Chapter 5 Duoverse #2
She veered into a bathroom and ran the water cold, patting her chest, her forearms, her face.
She told herself that she was being melodramatic.
She and Eli had never been in a relationship.
They hadn’t even been friends, had never interacted except for that evening in Upper Orchard, where place and circumstance had conspired to create a kind of portal: surely they wouldn’t have had the same conversation if not for the weather and the apples and the fact that they were weeks away from college.
And now he went to Stanford; now he was engaged.
Well, why shouldn’t he be? Laurel hadn’t expected Eli to pine for her, though she often wondered what had happened to him, and even hoped, when the web became widespread, that he might look for her.
Every couple of years, during a breakup or a bout of loneliness, she tried unsuccessfully to find him.
Sometimes she drove by the house in the field, but she never saw the Rosens.
Eventually, Laurel told herself that she’d magnified her feelings for Eli, but now she saw she hadn’t. The city, the party, the conference—everything that had charmed her minutes earlier—bleached in comparison to the thought of going home with him.
Laurel couldn’t bring herself to talk with him and Angela. Instead, she walked downstairs. From the living room, glass clinked and voices murmured musically. She turned right, into the hall.
There were four doors, two on either side, and none of them were locked.
Through the first, she peeked into a bedroom: four-poster bed and grandfather clock, pillows embroidered with strawberries.
Behind the second was a library that stretched to the ceiling, a wooden ladder propped against the tomes.
The third disclosed a closet filled with boxes, one of them half open.
Laurel spied a crowd of candlesticks, an antique pocket watch, and an unusual felt patch: blue wool, with an appliqued polar bear.
The last room was the lower floor of the turret. Where the upstairs octagon was polished, this one was dusty and unused. A threadbare rug, once crimson, held the center. In the windows, she saw her own reflection.
“Thought I’d lost you.”
Eli stood in the doorway. His voice was tentative, as if she’d turned him down.
“I’m sorry,” Laurel said. “I’m not myself tonight. I felt—a headache coming on.”
She was a terrible liar.
“It’s better now,” she added.
A bougainvillea pressed against the window, its night leaves the black-green of a Dutch still life. Eli stepped inside.
“We moved,” he said. “That fall. My parents decided they missed Chicago.”
Laurel told the truth before she could stop herself. “I drove by your house. I wondered why I never saw anyone.”
Eli seemed bolstered to hear it. “Are you presenting this weekend?”
“On Sunday,” she said. “Last slot of the conference.”
“I’d like to come.”
“You don’t have to.”
He smiled. “I know that.”
There was the sound of a glass breaking in another room, a gasp followed by laughter.
“Good omen,” Eli added.
—
He was there, just as he’d said he would be, in a back row by the door.
Laurel tried not to look at him while she spoke.
P. microcarpus, she argued, had not only shown the potential to learn.
By retaining its knowledge of the maze, it might also have exercised memory.
Gloria had called Laurel’s findings audacious: her highest compliment.
Afterward, she waited nervously for questions.
Audience responses were crucial to the future of the project; Laurel would incorporate feedback and submit a new draft to journals.
But the Q hierarchies were established or dismantled.
A particularly effective takedown could become academic lore, passed down over years: the victor was crowned, the vanquished humiliated.
The first two questions weren’t softballs, but neither were they castigations.
The last came from a woman in the front row.
Laurel’s jaw relaxed. She had met the speaker, a heralded young botanist, several years earlier.
The woman had been a finalist for a UW–Madison professorship, and after her talk, the department hosted a mixer.
Tess and Laurel stayed until the end, when the botanist sat to take off her heels.
“Do you mind?” she said, stretching her toes in nude stockings. “I’ve been in these since eight in the morning. My boyfriend has an interview this week, too, and I’m like, ‘Must be nice to wear pants and loafers.’ ”
Laurel and Tess nodded sympathetically. The UW job went to a male candidate, but the woman had since been hired at Princeton.
Now she stood.
