Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  Once we were back in the parking lot, she said, “Don’t let me keep you from finishing your walk. If you go that way,” she pointed to a third path, which I hadn’t noticed before and which led into the pretty grove of eucalypti, “you’ll end up back at the Bihistory Institute. Arni can give you a ride back.”

  “I think I’ll ask Pak where I can rent a bike.”

  I took a swig of the water and watched as she sped out of the parking lot. So she liked belly dancing. Who’d have guessed?

  [20]

  I PEEK INTO A WINDOW

  Pak looked blank when I asked him where I could rent a bike, so I purchased a baseball cap from a street vendor, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver a Palo Alto address. After a long, jolting ride, the taxi deposited me near a set of stucco rental housing buildings by the bay. The Egret’s Nest Apartment Complex.

  I paid the driver, tugged the price tag off the baseball cap, tut-tutted at the logo along its rim—Best and Brightest Start with B—and stuck the cap low on my head. I didn’t want any of the complex residents mistaking me for Felix B as I followed a stone path through the center of the complex, by a community pool where kids splashed in the still-strong late afternoon sun, and on toward building J. I noted in passing that the combination playground/outdoor gym that existed in my reality was here a large parking lot with numbered spots.

  Just before I reached the patio of building J, from which stairs led to various upper-floor apartments, it struck me that a little more stealth might be in order. What if Felix B had returned from Carmel and happened to look out of his window and immediately saw right through my baseball-cap disguise?

  I could always say I was here to pay him a visit, but I wasn’t.

  I pulled the baseball cap as far down as it could go around my ears, moved to the shady perimeter of the building, and cautiously continued on. A delivery person carrying packages was nearing from the direction of the parking lot. He gave me a tip of his hat and took the stairs two at a time to the top floor of building J. The three elderly residents playing bocce ball on the building green did not notice me.

  The Egret’s Nest Apartment Complex. Built next to the San Francisco wetlands, where the bay met solid land in a marshy hodgepodge of water, grass, and wildlife, it was affordable, basic, and had great views from the coveted top-floor apartments. Moving stealthily along the shaded side of the building, I turned a corner into the sunny back area where windows and porches faced the bay, hurried past several porches of no interest, and finally stopped next to my own ground-floor one, still keeping to the wall out of sight of anyone inside. A pet-walker who happened to be on the wetland walkway sent a puzzled look in my direction. I gave her a reassuring smile to show that I wasn’t here to rob the place and waited until the walker and her pet, a shuffling long-necked ostrich with the manner of a placid lamb, moved out of view, then took a quick look over the porch railing. The sliding-glass doors were closed, the shades drawn. There were no signs of life within.

  I’d overheard the students discussing that it was unusual for alters to choose identical living spaces, especially in a large, populated area like San Francisco and all its assorted neighborhoods. Our shared appreciation of apartments with views of marshy water had led both Felix B and me to apartment 003. What if my future mystery novel and his already-in-the-works (nearly completed?) one turned out to be alike to the tune of plagiarism? Since his book would be the first to make its appearance into the public eye, mine would be relegated to second-rate status, to be always known as a cheap imitation. Maybe if I sat down and wrote something really quickly, I thought, I could turn the tables on him.

  I slid from the porch to the study window, having remembered that I rarely bothered pulling its shade down—the sun did not do much more than illuminate a bit of carpet through the small window in the stucco wall. The shade was indeed rolled up. After a final glance around to make sure there were no other path walkers nearing, I brought my eyes close to the glass, screening out the bright sunlight with both hands.

  The first thing I saw was a pendulum clock halfway up the wall, which, as pendulum clocks always do (and pits too, I suppose, though one doesn’t run into too many of those) brought to mind Edgar Allen Poe’s famous tale. Next to the clock was a watercolor of the Carmel house, one done by our mother way back. Just out of sight was an oil painting showing a shapely alabaster foot with a bit of cloth draped over it. Nearer, just below the window, an easy chair with an ottoman looked comfortable for reading. Within reach was a tiered bookcase, and on the ottoman sat a large opened mailing box. The other half of Aunt Hen’s collection of dolphin figurines. Shipping to Universe B must have set her estate back a pretty penny, I thought.

