Chapter 10 Anima
Anima
The cemetery near Laurel and Eli’s house exists in the antiuniverse, too, but with an unfamiliar building at its heart.
In the universe of their birth, tombstones continued unimpeded from Glenway Street to Highland Avenue.
Native mounds spread through the northeast corner.
The Catholic section occupied the northwest corner, the Jewish one a small southwestern plot.
More recently, two sections were established for the Hmong.
The Union Soldier’s Lot and Confederate Rest bracketed the mausoleum.
Here, the effigy mounds remain, built in chorus with the land.
But there are no soldiers’ plots, and the mausoleum is absent.
Stranger still, every tombstone is blank.
In the center of the cemetery is a white building.
Its shape alone is notable: an oval dome, like a half-buried egg.
There is a skylight, but no windows. The entrance is flanked by guards.
Laurel wonders what happens inside. She doesn’t ask. As immigrants to this universe, Laurel and Eli are intensely aware of what they don’t know. They fear exposure as not-Eli, not-Laurel, not-of-this-place.
So she watches.
On this September morning, Laurel sits on a bench.
A short distance away, workers erect a white tent.
These appear at different places on the grounds, always over a tombstone.
The tent is accompanied by a covered walkway, made of the same material, which leads to the white building.
Both the tent and the tunnel have clearly been designed for privacy: the action inside takes place in silhouette.
Nothing distinguishes this installation until a figure emerges from the walkway. Laurel has seen him before, ducking in and out of tents: a tall Asian man with an asymmetrical haircut. He wears a long, black coat.
As he passes her bench, the man nods at Laurel.
Flustered, she returns the gesture; he’s never addressed her before.
Paths radiate diagonally from the white building.
At the far end, they intersect with a loop that encloses the cemetery.
The man takes the nearest spoke to that outer ring, which he follows before branching to the sidewalk.
Laurel stands without thinking and follows him. She reaches the loop at the same time as the man does the crosswalk. There he stops, turning his head both ways to look for cars, which puts Laurel in his peripheral vision. She ducks into the grass.
“Ma’am,” barks a guard, “please keep to the paths.”
Several people turn to look at Laurel disapprovingly. Shamed, she hustles back to the loop. Has she broken some social code? What if she’d wanted to put flowers on a grave?
By the time she reaches the crosswalk, the man in the dark coat is gone. Laurel walks briskly to discharge the sense of being chastised. A pebble slips into her sandal. She pauses behind a woman with a stroller to jiggle her foot.
When Laurel turns on to her street, she sees the man again. She shrinks back to avoid being noticed as he continues down the block. He stops at the house before hers. On the porch, a swing drifts loosely in the wind. The man lifts a hand to knock on the door of Laurel’s neighbor, Beth.
—
When Laurel and Eli landed in Madison, stiff-legged and underslept, her cell phone showed one new voicemail. She played it for him on speakerphone.
“Welcome home, you two,” someone said. “The renters are gone, and the cleaners are finished. You’re all set to move back in.”
They took a cab from the airport. As it entered their old neighborhood, Laurel seized with suspense.
The oldest-looking houses were angular and made of concrete.
Their Cape Cod looked new in comparison: the cedar shingles hadn’t silvered.
Solar panels hopscotched on the roof, and a hybrid was parked in the driveway. The front yard had no apple trees.
Laurel carried the mushroom tote bag she’d found in the lab at McMurdo. One of her double’s keys opened the door.
Certain features of the house matched those of the one she had recently sold: the bookshelves and bay windows, the woodstove with its long black pipe. But the kitchen was a slightly darker yellow than Eli had once painted theirs, and the bedroom’s creaky floorboard had traveled two planks over.
After her walk-through, Laurel returned downstairs. “I haven’t seen a single photo in this place,” she said.
Laurel and Eli’s walls had been hung with family photos. Maisie had framed the Polaroids from their wedding. Silas’s school pictures staggered above the staircase. In the hallway, the Rosens stood in front of their Chicago brownstone, and the Salters waved from the orchard.
