Chapter 9 Elsewhere #2
A headache begins to condense. Bowed by the pressure, Laurel sits on the bed. The thought of the couple who slept there is so disturbing that she stands up again.
“Hey. As long as only one of us is freaking out at any given time, we’ll be okay,” says Eli. “Have you eaten?”
Laurel shakes her head. She can’t go back to the galley.
“I’ll get you something. And then you should rest. I’m too worked up; I’ll go to the library.”
“That’s nice of you,” she says. He smiles and touches her knee, just briefly.
Laurel only means to doze, but a deep fog overtakes her. When she wakes, the room is dark. She has no sense of how much time has passed.
“Eli?” she asks.
“I’m here.”
He must have drawn the blackout curtains.
“How long did I sleep?”
His voice sounds far away and intimate at once, like radio. “About twelve hours.”
“You’re kidding.”
A muffled click as the desk lamp turns on. Eli appears in a shaft of light: his lower body shadowed, his eyes owlish.
“No harm done. I brought you lunch,” he says. “And dinner.”
The room has changed. Eli separated the beds and created a privacy screen: a blanket hung over a ceiling pipe.
“Bit of home improvement,” he adds.
“Thank you, Eli. For this, and the food.”
Eli takes notes while Laurel eats. She wonders if her body will rebel, unfit for antiuniverse food, but the cornbread and green pea guacamole taste just like Diego’s.
When she feels slightly restored, Laurel asks, “What happened on the dive, do you think? In the ink cloud, I felt this pressure. It was sort of the like the one in the Arc, except that it seemed to be pushing me upward.”
Eli nods. “I felt that, too, but I didn’t think much of it. Bodies always want to rise to the surface in water.”
He adds a note, though, to his pad.
“What are you writing?” asks Laurel.
He hands it to her. At the top is a heading: Best Guesses. Above the most recent addition—What happened in the basin?—is an earlier entry.
Q: If we’re made of matter, and this universe is made of antimatter, why didn’t we annihilate on contact?
A: Matter turns to antimatter on crossing????
Beside that is a spasm of blue pen.
“I don’t know how you’re thinking about antimatter at a time like this,” she says.
“Just warding off insanity. Speaking of,” says Eli, “what was your friend talking about in the galley?”
“Louis? He thinks we did mushrooms last night.”
“Please tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course not. Louis did give me a piece of mushroom chocolate—my Louis, that is. I didn’t eat it, but maybe they did.”
She looks at the couple in the photo. Their smiles are excruciatingly familiar.
“They look so happy,” she says. “Why would they have wanted to find a portal?”
“Maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they lost Silas, too.”
“But they couldn’t have. If time is going backward here, Silas’s life hasn’t happened yet.”
“Good point,” says Eli. “Add it to our list of questions.”
Laurel creates a new entry—Q. Why did Laurel and Eli Two cross over?—but, with no best guesses, she leaves the A. field empty.
—
A blizzard descends on Saturday morning. It sounds like the sky is being torn. Laurel can’t see more than ten feet out the window.
Eli has already left: his bed is made, a note on the blanket.
Laurel slept in her thermal underwear, unable to muster the nerve to pore through the other Laurel’s closet.
Now she finds a bath caddy and a towel. At the bathroom sink, she glances in the mirror for the first time in thirty-six hours.
Her cheeks are sleep-creased. She can’t remember when she last washed her hair.
As she keeps staring, Laurel realizes that she hasn’t looked at herself closely in months.
Focus has stripped her down to the essentials.
She is chiseled, steely, with blue circles under her eyes and a wolf’s lean determination.
In the shower, she turns the faucet to cold by instinct.
Then she remembers that she doesn’t have to train for the dive anymore.
She laughs: it is preposterous that they seem to have pulled this off, though she still feels she can’t be sure, still doesn’t understand so much.
Laurel uses soap and shampoo from the caddy.
Her double’s toothbrush is a more unsettling proposition, but a trip to the General Store feels equally daunting.
After her shower, wrapped in a towel, Laurel examines the toothbrush again.
Its yellowed head looks back, faceless but somehow confrontational.
In the end, she washes it vigorously while a steward stares from the next sink.
Having defeated the toothbrush, Laurel decides to confront the closet.
She doesn’t recognize the clothing, though she could imagine buying most of it.
Wriggling into a sweater, she tenses, afraid that she’ll detect the smell of someone else’s body.
Nothing registers. If the other Laurel has a scent, it must be the same one she does.
When she enters the dining hall, Jules is holding galley rally.
“Absolutely no one,” he says, “is going outside today.”
