Chapter 15 Entanglement #6
They drove back to the road for phone service. Gloria called in sick to her job at the diner, and Tess emailed a TA on her BlackBerry. Laurel made two calls: one to Samir, to ask if he could teach her class, and one to Eli.
Rain began to fall lightly in early afternoon. Droplets shimmered as though they were not falling but suspended. The currents in the cave remained stable, and the ORBs barely flickered. Tess climbed into the tree to make sure that they were working.
They ate a somber dinner at the camp stove.
“At least we can bathe tomorrow,” said Tess.
“Yeah,” Gloria said. “Maybe we’re the problem. At this point, our BO is probably interfering with the VOCs.”
—
That night, Laurel took the second watch.
Leaving the tent, groggy, she felt like a parent with a newborn.
But as she settled by the tree, the better analogy seemed to be the end of pregnancy—not the pregnancy she had experienced in this world, but that which she knew from her own.
She had slept more fitfully in the third trimester than she did after Silas was born.
Sometimes, after she had peed for the eighth time in a single night, she stood in the bathroom and looked out of the window to the yard.
She was exhausted and frequently cranky, but even her crankiness was tinged with the sublime—the paired mundanity and sacredness of waiting.
There was a soft padding sound. Tess made her way from the tent to the tree, wrapped in a blanket and yawning.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Laurel patted the grass beside her, and Tess sat down.
The rain made a gentle tapping sound. Silver flecks were visible, like tinsel, in the air around the spheres.
Laurel wished that Eli could see the tree like this.
If she still had an iPhone, she would have been able to take a video, but she had downgraded to a Nokia.
“Don’t you love watching Gloria here?” asked Tess. “All that excitement. If we gave her permission, she would probably camp out for weeks.”
Laurel laughed. “It’s true. She has so much life ahead.”
“Exactly,” said Tess. “And I’m already exhausted.”
Tess was a hard worker. What fatigue she felt rarely showed. She prided herself on being energetic, game—a team player. Laurel had never seen her look so weary.
“You’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?”
“Forty-five years?” Tess’s laughter had a wry edge. “God, that makes me sound ancient. But I feel it. I’m not as sharp as I used to be. And I sleep like shit out in the field.”
“If you aren’t sharp, there’s no hope for the rest of us,” said Laurel. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”
Tess smiled. They looked up at the ORBs. The gas inside them remained green. For a moment, Laurel thought that certain plumes had taken on a copper tinge. Then she sat back. It was probably her own projection; she felt as though she were willing the ORBs to change color.
“Lately I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do after this,” said Tess.
“Any ideas?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy.” Tess paused. “I might join a commune.”
“Really?” asked Laurel. She didn’t share her true thinking, which was that Tess’s instinct made sense: Tess One had spent the summer at a commune, after all, when Laurel was in college.
“I know it might sound out of left field,” Tess added. “It’s just—being alone for so long…I don’t know if that’s how we’re supposed to live.”
Tess rarely spoke about her love life. Delicately, Laurel asked, “Have you ever…?”
“Had relationships? Here and there. But nothing stuck. Don’t get me wrong—I like being unattached. I have financial freedom; I helped my parents open their gallery. My grandparents want to set down roots in Mexico. I can help them do that, too. My life is full.”
“It is,” Laurel said. Tess was always on the way to a film screening, or a pottery class, or dinner with a friend.
“Still, it gets old, doing everything alone. Nice to have someone to cook for once in a while. Hence the commune,” said Tess. “Maybe it’d be better as a fantasy. But maybe I’d actually enjoy being less independent.”
“I’ve heard of a place,” Laurel said. “A commune, where women farm mushrooms. I think it was called…”
She swept her memory. Tess One entered the Rhizotron, magnetic with her short hair and Doc Martens. A small tattoo hid in the bend of her elbow. It was a circle, segmented. Two words curved around the circumference.
What does that say? Laurel had asked.
And Tess had said—
“The Center,” Laurel told her.
Tess wiggled her eyebrows. “Sounds culty.”
In the woods, there was a sudden stillness. Then came a timpani of rain, as if the sky had been holding its breath.
“Shit,” said Tess. She covered her head.
But Laurel was staring at the tree.
“Tess,” she said, squinting.
