Chapter 8 The Basin
The Basin
Laurel booked an apartment in town with room for three. Actually, there was room for four: the attic bedroom had a bunk bed, which renewed Silas’s longstanding gripe about not having siblings.
He pointed to the bunk bed on the top. “I’m gonna sleep in there. And if I had a sister,” he said—a frequent refrain—“she could have the bed under me.”
—
The day: flat, gray, leaves quivering in the wind. Strange weather, said the cashier when Laurel ran out for sandwiches. Something restless to the air, or maybe the restless thing was Silas, who had been jumping on the furniture since he woke up that morning.
He wants to go to the beach, Eli said when Laurel returned.
And then the drive, no more than twenty minutes on a weekday but twice as many on this Sunday. They parked in the lot and walked down a wooded path: the beach was flanked by forest. In the ravine between two dunes, a cave opened into the ground. Small brown mushrooms huddled at the entrance.
Armillaria gallica, Laurel thought. Also known as honey fungus.
The mushrooms themselves weren’t particularly eye-catching.
What distinguished Armillaria were its rhizomorphs: thick, fused cords of hyphae coated in protective melanin.
Unlike traditional mycelium—those feathery white strands—these darker structures grew aboveground, not below.
Near the mushroom cluster was a decomposing tree.
Rhizomorphs surrounded it in strange and rune-like patterns.
She wanted to show Silas, but he had become resistant to these demonstrations. He associated mushrooms with Laurel’s professional life, which took her away from him.
“No working,” he had begun to say when she paused to examine something, and since it was his birthday trip, this time, she didn’t.
—
They set out three beach chairs, three towels, three hats. Silas was already kicking off his Crocs and negotiating his desire to go swimming before sunblock. Since it was cloudy, Laurel allowed it.
Silas tugged Eli’s hand.
“All right, all right,” Eli said.
While he was gone, Laurel set out Silas’s book. He loved any book with magic: she had read A Wizard of Earthsea aloud, and now he was reading A Wrinkle in Time to her.
She settled back with a magazine. Soon she realized she was hungry and unwrapped her sandwich, tuna salad on rye.
—
They emerged wet and ebullient. Eli winked at Laurel, his curls dripping.
“I’m starving,” Silas said, in the accusatory way that children declare hunger. She rummaged in the cooler for his egg salad sandwich, apple, and mini bag of Lay’s. Not until he was eating peacefully did she return to her reading.
“I’m thirsty,” Silas said.
Laurel put down the magazine again. She retrieved his water bottle as well as a plastic jug of lemonade.
“Two options,” she said. “Anything else, Your Highness?”
Silas shook his head, though he reminded her, through a mouthful of apple, that he was not a king but a wizard.
—
Eli kissed Laurel’s shoulder.
Freckles, he said.
It was four o’clock: the lazy hour, as Laurel and Eli called it. Silas slept in a folding chair, a bucket hat over his eyes. Every so often, Laurel made sure that it hadn’t slid to block his nose.
Eli put a hand on his bladder. Too much lemonade.
Pee in the water, Laurel said.
Eli shrugged. I wouldn’t mind a walk.
He rolled onto her towel to kiss her, lingering a little now that Silas was asleep.
—
Alone, Laurel’s mind drifted back to the cave.
Armillaria could cover vast distances. In the early nineties, a colony was discovered in Michigan.
It was at least fifteen hundred years old and as heavy as a blue whale.
After an article appeared in Nature, newspapers dubbed it the “Humongous Fungus.” So long as nutrients remained available, it would never die.
Laurel wondered if the specimen in the cave had ever been sampled. If she cut a piece, she could bring it back to the lab for testing. It would mean leaving Silas, but only for a moment.
“If you want to go in the water, Dad or I have to be watching you, and you can only go in the shallow part”—this was what she’d told him several days ago, on their first beach excursion.
“How shallow?” he’d asked, like a lawyer.
“Really shallow.”
“Like two feet?”
“Like one and a half,” said Laurel. Silas was four feet and four inches tall. She reconsidered. “Like one.”
She weighed the likelihood that he had forgotten this exchange.
Silas was thoughtful and attentive; he absorbed body language and tone.
Not infrequently he mentioned something that Laurel had said offhand months earlier.
Of course, sometimes he asked what was for dinner three times in an afternoon, and she said, “Silas, look at me. We’re having burritos.
