The Alternate Universe

by The Alternate Universe [MM] (epub)

  “Once they settled into freedom, they worked a farm until they saved enough to buy their own land. And then eventually, they started a general store and then a restaurant, and Molly became famous throughout the town for her cooking. They say the corn bread I make is her recipe. That’s why we call it Chatham bread.”

  “If she’d figured out how to mass produce it, we’d be rich today,” Carolien’s mother said.

  “It’s the dash of apple juice that makes it so sweet and moist,” Grandma Bets whispered theatrically. “Better not put that in the moving picture. I’m still thinking of taking a patent on it.”

  “How many kids did they have?” Carolien asked.

  “They took the last name Bailey, and they had a bunch of kids together, but the only one I can name is Elizabeth, with the one green eye, who married Tinker Washington. They had Anna, who everyone called Missy and sang like an angel, who married Jackson Ward, and they came to Chicago, where Jackson worked in the abrasives plant. Missy and Jackson, of course, were my mama’s parents, and Missy passed the story and the ring to my mama, June, who married my pop, Wilbur Thomas, and Mama passed the story and ring to me, and here I am, telling it again, October 6, 2005.”

  Carolien waited for more. Her gaze alternated between the real-life Grandma Bets sitting before her and the Grandma on screen. Either way, she looked beautiful, far younger than her 78 years.

  “It’s a great story,” Carolien said.

  Grandma Bets bit her lip. “Did it come out OK? Did it…,” she paused, searching for the right word. “… flow? Did it flow?”

  “It flowed perfectly. Like a river,” Carolien said.

  “Phew. I’m glad,” she said.

  “Carolien’s right, Ma. You told it just right,” her mother said. “And now that we got it in a moving picture, it’ll never be forgotten.”

  Carolien pulled out her cell and was disappointed to see no reply from Claude.

  “Claude’s watch was old-fashioned, big with a cover that flipped open,” she said.

  “Pocket watch?” her mother asked.

  “Right.”

  “And he got it today?” Grandma Bets asked.

  “Yep.”

  Grandma Bets shook her head. “It’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe the watch came from slave times too,” Carolien said.

  Grandma Bets nodded. “Could be. Could be.”

  Carolien’s mother looked at the clock on the wall. “I better start cooking.”

  “And I’m taking off these shoes. They’re pinching my feet something awful,” Grandma Bets said.

  “And I’ll try Claude again,” Carolien said. She quilled:

  Where r u? Can u come 2 my haus? Bring yr watch. Have smthing weird 2 show u.

  After hitting send, she flipped on the camera, and watched the 4D image of Grandma Bets tell her story—the beginning, middle, and end—all at once.

  Chapter Seven

  The Experiment

  Heading home, Claude kept thinking about Jay: the excitement of chasing the hat and racing to the bandshell, the thrill of the first kiss, and the mind-blowing unreality of kissing him again and again.

  Claude laughed at his previous worry about so-called mixed messages. It was obvious now that every glance, every gesture over the last several weeks had been building, step by step, to the amazing moment when Jay leaned over and kissed him. In that delicious moment, there’d been no hesitation, nothing mixed.

  Claude had drawn the line at unbuckling his belt, pointing out that they were in a public park. “I don’t feel like getting arrested,” he’d said, leaving out the other reason he wanted to keep hands above the waist: the fact that he’d never actually gone all the way with a boy and wanted to make the first time special—be certain it wasn’t a short-term fling, as his past two boyfriends had been, but something serious, genuine.

  Jay begged him to have dinner at his house, but Claude said no, a decision he began to regret as he galloped home. They’d made tentative plans for tomorrow after Carolien’s competition—they would either go to Jay’s to play tennis or to a motion picture show. But now Claude didn’t know how he’d be able to wait.

  He wanted to turn around and race to Jay’s house. But intellectually, he knew it was better to play hard to get. He needed to find something nice to wear to meet Jay’s parents. They were rich, owners of an Indian telecom company, and probably snobs like Millstone—he knew for a fact that their social circles overlapped—and he wanted to make a good first impression.

