Chapter 10 Anima #4
“The arrow of our universe points toward increasing disorder,” he says. “Ice melts. Bodies age. Things fall apart. But this universe moves toward the Big Bang, and entropy is reversed.”
“Things build up,” says Laurel, catching on. “Molecules join other molecules. Complexity increases. But the process is noisy and prone to error, so most newborn adults have some kind of disease.”
“The same thing they died of in our world?”
“If Helen is any indication. Beth said she’s still being treated, so maybe that’s what happens in the white building.
It could be a kind of reverse hospice—a nursery.
And since the overtaker knew to bring Helen to Beth’s house, they must do genetic testing, matching newborns to their closest living relatives. ”
“But what about new life?” asks Eli. “Babies…”
“Maybe the definition is different. Newborns are people like Helen, and the elderly are kids.”
“So people live for decades before they meet their parents?”
Laurel thinks about the mirror. “Well, it’s the opposite for us. You don’t know who your children will be until you have them. In this universe, the order is reversed. You take care of your parents, and then your parents take care of you.”
Eli presses his palms to the sides of his head. “Do you realize what that means? Everyone outlives their children.”
The chill she feels then goes down to the bone. “Eli, if I were alone here, I think I’d lose my mind.”
“Me, too,” he says. “You’re the only reason I’m fairly sure I haven’t already.”
Laurel drops onto the sofa. The cushion presses back against her thighs.
In moments of overwhelm, she squeezes her own hand, reassured by its solidity.
This time, she almost leans against Eli.
The impulse spooks her. Their relationship is stable because they’ve sanitized it—and surely what she wants is just the comfort of another body.
The next time Laurel sees Clare, she’ll give her a longer hug than usual.
—
An email confirms her spring course assignment: the Principles of Composition. Before she can design it, Laurel has to teach herself.
In the other Laurel’s office, she dismantles everything she thought she knew about the natural world. Sometimes she stares in awe at the tree slices threaded with hyphae. Here, fungi are not agents of decay; instead, like dark matter, they hold material together.
She emails Kwame about Samir’s findings. In July, Kwame sends her an initial hypothesis. That month is unseasonably cool. Laurel bikes to her favorite Vietnamese restaurant and returns with takeout containers of pho.
“I heard from Kwame this morning,” she tells Eli. “He thinks that the fossil forest will compose in about three hundred million years—and I can check his work.”
Eli transfers the broth into bowls. “Because our past is their future?”
“Exactly. And the Kwame in our world, the one who discovered the fossil forest? He dated them back to the same period, before the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.”
Eli looks thoughtful. Several hours later, she hears his footsteps outside her office. Laurel leaves the door cracked, but he always knocks.
When she waves him inside, he asks, “Do you know when Helen died in our universe?”
Laurel shakes her head. “I had left for McMurdo by then. But before that, Beth said…” She pauses, trying to remember. “I think she said that it would be likely within a year.”
Eli is holding his laptop. He sets it down on her desk.
“These are the birth announcements for last month,” he says. Beneath a heading—September 2017—Laurel sees Helen’s name. “You came to Antarctica in October of 2016. This would have been one year later.”
Laurel cocks her head. “What are you thinking?”
“Do you remember how the birth dates on our drivers’ licenses didn’t make sense?”
Laurel thinks back to the moment on the plane when they puzzled over the strange years. She had not intentionally committed hers to memory, but she recalls it right away.
“Mine was 2068,” she says.
“And mine was 2070,” says Eli.
They look at each other.
“The years our doubles were born,” says Laurel.
The second implication follows on the tail of this one.
“And…in our world, the years we die,” says Eli. “You’d go two years before me.”
The thought is chilling. It feels as though she knows something she shouldn’t, stolen from the other side. She can tell by Eli’s face that he has more to tell her.
“If people here are born on the day—and in the same way—that they died in our world, then that should be the case for Silas,” he says. “August 18, 2014: we’d only have to wait three years.”
“But that would be the other Silas,” says Laurel. “Silas Two.”
“Think of Helen, though. She started life as an old woman, but developmentally, she’s a baby.” Eli puts a hand on her shoulder. “We’d raise him as ours.”
Until now, Eli has played the role of skeptic. Laurel hasn’t seen him with the zeal of a believer.
“What about our plan?” she asks. “We were supposed to cross back to our world in July.”
