Chapter 12 Wave Function #2
The place looks unchanged: the hemlocks, the dunes, the crooked wooden boardwalk to the beach.
Laurel glances at the water, just to show herself she can.
Families cluster on the sand: children with buckets, seniors under umbrellas, middle-aged people keeping an eye on both parties.
She walks away from them, into the trees.
—
Laurel has wondered why the other Laurel’s research is so different from hers. Eli shares his double’s interests, but Laurel has never studied fossils or forest decomposition.
One week before they left for Michigan, she tidied her office on campus.
At a State Street bus stop, Laurel saw Samir.
The semester had just ended, and she held a box of office detritus as well as her messenger bag.
They had finished their paper on the fossil forest. Samir asked what she planned to study next.
“I’m not sure,” Laurel admitted, readjusting her hold on the box. “We could continue to look at fungi and fossils. Or wood composers, specifically.”
Samir nodded, but she could tell he was holding something back. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Why did you drop your work with electricity?”
Laurel became aware of her facial features. She tried to hold them in a way that feigned normalcy.
“It’s just that I thought you really had something,” Samir added.
It was the first time she heard that Laurel Two had studied electricity, the first hint of a throughline between them. She didn’t know why the other Laurel had given up that work. She could only say why she’d abandoned hers.
“I couldn’t prove it.”
Samir’s bus trundled toward them.
“Well,” he said, queueing to board, “you have to admit that you didn’t spend all that long trying.”
—
Shorebirds arc overhead. Laurel knows the way. She can still hear the gulls, the spray, though they muffle as the maples close around her.
In her linen bag is a notebook. A black pen. Her foraging knife. And a headlamp, the one Samir said he’d found in her caving supplies.
Fainter now are the voices of beachgoers.
Laurel walks over rocks and through black cherry trees.
The last fall mushrooms stud the forest floor: black trumpets, with their floral shape; shaggy lion’s mane.
Soon she catches sight of the ravine, but the cave seems to be missing.
She sees only more trees, oaks as high as fifty feet.
Laurel stops to situate herself. Could she have gone the wrong way? The cave should lie straight ahead, between the dunes.
Some of the oaks are still golden, but most wear their new summer leaves.
An unusual tree stands in the center of the ravine.
It looks older than the others, which would make it younger here: the crown isn’t nearly as wide, and the bark is loose and scaly, some flaking off in vertical strips.
Dark cords—rhizomorphs—surround the trunk and branches.
Laurel tilts her head. Strangely, the tree seems to be growing at a curve. The branches reach toward the sky, but the lower trunk leans diagonally.
It strains from the mouth of a cave.
—
Her scientist’s brain powers on. She notes the cave’s familiar shape: like the one that drew her last time, the opening is roughly circular, its circumference close to five feet. The oak tree fills most of that space. To squeeze around it, Laurel will have to cut a branch away.
Honey-yellow mushrooms crowd the floor. Armillaria: the same species she found here before.
—
“How was your hike?” asks Eli.
“Invigorating, actually,” she says, pulling her linen bag over her head.
After embodying her double for years, dishonesty comes easily to Laurel, but she’s never lied to Eli. Why doesn’t she tell him about the cave? Her thoughts about it are too nascent, too vague. She feels a gathering momentum. And she feels protective.
“I’d like to go back tomorrow,” she adds.
Eli plates potato curry from the stovetop. The Pakistani couple who own the nearest grocery store sell fresh food to go every day. “I’ll come with you. We could stop by that cherry place afterward.”
“To be honest,” Laurel says, “it cleared my head to be alone. Do you mind?”
Eli lifts a shoulder. “Okay.”
She blows on a spoonful of curry. A clock ticks in the kitchen.
“If I take my hike in the morning,” she says, “we could do Cherry Republic in the afternoon.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Eli says. “It was just a way to pass the time.”
His face betrays no emotion. Laurel chides herself for feeling stung.
The terms of their reengagement have always been clear: to get here, they had to work together.
Now the wheels are wobbling, the hood held shut with tape, and maybe even the flicker between them—that moment in the gazebo—was some perverse, subconscious way to keep each other going.
They’ve been yoked for years. She can’t blame Eli for wanting to be free of her.
—
Laurel dreams of Silas. The next morning, while making breakfast, she is besieged with memories of pregnancy.