“They must have taken everything down for the renters,” said Eli, but he seemed distracted. His eyes had a haunted look, and he still hadn’t moved from the couch.
Laurel came to sit beside him. “We don’t have to stay here. We could sell the house and find places to rent.”
“Simpler this way,” said Eli. “You take the upstairs bedroom. I’ll sleep in my office.”
Laurel didn’t press him. She understood that he wanted distance from the second floor.
When Silas died, Laurel and Eli had agreed on one thing: they would not dismantle his bedroom.
Eli slept there until he moved into his own apartment.
After that, Laurel couldn’t bring herself to open the door.
By the time she sold the house, a shroud of dust had settled over the bed.
Silas’s last Lego creation—a Jedi training diorama—still sat on the rug.
Maisie and Gloria came over to help. Just as Laurel needed, they worked briskly and in quiet.
Afterward, she stored a box of keepsakes.
The rest she donated. Somewhere, another child could build Yoda’s planet, Dagobah, again.
Here, what had been Silas’s room was the other Laurel’s office.
This room had been emptied for the renters, too.
Laurel repopulated it with the contents of the boxes she found in the closet.
She propped a dried reishi on the wide oak desk.
On the shelves, she set fungal artifacts beside books.
Last, she hung the walls with tree slices coated in varnish.
Hyphae layered through the heartwood: each specimen had been preserved in a different stage of decomposition.
She found no Armillaria, in mushroom or rhizomorph form. This was both a relief and a puzzle.
Laurel put the placemaker from Louis in one of the oak desk’s many drawers.
She hung her double’s shawl over the chair; to keep it close felt like a sign of respect.
Laurel Two might have unnerved her, even assumed her identity—but Laurel was also a guest, living in a stranger’s home, using her clothes and her bank account.
Every day, Laurel and Eli noticed something new.
One morning, a young man rang the doorbell.
When Laurel answered, he produced a petition against VR headsets in the workplace.
Time’s latest issue sounded the death knell of the Metaverse (“Facing Mass Depression and Anxiety, Psychologists Prescribe Physical Life”).
The local grocery co-op had no meat section.
As a vegetarian, Laurel found this refreshing, but she still inquired out of curiosity.
The clerk stared as though she had inquired about the human heads.
Like Eli, Laurel would resume teaching in spring, when the academic year began. Until then, they agreed to pursue separate lines of inquiry. Eli’s task was antiuniverse physics. They assigned biology to Laurel.
“Thank God for Google,” Eli said.
It was late September. They lay on lawn chairs in the yard below a warm sun.
“I don’t think I want to use the internet,” said Laurel.
By Eli’s expression, she might have suggested that they swap the hybrid for a horse. “What do you mean?”
Laurel propped herself on one side. “We’re meant to learn by interacting, don’t you think? Think of a baby, a kid. I don’t think I’ll understand this place very well if all I do is read about it.”
The second reason, which she did not share, was that Google overwhelmed her.
Everything she wanted to know about this universe, and anything she didn’t, was instantly accessible.
Laurel had Googled something once, after her first trip to the grocery store.
She had purchased a butternut squash and wanted to remind herself of the best roasting temperature.
As soon as she typed the name of the vegetable, an AI summary appeared onscreen: Butternut squash originated in Argentina—then known as New Peru (Nuevo Perú)—in the late 6000s.
Its first extinction occurred during the Fire Age of 5048–3772.
Laurel slammed the computer shut. If she had learned anything so far, it was that titrating information kept her sane—or, at least, saner.
She and Eli worked separately until evening.
Over dinner, they shared what they’d learned.
There was a high to the learning curve, but sometimes, wrongness descended like a pall.
One evening, Maisie called. The dissonance was overwhelming: her voice was painfully familiar, her personhood a total mystery.
Laurel’s appetite faded. Afterward, she put earplugs in and lay down to mute the senses, the barrage of new.
The next morning, her cell phone rang. It was Clare Two, the other Laurel’s mother, and not for the first time. There was no one Laurel felt more nervous to meet, but to avoid her any longer would only rouse suspicion.