Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  “L-11-C denotes the lower level, room 11, desk C. I know, it makes no sense to label a desk, especially if there are only three in the room. Official story is that it’s easier for mail and students to find us that way. Personally I think it’s a DIM thing, an additional way of keeping tabs on citizens.” As the elevator door opened to let us out, she added, “Did you know that at one point DIM wanted to use electronic tags, like we’re genetically modified pets living in the wild or something? Necessary for public security, they argued. They almost got it too because it sounded good: no more crime, no worry about people stealing their alters’ lives or swapping them willingly without telling others…Common sense prevailed in the end.”

  The professor was not in, but the nameplate on his door, next to which a note was pinned with the words, In the Lab, made me stop in my tracks. I must have let out a sound, since I received a puzzled look from Bean.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Professor Wagner Maximilian,” I pointed to the nameplate. “Your graduate advisor is not, by any chance, a rather short, stocky man in his fifties, blond hair, loves to talk? Has connections everywhere—and, I suppose, a side interest in kitchen equipment?”

  “Well, yes—you didn’t know, then? I guess there’s no reason you would.” She grinned. “We work for the same boss.”

  The absurdity of the situation suddenly hit me and I laughed ‘til tears ran down my cheeks. Bean looked on with a slightly concerned look on her face.

  I wiped my eyes. “Right. What do we do now? Wait for Wagner B so I can sign the contract?”

  “Let’s not waste any more time. We can get in touch with the professor on the way down.”

  “To the basement?”

  “To Carmel. Photos 1-12 and 14 and up. We need to find them before James and Gabriella do.”

  [12]

  MONROE’S HOUSE

  The sun was high up in the sky by the time we managed to track down Bean’s office mates Arni Pierpont and Mike Pak, piled into her bubble-gum pink Volkswagen Beetle, picked up everyone’s overnight bags, and took Route 1 south toward the small picturesque town of Carmel. Though opposing traffic was safely contained by a road divider, I had an unobstructed view from the passenger seat of Bean’s Beetle as the Pacific Coast Highway rose and fell, alternating between cliff-top vistas of the ocean waves crashing on the rocky shore below and sea-level valleys. A knee-high rail guard between road and cliff edge provided laughable protection against disaster.

  “I thought you said I shouldn’t go to Carmel,” I said to Bean, surreptitiously wiping my copiously sweating hands on my shorts as the Beetle chugged up a particularly steep portion of the road.

  “To be precise,” she answered distractedly, with a glance at the mirror that hung above the dashboard and offered a back view, “I said you shouldn’t go to Carmel with James. With Arni and Pak and me, that’s a different matter.”

  “A different matter entirely,” Arni concurred from the back seat. I’d noticed that he had a largish nose and shoulder-length curly hair. “Besides, your alter might be in Carmel already. I’m sure you want to meet him.”

  “Not really, no. Regulation 7 prohibits it.”

  “The privacy and information of alters, yes. Not if he signs a form giving you permission. And yes, there’s also the Lunch-Place Rule, which probably applies to alters most of all. Even so, it seems to me that there is a curiosity that must be satisfied. I don’t have an alter, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but it’s human nature to want to take a peek at one’s alter—”

  “Could we stop calling him that?” I grimaced. “Call him Felix or Citizen Sayers or something.”

  “Isn’t it confusing to call him Felix?” Arni said, leaning forward so he could see around my seat’s headrest.

  “Not to me. It’s not like I call myself Felix inside my head. I don’t call myself anything inside my head. It’s just me.”

  “We do assign a number to each research subject, if you’d prefer that. You and your alter are 4102A and 4102B. Culinary-manual-writer Felix and Chef Felix, if you will.” While he carried on the conversation, Arni seemed to be rummaging around in the back, bumping the back of my seat occasionally. As befitting one who spent most of his time chasing down and interviewing research subjects, he was the most dapper of the three students and sported a trendy sweater and slacks in contrast to Bean’s and Pak’s T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers.

