Chapter 15 Entanglement
Entanglement
One universe and many years earlier, when Laurel and Eli were in high school, their English teacher, Ms. Galasso, began class with a writing prompt.
When Laurel entered the room, the blackboard read: Define love.
Some of the boys rolled their eyes as they arrived. An overzealous girl named Amy Wagner, who always raised her hand before it seemed possible to consider the question, was taking rapid notes. The other students, including Laurel, stared at their notebooks, united in mortification.
Ms. Galasso, a former rugby star, was frank, flinty, and impossible to embarrass. She hoisted her desk chair into the center of the room, turned it around, and sat on it backward.
“All right,” she said. “Who wants to kick us off?”
Amy raised her hand. “Love is putting someone else before yourself.”
Ms. Galasso nodded noncommittally. “Let’s keep the ball rolling. What else?”
No one spoke. Laurel looked down at her notebook. She had only managed three words: It’s a feeling.
Then Noah Takahashi said, “You know you love someone when you’re afraid to lose them.”
“Yeah, like: the stakes are higher,” said Maisie.
“Love is really just a bunch of chemical signaling,” volunteered Tim Wiggins, who was on the debate team.
“Love is dead,” said a girl in silver eyeliner.
Mikey Schneider—a spiky-haired boy with a puka shell necklace—said, in a mocking falsetto, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.”
“That is definitely not love,” said Amy.
Ms. Galasso cut in. “Eli, you were writing for a while. Care to share your thoughts?”
Eli froze, as though he’d been caught. He hesitated, and the silence gathered charge.
“There’s this physics concept,” he said. “Called entanglement?”
A hockey player named Donald Brock-Medley mimed masturbation. Eli flushed. The previous year, when Eli transferred, Donald had nicknamed him Schnoz.
“If that is your level of maturity, Mr. Brock-Medley,” said Ms. Galasso, “then maybe you need to take a recess.”
Donald snorted, but he stopped. Laurel could see his piece of paper from her desk. In response to the prompt, he had written: MY DOG.
Ms. Galasso faced Eli again. He looked truly reluctant, and Laurel felt bad for him then, with thirty sets of teen antennae turned in his direction.
“Entanglement happens when two particles become connected,” he said. “You can do it in a lab: scientists entangle two photons, for example, and then separate them. After that, the photons influence each other. It’s like they lose their independence.”
“How so?” asked Ms. Galasso.
“Particles exist in an uncertain state,” said Eli haltingly.
“Their properties aren’t fixed until you measure them.
But if you measure one entangled particle, you also fix the other.
It happens instantly, and distance doesn’t matter: they could be billions of light-years apart.
Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ ”
At the mention of spooky action, Donald Brock-Medley grinned broadly. Ms. Galasso cast him a warning glance.
“I guess that’s what I thought of,” Eli said. “When you love someone, you’re attached, no matter what. You couldn’t separate yourself if you wanted to.”
May 1999
Laurel carries beets from the garden to the Hub. Now that the latest batch of tinctures is steeping, she goes where help is needed. All week she has flitted between work groups: kitchen, harvest, cleaning, carpentry. She picks and chops, vacuums and dusts.
And all day the same march in her head.
Eli is coming. Eli is coming. It plays while Laurel does dishes, while she makes her bed and sweeps the floor.
She’s told the other members that Eli is just an ex.
Though Esther seems to know the truth—or sense it.
At seventy, she is girlish, and always getting crushes.
She recognizes the disease in someone else.
Then again, Laurel’s claim is also true. She and Eli haven’t spoken in years. She doesn’t know what he is to her now.
Eli is coming. Laurel walks through the Longhall and deposits the beets in the kitchen. Rox waves in acknowledgment.
“Dishes?” she calls, and Laurel weaves between bodies to the bus tubs.
Yes: five years since she’s seen Eli and four since she’s been here.
Laurel is nineteen years old. While apprenticed to Olive, she has learned enough to fill a college course load.
That reishi buffers stress, for example, and lion’s mane bolsters the brain.
Elderberry and rose hips keep viral loads low, and nettle relieves muscle pain.
Roots should be gathered in late fall or winter; bark is harvested in spring, and only from fallen branches.
