Chapter 15 Entanglement #3
What if she held nothing against him? He leaned into her, tall and heavy, and she stroked his scalp.
When he arced his neck, seeking comfort, she kissed him.
She missed doing that. He was warm, almost sweaty, and his mouth had an unvarnished tang that stirred her.
He unbuttoned his jeans. She peeled down her maternity pants, the ones she got on eBay that were too long in the crotch, and he pulled her toward the couch.
She knew what he was thinking. They’d had sex this way when she was pregnant with Silas One, Laurel bent forward and holding on to something.
She had expected to feel self-conscious as her body changed—at that point, they had only been dating for months—but they were so in love that nothing deterred them, and in fact Eli liked the belly, found it sexy, brought a hand below to hold it while moving in and out.
She put his hand there now, trying to replicate the memory, twenty-six and almost feral, but they weren’t twenty-six anymore.
She felt him slow down behind her, then soften.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” said Laurel. She meant it, but she still felt mildly humiliated.
“It isn’t you.” Eli looked agonized. “It’s me. It’s him.”
He came around to sit on the couch.
“It’s okay,” said Laurel, again. “I know.”
Eli was still wearing his shirt, his lower half exposed. He looked so vulnerable that it pained her. Laurel brought his boxers over.
“Don’t give it another thought,” she told him.
—
In the antiuniverse, the notion of nonhuman intelligence was becoming more mainstream.
One scientist showed that plants could learn through Pavlovian conditioning.
After being trained to associate a fan with light, pea plants bent toward the fan alone in anticipation.
A different researcher suggested that plants store long-term memories: when a leaf-folding plant was moved to a new environment, it maintained its previous behaviors for one month before adjusting.
In California, activists circled a two-thousand-year-old redwood tree slated for logging.
They didn’t move for days. When two people fainted from hunger, the story went viral, and volunteers arrived in droves.
Some had traveled from across the country.
“We’re perfectly willing to consider whether or not AI is conscious,” said one, in a TV interview. “Why aren’t we asking the same question about other nonhumans?”
“Because it’s disturbing,” a second person added. “If plants are conscious, then we have to think about our impact on them in a totally new way.”
The momentum excited Laurel. To chart the cave’s progress from afar, Gloria engineered a Raspberry Pi: a customized computer that sent data by satellite.
They nicknamed it the Pie. That winter, the electricity grew like a wave, interrupted by surges and spikes.
More and more often, a green ORB flashed red.
Laurel was eager to return, but a snowstorm descended on the day before their January trip. She sat by her bedroom window, watching the flakes come down and texting frantically.
Laurel
I think we’ll be fine tomorrow. They always clear the highways first.
Gloria
respectfully, laurel, yr crazy. we’re supposed to get 14 more inches.
Tess
I’m going to have to side with Gloria here. We’ll go after the holidays!
Laurel tipped her head back in frustration.
She was dreading the holidays, their first without Silas.
And though it pained her to admit it, she was nervous to spend a week at home with Eli.
She wanted to free him from the torment of self-blame, but she couldn’t interest him in therapy or support groups for grieving parents.
He rarely saw friends, or read books, or listened to music.
At night, he stayed up watching reruns of shows he had already seen.
“Everything else makes me anxious,” he said. “At least I know how Lost ends.”
On Christmas morning, Laurel woke early.
She lit a fire and wrapped Eli’s present: one of the record players that had just come on the market.
Then she drank her coffee on the couch, one hand on her stomach.
In recent weeks, Silas had become less active.
Laurel’s sensitivity to smell had faded along with her craving for pineapple.
What seemed natural in one direction felt fraught in reverse: instead of nourishing Silas’s body, his life force was fueling hers.
She heated Maisie’s holiday scent on the stovetop and tucked cinnamon rolls into the oven.
When Eli came downstairs, they played hearts, which had been Pete Salter’s favorite thing to do on Christmas.
That afternoon, Eli made an ambitious mushroom Wellington.
They ate in front of the tree before opening gifts.
Eli reveled in the record player. Then he handed Laurel a sizable box, carefully wrapped.
He watched as she loosened a long green ribbon. Inside the box was a camel-colored wool coat, lined with eucalyptus silk.