  “Arnold, what are you doing back there?” Bean demanded, swerving to avoid a pothole.

  “Picking up. Do you have a trash bag in the car?”

  “Somewhere on the floor. Don’t throw out anything important.”

  “I think I’d prefer not to refer to him by a number,” I said after a moment.

  “We’ll call him Felix B, then. Should I call you Felix A?” Arni asked, crumpling up an old soda can.

  “No. Just Felix.”

  “You really don’t want to meet him? But he’s one of your closest relatives—the closest really. Think of all you have to talk about.”

  I stared out the window as Bean took the Beetle down a steep grade toward a rolling sand dune portion of the road. Uniques. What did they know about it anyway?

  “We’re not likely to see him in any case,” Bean said in a gloomy voice, recklessly taking her attention away from the road to send a resigned shrug in our direction. “Felix B is probably closeted in a Past & Future office telling them all about his childhood.”

  “Speaking of childhoods,” Arni said, “is it true, Felix, that you had no idea you had an alter until Photo 13 surfaced? How is that possible? Your name is not nature-based, which is often a tip-off—do you need this research paper, Bean?—all right, I won’t throw it out—Bean and I have nature-names since we’re uniques, of course; then there’s Mike Pak—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Arni?”

  “Arni is short for Arnold.”

  “And—?”

  “And an Arnold has the power of an eagle. There’s also DIM’s official list of alters, not to mention your identicard, birth certificate, health records…And how did our trusty and reliable DIM officials fail to notice that your parents shaved six months off your age?”

  I sighed. “My parents paid someone to fake my birth certificate right around the time the Department of Information Management was formed. DIM just accepted the new birth date as valid. As for me—I just thought I was a tad taller than the other kids in my class. How was I supposed to know I was older than everyone else?” I was a bit defensive, because he was right. I should have realized it sooner. I had been dejected about having missed out on being unique by a hair, but when you thought about it, six months was hardly a hair.

  “Do you think,” asked Arni, who was unstoppable, “that your parents and his parents ever met? Maybe the four of them got together and hatched a plan to protect their offspring from the knowledge they were identical.”

  “I think it was sweet of your parents to try to protect you,” Bean said, throwing another glance at the back-view mirror. “People certainly had much stranger reactions to the link. Were they planning to tell you when you were older, do you think, after you finished your schooling and settled into a profession and a stable life?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But then there was the accident.” Bean had told me that Felix’s parents too had been on a Caribbean cruise celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary when a hurricane veered into the ship’s path. The probability of an A storm and a B storm overlapping in time and place was so small, Bean said, as to be practically nil, but weather being what it is, storms did quite often anyway.

  “So,” I broke the silence which had suddenly descended over the car, “what do we know about Felix B?”

  “This and that,” answered Arni. “Much of the data is irrelevant, of course. But that’s the trick, to figure out what’s important and what isn’t.”

  “Indeed,” Pak said.

  I had almost forgotten he was in the car. The senior of
the graduate students had a deep voice, a scruffy exterior, and a worried look, like the world was about to end and he was the only one who knew about it. Bean had introduced him as “Mike Pak. Call him Pak, no one calls him Mike.” Intrigued, I asked why, whereupon Pak replied, “You know at least three Mikes. Everyone does, it’s a connectivity thing. I’m working on a paper on the subject. You probably don’t know any Paks, however, unless you grew up in a household of them or live in Seoul.” He pronounced the initial sound in his name like a cross between a p and a b. The only other thing I had found out about him was that he owned a bicycle.

  I stared at the road ahead, trying to appear not overly interested in what Arni was saying—“The lab computer sifts through batches of data, compiling event chains from old newspapers, subject interviews, city records of every kind, historic footage. Your alter—Felix B—signed a contract with Past & Future and declined to talk to us. Unfortunate. What we have on him was obtained indirectly and is therefore incomplete.” He continued, “It didn’t help matters any that Sayers is such a common last name. We even came across a few other Felix Sayers-es that, as far we could find, were unrelated to the two of you and existed merely to confuse the issue.”

