Regarding Ducks and Universes (4 page)

Near the entrance I noticed a table labeled
Bestsellers
and picked up at random one of the books stacked on it. The book felt surprisingly light. The description on the back promised a riveting story of love and revenge in the Wild West, penned by an author whose grasp of historical accuracy, judging by the dirt-free and perfectly toothed intertwined duo on the front cover, seemed to be lacking. I took a peek inside the book—there were no further images, not even ads, just text—then put the bestseller back on the stack of identical books and proceeded deeper into the bookstore. It was quiet. Not a museum kind of quiet, more of an upscale-restaurant-that-serves-wine-no-soda kind. I was one of a handful of customers scattered throughout. A single clerk stood at a row of registers attending to a sale. Among the neatly packed shelves, in the very center of the store, a wide curving staircase led to an upper floor.

Tree books
. I did not recall reading them, though I must have as a child, before the Great Recycling Push of the 1990s. It was then that luxury paper items had been collected and turned into paper products whose job could
not
be taken over by omnis. Toilet paper. Cardboard boxes. Egg cartons.

But that was in Universe A.

An angular face with a strong nose and an
s
-shaped pipe stared at me from a cover. (In the midst of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, I had automatically gone to look for them.) I took the book off the shelf and opened it. This one had a few illustrations. I chose a page and read a bit, the paragraph being a letter to Holmes by
the
woman, Irene Alder, then flicked my fingers—and shook my head and advanced the page by hand, though with some trouble because the pages stuck together slightly—and read some more. The font was tiny, the lines too close together, and the page lacked color. Even so, the book had a charm of its own, like an old mortar and pestle sitting on a counter in a home kitchen.

The outer wrapper, in addition to the drawing of the Great Detective on the front, had a somewhat sensationalistic synopsis on the back. Genuine Morocco leather, it advertised. Red silk ribbon bookmark. I searched for the price, found it in the lower right corner, and let out a gasp. Four hundred dollars! Everything was more expensive here—their runaway inflation had been faster—but that was still quite steep. Perhaps a smaller book, one of the ones with the flimsy covers, would be more in line with what a tourist from afar could afford, I thought, gingerly sliding the Holmes back in its place among fellow editions bearing Sir Conan Doyle’s name.

I took a moment to run my hand along the spines of the C-to-D books in what was clearly the section of the bookstore devoted to novels of all kinds. Agatha Christie, with a long row of mysteries overflowing from one shelf to the one below it. (Eighty plus novels—where had she found the time?—took up a lot of space.) Below, I saw Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, others. I tried to imagine my novel-to-be—once I got around to writing it—sitting on a shelf waiting to entice a customer into parting with a bit of hard-earned cash. I failed. The prospect of creating an object you could hold in your hand seemed fraught with more problems than creating an omni memory link nestled among countless others. What if, for instance, you made a typo and noticed it
after
the book got printed, when it was too late to correct it? And what did authors do when they needed images to convey settings and plot points too difficult to describe in words? And if readers didn’t like a book, all they could do was to dispose of it in the thrash after having purchased it, there being no possibility of a free preview—a waste of money and resources. No way of obtaining feedback from readers, no comments section to fill up with praise or criticism of the book. Perhaps, all things considered, it was a good thing that I didn’t live here in Universe B, given all their peculiarities.

Suddenly I remembered why I was here in the first place.

Quite calmly, I located section S several bookcases behind me.

Bent down, looked. Double-checked—

And breathed again.

It wasn’t there.

As my heart, beating as rapidly and insistently as Poe’s telltale one, started to subside to its normal rhythm, I heard a light cough behind me.

“Can I help you find something?” It was a bookstore employee.

“No, thank you. I was just looking for—a book.”

“Did you find it?”

“No, but—”

“Let’s look, then.” She pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up toward the top of her nose and looked at me expectantly. “What’s the title?”

“Er—I’m not sure—that is, I have no idea whether it even exists—”

“Do you have the author’s name, then?”

I had the name, all right. “Felix Sayers.”

