Regarding Ducks and Universes (16 page)

It was a good question. Ignoring the musty furniture, the coat/umbrella rack in one corner, the upside-down refrigerator, and a couple of piles of knickknacks that were clearly more recent in origin, that left most of the room. Cardboard boxes lay stacked on top of each other, with no clues as to whether they were placed there before or after Monroe moved in.

Bean pulled out the utility knife she had bravely borrowed from Franny’s cousin back at the B&B. “Let’s do this systematically. We’ll start by the door, each take a box, look through it, then move on around the room.”

Arni pushed his long curls behind his ears and looked down ruefully at his pleated chinos. “I wish I’d worn an older pair.”

“Do you even own any clothes that aren’t brand new?” Bean said and handed him the knife.

The first few boxes turned out to be full of old garments, prompting more jokes about Arni’s sense of style.

“I’ll tell you what I wish,” I said, unable to suppress a shiver as I folded a box closed. (I had always found dated, worn-out clothing to be creepy.) “That we’d thought to bring some plastic gloves. Who knows what’s living in these? And what are we looking for anyway?”

“Photo albums or a boxful of receipts, if we’re lucky.”

We weren’t. A couple of hours and twenty-some boxes later, we were still empty-handed. We had unearthed some surprising things about Monroe’s past—who would have guessed that he played professional tennis abroad as a young man—but we hadn’t found anything belonging to my parents that wasn’t in the clothes or furniture category.

“What about that box over there?” I stood up to stretch my legs, hoping my knees wouldn’t crack and asking the question so Bean wouldn’t notice if they did. She was jamming a utility knife into the refrigerator door. The door opened with a
pop
, revealing rows of jars, all upside down, some broken. “Ugh. Pickled vegetables. Did you say there was a box left, Felix?”

“The microwave-sized one over there, behind the umbrella stand thingie.”

“The
what
where?”

I stepped over various hazards on the floor, pretending not to hear Arni explaining in a low voice, “A microwave oven is an appliance used to heat up food. Works on the principle of exciting water molecules via radio waves. Very popular in Universe A.”

“I think I remember those from when I was a child,” I heard Bean say. “Whatever happened to them?”

“People thought the radiation was dangerous. Plus we have self-heating cans nowadays.”

“It’s marked BOOKS,” I said loudly.

Bean closed the door on the refrigerator smell (which managed to permeate even my impaired nostrils) and they hurried over. Arni knelt down, wincing at the dusty stains on his chinos, and carefully slit the tape that sealed the box. He opened it to reveal, unsurprisingly, books. Bean lifted out a couple. “Hey, these are on art. They must have belonged to your—I mean, Felix’s—parents.”

I took out a volume. It bore the title
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds.
“Why is it so bulky, this book?”

“Looks like a museum publication,” Bean explained. “A textbook perhaps.”

Inside the cover page, the textbook owner had written his initials: P.S., for Patrick Sayers, my father. At that moment I didn’t care that, technically, it was not
my
father’s hand that had set the letters down on the page, but his alter’s. I placed
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
aside and we began carefully lifting out the rest of the box’s contents and looking through the books one by one. As Bean said, “You never know.” The books were all oversized, had durable covers, and spanned the range of prehistoric art, from cave paintings to megalithic monuments. It was a collection that represented both my parents’ education and their interests as they went about gathering life-size reproductions of ancient art for their own gallery (though not, of course, of the megalithic monuments).

“I’ve always wondered about the first person who decided to make a sketch on the dank, dark wall of a cave,” said Arni, who was leafing through a book with glossy pictures of the Lascaux cave drawings. “You gotta ask, what prompted him or her to do it?”

Bean put a book aside and lifted out another. “It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the first cave wall sketch started a really long event chain, one that led to, say, Professor Singh discovering inter-universe vortices.”

I shook
The History of Pigments: Volume I
, but no conveniently hidden receipt or photograph fell out. “And what if these people had done something more constructive with their time than defacing cave walls, like hunting or berry picking?”

“Maybe in that universe we’d still be berry picking.”

“Ouch,” I said. “What the—”

Bean looked over. “Paper cut. Watch out for those.”

“You know,” Arni mused down his large nose, “it’s quite an evolutionary leap, to be able to create things that have no immediate practical use. Or to try anything new, for that matter. Who would have thought that sliding a bit of raw meat onto a stick and cooking it over a fire would yield something as delicious as steak? Just an example—I don’t eat meat anymore, I’m a pescetarian now,” he explained to me.