Laurel had only ever seen the gas in the ORBs turn one of two colors: the green of the fungi, or—just briefly—the red of the tree.
Something different was happening now. Green became olive; red leaned toward umber; until, at last, all turned bronze, as if the red and green had blended. The spheres juddered with tension.
The Pie began to beep. Laurel fumbled for the screen. The peaks on the main graph leapt over the top of the frame.
—
Laurel woke Gloria.
Dawn was at least an hour away, the sky an ashen blue. They ran to meet Tess in the cave. The ORBs there had turned the same color as the ones in the tree—and every rhizomorph was glowing.
Gloria reached for the Pie. “I’ll stay here.”
“I’ll stand in the middle, at the entrance, so I can see all of the ORBs,” said Tess. “Laurel, you should go to the tree.”
They took their places. Laurel breathed shallowly. How many other members of these woods could sense that a change was coming?
There was a low rumble of thunder, and then, like music, it began.
—
This is what Laurel knew.
She knew that animals compose in layers, from the inside out. The hardest part—the skeleton—comes first. Then the soft ones: tissues, organs, skin. Blood flows. When enough of its cells have formed, the clock of the heart starts to tick.
Only the brain remains dormant until the end. It forms like any other organ, but it does not animate. And so the body waits like a planet for its star—for a boost of power so explosive that a central switch turns on.
Laurel could not prove that she saw this happen in the tree.
But as she stood there, she believed that she was witnessing a birth.
The ORBs at the roots were the first to transform.
The bronze plumes shone brighter, louder—and then, in an instant, they turned crimson.
The rest followed in an upward flush. Red flowed from the lowest branches to those at the top, like blood to the cheeks of someone gaining consciousness.
It would be too simple to say that independent meant “separate.” The tree and the fungi would always be connected. Still, there was an unmistakable calving, as one cell becomes two.
The tree quivered. To Laurel, it seemed to be singing.
She could not identify the lyrics. For now, she imagined the song that everything sang, for as long as it could:
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.
May 1999
At six, the Center’s residents flood into the Longhall for dinner.
The meals here are astonishing. Buttery shiitake eggs, scrambled with Wisconsin cheddar.
Lion’s mane sliced thin and soaked in tamari, then fried.
Salad with beets and squash and pickled onions, or salty, oil-cured olives and soft knobs of goat cheese.
Tonight, Rox has had the kitchen make Laurel’s favorite dish: an apricot and king oyster tagine. Laurel is stacking plates on the serving table when she approaches with a parsley garnish.
“This looks incredible,” Laurel says.
Rox swats her. “You shouldn’t be working. It’s your last meal.”
“I want to. Otherwise, I’ll just be in my head.”
Eli is coming. A line forms at the serving table. Rox says, “Who’s going to pick you up again?”
“Her ex,” says Esther, who has snuck up behind them and thrown her arms around Laurel’s waist.
Rox raises an eyebrow. “Okay then.”
Esther smells like lavender spray. Her short white hair is in two braided pigtails, and her body is soft against Laurel’s.
“Don’t go,” she says.
And now a crowd is queuing around Laurel, almost as long as the one for food.
Ha-yoon writes down the address of Clare’s farmhouse.
CK gives Laurel the lanyard key chain they made for her.
Bev tells Laurel how much she’s learned from their conversations about fungi.
Maeve cries, but then, Maeve cries at everything.
Still, as Laurel sits between Esther and Joanie, sadness overtakes her.
It is not exactly grief—more a premature nostalgia for this place, which took her in when she needed it.
The Center is not a utopia. There are clashes of personality, and a god-awful line for the bathroom, and tiffs from which Laurel is not exempt. One night, Jaz borrowed her coat on the way to a bar. When she returned it with a wine stain, Laurel became hysterical.
“You’re being a drama queen,” said Jaz. “It will literally come out with soap.”
Nell brought over a bottle of stain spray.
“It’s the hormones,” Nell said when Jaz left.
Laurel knew that Nell was right. Her emotional stability, scaffolded throughout adulthood, was coming apart. Shingles blew off without warning. Shortly after the stain incident, Nell turned eighteen and left the Center. She waved from the back of her father’s truck, her face a smear of tears.
—
After dinner, Laurel helps to clear the tables, despite Rox’s protests. When the dishes are finished, a small group remains in the kitchen.