“Well, from a technical standpoint,” the botanist said, “I think we should acknowledge how skillful this work is. I’m not sure how many of you have tried to isolate a fungal culture, but let’s just say that it requires superhuman patience—and that’s when you don’t have to send it through a labyrinth. ”
She paused for appreciative chuckling. Laurel exhaled. For a moment, she let herself think of afterward: she could treat herself to an expensive coffee at the café across the street and walk her adrenaline off at the beach. She smiled at the botanist, who had not yet sat back down.
“Which is why I find your conclusion so disappointing,” the woman said.
Several spectators had begun to pack up, but at this battle cry, they settled back into their seats.
“It’s staggering, really—this conflation of cognition and evolutionary programming. When you apply a human lens to other species, the case becomes so anthropomorphized that it loses all credibility. In fact,” the botanist continued, “as a scientific community, I think this work sets us back.”
Laurel felt her neck grow hot. She took a sip of water, which gave her seconds to formulate a counterargument. What would Gloria say?
The botanist leaned back pleasantly. Laurel screwed the cap onto her water bottle.
“Actually,” she said, “I agree with you. For too long, Western science has seen the world through a human lens. Since the time of the Greeks, we’ve assumed that anything sentient must work the way we do.
I mean, researchers still don’t agree about whether animals are conscious, as if we aren’t animals ourselves; into the eighties, it wasn’t widely thought that they feel pain.
This does a disservice to nonhuman life, yes, but it also does the same to us.
Think of what we might know now if we’d taken off those blinders sooner. ”
Some attendees glanced at the botanist, to see how she was stomaching this parry. Her posture had stiffened. Laurel looked at the clock; her slot would be over in less than one minute.
“What if evolution produced all kinds of minds? What if the path forked? I’ve suggested that fungi might evince intelligence,” Laurel said. “If it seems to you that I’m using a human lens, then I’d ask why you see intelligence as human.”
In the hallway, a small but respectable group of attendees lined up for discussion.
The botanist wasn’t one of them. Neither was Eli.
Laurel felt disappointed; she hadn’t seen him slip out.
But when she opened a side door, trading the staleness of the auditorium for the brisk, reviving air outside, he was sitting on a bench with a notebook.
He smiled to see her, squinting into the clouds.
“You took notes,” she said. “I won’t quiz you on it.”
Eli laughed. “I take notes on things that interest me.”
“I’m honored.”
The conference took place at the University of San Francisco, whose hilltop campus bordered Golden Gate Park. Cypress trees—perpetually windswept—slanted sideways.
“You did a good job with the curveball from the front row,” Eli said.
Laurel shook her head. “I thought I was in the clear.”
“Never relax your defenses,” intoned Eli, and Laurel laughed. “Really, though: it was fascinating, what you said. The memory piece—how do you think it works?”
The tension Laurel had felt all day was unspooling, and so, too, in the equanimity of afternoon, was some of her anguish about Eli and Angela. If they talked about work, maybe she could enjoy herself.
“I’ve been toying with the idea of electrical signaling,” she said.
“How’d you think of that?”
Laurel sat down on the bench, holding her bag on her lap. “In animals, that’s how nerve cells communicate: charged elements pass messages throughout the body. They’re also crucial to memory.”
“Cells that fire together wire together?”
“Exactly. And we know that fungi produce electricity. Plants do, too. In fact, they’re better at it than we are,” Laurel said. “If bioelectricity underlies human intelligence, I thought it might contribute to intelligent behaviors in fungi.”
She told Eli about the developments that took place over the summer.
Laurel brought her hypothesis to Gloria, who pointed out that the brain, like mycelia, is a collective: billions of neurons in a coordinated web, which gives rise to behaviors that would be impossible for one neuron alone.
Gloria suggested that Laurel listen to an interview with a neuroscientist, Urmi Bhattacharya, who had recently been featured on The Larry Meiller Show.
Laurel found the episode in Wisconsin Public Radio’s online archives. She brought her laptop to a study carrel in Memorial Library and plugged her headphones in, to listen while she read the transcript.
Bhattacharya: None of us can understand what it’s like to lack consciousness, because we are conscious.
You might think that sleep is the same as unconsciousness, but that isn’t true.
When we wake up in the morning, we might not remember what happened overnight, but we still have the sense that time has passed.
So the closest we get to an unconscious state isn’t sleep. It’s anesthesia.
Meiller: What’s the difference?