Chapter 9 Elsewhere #4
“That tech always gave me the creeps,” Nita says. “I’d try to cuddle with Sanjeet and go right through him.”
Louis shrugs. “Touch is overrated.”
Laurel drinks her tea obediently. Nita passes the cookies. Eli hasn’t said a word; he looks as though he wishes that they hadn’t left the dorm.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to start,” says Louis. “I’ve never been master of ceremonies before.”
The others look at him expectantly. His hair spills out from beneath a striped hat, its pom-pom drooping to one side.
“I guess the thing to say is that I’ll miss you.
I’ve never really had a family—it wasn’t like that with my dad—and I know Nita’s staying through winter, but it won’t be the same, will it, with Laurel and Eli gone?
So I went to Skua,” he says. “I was looking for friendship bracelets, but what I found was so much better.”
He produces a square tin. The lid reads Collector’s Marbles.
Nita says, “I think I’d rather have a bracelet.”
“Hush,” says Louis. “Open it.”
The tin has rusted; Nita has to use her nails to pry it apart. Inside are three silver ovals. They remind Laurel of Tamagotchis, the virtual pets that were popular when she was a teenager. Each has a small inset screen and a single black button.
“Holy shit, Louis,” Nita says. “Where did you find these?”
Louis beams. “In this tin! One of the military guys must have brought them over accidentally. Poor fellow didn’t know what he had on him.”
“What are they?” asks Eli.
“Spy equipment,” Nita says. “They’re called placemakers. I’ve never seen one in the flesh.”
“Invented during the last North American War,” says Louis.
Eli pales. “How many have there been?”
“North American Wars?” Louis bites his lip. “In total?”
“I think Eli was asking how many placemakers were ever made,” says Nita, smoothly, “but no one really knows, because they aren’t traceable. You can’t track them via satellite. And since they rely on solar energy, they’re rechargeable.”
“What exactly do they do?” Laurel asks.
Louis rolls his eyes. “You two need to review your American history.”
“They generate a meeting place,” says Nita. “To link them, you press the button while everyone is still in the same location.”
Louis scrapes the filling out of an Oreo. “I did that bit already.”
“Then you hand them out, and everyone disperses. The next time someone presses the button on their device, their coordinates appear on the screens of the others.”
“The thing is,” Louis says, “they only work once. After that, you have to sync them all over again. So we should save them for an emergency.”
“Darling,” says Nita, “don’t take this the wrong way, but if there’s an emergency, you aren’t the first person I’d call.”
“Who would you call first?”
“9-1-1?” says Nita.
Louis waves a hand. “There are things that you can’t tell those people.”
“That’s true,” says Laurel. She knows that this gift isn’t meant for her—it’s for Laurel Two, wherever she is—and she misses her Nita, her Louis, her Charlie. But this Louis is a balm, and suddenly she does feel pained to leave them: Louis and Nita Two, her only friends in this universe.
“One last thing,” says Louis. “Let’s take off our clothes.”
Nita chokes on her cookie.
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Louis says. “We’re doing a polar plunge.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, either.”
“Oh, come on. We’ll be bonded for eternity. Besides, I already reserved the sauna, so we can warm up afterward.”
“I think we’re sufficiently bonded already. And you can’t reserve the sauna,” Nita says.
“You can if you put up a sign that says Warning: Rodent Infestation.”
“I say we go for it,” says Eli. Laurel turns toward him with surprise. “I mean, you can’t go to Antarctica without doing a polar plunge. We’ll suffer now and spend our lives as champions.”
Laurel blows on her hands. “Then we’d better do it right away, because my fingers are going numb.”
“I’m keeping my bra and underwear on,” says Nita.
“Me, too,” says Laurel.
As Eli strips down to his boxers, they both avert their eyes. Ahead, the ocean pleats and shifts. Only Louis is stark naked. He seizes Laurel’s hand, then Nita’s.
“Hallelujah!” Louis screams, running in.
—
After the sauna has rendered Laurel a human temperature, she watches the Arc from bed.
As always, there is a busyness to the light, a sense of fathomless industry.
She isn’t ready to say goodbye to it. In the drawer of her bedside table, she found a cell phone, wiped like Eli’s.
Now she uses it to take a video, but the result is a poor approximation.
Laurel deletes the file. She’d rather remember the Arc like this: as a luminous dome with life inside, like a greenhouse at night.
In the morning, Laurel and Eli carry their bags to the Terra Bus. Well-wishers crowd on the ice.
Louis kisses her cheek. “Don’t forget me.”