“Wagner’s Kitchen markets a decent soy burger recipe,” I said, staring at my finger, the sting of the paper cut far out-scaling the size of it. I added, “Here’s what I don’t understand about this business of universe-making. I’m not sure how to phrase it, but—”

“I know what you’re going to ask,” Bean said without looking up from
The History of Pigments: Volume II
.

“Oh?”

“People always ask the same question. You want to ask if your dog can start an event chain, though sometimes it’s about their favorite fish or hamster or whatever.”

I felt a little deflated. “I was going to say duck.” For no reason at all, the orange-billed ducks frolicking in the health center pond had lingered in my mind. “If people can do it, why not ducks?”

Bean looked thoughtful for a moment. “Do ducks,” she said quite seriously, “create universes?—Probably.”

“Just like that? All the time? With every waddle?”

“We think so, yes. With every waddle that sets off a nice long event chain, in any case.”

I put the last of the books aside and peered into the now-empty box. “So how do we know that a duck didn’t—?”

“We don’t. As a matter of fact, a duck would be just about the right size, I suppose. From Professor Singh’s old data we know that the warping of space-time that yielded A and B required a prime mover of small mass, around twenty-four libras. Anyone know what a typical duck size is?”

Arni gave
The History of Pigments: Volume III
a final shake and stood up, clearly happy to be off the floor. He dusted off his hands and pants and reached for his omni. “I’ll check.”

“A small-sized universe maker,” I said. “So that’s why you’re interested in me.”

“Twenty-some libras is the typical weight of a six-month-old.”

“
Can
a baby set off a significant chain of events?”

“You ever been around one?” said Arni, nose deep in his omni.

Bean had picked up Monroe’s catmouse and was absentmindedly stroking it. “It
is
limiting that people are the only observers we can interview. We have yet to figure out how to ask a whale or a tortoise if they saw anything of interest thirty-five years ago.”

“So far,” interrupted Arni, reading from his omni, “I can tell you that your typical dinner duck is about ten libras, requiring at least two hours of roasting. Sounds appetizing for those who aren’t vegetarians, but a bit on the small side for our purpose.”

“Forget ducks,” Bean said dejectedly, “we can’t even figure out where Felix was at the moment the Y-day yabput took place. Are you sure that you don’t have an old photo album sitting on a shelf somewhere at home, Felix?”

“Sorry, no. Is it all right if I secretly hope a duck did it?”

Arni flipped his omni shut. “Well, whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t me. I wasn’t born yet. Although I can’t guarantee that a few of my molecules weren’t part of the Y-day prime mover. We are all recycled, always shedding and taking in molecules, you know.”

Monroe refused to let me leave with any books, insisting correctly that my A-ness prohibited me from being the rightful inheritor of any Universe B items and relented only when I pulled out my identicard and signed a chunk of my credit over to him.

Pak was in the breakfast room of the B&B and had commandeered the long wooden table for his own purposes: on it sat the laptop, a printer, an empty teacup, a discarded banana skin, a plate with only crumbs on it—and half a dozen photographs strewn about.

He looked at us inquiringly as we walked in. “Found anything at Monroe’s?”

“Art books,” I said, placing my newly acquired treasure,
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
, on the edge of the table, away from the teacup and the crumbs.

“The recovery program finished running. Took the whole night and most of the morning. It found photos.”

I sat down.

Arni gathered up the dirty dishes off the table and took them to the kitchen. He came back just as Pak said, rather rudely I thought, “Only a few are of interest to us. Five, to be exact. The resolution is not great—no, don’t touch them, Bean, they are still wet. I just printed them.”

“When you say they are of interest,” I began weakly, “do you mean that they were, in fact—”

“Taken on Y-day? Indeed.”

I permitted my eyes to travel over the photographs.

I don’t know what I expected to see.

I
t’s impossible to imagine
The Hound of the Baskervilles
without the foggy and inhospitably barren English moor, or
Murder on the Orient Express
without the claustrophobic tension of the Istanbul-Calais train moving ever closer to its final station. Mood was important in a story. And in life. With Pak’s words, the mood in the room had heightened from academic interest to academic fever. “Five, you say,” Arni said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“I’ve ordered them by photo number,” Pak said of the items recovered from the Bitmaster.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope there’s a time stamp as well,” Bean said, her eyes darting from one photo to another.

“It is.”

The first of the photos showed my mother next to the open door of a brown Chevrolet, either in the process of strapping me into my car seat or taking me out of it; in the background a store or restaurant could be seen. “The Big Fat Pancake,” Pak said. “Either right before breakfast or right after.”

