm in the cold. Pink dye flushes over the test strip, and a single line appears.
—
Nita applies baby-blue eye shadow; Louis lines his eyes like Prince. Stewie Prom is the last hurrah of the season, and this year, the theme is the nineties.
Skua was good to them: Laurel found a flannel shirt, and Charlie cut an orange tank into a tube top.
An industrious steward takes requests for tissue paper corsages.
While getting ready, nearly everyone props their door open, and Boyz II Men competes with the Lauryn Hill that wafts from Nita’s computer.
When they leave for Gallagher’s, Nita and Charlie take the lead.
“Don’t mind if we make a pit stop, do you?
” asks Louis, pulling Laurel in the opposite direction.
He stops in front of a discarded shipping container, hung with Christmas lights and packed to the gills with bodies.
In the back, Matty bends over a flame. Miles is licking rolling papers.
Laurel has never seen them interact with Louis, but they nod as though they’ve met here before.
Louis hands Miles a crumpled bill. “This should cover both of us.”
Matty passes him a joint. Louis takes a drag, and then he offers it to Laurel. She tries not to show her hesitation: in college, weed led to a sore throat and paranoid insomnia.
“Is this the stuff that chills you out?” she asks.
“No, sweetheart.” Miles laughs, coarse. “This is the shit that makes you do your taxes.”
“Roll her something a little more mellow,” Louis says.
Miles takes his grinder out and prepares a new joint. He holds the tip over a lighter, rotating it slowly, before he hands it to Laurel. She coughs out the smoke.
“You don’t know how to inhale,” says Miles, watching her.
Laurel reddens. “Yeah, I never got the hang of that part.”
“No, I mean”—his gaze is serious—“you don’t really inhale, do you? In general.” He points to her shoulders, hunched in self-protection. “You don’t take very deep breaths.”
Flustered, Laurel laughs. “I don’t know.”
“Shake your head,” says Miles. “Let your shoulders go. Breathe from your stomach, not your throat.”
“Miles gets bossy when he’s high,” Louis says. But he’s watching her curiously.
Laurel lets her head drift from side to side, like a flower on a stem. She drops her shoulders. When the joint comes back around, she inhales differently. This time, the smoke travels down.
—
Gallagher’s has transformed. Cardboard stars hang from the ceiling, and confetti covers the floor. Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” plays as Louis and Laurel join the line for the bar. Ahead of them are two production cooks. The first gestures to her black, knee-high socks.
“They’re Doc Martens, asshole,” she says. “Use your imagination!”
Nita slow-dances with Sam; Charlie whispers to Diego, the pastry chef.
As “Linger” segues into “No Diggity,” a helium sensation comes over Laurel.
Her skin tingles; she feels weightless and warm, filled with an urge to giggle at nothing in particular—and how good it feels to laugh, like punching through something lifelike to life itself.
“You’re high,” says Louis. In a pink spotlight, he is radiant.
He wears a women’s blouse and a pair of fingerless gloves.
They rock back and forth to TLC’s “Unpretty,” and when “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” starts, they jump until their corsages fall off.
There’s a photo station against the wall, a piece of cardboard painted the precise slate of prom backdrops everywhere, and they squeeze everyone in, Louis kneeling in front with his arms out like a jester.
Miles and Matty arrive after midnight. Miles wears a T-shirt under his parka; his lean arms are blue with tattoos.
Laurel thinks of the sound of his laugh, its depth and rustiness.
When he walks past, she grabs his wrist. She knows her eyes are red.
He kisses her, his tongue muscular and full, and for a moment, she is paralyzed, thinking cheating, thinking Eli.
Then she remembers the divorce, and the fact that she is doing nothing wrong makes her feel both free and devastated.
She finds Louis at the bar, nursing a negroni. His eyeliner is smeared.
“He’ll only use you,” Louis says.
“Miles?” Laurel raises her eyebrows. “Maybe I’ll use him. I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”
Against the wall, a man with cropped blond hair kisses a second man. Louis is watching them. “What if I am?”
Laurel has only to see the look on his face to know that the blond is Patrick.
She hugs Louis until he softens. The song is “Black Hole Sun,” not something to dance to, but she pulls him onto the floor anyway, and they stay there, swaying, his eyes in her dampening shoulder, for as long as the music plays.
—
Laurel wakes up in a Thrasher hoodie on someone else’s twin bed. A male stranger sits at the room’s single desk.
“Miles left,” he says. “Work. He said to tell you”—the man adopts Miles’s grainy voice and lowered eyelids—“ ‘Hey.’ ”
“Thanks,” Laurel says, with as much self-respect as she can muster. She’s still wearing her flannel shirt, but her bra is looped around the bed frame. Her corsage dangles from a lock of hair.
Mercifully, Miles’s roommate stands. “I’ll get breakfast.”
As the door closes, Laurel puts her face in her hands. She feels like laughing again. There’s still a trace of the weed in her system, the world blurred to a glow. She feels, if not infinitely free, a few degrees more so.
Through the window, she catches a flash of movement.
The Terra Bus, ferrying newcomers, has just arrived from the airfield.
Most travelers disembark with confidence; it’s clear that they’ve been here before.
But Laurel is drawn to one person: a tall, dark-haired man who looks as bewildered as she felt four months earlier.
He might as well be walking on the moon.
She puts a hand on the wall. It isn’t possible. He must be a mirage; Laurel must be projecting. When she finds her balance, she looks out of the window again.
The man has turned to face the mountains, but Laurel knows him even from the back. Briefly her vision goes white. Eli is walking across the ice.