“I know it’s not the most romantic present,” he said. “But your blue coat has that hole in the pocket, and this felt like you.”
The coat waited in elegant folds.
“It’s gorgeous, Eli,” said Laurel.
“Oh, good.” Eli mimed wiping sweat, and Laurel kissed him. He kissed her back. But when she leaned into him, he patted her knee and said, “It’s been a nice night.”
Laurel nodded rigidly. The next weekend, she invited Maisie to go ice-skating on Lake Monona. The sun was high, the temperature frigid. They sat on a bench to lace their skates.
“When you were pregnant,” Laurel said, “did you and Noah sleep together much?”
“Honestly?” Maisie double-knotted the bow in her laces. “All the time.”
“Really?” asked Laurel.
The lake seemed to glow with cold. They hobbled down to the edge.
“It felt weird, because we were miserable. But we also had this urge. Maybe it was hormonal,” Maisie said. “Or a way to comfort ourselves. Like—even if we didn’t have the girls, we still had each other.”
Laurel had to keep from crying as she stepped onto the ice.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Maisie added. “Our therapist said it’s pretty common. She even framed it as a sign of a healthy relationship.”
Schools had resumed, and the lake was relatively empty. A scattering of ice fishermen sat on overturned buckets.
Laurel skated toward the horizon and said, “We’re sort of having the opposite problem.”
“Oh.” Maisie glided in parallel, leaving a few feet between them. “Honey, I’m sure that’s normal, too.”
“Maybe. He seems so distant.”
Maisie’s wedding ring glinted in the sun. Laurel and Eli hadn’t remarried. In the antiuniverse, it seemed superfluous: they were more committed here, a world away from home, than they’d ever been.
But she would have said yes again if he’d asked her.
“This distance,” Maisie said. “Has it happened before?”
“Not really,” said Laurel. It was a lie. After Silas died, she and Eli had barely touched, though she couldn’t say that to Maisie.
—
Tess invited Laurel to every horror movie night. Samir dragged her out for karaoke. Laurel continued to gather with the parents of Silas’s classmates, and she never missed her biweekly lunch with Clare.
Even so, she was lonely. Only Eli knew her completely.
Laurel found herself thinking of her double.
She still didn’t understand why they aligned in some ways but diverged in others, nor why Laurel and Eli Two had wanted to visit her world in the first place.
She didn’t even know whether they had crossed successfully.
Initially, Laurel had wanted them to succeed for selfish reasons: whisked out of the way, they wouldn’t interrupt her search for Silas.
Now she was glad to think that the other Laurel had filled her place.
Assuming that Laurel Two, like she, had kept her identity a secret, Laurel’s loved ones were mercifully ignorant: she might have lost them, but they wouldn’t have to know that they’d lost her.
In some ways, Laurel Two felt as unknowable as ever.
In others, she seemed tantalizingly near.
Frequently Laurel thought about the vision she’d had in the cave.
She remembered the office, the despair—the sense of another presence, weakening.
In that moment, the other Laurel had been as accessible as her own brain.
She hadn’t discussed the experience with anyone, not even Eli. It made her uneasy, and it fascinated her. Sometimes, her interest took on a morbid tone, as though she were considering the soundness of her sanity.
Lately the memory had begun to provoke a new feeling: the desire to comfort her double. It was a protective instinct, though not one that she associated with motherhood. More like what Laurel might feel for a sister, if she had ever had one.
Yet how could they communicate? Partitioned by the Duoverse, Laurel couldn’t call or send an email.
She set the question aside as the month continued.
She taught seminars, met with students, processed data in the Rhizotron.
The answer came to her as she walked home from campus.
Perhaps she could use a different, private technology—one that belonged to Laurel and her double alone.
She would try to reach the other Laurel with her mind.
That night, Laurel conjured the vision from the cave. She called on all the details she remembered, and then she tried to animate them. The difference was clear. Her vision had been a living thing; this one was only a reproduction.
Laurel had long suspected that information passed between universes.
If that was true, there had to be places where the membrane became permeable.
Maybe what she needed to find was a location: some inner void, a chasm deep below her consciousness.
One evening in November, she nestled in the bedroom’s dormer nook.
Eli had gone to his parents’ house for dinner.
A late-winter snowfall drifted past the window.