  Below the pendulum clock and the paintings, a desk hosted a computer, its screen dark. By the keyboard lay a loose stack of papers. The top page had text printed on it and edited with a red pen. My eyes went to the trashcan under the desk, which was overflowing with crumpled paper. Universe B writers went through sheaves and sheaves of paper when they needed to proofread, apparently. I moved my head and hands along the window trying to find an angle that would afford a better view of the pages on the desk and in the trashcan—at least a page number—when I spotted out of the corner of my eye a discarded page, one that had fallen on the floor. I turned my attention to it, trying to decipher the upside-down content. About a dozen short phrases covered the page, some crossed out, others underlined or circled, like a used grocery store shopping list. I glued my face to the window in an effort to read the list—was one of the circled phrases Killer Cocktail or was I misreading that?—and an underlined one, Butcher’s Beef—and another, crossed out, Murderous Beets—and next to it Bleeding Beets, circled—and another, Devil’s Dish…Suddenly I knew what the phrases were—it was a list of titles for a mystery series, that’s what it was, with an amateur sleuth who was a chef or a caterer—how many had Felix written already?—I began counting the circled ones—

  A tap on my shoulder almost made me shriek.

  “Citizen, kindly explain your actions.” The DIM official, perspiring heavily, pulled at the turtleneck of his avocado uniform, clearly unhappy to have been called out in the heavy late-afternoon heat. (The bird-walker, no doubt.)

  “I was—I was just checking whether a friend was at home,” I said, my heart in my throat.

  “A friend? Your identicard, citizen.”

  I surrendered the identicard into his sweating hands and continued babbling. “I thought my friend might be back from Carmel, but he wasn’t answering his doorbell, so I thought I’d walk around to the back here and peek into his windows just in case he was asleep. But all I could see was his study, just some dolphin figurines and a computer and a list of book titles…” I trailed off.

  “Visitor from Universe A, huh? Your actions violate Regulation 3 concerning personal privacy, citizen. I don’t know how things are done over there, but here we expect all citizens to mind all regulations to the letter.” He unfolded the familiar list of regulations from a pocket and held it up for me to see.

  “Of course, sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. As I said, I was just checking to see if my friend was at home, I know he wouldn’t mind—”

  “You could try calling your friend and leaving him a message,” the DIM official pointed out, giving the now slightly moist identicard back to me.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, I’ll go ahead and do that. Good idea.”

  “I’ll let you off with a warning this time.”

  Fanning himself with the regulation list, he headed for the shade. I slunk away.

  [21]

  OLIVIA MAY NOVAK IRVING OF UNIVERSE A

  In the morning I called Wagner via inter-universe communications and left a message asking for a favor, then took the stairs down two at a time to the main parlor of the Queen Bee Inn. Trevor, whom I hadn’t seen since my first morning in Universe B, was behind the front desk, reading a printed newspaper. He looked up as I said, “You probably don’t remember m
e, I’ve been in and out all week. Just got back from Carmel, before that I was at the Palo Alto Health Center—”

  “You don’t look sick, Citizen Sayers.”

  “No, the stay at the health center was a false alarm. Food poisoning.”

  “Not from our breakfast, I hope.”

  “No, no, not at all. It wasn’t even food poisoning really. More like a mild stomachache. Not even that. Nothing to worry about.” I added, “Here’s the book which your wife kindly sent to me at the health center.” I had finished reading Evans the previous night after getting back from a nearby movie house (where I’d spent two absorbing hours in the popcorn-enhanced experience of watching Jungle Nights starring Gabriella Love, movie star and alter of the woman determined to make me a client of Past & Future and prove me universe maker.) As to the paper book, I had decided that Franny had no doubt only meant to lend it, not make a present of it. She was probably expecting it back.

  “Keep it,” Trevor said of the book and pushed it back toward me across the front desk. He turned a page of the printed newspaper and a headline jumped out at me—an arrest had just been made by the Council for Science Safety.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “Who is what?”

  “Who got arrested?”

