Chapter 9 Elsewhere
Elsewhere
Eli parks next to the dive locker. Neither one is laughing anymore. They climb out, onto the ice, as they might another planet.
The station looks exactly like the one they left, though the sky is brighter.
After the dive, they moved more slowly, hindered by exhaustion.
Now people walk between buildings in their rubber boots and Big Reds.
Laurel begins to doubt herself, unsure of what she saw with Eli, or whether they came to the right conclusion.
At the door to the dive locker, she looks at him with dread. What will they do if they find someone inside? Eli exhales decisively, and then he opens the door. Laurel’s shoulders release when she sees that the light is off.
They hurry as much as they can, rehanging their suits, carting gear in from the PistenBully. When Laurel returns from her last trip, she finds Eli crouched by the dive tanks. There’s a gap in the bottom row, clear as a lost tooth.
“Two tanks are missing,” Eli says.
Laurel doesn’t understand. “Ours.”
“How can they be?” asks Eli. “If we’re…”
In another universe. It still feels too absurd to speak aloud.
In Laurel’s mind is a flash, a schism, and then a forceful pushing-back. Later she’ll experience other moments like this, when overwhelm triggers some sort of hardware malfunction in the brain—a power outage, as it were. Protecting her.
“Anyone could have gone for a dive,” she says.
“At night?” he asks.
Eli slides their tanks into place. Before they leave the dive locker, he dons his blue-and-yellow backpack, and Laurel ties her shawl. Fearsome cold streaks through her hair.
“Have you seen my fur hat?” she asks.
“You left it in the dive hut.”
Of course: she hadn’t brought it through the portal. But then—
“My shawl was in the PistenBully.”
“So was my backpack,” says Eli slowly.
The galley is only a short walk. At the entrance, Laurel begins to sweat. Before she can reach for the handle, it turns from the inside. Another couple exits, holding the door open for them.
—
At first, all is commotion. Then the shapes she knows become themselves: the round tables and panini press, the hot-food bar and Frosty Boy.
A man in a cook’s uniform is walking toward them, his ponytail held back in a hairnet.
Laurel stares until she recognizes him as Miles. Yesterday, his head was shaved.
“Steady,” murmurs Eli.
“You’re late,” Miles says. “We need backup in the dish pit.”
But he isn’t talking to her. Laurel turns. Brown curls, his baseball cap on sideways: Louis looks just the way he has for all the time she’s known him.
“Be thankful you don’t work in the galley,” Louis says, sidling up to her. “Miles is always a nightmare at the end of the summer, but it’s worse this year.” He gives her a sly look. “How are you feeling?”
Laurel smells sausages and scrambled eggs. When they left for Cape Evans, it was night, and October 8 had just ended.
“It’s morning,” she says.
“Still upside down? Me, too.” Louis links an arm through hers and meanders toward the kitchen. “Well, I can’t say I’ve divined the meaning of life. But the ceiling moved, and so did Patrick’s freckles. He wanted to go to the sauna, and then I lost track of you.”
Eli lags behind them. Frowning, Louis stops.
“Why are you being so weird? Are you two having a row?” He looks from Laurel to Eli, who freezes. “And why did you shave your beard?”
Then two things happen at once: an ANITA physicist taps Eli’s shoulder, and someone shouts, “Oy!”—Nita, in her purple sweater and silver clip. When she sees Laurel, her eyebrows lift. Louis puts his hands on Laurel’s shoulders and steers her to the chair next to Sam.
“Careful with this one,” he says. “She’s not herself.”
“Neither am I,” says Nita. To Laurel, she adds: “Well, we had to see you off, didn’t we?”
“Bit more fun than looking at them through a microscope,” says Louis.
“At what?” Laurel asks.
“Mushrooms.” He fluffs her hair affectionately. “Doesn’t know her own name, does she? I guess that’s why they call it a trip.”
Sam stands. “I was just about to get more coffee. Laurel, I’ll bring you some.”
“Here.” Nita pushes a waffle toward Laurel. “Eat.”
Louis and Nita chatter while he helps himself to Laurel’s waffle. Then he shimmies to the kitchen, leaving Laurel with Nita.
“Laurel,” Nita says, “did you—?”
“Caff-eine!” sings Sam, delivering Laurel’s mug of coffee. A foamy white dollop sinks through the center. “I beat a geologist to the last lump of Frosty Boy. Hey, where’s Eli?”
Laurel looks over one shoulder. Both Eli and the physicist are gone. When she turns back around, Nita is staring at her with discomfiting scrutiny.
“I should find him,” says Laurel, standing.
Steady. But she isn’t, can’t be. She walks heavy-legged through the uncanny.
A photograph of a ship hangs on the wall, but it’s in color, not black and white, and it isn’t the Endurance.
