Chapter 15 Entanglement #10
Laurel hoped that she’d chosen correctly. It was difficult to know what had been precious to Laurel and Eli Two, in part because the house had looked so impersonal when she arrived. Eli had suggested that it had been denuded for renters, but Laurel had always wondered if that was the only reason.
On her final walk-through, Laurel searched the utility room, then the basement.
The laundry room was empty, as was the slanted crawl space where she and Eli had kept luggage.
Laurel didn’t bother to scan her office; she knew that space backward and forward.
The closet in the bedroom stored only stirred-up dust.
As she walked across the bedroom, the creaky floorboard whined. In both universes, it was partially concealed beneath the bed; only the last four feet, which extended to the wall, saw foot traffic.
Now she knelt to examine the plank. There was an open gap on one side. Her fingers wouldn’t fit, but a knitting needle might.
Laurel ran down to the moving truck. She had to rearrange half of the cargo to find a pair of needles. Back in the house, she took the stairs two at a time. When she inserted a needle, the plank lifted easily, as though, for years, it had wanted to.
The cavity below was narrow, but deep. Files were wedged inside.
Whoever put them there must have been loath to leave anything out: every millimeter of space was occupied.
The first thing Laurel extracted was a drawing of a fish.
The maker had spackled fins with glitter, and the lips bulged forward in a kiss.
There was a trio of report cards—eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth—and a crinkled piece of paper, torn from a notebook: Dear MOM I miss you I cod olmst cri for sum resin wen you go.
The next item was a high school portrait.
The woman inside had turned in a three-quarter view, but her eyes looked straight into the camera.
There was warmth in her expression, an alertness and quiet wisdom, but also a glint of daring.
She looked like Laurel, if Laurel’s hair were wilder, wavy, more like Eli’s; or like Eli, were his nose straighter, more like hers.
She turned the frame over.
Celeste, freshman year, someone had written.
Laurel had always loved that name…
Lifting a clear sleeve of photos, she knew what she would find.
Here was Eli Two, in old age, with a walker; Celeste, perhaps fifty, held a telescope up to his eye.
There was Laurel Two—with glasses, and a gray braid!
—making her way to Celeste on all fours.
The photos zigzagged through decades: birthdays and holidays, trips and graduations.
As Laurel and Eli became younger, so did Celeste.
She posed after a dance recital or curled in the dormer nook, reading.
Eli carried her through the hallway on his shoulders.
In the final picture, Celeste crawled into the arms of Laurel Two, her mother.
—
Laurel paced the bedroom in a state of desperation.
She needed to know more. Or perhaps she was finally sure that she could handle what she learned. No longer did she doubt her own resilience.
There was only one person with whom she could speak truthfully. First, she collected the items below the floorboard with as much care as she could: she would be their steward. She put them in her truck, and then she left for the cemetery.
—
Laurel told the guards that she had come to see Kenji Nakamura.
On her previous visit, she had barely noticed the building’s interior—just the rush of sound, the upward ramp, and, at last, the crying babies.
This time, she was surprised to find the waiting room calming.
The walls had been painted in subtle shades of blue, and classical music played on low volume.
A middle-aged man flicked through a magazine; a younger couple waited with their toddler, who sorted through a bin of colored blocks.
A nurse entered. She was pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair. Seeing them, the middle-aged man bounded over.
“Who’s that?” the nurse asked her patient.
The man croaked unintelligibly, beaming. The younger man kissed his forehead.
“Hi, Dad,” he said.
“Isn’t it wonderful when they start smiling?” asked the nurse, as they disappeared into a corridor; and then Kenji Nakamura appeared. He did not look as surprised to see Laurel as she had thought he might be.
He greeted her, and she rose to follow him. To their right, she saw the ramp that led upstairs. The overtaker turned left, where a different ramp spiraled into the bowels of the building.
They entered a warren of rooms. The air cooled as they descended, and the walls were lined with torches. Rugged passageways had been carved out of rock. Laurel peered into cavern-like offices, some even darker than the hallway; several people were working by candlelight.