Laurel fills a bowl with oatmeal and a mug with coffee. There’s no time to temper it with Frosty Boy: Nita waves from the center of the galley. Laurel pretends not to see her, then hurries upstairs with her oatmeal. She’s only eaten a spoonful when she hears a knock on the door.
Laurel peers through the peephole. Nita stands on the other side, glaring.
“I can see your shoes,” Nita says. “You might as well let me in.”
Laurel counts to eight before she turns the handle. “Sorry about that.”
She’s tacked on a smile, but it’s already slipping. Nita crosses her arms.
“Yesterday, at breakfast, you barely acknowledged me. And today you ignore me completely?”
“I’m recovering. The mushrooms must have hit me harder than you.”
Nita looks incredulous. “You’re joking.”
“I have a low tolerance,” Laurel says.
“Look in your pocket,” says Nita.
Laurel reaches inside her Big Red. She pulls out a piece of chocolate, still inside its plastic wrapper.
“You didn’t do mushrooms last night,” Nita said. “You put that in your coat, and then you left for Cape Evans. Don’t you think I deserve to know what happened?”
She plays with the zipper on her turtleneck, running her finger over the pull, and Laurel realizes that Nita isn’t angry. She’s hurt.
“You helped us,” says Laurel, slowly.
“Of course I helped,” says Nita.
Across the hall, a pair of stewards are tossing a hacky sack and eavesdropping.
“Will you come in?” Laurel asks.
Nita must sense that something has shifted, for she obeys without a word. She looks from the two separate beds to the blanket, scrunched on one end of the ceiling pipe.
“What’s going on in here?”
Laurel could invent another excuse, but she remembers lying beside Nita after the Midwinter Feast. Tell me if you make it to the antiuniverse, Nita said. And Laurel promised that she would.
Is this Nita? The person before Laurel is an optical illusion, neither friend nor stranger. Still, she might be the next best thing.
“What I’m going to tell you will sound totally insane.” Laurel retrieves the photo from the windowsill. Pointing to Laurel Two, she says, “That’s not me.”
Nita tucks her chin. “Did you hit your head down there?”
“I’m fine,” Laurel says. “As fine as I could be after swimming through a portal.”
They stare at each other. Wordlessly, Nita asks if what Laurel said is true, and Laurel nods in answer.
“So you made it.” Nita’s voice is hushed, her hurt forgotten, and Laurel realizes that this version, too, is a good friend. “You made it to the other side.”
“Nita,” Laurel says, “I’m from the other side.”
A glitch appears in Nita’s smile. She looks from Laurel to the photo, and then she stumbles back.
“It was just as much a shock to us,” Laurel says. “We had no idea what the antiuniverse would be like, but we didn’t expect this, with—with duplicates of everyone.”
Nita’s voice rises. “Duplicates?”
“I know,” says Laurel, and it feels so good to unburden herself, to share with just one person. “In my universe, Eli and I are divorced, and I’m a steward. Louis looks the same, but Miles has a shaved head, and you and I are roommates.”
“Oh my God.” Nita pulls her turtleneck over her mouth. “Do you have a mask?”
“What for?”
“You could be carrying some seriously incompatible microbes, not to mention another infection. We just got rid of Covid-19!”
“Covid-19?”
“The virus? It went extinct in 2019?”
“In my world, time moves in the other direction,” says Laurel. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”
Nita drops her turtleneck, but she keeps a hand over her mouth as she gasps. “So Eli was right.”
Laurel points to the man in the photo. “He knew about the Duoverse, too?”
“He came up with it,” says Nita—and then she becomes still. “You said we’re roommates. Does that mean there’s another version of me?”
Laurel nods.
“What’s she like?” asks Nita, searchingly.
How can Laurel encapsulate Nita? She lifts her hands, palms up.
“She’s wonderful. Loyal, and trustworthy, and smart. She helped us dive. She asked me to tell her if we made it.”
“That’s what I said, too,” says Nita. Outside, the sun emerges from behind clouds, and Laurel sees that her eyes are wet. “Why did she come to McMurdo?”
“She studies octopuses.”
Nita lowers herself into Eli’s desk chair. “I study cuttlefish.”
Laurel puts the photo on the desk, and they look at it together. This time, Laurel fixates on her double’s face, searching for some divergence, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s looking at herself.
“The other Laurel and Eli,” she says. “How long have they been at McMurdo?”
“Just for the summer. They got here in February.”
“She doesn’t work in the galley, does she?”
“No,” says Nita. “She’s a mycologist.”
Based on what happened at breakfast, Laurel isn’t surprised, but that doesn’t blunt the impact. She tucks this fact away for now and asks, “Why did they want to cross over?”
Nita shifts in her chair. “I can’t tell you.”