“I never could,” says Laurel.
“People move on. You’ll see,” he says, his mouth in her scarf.
Laurel tucks a curl behind his ear. “Not me.”
Louis tells her to write, and she promises she will. When he leaves, she finds Nita.
“Thank you for everything,” Laurel says. She hopes that, somehow, Nita One will hear this, too. “You didn’t have to trust me, but you did.”
“I could say the same to you.” Nita presses a folded piece of paper into Laurel’s hands. “Here’s my contact information. If you need anything, get in touch. We’ll save the placemakers for an emergency, like Louis said.”
Laurel responds with a salute.
“One more thing,” says Nita. “Since Sam is leaving, I’m going to have a new roommate, and I just found out who she is: an illustrator, and kind of famous, too. Charlie Morrison. Ring a bell?”
Laurel grins. “You’re going to love her.”
—
Laurel and Eli climb into a cargo aircraft.
In addition to the passports, Eli found two wallets in the blue-and-yellow backpack. They examine the driver’s licenses while the other passengers board. The addresses match their old house in Madison, the one Laurel sold before she flew south. Under date of birth, though, are unfamiliar numbers.
“Two thousand sixty-eight,” Laurel says. “What’s yours?”
“Two thousand seventy,” says Eli.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, we know that time is inverted here. October comes before September, and night comes before morning, at least to our way of thinking, but cause still precedes effect. Maybe people get older as the years go backward.”
“But that would put the other Laurel and Eli in their fifties.”
“True,” says Eli, frowning. “And they certainly don’t look like it.”
—
Five hours later—or, Laurel corrects herself, earlier—they deplane in Christchurch.
Everywhere is convenience: duty-free shops and food courts and a Dunkin’ Donuts where Laurel and Eli get coffee with real dairy, dispensed as though it isn’t precious.
After customs, they stop at the Clothing Distribution Center.
Laurel turns in her Big Red with unexpected emotion.
An employee hands each of them a silver fern: a symbol of New Zealand, and the first plant she’s touched since leaving Wisconsin.
Outside, Laurel braces for cold by instinct, but the air is sixty-five degrees and humid.
Compared to volcanic rock, the sidewalk feels soft.
Billboards and cars, stoplights, houses, trees—they come flooding back, these facts of the world, a cacophony after so many months of water and ice.
Laurel misses McMurdo already, and with a sharpness she didn’t expect.
A shuttle takes them to the hotel where they’ll stay overnight.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rosen?” says the concierge, his eyes on the computer monitor.
When she and Eli were married, people often addressed Laurel this way, even though she had never taken Eli’s last name. The other Laurel didn’t, either, judging by her ID: Laurel Salter, it reads, beside a straight-faced doppelganger.
“We have a suite for you—my favorite room, actually,” says the concierge, “with a sitting room and a king bed.”
“Actually,” says Laurel, “could we have one with two queens?”
“I’d be happy to look,” the concierge says, without pause. Laurel makes a note to tip him for this alone. Surely he’s encountered other couples like them—bickering, or worse—and after rebooking Laurel and Eli, he passes them two keys.
—
The room is larger than the one they shared in Antarctica, but somehow, it feels more claustrophobic. At McMurdo, they had the distraction of work and a station full of other people, as well as separate bathrooms. There are no such buffers here.
They decide to order room service for dinner: night is falling, and navigating Christchurch feels ambitious.
The menu is entirely vegetarian, a rarity, and the costs are exorbitant.
They pay with the other Laurel’s credit card.
If Laurel feels like a criminal, she also wonders whether their doubles are doing the exact same thing.
While they wait, Eli brings his laptop to the table.
“What are you doing?” asks Laurel. They already perused the laptops at McMurdo. Like the cell phones, both had been restored to their original settings.
“Logging onto Wi-Fi. I have an idea,” he says. “What if we can get into their faculty email addresses?”
“Brilliant,” says Laurel. She retrieves the other laptop and opens the landing page for WiscMail.
The NetID is easy—lsalter—and her passwords have always been apple trees. But when she tries her favorite varieties, the rectangular box shakes stubbornly.
“I’m in,” says Eli.
Laurel comes to peer over his shoulder. “What was the password?”
“Physics term,” says Eli, his eyes on the screen.
Laurel scans it, too. “There are only eight messages.”
The emails are commonplace: spam, a utilities bill, a notice to schedule his annual physical.
Most interesting is a note from the chair of the physics department.
She welcomes Eli back from Antarctica and confirms that his leave extends through summer: he isn’t due on campus until the spring semester begins in May.