Mr. Nakamura saw her looking. “Down here, we use as little electricity as possible. We don’t want to interfere with what happens underground.”
As they turned a corner, two people appeared, walking toward them: a woman and a man, both near Gloria’s age.
Seeing the overtaker, they bent their heads with respect.
Mr. Nakamura’s clothing had the fineness of his black coat.
His pants were crisp, and the top had been made from a fluid material that rippled as he walked.
The approaching pair wore the same work boots, but their uniform was different: a black tunic and technical pants.
Mr. Nakamura nodded, and the pair continued down the corridor.
“Apprentices,” he said to Laurel.
Each of their tunics was cinched with a belt that doubled as a holster for three tools: a spade; a probe, encased in glass; and an implement shaped like a pen. Even from a distance, Laurel could tell that they were exceptional.
“Those tools,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”
“And almost ten thousand years old. The spade is palladium, and the capacitor is mica. Neither tarnish,” he said. “An overtaker’s tools are precious. The set an apprentice receives belongs to them for the rest of their career.”
Mr. Nakamura opened a door to their right.
Like the other offices, this chamber had been hollowed out of rock.
His desk looked like a space-age navigation system: there were levers and dials, keypads and buttons.
This faced a wall of tile-like screens, each of which showed one portion of a larger grid.
“My God,” Laurel said.
The grid corresponded to the cemetery. Red dots—bodies, she thought—pulsed hotly. Fractal lines, which seemed to represent the fungal network, flowed between them.
The overtaker turned a dial. Every screen became dark except for the one in the northeast corner, which enlarged to cover the others. Mr. Nakamura selected a single dot. Now the view changed again: the chosen body moved into the middle screen, and the others became electrical graphs.
“The screens aboveground, by the tombstones—you’ve seen them, I think?
” he asked, and Laurel wondered if the overtaker had been watching, years ago, as she uncovered the wires.
“They show the total power in one section of soil. Here, we can divide that signal into separate waves. This is the heart. And this is the brain,” he said, pointing to different tiles in turn.
“We can see entire organ systems, too: the cardiac system, for example, or the nervous system.”
His fingers flew over the instruments, evoking this or that reading. The screens had a holographic depth, so the command to view two systems at once summoned overlapping layers. Laurel knew that he was harnessing an elaborate program, but she couldn’t shake the sense that he was also doing magic.
Laurel said, “Can you see the bodies themselves?”
Mr. Nakamura paused. He stood to close the door before he returned to the desk.
There he navigated to the previous image: the northeast section of the cemetery.
Next, he performed a series of light, deft strokes, and a cluster of red dots lit up.
When he turned another dial, the diagram disappeared, replaced by images in sepia.
Each screen now showed a black chasm—a pond-like sac—in which a single human being curled.
The bodies were little more than shapes, but Laurel could discern varying stages of development.
Some appeared as skeletal clusters, sticklike in the dark void of the cavity.
Others had acquired roundness: fat, muscle, skin.
The images shifted and rippled, articulating faintly. They looked like sonograms.
“Thank you for showing me,” Laurel said. Her eyes were wet. When she looked down, to compose herself, she saw that boxes lined the floor. “Are you leaving?”
“Retiring,” Mr. Nakamura said, and only then did she notice how young he had become—how different he looked from the first time she’d met him, when he came to Laurel and Eli’s house to tell them where to look for Silas.
Any lines had been erased; even the scar she’d noticed on his cheek was almost gone.
But his eyes betrayed fatigue, and his hair was untidy.
For the first time, Laurel saw through to his humanity, his ordinariness, even though he was also abnormal, as if humanness was something he could calibrate with yet another dial.
“Oh.” She felt a sense of loss. “What will you do next? You and your wife?”
“We separated.” Seeing Laurel’s face, he added: “It was the right choice. She wanted to stay in Wisconsin. I wanted to go home.”
“Where is home?”
“I was born in Otaru, just before the Russo-Japanese war. When I was young, the Russians invaded Hokkaido.”