  The stable was empty, which meant his dad was working late. He settled Trax and marched into the house, kicking off his shoes, tossing his rucksack on the floor, and yanking open the refrigerator. The box was bare except for a half-empty package of Holesome Americano Cheese that was a month beyond its expiration date, a carton of Moo Done It Milk, a bruised apple and a desiccated orange.

  He found a box of Stupendous Saltines in the pantry and, after examining the label and finding that it wasn’t produced by a wholly owned subsidiary of APU, carried it to the living room.

  His dad’s puzzle was still on the table. He left a new one every morning. Sometimes it was an equation, sometimes a riddle, sometimes a code, sometimes an unfinished sequence. Licking cracker crumbs off his lips, he grabbed the puzzle and plopped on the couch. The note read:

  Hi! What word do you get when you grind wheat, subtract a train, add 10 and then turn the whole thing upside down? Love, Dad.

  Grind wheat. Claude picked up a quill and wrote “flour” on the page. Subtract a train. He studied the word “flour.” Since trains run by the hour, he crossed out “our,” then he added “ten,” crossed that out and then added “10.” He crossed the whole thing out and then wrote, “fl” 10 times. That’s not right. He wrote “flour” again. Other words for train? He wrote “locomotive,” “freight,” “passenger,” “subway,” “elevated.” He stopped and smiled then underlined “l” in elevated. In Chicago, the mostly elevated train system was called the “L.”

  He wrote “flour” again and crossed out the “l,” which gave him the word “four.” Add 10 to 4 and you have 14. Turn it upside down and you get… hmm. It looked like a lowercase “h” and a capital “I”: hI. “That was too easy, Dad,” he said aloud, as he wrote “Hi” and tossed the sheet on the floor.

  He fell back on the couch and, with the carton of crackers on his chest, gazed at the ceiling. He could still taste Jay, a mix of mint breath freshener and sour sexiness. There’d been a moment, just before they’d parted when the storm clouds broke and they’d been bathed in sunlight, as if the heavens were blessing them, and Claude had felt as if he could have stayed there forever.

  His phone chimed.

  where u??? Carolien wrote.

  She’d quilled several times in the last hour, asking him to come over, and then had left a VM about a ring that supposedly had a pattern like the one on the watch. He hadn’t responded because he’d been with Jay, and now wondered how much to tell her. Carolien thought Jay was a jerk and would probably say Claude was letting his groin lead him by the nose.

  He turned on the TV. A newscaster said a poll showed the presidential candidates were neck and neck after months of back-and-forth scandals. At the commercial break, a young woman appeared on the screen. “I look young, right?” she asked, in a sultry voice. She appeared to be about 25 years old. Her skin was wrinkle free, her eyes clear, her teeth sparkling. “Well, I’m not,” she continued. “I’m 75.”

  “Give me a break,” Claude said.

  “I know. It’s hard to believe. But look,” the woman said, holding up a photo of a grandmotherly woman. The woman looked not only old but unfashionable, in a dowdy dress and clunky black shoes. “This was me six months ago. And this is me today,” she said. The camera pulled back to reveal the woman’s figure. Her body was as youthful as her face, and she was wearing a tight red dress and pointy dick-kickers. “And I owe it all to Rejuva, the foam pillow that releases growth
hormones into your skin while you sleep.”

  A large tortoise peered at the camera. “The growth hormones were developed under a patented process using the DNA of tortoises, the oldest living creatures on earth.” The ad cut to scientists in masks and lab coats dropping liquid from droppers into tubes. “Scientists at All Products United extracted the key proteins responsible for tortoises’ eternal youth, combined them with human growth hormone—which is known for its ability to keep children’s skin youthful and elastic—and placed them in this,” —the young-old woman sat down on a bed, which she patted lightly with her palm—“a mattress made from time-release foam that delivers this miracle medicine to your skin while you sleep.”

