Chapter 15 Entanglement #7
Rox distributes materials. With their woody-looking stems and shriveled golden-brown caps, they look less like mushrooms than acorns on stalks.
Though all of the participants will consume the same fungi—dried Psilocybe cubensis, by the look of it—their preferred methods vary.
Rox, Aisha, and Noor add hot water and drink the tea.
Joanie and Maeve eat theirs in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Fran, Olive’s new apprentice, chews the mushrooms raw.
“Want to join us?” asks Rox.
“That’s okay,” says Laurel. “Not my thing.”
“How can you know that if you’ve never tried it?” Fran asks.
Five years ago, while packing the house, Laurel found the psychedelic chocolate from Louis. She put it in the pocket of her duffel bag: it linked her to the past, and to her life in Antarctica. But she hasn’t eaten it.
“No peer pressure,” says Aisha.
“Perfect night for it, though,” says Noor. “We’d send you off with a bang.”
“Rumor has it that her ex is coming,” Rox says. “She probably shouldn’t be tripping when she sees him.”
“Or maybe she should,” says Aisha.
—
Laurel carries her duffel to the edge of Big Meadow. This is the meeting time that she and Eli chose: sundown on the first of May 1999.
“I’m afraid he won’t show,” Laurel whispered to Esther when she woke up that morning.
“Why wouldn’t he?”
Esther had the bed next to Laurel’s. They faced each other: Laurel in striped pajamas, Esther in her nightgown and happy-face slippers.
“I don’t know,” Laurel said. “I keep thinking about…” She made a face.
“Angela,” Esther translated.
Now Laurel sits on the grass. She’s starting to think that she should have taken mushrooms after all. She retrieves Louis’s chocolate from her bag. Somehow, it’s still securely wrapped. She slips it into the pocket of her jeans.
When Laurel was a college student, Gloria’s most popular upper-level course was a seminar called Shrooms. It traced the use of psychedelic fungi from ancient civilizations to the 1960s, when pharmaceutical research was abandoned during Nixon’s War on Drugs.
Laurel’s favorite book from the course was María Sabina: Selections, the oral autobiography of a Mazatec healer.
María Sabina was born in Huautla at the end of the nineteenth century.
Her grandmother prophesied that she would be a Wise One, a healer who sang in the voice of the mushrooms. María said that they tasted like roots and spoke to her from another world.
Word of her abilities spread, and the sick traveled to see her.
But these stories attracted other visitors, too.
In 1953, Gordon Wasson—an American journalist—arrived with his wife and a photographer.
The Wassons had studied psychedelic mushrooms, and they wanted to be the first Westerners to eat them.
Wasson chronicled the ceremony for a story in Life magazine.
It made María famous: hippies and rock stars flooded to Huautla, wreaking havoc.
The villagers blamed her. Accused of selling drugs, María was arrested, and her house burned down. She died in poverty.
María’s story has stayed with Laurel. She didn’t want to participate in that cruel history, however distant.
But there is another reason, too, why she’s avoided psychedelics.
Laurel has spent her career observing fungi, but she has never been their subject.
In this way, she has maintained control.
To take mushrooms would be like entering her own experiment.
2005–1999
Laurel, Tess, and Gloria returned to Madison in a state of celebration. Other Worlds—the conference where Laurel had presented her maze experiment—would take place the following fall, in 2004, and their submission was accepted.
Eli felt aimless. He still had an office at the university, but he had abandoned the workspace in the basement. His belongings sat like artifacts: the Best Guesses notepad, his drawings, the materials he’d used to make the entropy device.
In July, Laurel dragged him to dinner at his favorite dim sum restaurant.
“A lot of physicists only come up with one good theory,” Eli said. “Most of the time, it happens when they’re young.” He hadn’t touched his scallion pancakes. “I just didn’t think that I would be one of them.”
“Many people never come up with one good theory,” said Laurel.
“I know,” said Eli. “It sounds obnoxious. But with my work, and Silas gone…it feels like the best years of my life are behind me.”
Sometimes Laurel wondered whether he resented her success. If he did, he knew not to say so, still remembered the long years when the scales tipped in the other direction. Still, he was often irritable in the way of a younger person—the younger person that he was becoming.
Laurel found a grief counselor and scheduled his first appointment. The therapist had been a father, and Laurel thought that his experience might resonate with Eli. At first, Eli went weekly. In June, though, Laurel realized that the bills had stopped coming.