  “The only other Sayers I’ve heard of,” I said, “is the Dorothy L. Sayers who penned the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane mysteries, but she’s no relation. She was British.”

  We slowed down briefly to pass through a DIM checkpoint. The officials scanned our identicards and waved us on.

  “Yes, but what did you find?” I asked as the checkpoint grew smaller behind us.

  “The usual stuff,” Arni said, stuffing used gum wrappers into the trash bag. “You want examples?”

  “Examples, yes,” I said, expecting to hear the words, He’s working hard on a mystery novel…

  Arni wiped his hands on a tissue and flipped open the stylish omni hanging around his neck. “Here we go, 4102B, in no particular order: alphabet cookies in rainbow colors, honorable mention, third-grade art fair. Also from his childhood, sixth grade poetry recital, first place. Graduated high school the same year you did and also went on to the San Diego Four-Year. He was a member of the school yearbook committee in high school and of the dog-walking society at the four-year.”

  “No spelling bees, though,” said Bean.

  I had gone through a brief period in high school of entering spelling bee competitions, until an unfortunate run-in with the word ukulele had soured me on the whole idea.

  “Jumping to adulthood,” Arni went on, “there is a review of the newly renovated Organic Oven, complimenting the chef on his pasta e fagioli and complaining about slow service, and another calling it ‘San Francisco’s hidden gem.’ Name of first childhood pet, Talky. Of second, Chin-Chin. Current member of Presidio kennel club. Owns a dog there—an actual dog—named Garlic.” Arni stopped. “Oh, and he rents a ground-floor apartment in the Egret’s Nest Complex in Palo Alto and attends Japanese for Beginners lessons on Monday afternoons, his day off from the Organic Oven.”

  I felt a rising irritation. Alphabet cookies and restaurant reviews. Japanese lessons and dogs. I liked dogs, who didn’t, but a member of a kennel club? Was the man even related to me? “What else do you have about his private life—aggh, Bean watch out!”

  A vehicle had suddenly swerved into our lane, almost cutting us off and forcing Bean to slam on the brakes.

  Bean recovered and leaned forward over the steering wheel as we picked up speed again. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Who?” I asked, then realized that I already knew the answer. The last time I had seen a car this particular shade of green, its top had been down and an overweight pet had been sitting next to the driver. Today, even though it was a bright and sunny day, the top of the cucumber-green vehicle was up, obscuring the occupants of the car.

  “If I had to venture an opinion,” Arni said, “then I would opine that it’s James and Gabriella. I guess the flier sightseeing got cancelled.”

  “He’s been more or less behind us this whole time. I thought it was just a tailgater,” Bean said, slowing down and opening additional room between us and the car ahead. “What should I do? Pass them? Take the next exit?”

  “What do they want?” I said.

  “You,” Arni said simply.

  Bean tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “I’ll try to lose them.”

  “No,” Pak said in the voice of one dealing with imbeciles. “The contract. All we have to do is show them the contract.”

  “Right. Felix, give me your copy.”

  I passed her the five-page contract with which I had chartered Professor Maximilian’s group to research the storyline of my life. As if there weren’t three passengers in the car whose hands were perfectly free to perform such tasks, Bean rolled down her window while controlling the steering wheel with her elbow. She stuck her head and the contract out the window and waved it in the air. “He’s signed already,” she yelled out at the top of her lungs, even though there was no way the occupants of the car in front of us could hear her over the road noise. The wind whipped out a single page from the contract; we lost sight of it as it disappeared behind us.

  The green car in front of us sped off testily.

  “There,” Bean said with satisfaction as if that settled matters. She passed the somewhat thinner contract back to me and rolled up the window.