  The screen filled with a cartoon showing waves of medicine radiating from a mattress into the body of a sleeping woman. The woman’s aged face and body transformed into a young woman’s while numbers on the bottom of the screen quickly scrolled from “1 night” to “180 nights.” Meanwhile, the woman’s voice narrated: “In just six months, you can turn back the hands of time 50 years,” pause, “or more.”

  Claude shut off the TV, wondering how Millstone did it. One subsidiary of All Products United was destroying turtle habitats while another was exploiting turtles’ DNA, and both subsidiaries were probably making a profit. The company was always ahead of the curve, always the first on the market with the next new thing. They seemed on a track to own everything these days—a steamroller so powerful that Congress was actually debating a bill to regulate the speed at which a company can grow, a not-so-veiled attempt to restrain APU’s expansion.

  “Hey.”

  Claude’s dad was standing at the window, holding a bag of Frik ‘n’ Frak Fried Chik ‘n’ Chak.

  “Hi,” Claude said.

  “Dive in. I’m going to check the garden.” His dad left the bag on the windowsill and disappeared.

  Claude stepped through the sliding door, grabbed the bag of Chik ‘n’ Chak, and followed him across the yard.

  “How was your day?” his dad asked, glancing up from an elephant ear-sized leaf of rhubarb that he was gently rubbing between thumb and forefinger.

  “OK,” Claude said, dropping the bag on a picnic table that stood on crooked legs in the middle of the yard. The table, like the entire house, showed signs of neglect—the table with its splintered surface and warped legs, the house with its sagging roof and rotting siding.

  It wasn’t that his father couldn’t afford to get a new picnic table or fix the house. He just couldn’t be bothered. His focus was work, so that even when he set aside time for non-work related subjects, his mind always drifted back to the formulas scrawled across the blackboard in his office or the inventions that cluttered his workbenches.

  “C’mon and eat,” Claude said, reaching in the bag and grabbing a chunk of warm, boneless meat.

  His dad walked over and peered in the bag cautiously as if afraid it might bite. Sometimes he seemed to look not at things but through them, as if he was seeing something no one else could see—their molecular structure or the laws of physics that held them together.

  “You want an artificial breast or artificial leg?” Claude asked.

  His dad smiled. “Since they’re artificial, does it matter?”

  “Which shape do you prefer?”

  “Hmmm. Since you put it that way, I think I’m in the mood to eat something shaped like a club.” He sat down and tossed his head back to get his shoulder-length hair out of his face. Claude handed him a leg-shaped piece, and he tore into it as if he hadn’t eaten all day.

  They ate for a few minutes in silence, and then Claude asked, “Where did Mom meet Ted?”

  His dad was startled. His eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well… I don’t know. Just curious.”

  In truth, Jay had sparked the question. As they’d parted, he’d declared that “a relationship is defined by how it begins.”

  “Uh oh. Ours began in a storm,” Claude said.

  “That’s where it began, not how. The how was … first off, we were doing a good deed. You know, trying to save the lady’s hat.”

  “Hmmm. True. When you put it that way, it sounds like an auspicious beginning.”

  “Right.” Jay smiled. “And we had a race.”

  “Which you won.”

  “True, but my point is we were playing, messing around, having fun. That’s another auspicious way to begin a relationship. And then what we were doing just now…” He smiled mischievously. “That was pretty hot. At least I thought it was hot.”

  Claude grinned. “I did, too,” he said, leaning over and kissing him again.

  “Yep, hot,” Jay said, kissing back.

  “Yep, yep,” Claude said, planting a third kiss.

  Jay, his expression unexpectedly serious, pulled back. “So I think our relationship will be full of good deeds, fun, and passion.” Passion. Claude liked how it sounded, and it got him thinking about his mom and Millstone’s relationship. He’d never seen them be passionate. Sometimes they seemed more like acquaintances than husband and wife. What had been the spark that had drawn them together?

