Chapter 11 The Overtaker
The Overtaker
Their third autumn in the antiuniverse is the most beautiful yet.
The trees change early—coral and crimson and dark purple leaves sprout straight from their stems—and there are no late winter storms, so the colors remain for months.
The days grow warmer, longer. Laurel goes to the pumpkin patch wearing a jean jacket.
Even the end of the season is glorious: lilac asters bloom, and beech leaves toss like gold coins in the wind.
The academic year will end just before Labor Day.
While Laurel administers a final exam, her cell phone pings with a flash flood warning.
Afterward, she swings her messenger bag over one shoulder and hurries to the bicycle rack.
A graduate student in her sixties stops to thank Laurel for her guidance that semester.
She isn’t the first aspiring mycologist to express admiration.
In the past, Laurel didn’t feel deserving: the students were thinking of Laurel Two, not her.
This time, everything the student describes occurred after Laurel’s arrival: the care Laurel showed during office hours, her insight on the woman’s thesis.
Walking her bike to the curb, Laurel thanks the woman with equal sincerity.
The sky darkens as she turns onto University Avenue.
The student’s thesis earned her a postdoc at the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in Utrecht—the same institute where Tess One had been hired.
When Laurel perused the website of the antiuniverse institute, she found a picture of Teresa Torrez Two.
She had a shaggy bob with short bangs, and her eyebrow ring was on the right side instead of the left.
Tess One had wanted to improve the detection of volatile signals in the field.
Tess Two, Laurel learned, had done it. In Utrecht, she’d created a device called an odor ratio biosensor.
The ORBs were transparent balls made of bioplastic; empty, they looked like bubbles.
Air entered through a narrow opening, and a sensor assessed volatile molecules.
Signals were entered in a database and matched to the likeliest organism.
Laurel emailed Tess Two to say how much she admired her work.
Thunder sounds as if from a sky-wide drum.
Laurel pedals quickly, buoyed by her conversation with the student.
Teaching helps to distract her at this time of year.
Whenever August approaches—and with it the day that Silas died—Laurel and Eli become tense.
They’ve had no way to answer the question that plagues them most: whether Silas, like Helen, will be born on the day he died.
There is also the matter of where. Would they find him on the beach in Michigan, or would he appear in the cemetery?
Laurel is convinced that Silas will be in Michigan.
Eli isn’t. To cover their bases, he thinks one of them should stay in Wisconsin while the other goes to Cedar.
Laurel believes they should stay together.
They lost him while apart: Laurel at the cave, Eli walking away, Silas in the water.
Shouldn’t they make sure that the reverse is true this time?
Lately, they’ve been arguing, which has agitated both of them. They can’t unravel now.
Laurel hangs her bike in the garage and enters through the back door.
“Did you get caught?” Eli asks, from his office.
She wrings her hair out in the kitchen sink. “I’ve basically showered.”
Upstairs, Laurel strips off her wet clothes and hangs them on a towel bar to dry. She changes into leggings and a sweatshirt; the legging pocket doubles as an iPhone charger, but the sweatshirts of the future are comfortingly unchanged.
Before she goes downstairs, she removes a waterlogged Band-Aid.
The paper cut underneath is only hours old, but the cut has already knitted together.
In another day, even the pink line will disappear.
The arc of the antiuniverse moves toward healing as well as youth: even colds pass more quickly.
Laurel is thirty-four years old, two years younger than she was when she left for Antarctica.
She has no proof, but she can feel it. When she stretches, her knees don’t pop, and the silver hairs at her part are now blond.
Laurel, Kwame, and Samir are finalizing an article, and she promised to look at their edits before the weekend begins on Sunday.
She reads at her desk as the sky darkens further.
When she stands to turn on a lamp, Laurel notices a streak of motion outside.
Someone is walking briskly up the block.
She can only see a long coat’s swaying hem: the person’s face is obscured by a black umbrella.
The doorbell rings.
“Are we expecting anyone?” calls Eli.
“No,” says Laurel, jogging downstairs.
She opens the door to streaming water. A familiar face peers calmly through the din.
“Hello, Laurel,” says the overtaker. “May I come in?”
