Regarding Ducks and Universes (14 page)

“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 Maximilian 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.

“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Monroe continued mercilessly. “Look at you, all upset because you shared a few months of life with another.” He let out a second unidentifiable sound, something in the neighborhood of a snort. “What would you say if I told you that I was seventy-one—that’s right,
seventy-one
—when I found out that
your
sort,” he pointed a bony finger toward Bean and Pak, “had gone and produced a copy of the whole world and everyone in it. Alter indeed. Well, I outlived him, heh, heh. Died in a fire, he did. Burned his own house down last year.”

“We didn’t make a copy of the universe,” Bean rose to the defense of her sort, “we merely found it.”

“Irresponsible,” Monroe snapped.

“The progress of knowledge,” Pak said, “never stops.”

“Progress? Ask your young friend here if he considers it progress.” He jerked his thumb in my direction. “Ask him if he’d be here today if it wasn’t for
meddling
in nature’s affairs. Luckily the government put a stop to the whole thing.”

Arni sent Bean, who looked ready to explode, a warning look. “What’s done is done,” he said easily, “but that’s not why we’re here today.”

“Do you have my money, Pierpont?”

Arni got up off the stool, handed Monroe a credit slip from the pocket of his sweater, and sat back down. “We appreciate your giving us the opportunity to examine the item from Felix’s past.”

Monroe grunted in reply, scrutinizing the credit slip.

“Is it all there?” Bean asked with an edge to her voice.

Monroe folded the credit slip and carefully put it away into the pocket of his robe. “What you are looking for is upstairs. It was here when I moved in and I kept it because you never know, I say, and I was right because here you are. The other group, the one that got here first”—Arni swore under his breath—“they were able to start it up. They wanted to take it to their workplace, all of it, but I said no. And I told them they’d better leave it in the same condition they found it, no funny business. Same goes for you folks.” He got up, quite springily for a man who claimed to have been seventy-one 35 years ago. “Top of the stairs and to the right. I’ll be in the kitchen eating my dinner.”

I caught sight of the clock on the wall. It was only 3:37.

Monroe noticed. “The secret to longevity—and I’m the right person to ask, heh, heh—is prunes and an early dinner every day. Don’t touch any of the boxes in the attic, Pierpont, like we discussed. They are all mine. And close the door on your way out.”

I hung back as the others started up the stairs.

“Er—” I stopped Monroe on his way to the kitchen. “My alter, was he here with the other group?”

“Yeah, I reckon. Unless you have a twin.”

A creature slinked by, brushing against my leg with its fur. A tiny cat.

“Did he—” I wasn’t sure how to formulate the question. “Did he seem
content
with his life?”

Monroe gave me a blank stare. I went upstairs.

Monroe’s attic was a depository for boxes of discarded clothing, outdated appliances, and a variety of furniture, all of it old, covered with a thick layer of dust, and serving as a breeding ground for dust mites and probably larger fauna as well. A lone bulb hanging bare from the low ceiling made a feeble effort at illuminating the space. “What is that
smell
?” Arni wrinkled his nose as Pak pushed the attic door open all the way; it stuck slightly and left a clean arc on the cobwebby floor. Pak headed straight for the pile of antiquated-looking computer equipment in one corner. “Recently disturbed,” he commented. He knelt down and started connecting cables, muttering softly, “Come on now.”

We dusted off a few sturdy boxes and moved them around to use as seats. Bean settled down next to Pak. As they worked to start up the computer, Arni cornered me next to an upside-down refrigerator. “Just a few more questions, Felix,” he urged, as if I hadn’t spent most of the car ride down and all of lunch answering questions about my childhood. Any minute now, I thought, one of them will suggest hypnotizing me to get at my subconscious and retrieve long-lost details of my early life; and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they did happen to know how to perform hypnosis on willing subjects. The three graduate students digging around Monroe’s attic and my past seemed confident they would find answers and achieve their research goal, no matter what the skills needed or how far they took them from their own field of study, bihistory.

As I pretended to listen to Arni, who was showing me something he called an interconnectivity and propagation of events diagram, it occurred to me that I was stuck somewhere in between, with neither the blind confidence of youth that everything would turn out as imagined nor the experience that builds up as years pass that it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t. Did that mean I was ready to leave Wagner’s Kitchen, comfortable as it was, and try my hand at something else? Perhaps it was time to burn some bridges and just
write
.

