Regarding Ducks and Universes (21 page)

“Which way?” I asked. Walking paths led from the mostly full parking lot in two directions.

“Good question. The paths were here thirty-five years ago, though they’ve been widened recently. One of them—that one—gets you to the bridge quickly, via the elevator. The one over there kind of winds its way uphill through the Presidio, by the old gun battery, and eventually gets you to the bridge.”

“I think I’ve been on it,” I said, frowning at the geography, “though it’s hard to say.” Where I was used to seeing a people mover station, there was a pretty eucalyptus grove—was this where a kind stranger had taken Photo 10, the one of my family?

“At eleven fifteen, you and your parents headed toward the bridge via the elevator or the longer Presidio path. Binary decision. A literal fork in the road.”

“I see. If we took the shorter path, we were on the bridge when Professor Singh made a copy of the universe—when the yabput occurred, I mean—and if we took the longer path, we were in the Presidio somewhere.”

“Correct.”

“And you and I?”

“Split up and time the paths.”

“Great,” I said, pulling in my stomach. “I’ve been feeling a bit sedentary. A walk would be just the thing. I’ll take the longer one,” I added chivalrously.

“Well—all right. See if there’s anything interesting thirty-one minutes into your walk.”

“Thirty-one minutes—?”

“Eleven fifteen plus thirty-one yields yabput time.”

She adjusted the wide-brimmed hat and we split up.

I set a moderate pace. The path started out narrow, zigzagged up a hill, then rolled over an exposed ledge and became wide and flat. On this portion of it there were summer students jogging, rollerblading, and scootering instead of attending whatever classes they were nominally here for. More than a few were recumbent on the well-watered campus lawns working on tans instead of algebra. As I walked along, I alternated between being quite sure that the path still existed in Universe A and that I had been on it at some point and being quite sure that it didn’t and that I hadn’t. Not that it mattered in the least. It’s just that it was a nice path. In my own Universe A, the Presidio was not a university campus but an agglomeration of museums—there was the popular fashion museum, also a nature museum with a pond and an arboretum, a soccer museum, next to it a museum of Universe A accomplishments, and in the middle of it all the tiny but well-known surfing museum. People mover line 66 circled the whole thing.

Occasionally I caught sight of the bridge as the path took me past student dormitories, classroom buildings, an auditorium, and a long row of tennis courts. Beyond the tennis courts I puffed up a steep portion of the path and entered a eucalyptus grove, a large one where the grass was sparse and yellowish. I exited the grove to the sight of an abandoned gun battery with cliff-top views of Baker Beach and its Ferris wheel. The battery was a nineteenth-century remnant of the need to defend the city from attack from the sea; the Ferris wheel, slowly turning basketfuls of tourists, was a record-setting eyesore that must have been difficult to keep stable and upright on windy days. There were plenty of places (like the gun battery) that seemed just right for throwing a duck pacifier at.

That reminded me to check my watch, and I discovered that the thirty-one-minute mark—the one Bean had requested I take note of—had already passed.

“Great,” I said, tried to figure out how long I had overshot the mark by, got muddled in the math, and decided to press on instead of trying to go back.

It was all very complicated, I thought as I began to descend the long wooden staircase that would take me to the bridge, but complicated wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I was keeping my fingers crossed that the professor’s calculation would turn out to be wrong and that Olivia May or a lively egret or sea lion would emerge as the culprit. If that failed, then my only hope was that Felix B would turn out to be the guilty party of the two of us, that is, that
his
universe was the one that had branched off.

As to the other thing—as the great detective Sherlock Holmes put it so well, it’s a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. I needed to know more, to sneak a peek at Felix’s novel to see if it had that
something
that makes a book a must-read, high-publicity product that bursts on the scene—or a slow-emerging-but-steady-selling classic that endures for years on reading lists. It occurred to me that Mrs. Noor could probably think of a clever way of obtaining a copy of Felix’s book. “Leave it to me,” she’d say, and that would be that. I felt foolish for calling her off the case but too embarrassed to call back and say I’d changed my mind.

It was time to take matters into my own hands.

As I moved out of the way of a young rollerblading couple on their wobbly way down the staircase, it struck me that it might be nice to invite Bean out for a meal. The Organic Oven, perhaps. I could get her opinion on the dishes I couldn’t taste.

She was at the bridge vista point, lost in thought under her hat.

“There you are.” She checked her omni. “Forty-seven minutes exactly.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Ten. That’s including a five-minute wait for the elevator.” She handed me one of a couple of bottles of water she seemed to have purchased while waiting.

“I didn’t rush,” I defended myself, twisting the bottle open and taking a grateful drink. “I went at what I imagined the pace of a couple carrying an infant—for almost fifty minutes!—might have been. By the way, I completely missed the thirty-one-minute mark, sorry. Do you want me to go back?”

“We can get Arni and Pak down here and repeat the timing experiment. Wouldn’t that be something, to find the pacifier you lost all those years ago somewhere on a Presidio path?”

“Not really, no.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be here anyway. We’d have to look in Universe A. Only the bridge is no longer there and the Presidio has been bulldozed into a museum complex. What we
can
do is at least pinpoint the two potential yabput spots.”

“I have to say, if it was me—well, I
was
there, but you know what I mean—I’d have taken the shorter path.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “And your family likely would have made a stop here before continuing on to the bridge.”

Here
was the vista point we were standing on, a circular patch of cement level with the bridge deck and protected by a wooden railing from the drop below. Tourists milled around reading information panels and taking photos. Who could blame them? The sky was wide; the sailboats, lively; and Alcatraz and the larger Angel Island, squatting in the middle of the bay, picturesque. The bridge, with its brick towers, was more like a whimsical work of art than a bit of connecting road.

“Not a bad view,” said Bean. “If you were going to create a universe, this would be the place to do it.” I noticed she was checking the time again. She saw me watching and, taking her hat off and twirling it on her finger, said awkwardly, “Er—we’ll have to leave finding the two yabput spots for tomorrow. I have to go.”

“Was it something I said?”

“I have a class. It helps me think better if I take an occasional course that has nothing to do with bihistory. Soap Making. Maltese Poetry. Pet Sequencing. That kind of thing.” A pinkish tint spread across her cheeks. “This summer it’s, well—it’s Belly Dancing for Beginners.”

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?

P
ak 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.