  He spun the newspaper around so I could read the article. An archeologist had, apparently without authorization, stumbled on the ruins of Atlantis at the bottom of the Mediterranean and was trying to raise a serendipity defense. It didn’t look good for him.

  I wordlessly headed into the Nautical Nook, taking Evans with me.

  Body doubles. Even before alters had come into the picture, body doubles had made useful (if somewhat of a cop-out) mystery suspects: a doppelganger, the look-alike of a living person, would be seen getting into a train or on a foggy street, like in Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel, but would invariably turn out to be someone wearing a wig. As I sat below a mounted fake shark spreading cheese onto a bagel in the nautically themed breakfast room of the Queen Bee Inn, my thoughts were on my own doppelganger. If Bean was right, then not only were there two of us, but a whole menagerie: Felix 1, Felix 2, Felix 3, Felix 4…, all living slightly or wildly different lives, like a set of distorted mirror reflections in a haunted house at a fair. I dabbed more camel cheese onto the bagel and tried to picture a universe in which there were no rainbows or summer rain showers, or where books had never been invented, or where people liked to eat cheese made from goat’s milk or even cow’s milk. There was something oddly comfortable about the idea. It seemed easier in a way—aim for the middle of the pack, maybe somewhere around fifty or so, live happily.

  It struck me that one of these other Felixes might entertain the idea of running down people in crosswalks or planting rubber rolling pins on top of steep staircases. It was just that, having met him, Felix B didn’t seem that different from me. That was almost the whole problem.

  On the other hand, what did I know about him, really? I’d only had one conversation with the man and a quick peek into his study.

  I washed down the rest of the bagel with papple juice and went outside to find that Bean had maneuvered her Beetle into a parking spot under a sign that said, Fire Department only. No stopping or parking. I got in and she zipped back into traffic.

  “Bean,” I asked after quickly securing my seatbelt, “what methods does DIM use to enforce Regulation 19?”

  “Methods? What you might expect. They perform unannounced lab inspections, bring scientists in for questioning about their own research or a colleague’s, plant listening devices, confiscate research notebooks and equipment…that kind of thing. They do arrest people on occasion—did you hear about the Atlantis archeologist?—and send them to work camps for a spell. I want to thank you, Felix,” she added, her eyes on the road, not seeming very concerned that she might end up at a work camp for a spell. “This is your vacation and here you are spending it helping us.” She hit the brakes at a red light and turned toward me with a smile. “Though I know you’re hoping we’ll find a universe-making duck.”

  It was a nice smile. Luckily my omni buzzed and I was saved from having to be struck speechless any further.

  “Felix,” Wagner said from behind a stack of electric salad spinners, “I got the number you wanted.”

  “Already? Wagner, it’s barely been half an hour.”

  “It took only a couple of calls. Egg and Rocky helped me—they are climbing Folger Peak today—a nice hike, they say.” Wagner emptied a bag of lettuce into one of the salad spinners, doused the lettuce with water from a pitcher, put the lid on, and set the spinner spinning. “I talked to the woman, introduced myself. She didn’t seem—where are you?”

  Bean had jolted to a sudden stop to avoid driving through a cable car.

  “In a Volkswagen Beetle. Go ahead.”

  “She didn’t seem eager to be interviewed but relented after I told her that you’d just found out that you have an alter. She’s agreed to talk to you. You only,” he repeated, taking the basket out of the spinner and checking the amount of water underneath. “I’ll send you her number.”

  “Wagner, I never know how you pull these things off. By the way, you haven’t used that Golden Gate Bridge write-up yet, have you? I don’t think I’m happy with it.” It was true, I wasn’t. I winced inwardly at the clichéd phrases I had used, seeming to recall writing, To make golden loaves of bread, turn to the Golden Gate Bread Maker. I must have been really distracted.

  “We’ll wait to package the bread maker until you obtain the item from the Salt & Pepper Bakery,” he said in what he probably imagined was a reassuring reply, and reached for the next salad spinner.

  “Are you picking something up for Wagner at a bakery?” Bean, who had been pretending not to listen, asked as we rumbled over the cable car tracks.

  “Sourdough bread starter.”

  “I’m not the only one breaking regulations left and right, then?”

