Chapter 15 Entanglement #8
He took her other hand and squeezed so tightly that her skin turned white. She didn’t want him to let go yet. It was the only thing keeping her upright.
“You’re so strong,” said Eli. “You were right. I couldn’t know what you were feeling last time. I thought I did, but it was beyond me. I’m sorry, Laurel. I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Is it too late to tell you that?”
Laurel shook her head. “It isn’t. Thank you.”
Eli brought his forehead to hers.
“I love you,” Laurel said. “I need you to know that this isn’t about love. It’s like the tree, you see? We have to be able to stand on our own.”
“So—so what do we do?” Eli asked. “We break up? We see other people?”
The idea was crushing, but Laurel said, “I think so.” Otherwise, their freedom would be false.
“I need to know that it won’t be forever,” said Eli.
Their heads were still touching. Laurel nodded. “Let’s pick a time—a date when we’ll come back together.”
It was a fallacy, and they both knew it. They could decide to reunite, but they couldn’t know how it would feel when they did.
“When?” Eli asked.
“Before high school.” In the antiuniverse, high school was akin to day camp for retirees, with arts programming, fitness classes, and continuing education. “We could go home together.”
He broke away and turned. Outside, a couple walked their schnauzer, oblivious to the drama that was happening in Laurel and Eli’s house. The thought of living alone, not being able to see Eli, not being able to touch him—Laurel couldn’t think those thoughts.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I can’t, either. But don’t you think we have to?”
Eli came close again and put his arms around her. She felt as though they were standing on a precipice, watching their most precious shared belonging tumble down the cliffside.
Into his chest, she said, “I’ll come to San Francisco next September, for the conference. You should, too. We can decide if we want to stay the course.”
“I’ll be thinking about you the whole time,” he said. “I won’t be able to stop.”
“Me, too.” There was one more thing. It would cleave her to say it. “But we—we shouldn’t talk while we’re apart. Or else I don’t think it would work.”
It was not fully real to Laurel until they sold the house.
The buyers agreed to wait until summer: Laurel had signed a contract for her old apartment, the one with the rickety outdoor staircase, but she couldn’t move until August. Eli found a faculty rental in Palo Alto.
The tension between them dissolved. They had opened a window. All the trapped air flowed out.
And they held to the promise of their reunion in San Francisco. They could decide then if they’d made a mistake.
Eli would drive across the country after New Year’s. On the day of his departure, they arrived separately at their favorite diner: Laurel in her silver Subaru, Eli his blue Acura. They ate breakfast together, though neither could muster an appetite.
On the street, he kissed her ardently. A middle-aged woman glanced at them with reproach.
Kids, she might have thought.
Then he was gone: the Acura turned toward the highway, taking the pearl of Laurel’s heart with it.
—
Some people couldn’t understand the separation.
“You were so good together,” said Maisie. Gloria looked stunned.
But the other Clare was not surprised—“This will be good for both of you, honey,” she said—and Tess nodded grimly (“After my nephew passed, my brother and his wife drifted apart. It’s so common, Laurel”).
Eli had taken Laurel seriously when she told him that they shouldn’t talk.
She didn’t hear from him when he arrived, presumably, in Palo Alto, or in the days that followed.
Hourly Laurel felt the stretching of the cord that bound them, a tether not unlike the one that had joined her to Silas.
But Silas was inside her now; Eli was beyond her, two thousand miles away.
Christopher Two—her ex-boyfriend’s double—entered as if on cue.
His visiting professorship had begun that spring.
Laurel avoided him strenuously. Everything about him repelled her, from his habit of saying “It’s true that…
” to his little tin of mustache wax. Christopher was undeterred.
He plied her with chanterelles and stood too close in the elevator.
It seemed that nothing was so tempting as Laurel’s total lack of interest.
Sometimes she wondered whether his pursuit was the will of the Duoverse itself.
Coincidences conspired: Laurel found herself alone with him in the cold room.
On the night of Tess’s annual Halloween party, Laurel’s car was towed, and she was forced to accept a ride from Christopher.
Dressed as a sheep, she sat in stony silence, crossing all her hooves.
In that moment, she resented the Duoverse as much as, or even more than, she did him.
It seemed to have its own leanings—and methods of coercion.