—
What does one serve to an overtaker? Laurel offers every option: coffee, tea, water, wine. Kenji Nakamura requests tea.
She puts the kettle on as Eli emerges from his office.
His curls are haphazard, a pencil tucked behind one ear.
When Laurel introduces the overtaker, he removes the pencil and smooths his hair.
Mr. Nakamura hangs his coat on a stand in the entryway.
They sit in the living room, the overtaker on a chair, Laurel and Eli on the couch.
“I knew the rain would be torrential when it came,” the overtaker says. “But your house is so close to the cemetery. I couldn’t bring myself to drive.”
Laurel can’t think of what to say to this. Of all the subjects she’s longed to discuss with an overtaker, weather ranks at the bottom.
“Always nice to stretch your legs,” Eli offers.
The teapot whistles.
“How do you like the neighborhood?” asks Mr. Nakamura. For years, Laurel will refer to him this way. He is younger than she and Eli, but despite this—or, rather, in this universe, because of it—it seems disrespectful to use his first name.
While Eli praises the relative quiet and the local chocolate shop, Laurel walks into the kitchen.
Drought, frost, and deforestation have restricted tea production.
The wealthy can still afford to discard leaves after a cup, but most people have a kettle like the one she retrieves from a cabinet.
Loose tea goes in one half of a vacuum-sealed compartment, and after brewing, the other half dehydrates the leaves for further use.
Laurel initiates the dehydration process before she brings three teacups to the living room.
“You’ve been here three years, I think?” asks Mr. Nakamura, after thanking Laurel for the tea.
“That’s right,” she says, sitting. When Eli touches her arm, Laurel sees her error: she was thinking of herself, not her double. She flushes.
“Don’t be afraid,” the overtaker says.
Eli speaks first. “What do you know?”
“About this, more than most. Some think the overtakers know everything. That isn’t true. I see around corners and under surfaces, in part because of people like you, who arrive infrequently—very infrequently—and tell us about where they came from.”
In the silence that follows, Mr. Nakamura takes his first sip of tea.
“Is that what you want from us?” Eli asks. “Information?”
To Laurel, the question sounds harsh. But perhaps he isn’t wrong to perceive an exchange.
“I come with news—news I believe you want very much. I offer it freely. What you choose to tell me in return, if you do so at all, is your decision. Of course, the less you share, the less you might learn. We have different pieces of the puzzle.”
“If we talk to you, who will you tell?” asks Eli.
Mr. Nakamura returns his teacup to its saucer.
“There are people who want to find and control the kind of paths that brought you here. My purposes are antithetical to theirs. Our conversation would go no further than my father, as my son revealed the secrets of our kind to me.” In response to their surprise, he adds, “Often the gift runs in families.”
“The gift,” Laurel repeats. She thinks of the screens in the graveyard. She assumed that interpreting their contents was a matter of science.
“Overtaking is less a manual job than a mystical one,” Mr. Nakamura says. Only Eli has been able to read her so easily.
“Is it like a religious position?” asks Eli.
Mr. Nakamura crosses one leg over the other. Beneath his pantlegs are work boots, chipped with mud.
“The overtakers are not aligned with any religion, though we work in partnership with religious institutions. Individually, some of us practice; others don’t. What we share is an ability to interpret certain texts, and a sense for the moment of rupture that marks life’s beginning.”
Eli looks skeptical. There is a strange energy between him and the overtaker, almost one of competition, though it seems to come mainly from Eli’s side.
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“In the cemetery, we use electricity to track the process of composition. Births that happen this way are straightforward; some debate whether they require an overtaker at all. The mark of the gift is the ability to do our work elsewhere.”
The overtaker folds his hands.
“You await the birth of a child,” he says.
“Yes,” says Laurel, from an upper portion of her throat.
“I believe that you’ll find him in a place you know—the same place where you lost him before. But remote births are unpredictable. Most of the time, the newborn recovers. Still, there are risks.”
Eli’s shoulders are tense. “Do you mean he could die?”
The overtaker seems to wince, just as the grocery clerk did when Laurel asked about the meat section.
“That isn’t possible here—not the way you understand it. But life can be compromised in other ways.”