Unfortunately, there was the small matter of having to eat and pay rent. Any potential money made from a mystery novel would trickle in drop by drop as readers discovered it and gave it—one hoped—positive reviews. I felt a stab of envy for authors living in Universe B, where publishers, I’d learned, often paid a bulk sum in advance for a manuscript.

On the other hand, I consoled myself, what if publishers didn’t like your novel and declined to publish it? Whatever its faults, under the omni system, everyone’s work, however brilliant or mediocre or truly bad, received an equal chance. True, one usually had to wade through a bog of flashy, poorly written stuff to find something halfway decent—but it was a race for readers with a level starting line, even if there was a lot of elbowing and shoving going on.

Pak had managed to revive the computer; slowly, with much rumbling followed by a low-pitched shriek, it came to life. Arni abandoned me and went to hover over Pak’s shoulder.

“Someone cleaned this keyboard,” Pak pointed out as the computer monitor flickered on and off, then settled for being on. “We shouldn’t have stopped for lunch.”

“Monroe said to come after three.” Arni shrugged. “What’s done is done. Let’s see if we can find photos 1 through 12 and 14 and up.” Without turning around, he added, “If that’s okay with you, Felix, of course. This computer has been sitting here a long time.”

Monroe’s pet had come up the stairs after us and was padding softly around the attic, its paws leaving tiny footprints in the dust, its whiskers peeking occasionally from behind a box. “Is that a mouse or just an awfully small cat?” I wondered out loud. Arni frowned, said, “Both, I think,” and gave his attention back to the computer.

“What happened to your parents’ things after they died?” Bean asked.

“I came down to collect the paintings—the ones my parents did, not the gallery artwork. Their lawyer took care of the rest and sold the house as is, with the furniture and everything. Just think, had I been more involved in the process, I would have had the pleasure of meeting Monroe earlier.” I looked around the attic. While at the San Diego Four-Year, I had visited my parents once a month and had eaten their food and washed my laundry and paid no attention to the seldom-opened, narrow door that led to the second most unusual room in a California house. (The first being a basement.) Monroe’s claim of ownership aside, some of the furniture did look familiar, though it was impossible to be sure, it was all in such a state of decay. A grungy rectangular thing holding up boxes in one corner might have been a Universe B copy of a white table my parents had used to plan and lay out projects for their gallery. Or it might not.

Pak tapped the keyboard. “Hmmm. This is your parents’ computer, is it not, Felix?”

“No.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s Felix’s parents’ computer.”

“Correct, yes. Did your parents own a similar one?”

“It’s been fifteen years. Plus all computers look alike to me. That one just looks squarer and older.”

“It’s the Bitmaster 2001. They were popular around the turn of the century,” Arni said as Pak pushed back the box he was sitting on and headed wordlessly out the door, sending Monroe’s catmouse scurrying behind a dresser.

“Did 161 Cypress Lane have the same history in A and B?” I asked as we waited for Pak to return. “My parents lived here, I was born, they rented out the house and moved to San Francisco. Years later, they came back, opened the Art Cave, lived happily for a while, died. Then Monroe A bought the house and burnt it down.” I recalled Monroe’s unpleasant cackle as he pointed out the folly of his alter dying in a house fire. “Did all that happen here in Universe B as well, except for the last part and any cracks from our earthquake?”

“Pretty much,” Arni said. “Some things didn’t happen on the same date and Felix’s parents named their gallery Cave Art, but other than that, yes, pretty much the same.”

“Art Cave is better,” Bean said. “More catchy.”

The exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling suddenly went out. By the light of the open door and the bluish glow of the computer monitor, Bean felt around for an old umbrella and used its handle to tap the base of the light bulb. The light came back on. “Loose wiring,” she said. I noticed that a cobweb had attached itself to her hair.

“Cobweb, Bean. I still don’t understand why you think this is all necessary. There must have been a lot of people near Professor Singh’s lab on Y-day.”

From where she was putting the umbrella back in its place by the refrigerator, Bean replied, “Four-thousand some.”

“We’ve ruled them all out.” Pak was back from downstairs.

There was no arguing with him.

“What took so long?” Arni said. Pak was carrying the thin black bag he’d kept by his side all afternoon.