“I know.” He exhales, removing his hand. “And we can try. We will try. But when we made that plan, we had no data. Now we do. If Silas’s double is born here, he’ll need us.”
Laurel listens with quiet devastation. It would be easy to lash out, but Eli looks as pained as she feels.
“Everything we worked for,” she says. “It was all for him—for Silas One.”
“Maybe we only thought it was,” says Eli.
The room feels dense with the presence of both boys, each half real and half theoretical.
“Say we stay here, and we find the other Silas,” Laurel says. “What then? We don’t want him to keep getting younger.”
“The rest of the plan would stay the same. I’d still look for portals. We’d bring him home.”
That night, Laurel runs a bath. Could Silas Two really be within reach?
The thought sobers her as much as it has invigorated Eli.
If he’s right, gone is the era of daydreaming, the whole deck of possible cards.
Partly Laurel is angry at her own naivete.
The Duoverse has its own rules, just as Eli thought it would.
What did she propose at McMurdo? We use the antiuniverse like a time machine.
Only now does she recognize her delusion.
She wanted to believe they could skate through this world untouched.
Laurel eases into the water. To her, living here feels as strange as walking backward, but Silas Two would be a native.
If they find him, she and Eli will need to adapt.
—
She meets Maisie for the first time over frozen custard. Maisie squeals at the sight of her, and Laurel’s apprehension melts. When they hug, she lifts Maisie off the ground.
They sit at a picnic table, bare-shouldered, Maisie’s red tendrils floating in the sun.
When Laurel misses a reference, she ascribes it to winter-over syndrome.
Maisie listens with concern as she explains the symptoms: absentmindedness, memory loss.
As summer wanes, Laurel’s stumbles become less frequent.
She observes like a detective, listens more than she talks.
This new facility disturbs her. It doesn’t seem like a good thing, a talent for impersonation.
Yet there are moments, with Maisie, when it doesn’t feel that way at all.
One day, Laurel and Eli join Maisie’s family at Vilas Beach.
Maisie braids Laurel’s hair while the girls—Hazel and Frankie—bury Noah and Eli in sand.
Laurel leans back on Maisie’s knees. The closeness she feels is so genuine that it seems there must be some essence of the Maisie she knows in this one; and she wonders if part of the reason she can slip into the other Laurel’s skin is not because she’s a thief but because the same is true of them.
—
Memories of the people they left behind emerge in the same way that those of Silas did. It feels like an optical illusion: people cease to be only themselves. Sitting with Maisie or Clare, Laurel sees two of them instead.
“Are you okay, honey?” Maisie asks once. “Your eyes kind of glazed over.”
It’s a kind of double consciousness, as painful as it is distracting. To manage here, Laurel must choose one image—one person.
In June, seeking comfort, she searches for mushrooms. She finds fawn-colored morels at the base of an elm tree.
The ridges are filled with fine dust. As a tree composes, it sheds fungal cells, which disintegrate as spores and fall.
Absorbed by the cups of waiting mushrooms, they feed the mycelium underground.
A red fox watches Laurel with slanted amber eyes. It seems surprisingly unperturbed by her presence. When she steps back from the elm, the fox pauses, motionless; then it pounces on the mushrooms. Bounding away with its prize, the fox seems to smile in triumph.
That evening, the animal’s behavior strikes Laurel as even more peculiar. Foxes typically run at the sight of humans, but this one didn’t see her as a threat. And why did it target the morels? She’s only seen foxes eat fungi in fall, when more appealing prey are scarce.
Laurel solves the riddle just before she falls asleep.
The fox was unafraid of her for the reason it hunted mushrooms—the same reason that she couldn’t find meat in the grocery store.
If life here moves from old age to infancy, the body shrinks until it blinks out of existence. There are no remains after death.
—
Laurel will teach the Principles of Composition in Science Hall, the auditorium where she first saw Gloria.
In Laurel’s world, a Google search for Gloria Albert brought up thousands of hits, from the Washington Post (“ ‘Necrobiome’ of Deadwood Teems with Life”) to YouTube (“FREAKY PROF proves mushrooms GLOW IN THE DARK! [4K]”).
Here, the same search conjures dozens of Gloria Alberts, but none of them are Laurel’s.
On the first day of the semester, she wakes in a state of imposter syndrome. When she comes downstairs, a French press sits on the dining table, and Eli is making blackberry pancakes.
“You didn’t,” Laurel says. She planned to scarf a granola bar.