A New York Times article has been pinned to the bulletin board: “After Efforts to Combat Surface Melt, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Gains Mass.”
Ingrid almost bumps into Laurel with the trolley.
“Sorry,” she says, deferentially, as though they haven’t met.
Laurel stumbles into the dorms. Her bedroom door is unlocked. Inside, she sees Nita’s Panipat blanket, but none of her own belongings. Sam’s fuelie uniform sits, folded, at the foot of Laurel’s former bed.
She darts into the lounge, which is vacant, and collapses on the couch. A therapist once suggested that she count in moments of panic, so Laurel tallies stitches in her shawl. At the border, though, she stops short. The bind-off at the edge is one she never learned.
The door to the lounge opens abruptly.
“Eli, thank God,” says Laurel when he appears in the frame. She tells him what happened after she lost him in the galley.
“Let’s go to my room,” Eli says.
They walk briskly, without speaking. In the stairwell, they pass a man Laurel has never seen before.
He raises a hand to greet her. “Hiya, Laurel.”
She waves back weakly. They exit on the second floor. The hallway here is empty, and Laurel practically runs: soon, they can barricade themselves and strategize. Eli stops at his door and takes a key out of the backpack.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she asks—but the lock turns easily, as if to assure them that they shouldn’t have worried.
The first thing Laurel notices is that the bed is abnormally wide: twice the size of a standard station twin. There are two bedside tables. Eli’s glasses and cell phone sit atop the first, along with the legal pads he likes. On the other is Laurel’s gold watch—the same one she donated to Skua.
“That’s my watch,” she says. “How did it get here?”
Eli sets his backpack on the floor. She wonders what he’s thinking with a wave of trepidation.
“Laurel,” he says at last, “I don’t think that watch is yours.”
“I’m positive,” she says. “Who else would it belong to?”
But when she picks it up, Laurel sees that the watch is no longer broken: the hour is accurate, and the second hand ticks merrily. She sets it down with a tremor.
“Another you,” Eli says.
Laurel looks at the Big Red she found in the PistenBully. She assumed that it was hers, too. She has a sense of pitching into nothingness, like leaning too far backward in a chair.
“And your backpack?” she asks.
Eli unzips the main pocket. Inside is a dual passport wallet, with a booklet on each side. The first one opens to a bearded and thumbnail-sized Eli.
“Another me,” he says.
Laurel laughs, a streak of bald hysteria that curdles into fear. “No.”
“That’s why your friends seemed to recognize us in the galley. They didn’t recognize us. They recognized them.”
It feels, to Laurel, like some cosmic joke. “Did you think this was a possibility?”
“Everything was a possibility,” Eli says. “And if this room is any indication, I think the other Laurel and Eli were together.”
A blanket hangs over the bed. He pulls it off. Two single beds have been pushed side by side.
“Breathe,” says Eli.
“Trying,” Laurel rasps. She asks the most urgent question first. “What if they come back?”
Her mind would break. But Eli shakes his head.
“I don’t think they will. Something doesn’t feel right. Look around.”
Cautiously, she does. There are no stray clothes. The trash can is empty. One of the desks is entirely bare. Two laptops perch on the other, tight-lipped as co-conspirators.
“It’s too tidy,” she says.
“Don’t you think?” Eli taps the iPhone on his bedside table. A setup assistant appears on the screen. “This must have been wiped.”
Laurel lifts the legal pad the way she might an object from a crime scene. Half of the pages are missing.
“They were planning something.” She thinks of the missing tanks in the dive hut. “Planning the same thing we were?”
Laurel tries to picture a mirror couple—Laurel and Eli Two—on an inverse journey to her own McMurdo. Of course, Laurel and Eli Two would see themselves as Laurel and Eli One.
“Maybe,” says Eli, who is frowning at the trash can. Stuck to the bottom, face down, is a photograph.
He lifts it up. Two people stand in Madison, at Picnic Point. They look exactly like Laurel and Eli.
Laurel dissociates with staggering efficiency. “I don’t want to look at that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it feels wrong. Invasive.” Neither of these words are right, but she can’t think of a better one. Spooked by the whiff of prophecy, she turns it over. “And we can’t stay in this room together.”
“What would we say? There aren’t any extra beds,” says Eli.
This is true: in October, Antarctic summer, everyone has a roommate.
“Besides,” he adds, “we only have to make it four days. ANITA hasn’t been able to crack the anomaly, so you and I are leaving on the fifth. Everyone is pretty dejected. Atmospheric scientists are coming in next.”
Laurel thinks back to her first week in Antarctica. She stood with Jules on a bridge outside Gallagher’s. The atmospheric scientists had left, he explained. A team of physicists had replaced them.