  “Wagner found Olivia May of Universe A.”

  “He did? Where? How?”

  “Wagner has connections everywhere. Where he found her, he didn’t say.”

  “Arnold will be pleased. After all the time he spent talking to Olivia May B, he’s been frothing at the mouth to interview Olivia May A. I have to admit, I too am dying to know where she’s been all this time. Regulation 3 makes it hard to find people, but we never got even close. We figured she’d moved abroad or died or something. We’d better contact her before she changes her mind about talking to you,” she added, making a dashboard-clutching U-turn, prompting a couple of angry honks. “I’ll call Arni to let him know. We can go to the two potential yabput spots later.”

  “Also to lunch. There’s a restaurant I want to try.” I gripped the dashboard as she dialed with one hand, steering with the other. “That is, if I make it out of this alive.”

  The 4102 citizens caught within the event radius on Y-day accounted for 8204 storylines—half of them in A, half in B—all of them catalogued painstakingly by the graduate students. One of the storylines (number 221B) belonged to Olivia May B, who had gotten rich developing ideas; another (221A) to Olivia May A, who hadn’t. We were about to hear the A-dweller’s story via inter-universe communications.

  Olivia May sat cross-legged on a yoga mat in the middle of a wooden floor in a room with no furniture in it. She was petite and lean in a mango-colored bodysuit, just as Arni had described her alter.

  “I teach yoga,” she informed me of the obvious. “This is my school. Mango Yoga.”

  “Mango is a wonderful fruit,” I agreed from where I was sitting at Arni’s desk, “though hard on the hands. Wagner’s Kitchen makes a nifty hands-free fruit peeler—”

  “I have a new name too.”

  I heard Arni shift—he was standing by the wall, just out of the visual range of the omni, along with Bean and Pak. Unethical, perhaps, but as Pak had pointed out, Olivia May A had specified that she wanted to talk only to me, not that there be no one else in the
room. Professor Maximilian was elbow-deep in a lab-experiment of some kind and had told us to go ahead without him.

  “What is your new name, then?” I asked.

  “Meriwether Mango.”

  “Very natural,” I complimented her.

  “I strongly recommend a closeness to nature. It’s good for the body and the mind.” She inhaled deeply and let her breath out slowly through pursed lips. “Have you ever done yoga?”

  “I’ve been meaning to get more exercise,” I admitted. “All the free samples at Wagner’s Kitchen, where I work, well, a lot of them are desserts, and even my diminished taste buds spring to life when chocolate is invol—” I thought I heard a light cough and switched mid-word to what Arni had instructed me to say, though the question came out more abruptly than I intended. “Where have you been since Y-day?”

  “Why do you wish to know?”

  “I believe that it bears in some way on the storyline of my own life.”

  “And why are you interested in tracing the story of your own life? You know what happened.”

  “But I don’t know why.”

  This was the real answer, I realized. I didn’t want to be the universe maker, but I was curious. There was also a certain addictiveness to the possibility of it being true, like being told I might be of royal blood or have secret superpowers.

  She sighed. “I don’t see how my story matters, but since you seem to think it’s important, I’ll tell you what happened. I was on an hour-long bay cruise,” she began her tale. “To calm my nerves before a job interview. For a position in the research and development department of Many New Ideas, Inc. Have you heard of them?”

  I nodded. It was a well-known Chinese company. So that’s where Olivia May B had gotten her start.

  “I was young, I wanted the job, and,” she shifted her position on the mat and began to stretch her neck from side to side, “I’m told I would have done quite well in it…but that turned out to be my alter’s life, not mine. The morning began well enough. The tour boat left Pier 39 and made a wide arc around Alcatraz Island—and what a lovely but cold day it was. I got a cup of warm pomegranate juice from the refreshment stand and went above deck and found a seat. The water was a bit choppy, but I was soaking it all in, the vitality of the ocean, the seagulls, the fresh air…I still enjoy sailing.” She seemed to recollect herself. “But you wanted to know what happened. It wasn’t anything much, just a moment of inattention. Pomegranate juice down my suit and the front of a cream silk blouse, can you imagine?