  His dad swallowed a mouthful of chicken. “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “Do you ever think things could have worked out differently?”

  “Differently?”

  “You know, with you and Mom staying together.”

  His dad shrugged. “I used to think about it in the beginning. Maybe if I’d said X or done Y—not burnt the chicken I was making for your mother’s birthday dinner or not worked so late in the lab. Or maybe if your mother hadn’t taken that vacation by herself…”

  “What vacation?”

  His dad looked at his hands. “Paris. I was supposed to go too but there was an emergency at Fermi,” he said, referring to the particle accelerator where he spent much of his time.

  “Is Paris where Mom met Millstone?”

  “You must have heard this story a thousand times,” he said. He took a particularly large bite of meat.

  Claude shook his head. “Actually, no.” The story his parents told about their breakup was this: they’d fallen out of love, drifting over the course of 15 years in different directions, his mom toward nights at the opera, his dad toward work.

  With this mouth full, his dad said, “You’re too young.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are,” he said. Flecks of chicken flew from his mouth, one landing on Claude’s forearm.

  “Gross,” Claude said, grabbing a napkin to clean himself and the table.

  “Sorry. Bud, am I tired.”

  “Dad.”

  His dad crumpled a Frik ‘n’ Frak napkin in his greasy hands. “I better check the seed transporter.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “What was it again?”

  “Is Paris where Mom met Ted?”

  His dad sighed. “Maybe. Probably.” He looked worn out, as if the exhaustion not just of the day but of months and maybe even years had suddenly caught up with him. “In any event, I always think of that trip as the beginning of the end.”

  “So maybe if you had gone with her…?” Claude left the question unfinished.

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Seriously, do you ever wonder if you’d still be with Mom if she hadn’t met Millstone on that trip?”

  “Maybe we’re still together in an alternate universe,” he said and then headed toward a corner of his garden where he’d set up his latest contraption. It consisted of two covered dishes with a glass tube sitting midway between them. Dozens of wires and heavy cables connected the various pieces.

  Claude, a half-eaten piece of Chick ‘n’ Chak in his hand, followed him across the lawn.

  “Darn,” his dad said as he squatted near one of the dishes and examined a small gauge affixed to the lid.

  Claude squatted next to him. “What’s wrong?”

  “The carbon dioxide levels are up,” he said, pulling a small notebook f
rom his pocket.

  “So?”

  “They were supposed to go down.” He began jotting numbers in his book. Claude noticed that the page facing him was filled with doodles that looked vaguely familiar, like diagrams of atoms he’d seen in chemistry class.

  “Why are they supposed to go down?”

  His dad sighed. “I’m trying to transport the gasses from this environment to this one,” he said, pointing from one covered dish to the other.

  “Is transferring them hard to do?”

  “Not transfer. Transport them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Transport the gases atom by atom—quark by quark, actually—and reconstitute them on the other side.”

  “Like from Star Trek when they zap people from here to there?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’re joking.”

  His dad checked the connections holding the wires and dishes together. “A case can be made mathematically that teletransportation is possible, just as a case can be made for alternate universes,” he finally said.

  “Mathematically, huh?”

  “Say you’re at an intersection where you can turn left or right.”

  “Never mind. I’m not that interested,” Claude said, standing up. When he was younger, he looked forward to his dad’s explanations of why stars twinkled, how the moon influenced the tides, and why light was the fastest thing in the universe, but lately he did his best to avoid them.

  “Wait, you asked a question and I want to answer it.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “You asked if I’d gone with your mother to Paris, would we still be married, right?”

  “Oh that question. Go on, although I don’t see the connection unless you’re going to say you could have saved the marriage by teletransporting yourself across the ocean.”

  “No, but close. What I wanted to say was that if it were possible to combine alternate universes and teletransportation into a unified theory, I could answer your question by testing it.”

  Claude crossed his arms. “Testing it?”

  Wiping his hands on his pants, his dad stood. “Yeah. Transporting myself to Paris in the year 2002 and seeing what happens.”