“Just tell us what to do,” says Eli, and Laurel feels caught between them, understanding Eli’s impatience but wincing at the edge in his voice.
“Take your son to a hospital as soon as you find him,” the overtaker says.
Eli’s raised brow verges on sarcasm. “Anything else?”
“Don’t waste time.”
Laurel can tell that this is more than a platitude, but Eli seems to be reaching his limit.
“Mr. Nakamura,” she says, interjecting, “you mentioned that the overtakers can interpret texts. What did you mean by that?”
She isn’t sure that he’ll answer, because of Eli. But what irritation Mr. Nakamura felt, if he did so at all, is now imperceptible. He is tolerating Eli, she sees, as an adult does a child.
“Our texts document lineage. We call them the Maps.”
“Is that how you learned about us?”
For the first time, the overtaker pauses. Laurel watches him decide how much to tell her.
“The Maps trace the citizens of this world,” he says. “Sometimes, though, ink bleeds through from the other side.”
Water sluices down the windows, as though the house were a ship.
“Have you been to our world?” Laurel asks.
Mr. Nakamura shakes his head. “No. In fact, I’ve only met two other travelers—another couple. I was apprenticed to my son, and theirs was the first visit I did alone. I didn’t know whether to believe what I heard. I told my son, of course, and we tried to make sense of it together.”
Eli leans forward. “Where was their portal?”
“They didn’t use one.”
“Then how did they get here?”
“With a tool—some kind of instrument. I asked to see it, but they said they didn’t have it anymore. It was old nuclear technology, decommissioned before I was born.” Mr. Nakamura pauses. “Will you tell me about your portal?”
Eli looks from Laurel to the overtaker. He seems to be deciding whether to trust him.
Faced with Eli’s hesitation, Laurel realizes that she does trust the overtaker, and perhaps without reason; there is nothing to account for it except her own instinctual affinity.
But Eli’s choice is calculated: when he speaks again, it is with measured resignation, as if to fulfill his side of a bargain.
He must recognize, too, that Mr. Nakamura could be a valuable ally.
“Laurel discovered it,” he says.
Both men turn to her. Laurel tells the overtaker about the Arc. Then she describes her dream about the spaceship, and how the shape in the window cued her to the basin. Finally she explains what the basin looked like in real life: the rocky curve; the octopus that led her down one side.
“Where was Eli?” asks the overtaker, who has become vigilant. It occurs to Laurel that he has not been truly interested in what they’ve had to say until this moment.
“Coming down, toward me, from the other end of the basin.”
“You met in the middle.” Mr. Nakamura’s nod suggests some private confirmation. “Is that where you found the portal?”
“I think so,” Laurel says. “The bottom of the basin was filled with octopus ink. I’ve always wondered why.”
“Maybe the octopi detected something strange about that area. They might have inked it out of wariness. Animals sense so much more than we do,” says the overtaker.
Outside the living room, lightning streaks, brief as the flash of a camera. Mr. Nakamura’s gaze is intent.
“Go to Michigan. Find your child,” he says. “Bring blankets, to keep him warm, and learn CPR to revive him. Memorize the route to the nearest hospital. Practice this—all of it—until it feels like second nature.”
Laurel thanks him in return, and Eli nods in agreement.
While Eli carries the teacups to the kitchen, Laurel leads Mr. Nakamura to the entryway.
There she lifts his coat from the stand.
The garment is much heavier than she imagined, and the nap is finer than velvet.
The overtaker shudders, and she sees that she has disobeyed some code—that the garment is as personal to him as his own skin.
Laurel feels mortified, but as before, the reaction passes: Mr. Nakamura returns to his equilibrium, pardoning her ignorance. She can’t shake the sense that there is something more than human about him, though he, too, is a citizen—a parent.
“Mr. Nakamura,” she says, “can I ask how old your son is now?”
Alone, she looks more closely at his face. There is a small, straight scar across one cheekbone. He turns to her in a way that is less formal, more familiar, and for a moment she feels certain that they’ve met before.
“He died five years ago.”
Laurel flinches. “I’m very sorry.”
The rain has simmered to a steady tapping. Mr. Nakamura steps outside. “My wife and I were lucky to have as much time with him as we did.”