The aches on the sides of her abdomen. A journal entry: I already feel the baby is a part of us.
In the last month, she slept on her lunch break, and her stomach stretched until it had no give.
As she eats, her chest tightens. It eases only when she drags her mind away, to the cave.
She stops at the café where she bought sandwiches years ago. The same cashier is working the register.
“Nice weather,” he says, jutting his chin at the window.
—
Laurel has plenty of experience pruning apple trees, but this is no apple tree. After cutting through two branches, her tank top is soaked. She sits for a moment, panting. Then she maneuvers through the gap.
Scant light flows in, but not enough for her to see clearly. At first, she merely has a sense of shape: a cavity, rounded, shadowed. The ground is oddly knobby, and she almost loses her balance.
When she turns the headlamp on, she understands why. Roots braid from floor to ceiling: a labyrinthine inner lining.
Laurel has never seen anything like it. Underground, the diameter of a tree’s roots can reach up to seven times that of the branch system.
With nowhere else to go, these have turned in on themselves and bunched in brain-like folds.
Rhizomorphs sheathe the roots in black netting, just as they do the trunk and the branches.
This phantasmagorical vision shakes Laurel on its own, but what she notices next nearly makes her lose her balance. The rhizomorphs have been studded with pins that measure electricity.
Wind pours through the opening. Fallen pins skitter into the back of the cave. Laurel forces a slow breath and follows them. The beam of the headlamp is narrow: she can only see one part of the space at a time. When her foot catches, she staggers, and the light swings crazily.
She lands near a metal box. A padlock hangs from the front.
Laurel fumbles for her double’s key ring. She already identified the three larger keys: the first corresponds to the house, the second her campus office, and the third leads to the Rhizotron. For the miniature one, though, she still hasn’t found a match.
The padlock opens with a fine shower of rust.
Inside are two shelves. The top holds more pins, as well as labels and a pen. On the bottom, Laurel finds the same voltmeters she used in her maze experiment.
She feels lightheaded. There is a Nutcracker quality to the cave, as if something toy-sized has grown grotesquely large: instead of standing over the experiment, Laurel is now inside it.
She hears a snapping noise.
“Who’s there?” she shouts.
Her voice sounds strangled, paranoid. No one responds.
As she turns, the headlamp sweeps through the chamber. It lands on another object: a tripod, algae-covered, has been propped against the wall. On top is a trail camera, its glass eye a marble of mold.
Laurel’s vision dims. It occurs to her that she should sit, but first, she needs to record what she’s found. She cuts a sample of the rhizomorphs and takes pictures of the cave. From the metal box, she takes a voltmeter. The trail camera won’t turn on, but she still puts it in her bag.
Finally she removes a handful of pins from the rhizomorphs. Wrapped around them are tape labels, with dates written in pen. Some have been blurred by water and dirt, but others are legible. If not for that now familiar slant, the handwriting could be her own.
Déjà vu consumes her—at least, that seems to be the best description, though it feels less like her memory than that of someone else. She has no agency, feels like a pair of eyes. Checking the pins, she moves along the rhizomorphs.
Her mind is a flurry of activity. She has not come here in months, and there is a great deal of data to transfer to the hard drive. Which cords have grown? Which are shrinking? She wants to know where the current is strongest, and how the network in the rhizomorphs relates to the tree.
These thoughts transmit automatically. What registers at a delay is the feeling underneath them. Her scientific interest is a scrim over distress. As a curtain hides a window, it obscures something else.
Laurel wants to understand what lies behind the curtain. To do this, she must trade the role of viewer for participant. Her mind is the growing tip. She tries to fill the moment, to colonize it.
The sadness is her guide. She follows it like a thread. Now the setting changes: Laurel looks into her own home office. But the furniture is different, and a second person lies inside. A current growing weaker, no matter what she tries.
—
Laurel drives as if for the first time. Her right foot is shaky on the pedals, and a Range Rover honks when she veers into the next lane. Somehow, it is already evening.
She calls Eli as soon as her service returns, but he doesn’t answer.
Nor is he in the apartment. In the kitchen, she finds the ingredients for his vegetarian shrimp scampi: lemons and garlic, mushrooms, a bottle of Muscadet. Parsley wilts in a water glass. He must have walked to the grocery store while she was in the cave.