Inversion - 17

Chapter 17

Laurel studied his hands in the morning light, turning them palm up, then back again. They looked the same as they had when he first went into the forest, more than twenty-five years ago. There were no mirrors in the camp, but he had glimpsed his reflection in a puddle. It too looked the same as it had then.

Around the camp, his followers moved more gingerly, more circumspectly. Asher’s shoulders curved inward now, his once-steady writing hand occasionally trembling as he recorded the daily teachings. Lila walked with a slight limp from an injury that had never quite healed. Cal’s zealous energy had mellowed into something that looked more like resignation, while Nico had developed the habit of pausing mid-sentence, searching for words that came less readily than they once had.

Only Erin seemed unchanged, as willowy and youthful at forty-two as when he had first met her. Her skeptical intelligence remained sharp, her questions as pointed as they always had been. But even she moved more slowly than she once had, took longer to rise from sitting on the ground.

Laurel felt like a photograph of himself, perfectly preserved while everything around him aged and weathered. The followers spoke of it as evidence of his transcendence, his mastery over time itself. He did not agree. Something must have happened, either during the accident or during his Sitting, that changed the way he aged. Maya might be able to figure it out, but she was no longer in his life.

The messenger arrived on a Tuesday, footsore and windburned after weeks of following rumors and vague directions through the high country. She was young, perhaps twenty-five, and bore a determined look.

“I have a letter for Laurel. Are you him?” she asked, though his appearance seemed to surprise her. The followers had described him to her, but apparently, she’d expected someone who looked much older.

“I am Laurel,” he confirmed, accepting the sealed envelope she offered. University of Colorado letterhead. Maya’s familiar handwriting.

This was a first since he went into the wilderness. The outside world had become abstract, memories from another life. Now, holding Maya’s message, he felt a stirring of curiosity he’d almost forgotten he possessed.

Laurel,

I hope this finds you, and finds you well. The messenger I’ve hired has assured me she’s skilled at tracking people who don’t want to be found, though from what I understand, you don’t hide from those who seek you out.

You’ve become quite famous, you know. There have been articles about you in Nature, Science, Popular Mechanics, they even talk about you on morning shows. “The Vanished Physicist,” they call you. Some claim you died in the wilderness. Others insist you’ve achieved enlightenment. There’s been a documentary film, though it’s mostly speculation and interviews with people who claim to have met you.

Reporters have tried to find you for years, but none seem to have succeeded. It’s curious – prospective followers seem to locate you easily enough, but journalists, investigators, even your former colleagues hit dead ends. It’s as though you exist in a different category of reality for different types of people.

I’m writing because there’s been a breakthrough. Dr. Elisabeth Chen at MIT has apparently extended your teleportation work in interesting new ways. I’ve enclosed her latest paper. I am told that it’s quite elegant. She’s evidently developed a theoretical framework for preventing chirality inversion during quantum reconstitution. The math is too complex for me, but I understand that the principle is straightforward: a pre-correction field that accounts for mirror symmetry before transmission.

It’s too late to help you, of course, but it means others could travel safely now, if someone with the right experimental chops were available to verify the theory and build working prototypes.

I ran into Dr. Friedenthal last month. He still asks about you, still hopes you’ll return. “That teleportation problem,” he told me, “it’s so deeply complex that only an experimentalist of Laurel’s caliber could resolve it. The position is his whenever he wants it.”

I know you’ve found something out there – purpose, peace, whatever it is you were looking for. But I also know the questions still matter to you. They have to. You were never someone who could leave problems unsolved.

All my love,

Maya

Laurel read the letter twice, then examined the enclosed research paper. Dr. Chen’s work was indeed elegant, a solution that approached the problem from an angle that had not occurred to him. He found himself sketching equations in the dirt beside his feet, his mind racing through experimental protocols for the first time in years.

“Teacher?” Asher approached, his notebook ready as always. “Are you well? You seem… distant.”

Laurel looked up at his attendant, this man who had recorded his words so faithfully for decades. Asher’s hair had gone completely white, his face deeply lined. Yet his eyes held the same devotional intensity they’d always carried.

“A letter from my former life,” Laurel said. “News of work that was interrupted long ago.”

He noticed Asher concealing his alarm. After so many years together, his followers had learned to read his moods with uncomfortable accuracy.

Over the following days, Laurel found his attention drifting during teachings. He caught himself thinking about experimental design, about the equipment he’d need, about problems that had remained unsolved for thirty years.

“The Flow teaches us,” he told a gathering of followers one evening, “that all paths lead somewhere, but not all destinations are final.” He paused, aware that he was thinking aloud rather than teaching. “Sometimes what appears to be an ending is merely a pause.”

The statement created ripples of unease among his listeners. Asher’s pen hesitated over his notebook.

“Teacher,” said Cal, “do you speak of personal experience?”

Laurel considered the question. How long had he been tired of this role? When had the constant attention, the endless questions, the weight of others’ expectations begun to feel like imprisonment rather than purpose?

“I speak of possibilities,” he replied. “Of doors that remain open even when we’ve forgotten they exist.”

That night, Lila approached his shelter. She said nothing at first, simply sat beside him as she had countless times over the years. Her presence had always been comforting. She asked nothing, expected nothing, simply offered the quiet companionship that had drawn him to accept her among his followers.