The setting in the next two photos I thought might be the Presidio, the area just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. One was a close-up of a peeling eucalyptus tree, groves of which ran rampant all over the Presidio; the other was a shot of my family in front of (perhaps) the same eucalyptus, clearly taken by a kind stranger. “Cute hat, Felix,” Bean said. In addition to being cute in a powder blue hat, I was sucking on something and hanging on to my parents.

“One eucalyptus tree is like another. It will be hard to pinpoint where those two were taken,” Arni said, sounding a bit disappointed.

And the fourth photo—

“Hey,” I said, “is that—?”

Pak nodded. “It is indeed. The Universe B version of Photo 13.”

The fifth and last of the photos, like the eucalyptus ones, wasn’t going to be of much use to the students. California sea lions lounged in the bright sun, packed like sardines on a dozen square wooden rafts anchored in a marina and looking magnificently content. Pak tapped the photograph lightly. “The marina near Pier 39. Nearby is the restaurant where Felix B and family went to lunch, and maybe Felix A and family as well.”

“Never mind that,” Bean interrupted. “Did you say number 13?”

“Indeed. Thirteen B, as it were.”

She bent over the photo. “It’s not the same as 13A.”

“No.”

“So 13A and 13B were taken post-yabput.”

“Indeed.”

“And therefore not necessarily at the same time. That is to say, 13A could have been taken somewhat earlier than 13B, or vice versa.”

“Indeed,” repeated Pak as I tried to work out in my head what Bean had just said.

There was a noise in the hallway and Franny’s cousin stuck her head into the breakfast room. “Tulip needs to come in here and vacuum.”

“Give us ten more minutes, please,” Pak requested.

From the doorway Franny’s cousin surveyed the mess on her breakfast table. “I’ll tell Tulip to do the kitchen first. She needs to learn how to clean a stove properly anyway,” she added and left.

Quelling a sudden desire to go help Tulip, whoever she was, by telling her all about Wagner’s Kitchen Cleaner—
Spray Twice, Wipe Once,
I asked the graduate students, “So—now what?”

Arni had picked up 13B and was studying it so intently that his large nose was almost touching the paper; it was a wonder none of the ink had transferred to it yet. “It’s not that complicated, really,” he said. “The Sayers family drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, parked, walked a bit, took a couple of photos by a eucalyptus tree—then a bit later you or Felix B did something of momentous consequences, after which you took Photos 13 and went to lunch at Pier 39.”

His remark prompted me to reach into the lunch pack we had picked up on the way back from Monroe’s house. “Not that complicated, you say,” I commented as I unwrapped a sandwich. I took a bite. The ham-and-cheese on wheat might as well have been pink-and-yellow plastic nestled in stale cardboard. I couldn’t taste a thing.

“Not complicated, perhaps, but damn difficult,” said Pak and took a sandwich himself, though it looked to me like he had spent most of the morning engaged in snacking and making a big mess for Tulip to clean. “Not bad,” he said of the sandwich.

“Wait—Arni, did you say it was something that Felix B
or
I did?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “You mean only one of us did something?”

Arni had moved down to where a spidery chandelier hung above the middle of the breakfast table and had placed 13A and 13B side by side under the light. “I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. You and he were the same person up until the very moment the universes diverged. Whether Universe A split off and Felix’s Universe B is the continuation of the original, or whether Universe B split off and your Universe A is the continuation of the original, I don’t know that we can even say. It was a single moment in time. Does it even matter?”

“Oh, it matters.”

“Why does the camera never capture what people’s watches say?” Bean complained, moving in closer and jostling for the photos with Arni. “Pak, we’re going to need more copies. And it would help if we could enlarge them a bit.”

“I’ll try.”

“What about Patrick’s navy hat?” Arni suggested to Bean as they bent their heads together over the two photos. “He’s wearing it in 13B, but not in 13A. And can you make out the number on the lamppost in 13B? Is that a 41 or 71?…The baby looks happier in 13B, doesn’t it?…”

By the time Tulip came in and plugged in her vacuum cleaner, darting curious looks at the jumble of photos and enlargements on the breakfast table, even Arni had to admit that we were stumped. “Let’s run image analysis of the new photos and see if that tells us anything. The silver Ford in 13B was driven across the bridge several minutes after the yabput, I think. That will help pinpoint the time, at least.”

As Pak packed up his laptop, I asked, “What constitutes a significant chain of events, anyway?”