Flowers they pick, sparingly, as soon as the morning’s dew lifts.
The more bitter a plant, the more it gives.
Laurel takes the washing station beside Hetty, who hands her a pair of gloves.
When the dishes from breakfast are done, they’ll prepare for lunch.
Right now, the Center has roughly eighty residents.
Some, like Laurel, are former scientists.
Others were teachers or bus drivers or accountants.
A portion are activists, drawn to the Center’s ethos; many came for company after raising children or parents.
Some people join the Center simply because they have nowhere else to go.
New arrivals live in the Hub. Three years after Laurel’s arrival, Tess followed, but she only stayed for months: the summer of 2000, like her double. Other members have lived here for decades. A leadership circle of six, randomly chosen, rotates annually. By design, there are no men.
Every Sunday night, they gather to share news, ask for help, and air concerns.
The most recent meeting was a heated one.
Rox, who runs the kitchen, raised the idea of selling mushroom coffee.
Customers had asked for it at the farmers’ market, she explained.
It wouldn’t be hard to make a powder extract, with chaga or lion’s mane for focus.
Joanie disagreed with the concept. “We don’t need more mushroom products. We need people sitting with the mushrooms, talking to the mycelium.”
“We also need to support ourselves,” said Ha-yoon.
The meeting ran into the early hours of the morning.
Any decision requires consensus. Those who disagree are heard, no matter how lengthy their objections.
If opposition persists, dissenters must be brought to comfort with the choice of the majority; it is the majority’s responsibility to listen—and amend the proposal—until this is so.
Particularly fractious issues are tabled for a fortnight, as many times as necessary, and Laurel is often struck by the alchemy that time performs, turning resistance into curiosity, or anger to grief, or grief to healing.
An editorial team issues a monthly newsletter, though it is closer to a zine, as the Center has no computers.
Articles are submitted by anyone who wishes to contribute, then copied out in Juanita’s careful penmanship.
Joanie and Noor add drawings: portraits of Center landmarks, meandering botanical borders, caricatures of ignominious public figures.
Meeting notes appear in Peg’s loose dramaturgy.
Rox & Dana have moved to the cabin off Crescent Trail. Their cabin is now occupied by Peg, whose place has been filled by Noor & Hetty, whose old room is now taken by CK. Jaz has left for a month of soul-searching out West: bon voyage. Christi is back from organizing in Chicago: welcome home.
5/9: Carpools leave first thing for the antiwar protest in Milwaukee. No blood for oil!! If you need a sign, see Joanie.
Hub issues:
Who is going to fix Rainbow’s door—and when???
Discussion: Maeve & Tori. Lack of contribution & messiness their delinquencies (respectively).
Noor—do we really want people living in the Hub?
Rox—Maeve doesn’t live in the Hub. She lives in her head.
Dana—everyone has a right to be here. Bev—my only grudge against you Maeve is you don’t lift a finger.
Aisha—Tori’s clutter attracts pests. CK—just clean up your act a little.
Tori—has been trying. Maeve—I’m not good with conflict.
I want to be a lotus in a pond. Ha-yoon—well, Maeve isn’t a lotus and Tori could be a little tidier.
Maeve—what if I help Tori be tidier? Rox—and take a kitchen shift. General enthusiasm. Meeting adjourned.
Everything at the Center has a name. A pond, fringed by cattails, is the Swamp.
There are two meadows, Big and Small. The Hub is in the frontlands, and everything behind it—the cliffs and trails, the yurts and cottages—is the backlands.
Most residents move to the backlands eventually, but Laurel has always lived in the Hub.
She knew that her time at the Center would be limited, because of the date that she and Eli had agreed on.
Eli is coming. It is a miracle that Laurel hasn’t contacted him.
The first six months were hardest: she would lie on her bed with her knees drawn up, swiping through photos on her iPhone.
During the middle years, she kept herself distracted, but recently, the temptation became unbearable.
She slipped out to the road, for phone service, and pulled up her favorited contacts.
He was still there, along with Clare and Maisie, Tess and Gloria.
Her finger hovered over his name. One tap and she could hear his voice.
Then a car rounded the curve, and she stuffed the phone in her pocket, slinking back, thinking: Idiot.