“You’re thinking of leaving us,” she said finally.

It wasn’t a question. Laurel had never been able to hide anything from her.

“The work calls to me,” he admitted. “There are questions I never finished asking. Problems that may now have solutions.”

“And us? What becomes of us?”

This was the question he had been avoiding. His followers had built their entire lives around his presence, his teachings, his supposed wisdom. Communities had formed. Practices had been codified. People traveled hundreds of miles to hear him speak.

“You continue as you have,” he said. “Following the Flow, seeking understanding, teaching those who come after you.”

“Without guidance. Without direction. Without you.”

“You’ve had your own wisdom all along. I’ve simply been reflecting it back to you.”

Lila was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice carried a note of something that might have been fear.

“We’re not ready.”

Over the next few days, Laurel began dropping broader hints. He spoke of transitions, of the necessity of change, of the danger of clinging to forms after their usefulness had passed. His followers grew more and more agitated.

Asher was the first to confront him directly.

“Teacher, there are rumors. People are saying you plan to leave us.”

Laurel looked at his attendant, this man who had remade himself around recording and interpreting another’s words. “Would that disturb you?”

“It would destroy us.” The words came out as a whisper. “We’re not… we can’t…” Asher struggled visibly. “Without you, what are we?”

“What you’ve always been. People seeking their truth.”

“But we don’t know how to seek it alone. We don’t know how to hear the Flow for ourselves.

It was an honest admission, and it landed with a greater impact than Laurel had expected. These people had surrendered their lives to him so completely that they’d lost confidence in their own judgment. What he had intended as half-hearted teaching, they had received as the sole fount of wisdom.

That evening, the original five gathered at his shelter. They looked older than their years, not just physically aged, but somehow diminished, as though the prospect of his departure had already begun to hollow them out.

“Please,” said Lila. “We’re begging you. Don’t abandon us.”

“I wouldn’t be abandoning you…”

“You would.” Erin’s voice was sharp. “You know you would. We’ve built our entire lives around your presence. Without you, we are lost, and the teachings would be without foundation.”

“The teachings should stand on their own merit.”

“Should, perhaps. But they do not. They have always depended on you, and you know it.” Cal leaned forward, his old zealousness still flickering. “You have a responsibility to us.”

Laurel felt a flash of irritation. “I never asked for that responsibility.”

“But you accepted it,” Asher said quietly. “Every time someone came seeking wisdom and you chose to speak rather than turn them away. Every time you allowed us to record your words and treat them as scripture. You may not have asked for the role, but you’ve been playing it for decades.”

The words hit him with unexpected force. It was true. He had allowed their dependence, and maybe even encouraged it. In his loneliness and isolation, their reverence had been comforting. Their need had given meaning to his suffering.

“You made us into children,” Erin continued. “Eager, devoted children who hung on your every word. And now you want to declare us adults and walk away.”

Laurel studied their faces, these people who had given him their lives, their devotion, their unquestioning faith. Asher, whose entire identity was bound up in serving as his voice. Lila, who had found in his community the acceptance she’d never known elsewhere. Cal, whose zealous nature had finally found a worthy object of devotion. Nico, who had lost himself so completely in imitation that he barely existed as a separate person. And Erin, the skeptic who had never quite believed but had never quite left either.

“What would you have me do?” he asked.

“Stay with us,” said Asher. “Continue teaching. Help us learn to hear the Flow ourselves, gradually, over time. Don’t abandon us when we still need you.”

“The research…”

“Will continue with or without you,” Lila said gently. “But we can’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever…”

Laurel felt the weight of their need pressing down on him like a physical force. He thought of Maya’s letter, of the laboratory waiting for him, of questions that had remained unanswered for thirty years. Then he looked at the faces surrounding him, these people who had given him everything, who had asked for nothing in return except his continued presence.

The choice felt like an ending either way, a kind of death. Return to his former life and condemn these people to a crisis that might destroy them. Or remain and watch his intellectual self wither away entirely, leaving only the hollow shell of a teacher who no longer believed in his own teachings.

“I will die one day, you know. What will you do then?” He asked them.

Cal and Nico both blanched. “Die? You cannot die! You are the Unbound!”

“That doesn’t mean I am immortal,” Laurel answered, hiding his irritation. He was silent for a time. “It makes no difference if I am alive or dead. In the fullness of time, all of our existence is a rounding error.”

The faces around him were still clouded, closed to the message he was trying to convey. “If I could not die, I would not be alive,” he said and looked around. “Life and death cannot exist without one another,” he tried again. It wasn’t getting through.

“What you are saying is that everything is opposites that contain the other,” Asher was busy scribbling in his journal. Laurel gave him a long, cryptic look.

“Very well,” he said at last. “I am going to stay.”

The relief that flooded their faces was so profound it made him feel sick. They thanked him, blessed him, spoke of his wisdom and compassion. But all he could think about was the research paper in his shelter, its equations pointing toward solutions he would not pursue now.

As his followers departed, chattering among themselves with evident happiness, Laurel remained sitting in the darkness. Above him, stars wheeled as they always have, following laws others would be investigating now.

He had made his choice. The questions would remain unanswered. The work would go on without him, and he would spend whatever years remained to him playing the role of a wise man who had long ago stopped believing in his own wisdom.

The Flow, he reflected bitterly, seemed to lead only deeper into the wilderness.