Arni sent a quick glance in the direction of Tulip, who was securing an attachment to the vacuum in a dilatory manner, and repeated, “What constitutes a significant event chain? Anything that creates a universe.”

“And what creates a universe?”

“Anything that constitutes a significant event chain.”

“Anything that—oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, and stomped up to my room.

Awhile later Bean knocked once on my door, called out, “I got it, meet us downstairs,” and left just as abruptly. I took a moment to stretch my limbs, having spent the past couple of hours doing about the only thing a person
can
do while a team (two teams counting James and Gabriella) endeavors to prove said person accidentally created a universe thirty-five years ago by poring over his childhood photos with a fine-tooth comb, or is it a brush or a microscope that one pores with? Anyway—I took a nap.

Steep wooden stairs led from my Be Mine Inn tower room one flight down to where the graduate students had their rooms. (I was touched that they had given me what they clearly considered to be the best room of the four, though I found the round walls with their exceedingly narrow windows awkward to live in.) No one answered when I knocked on their doors, so I continued down two more flights of stairs to the breakfast room.

The students were bent over something at the breakfast table, their backs to me. The flower-motif posters on the walls hung a little askew, having survived Tulip’s cleaning. Vacuum lines crisscrossed the carpet.

I set down Franny’s paper book
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
which I had brought down to make it look as if I had been reading for the past couple of hours, but no one noticed. (On a side note, carting a paper book around while reading it had not turned out to be as much of a bother as I’d anticipated.)

“Look closely,” Bean was saying to Arni and Pak. “As I understand it, though admittedly my experience with babies amounts to zero, if you have something that succeeds in soothing the kid, you stick with it come rain or shine.”

Enlargements of 13A and 13B lay side by side.

I moved closer. In the photo on the left, Aunt Henrietta’s number 13, there I was, in a baby carrier hanging on my father’s chest, my puny limbs dangling while I sucked on something; in the Universe B photo, 13B, Felix was in
his
baby carrier, his puny limbs dangling while he sucked on something. It was like one of those maddening games where you’re supposed to find ten differences between Picture 1 and Picture 2, or in this case Picture 13A and Picture 13B. I’d never been very good at those, and the two pictures in front of me were only similar in the basics anyway: both were father-son tableaux, but 13A caught my father in a serious moment, while 13B had him doing antics for the camera, making a pretend motion as if about to toss Felix B, safely strapped in his baby carrier, up into the air; 13A was a close-up shot, while 13B had several pedestrians and a car accidentally caught on camera; light gray clouds and vertical bridge cables were visible in both, though more so in 13B. It was impossible to tell what was crucial and what was incidental.

“I know the enlargements are fuzzy,” Bean said, “and the viewing angle is different, and both objects are yellow, but—”

“I see it,” Arni said. “Banana. Duck.”

“What?” I said and looked again.

And there, as Pak would say, indeed it was. Yellow banana in 13A, yellow duck with no feet in 13B. Cutesy pacifier attachments.

“Now
that’s
interesting,” Pak said.

“The duck pacifier is there in 1B and 10B as well—the morning photo taken in front of the Big Fat Pancake and the later one by the eucalyptus tree—so the day started with Felix having the duck pacifier,” Bean told us, her voice rising with excitement. “But it’s gone in Aunt Henrietta’s Photo 13A. The change only happened in our Felix’s universe.”

I winced. “Don’t call it that.”

“Sorry. In Universe A.”

“Wait,” I objected, “there are a thousand tiny differences between the two photos. My father’s navy hat, for one thing. He’s wearing it in 13B but not in 13A. What about that? How do we know the pacifier switch is important?”

“We don’t,” Arni said. “But it’s very suggestive. It was windy, so hats on or off, not a big deal.” He produced a thick round magnifying glass and bent over the eucalyptus photo of my family like an old-fashioned detective. “Yes, I see it—the duck kind of blends in with Felix’s chin—that’s a magnificent eucalyptus specimen, isn’t it—”

I picked up 13A and 13B. There was one additional difference. The infant in 13A (me) wore a sullen, almost peevish, expression on its round face, while the infant in 13B (him) seemed content in his baby carrier, rather like the seals lounging in the Pier 39 marina. Holding us in the two photos was my father, dressed in jeans and a striped windbreaker, having taken his family out for a Monday drive. I wondered if he was smiling and clowning around in 13B because Felix B had been better behaved—unlike Felix A, who had managed to lose his pacifier.

What had I done?