Eli sat on a chair in the backyard. She walked outside and said, “Were you going to tell me that you stopped going to therapy?”
“That’s my business,” Eli said. “You can’t force me.”
“I’m trying to help you. At least tell me why.”
He slumped, avoiding eye contact. “Because I can’t tell him anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“What can I say? That I came here from another universe? That there were two versions of my son, and I lost both of them? The only person I can talk to is you.”
“Then talk to me. I’m here,” said Laurel, sitting.
Eli stared into the neighbor’s yard. “I don’t think more talking is the answer.”
Laurel knew what it was like to live in that abyss, and to feel that it would last forever. She felt guilty for climbing out without him. Even so, she no longer believed that the best way to mourn Silas was to suffer. Animals, like plants, bent toward light.
Every month, Laurel grew stronger. She knew joy more fully now that she knew its opposite. The sun felt warmer. Food tasted sweeter. When Gloria took her to a rave, Laurel danced for hours, feeling hope but remembering despair, so full she could burst from the both of it.
She peeled back like petals around a stem, opening, opening.
In April, Laurel brought her laptop to the kitchen. She sat at the island with an apple, intending to send a note to Samir. When she opened WiscMail, though, she realized that she’d made a mistake. Laurel and Eli both had iBooks—Apple’s latest model—and she had accidentally taken his device.
On screen was an email from Stanford. Eli had been offered an endowed professorship.
Laurel shut the computer. She felt ill even as she realized that she shouldn’t be surprised. The Duoverse was a mirror. In their world, Eli had moved from Stanford to Madison that year.
She opened the laptop again. This time, she read the thread from top to bottom.
Stanford had first made an offer six months earlier.
Eli had passed politely, and he had never told Laurel.
Now Stanford had written again. They proposed a higher salary in the hope that he would join them for the fall semester.
In a saved draft, Eli had typed:
I’m truly honored by your interest. Your previous offer was so compelling that I confess I’ve often wondered whether I made the right choice. After much consideration, I
Laurel changed into her exercise clothes. She ran to Picnic Point and followed the Lakeshore Path toward campus.
Dusk fell in a wash of purple. The academic year had begun one month earlier, in May, and the university buzzed with back-to-school energy.
Outside Memorial Union, septuagenarian undergraduates huddled, wearing backpacks.
Laurel continued straight on Langdon. The Greek houses here were astonishingly grand, and age did not prevent their members from hosting raucous parties.
Right on Wisconsin Avenue, left on Gorham.
The latter was a one-way street, so Laurel ran against the flow of traffic.
Shops and restaurants gave way to student rentals, which were followed by a synagogue called Gates of Heaven, and then Tenney Park spread along the lake; and all around were other students, reading on blankets or writing in notebooks, people whose lives were just beginning.
Laurel turned around and ran home.
Eli met her at the door. Laurel saw that he knew she had seen the email. In her haste, she must have left his laptop open.
“Laurel,” he said at the same time as she said, “Eli—”
He looked miserable, even afraid. He must have assumed that she would be angry.
“I wasn’t going to say yes. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I thought about it,” he added, “and that’s what I decided.”
Laurel took his hand.
“I think you should take the job,” she said.
“What?” Eli blinked. “I thought you wouldn’t want to leave the Rhizotron.”
“I don’t. I would stay here.”
Eli stepped back. She moved with him.
“Listen to me,” she told him. “It’s like you said: for years, we’ve only had each other.”
Her mouth began to tremble. It was essential that she express herself exactly. If he misunderstood her reasoning, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
“You deserve your own life—your own experiences,” she said. “I brought you here. I took you with me. I want you to be free.”
Eli became still. “You don’t think I can be free if I’m with you?”
It wasn’t an accusation. What pained her was the fact that he was genuinely asking.
“I don’t know,” said Laurel. “I just know that I’ve been in your place.
I had to separate from you—separate from everything—go to the end of the world…
I had to be by myself.” She was crying freely now.
“If we go on like this, I’ll worry I’m holding you back.
And every time you look at me, you’ll feel guilty, even though you shouldn’t—even though I don’t want you to… ”
She was still holding his hand.
“I’ll get better,” said Eli, fiercely. “I just have to figure out how.”
“I don’t think it works like that. The figuring out—it’s a kind of gripping. It keeps the pain close.”