The pressure built until early October, when Christopher spotted Laurel at a pub in the student union. He slung an arm around her shoulder. Beer sloshed down Laurel’s front.
“Get away from me!” she cried.
Everyone in the pub looked over. Christopher veered backward, his humiliation laced with animosity. He ignored her after that. Laurel felt a vise loosen: the Duoverse’s current flowed on, seeking other alignments.
Soon the conference in San Francisco was only weeks away. Laurel received an unusual card in the mail. It was shaped like a turreted house, with a sheer paper overlay of fog. She lifted the fog and bent back the shutters.
You are invited to
an evening at Seymour and Julian’s
in honor of
Other Worlds
She suspected that Julian Two had made it. Toward the bottom of the invitation, someone had added lines by hand: Heard of your project—intriguing! We hope you’ll join us. Bring a guest.
—
Seymour’s address was the same, but the house had been recently constructed. The other buildings in the neighborhood were made of glass and metal. To the residents of this world, a Victorian must have seemed futuristic: when Laurel approached the door, a dog-walker stopped to stare.
Tess wouldn’t arrive until the following morning, so Laurel brought Gloria as her guest. They knocked, and Seymour appeared, here a sprightly white-haired man just beginning his career.
“You must be Laurel,” Seymour said, taking her hand. He smiled at Gloria. “And who is this?”
“I’m Laurel’s protégée,” she said, proudly.
Gloria followed Seymour into the kitchen: she had a young adult’s enthusiasm for free food and drinks.
Julian offered Laurel a tour of the Victorian.
It was filled with his dioramas, which looked like larger versions of the party invitation: 3-D paper houses that collapsed into a single plane.
He and Seymour also collected antiques, some dating back to the twenty-third century.
Julian showed her a hologram projector (“That thing hasn’t worked since 2085”) and a floating silver daybed.
Once, it had hovered at window height, but now it hung mere inches aboveground, agitating noisily and dropping when someone sat on it.
Last, Julian brought her upstairs. Laurel didn’t expect to see Eli; they had agreed to meet at Ocean Beach on the last day of the conference. Still, she wanted to visit the octagonal room where, so many years ago, she had found him for the first time since high school.
The room was empty. Beyond the windows, fog wafted back and forth. Julian walked to a side table.
“Now, I must show you this,” he said.
There stood a device that looked vaguely like a gramophone: a fluted horn connected to an ornamental box.
A disc perched atop the box, and at the press of a button, it began to turn.
What issued from the horn was not just music—a bewitching piano solo that would have been impressive on its own—but also a field of colored light.
“It’s a chromaphone,” Julian said. “It translates sound waves into light. Seymour found it in a pawnshop for a song, no pun intended—the seller was sure it didn’t work—but we took it to a tech wizard in Chinatown, and she had it up and running in a day.
It’s very hard to find these records anymore; we only have the one, so it’s a good thing we like it. ”
As the melody changed, so did the apparition. So hypnotized was Laurel that she hadn’t noticed someone else had joined them.
“Oh, hello,” said Julian.
Laurel’s stomach leapt. Eli had not changed in any significant way, but he still looked different to her.
His skin was warmer—in Palo Alto, fall was as sunny as summer—and there was something more relaxed about the way he held himself, or perhaps the way he dressed, his shirt untucked and rolled up to the elbows.
Eli introduced himself to Julian, but his gaze returned quickly to Laurel. Julian looked between them knowingly and excused himself.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Laurel said.
Though Eli had seen her in every state imaginable, from waking up to giving birth, she was suddenly glad that she’d worn boots and done her makeup.
“I know,” said Eli. “Seymour invited the Stanford team, and I thought of bowing out, but…” He pressed his lips together. “I wanted to see you.”
“How are you?” Laurel whispered, even though they were alone.
Eli seemed unsure of what to say, as though he were trying to decide how to distill the events of the past four months. Finally, he shrugged, half smiling.
“Okay,” he said. “How are you?”
Laurel made the same face. She had so much to tell him, but most of it was minutiae, the mundane shifts and dramas that made up the grain of life.
It seemed pointless to mention that the dishwasher had broken again, or that Helen had snuck out with Beth’s car and driven straight into a Dumpster.
It was also true that Eli was the only person with whom she would have shared these stories.
“Okay,” she said.