  On sunny days such as the one that saw us arrive in Carmel without any further ado, tourists usually flock in large numbers to the cafés, art galleries, and quaint shops of that seaside town—or at least this had always been the case in Universe A.

  Carmel B turned out to be no different. It took us a good twenty minutes to find a parking spot, during which Arni pointed out a multistory glass building squatting in the hills above town, one floor of which housed the local offices of Past & Future. I tried to picture Felix sitting inside a plush office telling Gabriella and James all about his childhood and about our parents, who had spent much of their life in this seaside town. But the image would not come. Nor could I recall a single memory from my early childhood, even though I had spent the first few years of my life here, until my parents had started a new life elsewhere with a slightly younger child. They had left their art gallery jobs, rented out the house, and moved the family north to San Francisco, after which we lived in an apartment, and that was home to me. After I went on to the San Diego Four-Year, they moved back to the Carmel house and opened their own gallery, but it was too late for me. I was always just a visitor.

  According to Arni, 161 Cypress Lane was still standing, unlike its Universe A opposite—my parents’ house—which had burned down in a fire last year, he said. Any answers were here in Universe B.

  “Ready?” Bean said.

  “Sorry, I was lost in thought.” I jumped out of the Beetle, closed the car door, then slammed it with more force so that it closed all the way.

  “Nice car,” I said to Bean as she locked up the Beetle one door at a time.

  “It does its job, but new and spiffy it’s not. Don’t ask me what year—well, all right, I’ll tell you. It’s a 1969. Original engine.”

  “The Beetle has its own alter,” Arni snickered.

  “At least I use my car. Arni likes to keep his two-seater garaged and pristine,” Bean retorted.

  “It’s my baby. Lunch? Monroe isn’t expecting us until later.”

  I perked up. My stomach had been growling for a while.

  “Lunch it is,” agreed Bean, swinging her bag over her shoulder. (It was the same one she’d had at the crossing, only it seemed more compact, like the bag had folded in on itself.) “Felix, you choose. It’s the least we can do, treat you to lunch, after dragging you down here on a moment’s notice,” she said as we commenced the six-block walk that would take us to Main Street. “It’s too bad Professor Maximilian was busy with lab work and wasn’t able to join us,” she added.

  I wasn’t too sure about that, since knowing one Wagner Maximili
an was enough for a lifetime, but refrained from saying so.

  “True, he would have picked up the lunch tab,” Arni said.

  Bean whacked him in the shoulder with the bag. “You know that’s not what I meant. At least, not only that. The professor has a knack for talking to people.”

  “That he does,” I said to her.

  Shortly after three, our energy restored with a meal of seafood and lemonade, we stood knocking on the front door of a two-story Spanish-style house with an unkempt lawn and a single Monterey cypress tree out front. An old man opened the door, the grooves in his face so deep that he seemed out of place in the bright Carmel afternoon, like a wise ancient from a darker, bygone era who somehow stepped into the wrong century. Arni introduced him as Monroe. I never did find out if that was his first or last name.

  “You’re here,” Monroe pointed out the obvious. He was wearing mustard-yellow sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, with a loosely tied checkered robe over the whole ensemble. The four of us followed him inside as he padded in his slippers down a dimly lit hallway, under an arched doorway, and into a living room where heavy curtains blocked out any sunlight. He motioned us toward a scruffy-looking couch. Bean, Pak, and I obediently sat down. Monroe sank into the only other seating option, an easy chair. Arni took in the state of affairs, said, “Excuse me,” walked out of the room, and came back a moment later with a kitchen stool.

  Monroe seemed not to notice. He was staring at me. I felt the color rise in my cheeks.

  “Arnold Pierpont here tells me that you just found out you have an alter.” He let out a strange sound which took a few seconds to register as a cackle. “Can’t you count?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “The number of days on the calendar between your birthday and January 6. That’s how many days you and your alter shared before going—heh, heh—your separate ways.”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, deciding that I didn’t want to bare my family history in front of a perfect stranger.