” In the years that followed, she would torture herself over moments like these, when she could have been a little bit kinder, a little bit more loving—would have, had she eaten breakfast, or not just stepped on a Lego.
Silas hadn’t slept very much the night before. Laurel suspected that he would be out for some time. There was no telling when Eli would come back. His walks often expanded, acquiring detours and loops. Forty-five minutes later, he’d return, sheepish, to say he’d gotten lost in his head.
Silas’s hat had drifted to one side. Laurel adjusted it before she left.
—
She didn’t want to interrupt the rhizomorph network. Instead, Laurel sampled a mushroom. She carried a knife in her purse for exactly this purpose. At one tip was a boar-bristle brush, for cleaning dirt. A sharp, curved blade folded out from a beech handle.
As she made an incision, the sun moved behind clouds, and the cave darkened. A ring of moss circumscribed the black hole of its interior.
In seminars, Gloria had used Armillaria to demonstrate bioluminescence.
First, two teaching assistants rolled a covered lab cart into the room, like vaudeville magicians.
Gloria turned off the light, and the assistants sealed the cracks around doors and windows with towels.
It took time for the human eye to adjust, so Gloria spoke until her pupils’ pupils widened.
At last, she unveiled the contents of the cart: a block of wood colonized by Armillaria.
The mushrooms glowed a ghostly green, as if seen through night vision goggles.
Even their gills were perfectly legible.
Laurel had never encountered bioluminescence in the wild. She wondered if Armillaria had spread inside the cave, too.
Silas tugged from a string in her center. Her own wishes tugged back. She shouldn’t stay for long, but why not a few minutes?
She entered a soft, moist cavern. It smelled like wet soil, with an undercurrent of rot. To one side was a nest of logs, likely carried in by flooding. Laurel could not quite tell whether they were glowing.
Patience, she thought. Wait. As if in reward for her looking, a patch of green became visible. Others followed almost shyly: a raising of hands. Mycelium had invaded the wood. Strands knitted through logs like stitches in skin.
The sky brightened then, and the green light went out. For the first time all day, the clouds dispelled. Divine timing, Laurel thought, as she walked back to the beach with the mushroom, her prize; and because Silas was asleep, he wouldn’t complain while she took notes.
She scanned the water as soon as she came in sight of the beach. The sun had brought breeze, whitecaps forming. Seeing no one in the water, Laurel felt reassured. She had overworried, but that was parenthood. Eli’s chair was still empty. She walked around it to her own.
Where Silas has been, there was now a wrinkled towel.
—
Reason came to her mind’s defense. Perhaps he had wandered toward the woods in search of her. Or maybe Eli had returned, and taken Silas with him.
She was about to turn around when she saw something in the water. It flickered: a hand, beige, maybe twenty yards away.
—
Laurel dropped the mushroom on the sand. With her shoes still on, she thrashed into the water.
She was pure purpose. She had a sense of her entire life converging at this moment, of being called.
Adrenalized by fear, she believed she could not fail, as mothers were able—or said—to lift cars.
But the shoes bogged her down, and the current dragged her out: she could feel it now, an undertow, wrenching her from shore.
She screamed his name. It sailed away. Water poured into her throat, a wrong sensation that made her gasp, then choke.
She had only seconds between waves and refused to rest, but soon she was so exhausted that she had no choice: she flipped onto her back, which gave her just enough strength to endure the next break.
A dark descending spiral, a staircase into hell—not the way it was supposed to happen—the hand, its fingers splayed, as if it were waving goodbye to her.
No. Don’t think it. He had been here, or so Laurel thought: there were no landmarks, no way to mark space.
How could she be sure of what she’d seen?
When she tried to open her eyes underwater, there was only raw stinging, plumes of sand.
A hand on her shoulder, an arm around her chest—Eli heaved her out, though she didn’t want him to; it was like feeling the pull of another world, a past life—and she hated him in that moment, though her hate was but a skin, a cracking shell, over raw unholy terror.
On shore, she vomited lake water.
He went. She gestured. Down.
And lurched, with the force of a much larger mammal, toward the water again.
—
Eli’s voice, hoarse with panic: A hand? You’re sure that’s what you saw?
He searched the water himself. There was no cell service on the beach.
A couple arrived, two men with young children, and one drove back to the road to call 911.
Every minute was interminable, and Laurel wailed, for too much time had passed—she knew this in her core, though she refused to accept what it meant.