“Sayers.” She squatted down by the bottom shelf, where the S-es began, as if I wouldn’t have already looked there myself. “Let’s see. Sayers, you say…Dorothy, of course…
Strong Poison
…that’s a nice one…
Busman’s Honeymoon
too…no, I don’t see any others with that name.” She stood back up, almost losing her glasses in the process. “I do believe these shelves get lower every year. Sometimes I think we should just have one
very
long shelf that circles the store at eye level. Much easier. No bending down or having to reach up or wondering if you are in the right section. Speaking of which—”

“Yes?” I said, trying not to reveal that a lack of (non-Dorothy) Sayers authors was good news.

“Your Felix Sayers is to be found among favorite authors of the past?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are in the classics section. Pre-twenty-first-century authors.”

I looked around, deflated. “Classics—oh.”

“To which section can I direct you instead?”

“Well—most likely, mystery, I suppose. Is there a mystery section?”

“Mystery is over in that corner, but let’s check our list first.” She turned to a nearby computer station and squinted at it. “Visiting A-dwellers, you see, often forget that what’s on the shelves is only a fraction of what’s available. Let’s see, Sayers in mystery…first name begins with an
f
…don’t see anything…”

“No Felix Sayers,” she said after a minute or two. “It’s not, by any chance, Flavio Sayer-Solomon?”

I shook my head.

“Sorry I couldn’t find your book,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose again. “Anything else I can help you find? Dorothy Sayers, though that wasn’t quite the name you wanted, has a nice collection of mystery novels—”

“Eleven of them. A reasonable number.”

“—or may I suggest Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
—or her
The Birds
, which though not a mystery
per se
is quite a riveting read—”

The wide curving staircase led to an upper floor, more of a balcony really, where there was a counter with beverages and snacks. Though it was embarrassingly soon after breakfast, I ordered tea (they gave me a blank look when I asked for coffee) and a plate of almond thins. I found a free table by the railing and sat down. A cooking competition, that was the brilliant idea that had stuck around in my head since I’d talked to Wagner, who was by now no doubt knee-deep in pretzel dough. Set somewhere rustic, say in the Sierra mountains where Egg and Rocky had gone on their hiking adventure, a cooking competition presented all sorts of interesting possibilities: motives (kitchen sabotage and contestants stealing each other’s recipes); murder methods (hiking accidents in the summer, icicles as stabbing implements in the winter, and the more obvious chef’s knives all year round); and clues (ingredients in killer cupcakes traceable to local markets frequented by the poisoner and so on). I would have to ask Wagner what went on behind the scenes at these things.

Of course, an idea, even a good one, is a long way from that short, satisfying phrase, “THE END.” Even someone like me, who (culinary user guides aside) had been more of a reader thus far, knew that.

Squashing down the patently obvious problem that newly published books would appear on the shelves below as soon as tomorrow and that one of them might belong to Felix B, I let out a sigh of relief that for the moment at least the shelves had been devoid of any Felix B books.

“Astonishing, isn’t it?”

The man had his hand on the back of the chair across from me. “Hope you don’t mind. I can see you are a fellow A-dweller.” He took the chair and set his tea on the table.

“Astonishing, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

He gestured down at the books with his thumb. “All those trees.”

“I suppose so.” I took a sip of my parsley tea and made a face. I’d never been much of a tea drinker. I tried an almond thin, which wasn’t bad, and offered him one.

He accepted the almond thin and dipped it in his tea, spilling a couple of drops on the sleeve of his tweed jacket in the process. “You can’t get a decent cup of coffee in the whole city, but they sell something called coffee-table books. And a whole rack of standalone dictionaries. Why bother? Dictionaries always need updating. Atlases too. I get it with the really
old
books, the ones written before we figured out how to do things better. Let’s keep those around, but the new stuff? Why print on paper?” He bit into the almond thin.

“What, out of curiosity, do you read?” I asked with an inner shudder.

“True-life crime. And I tell you what, I wouldn’t buy a tree book, even a true crime one. Forget the environment, it’s just impractical. I wouldn’t have anything to read”—munch, munch—“if I didn’t have my trusty omni”—he tugged on the omni around his neck—“because it makes little sense to pack a bunch of heavy books and lug them along when you travel. But what gets me most of all is this. What if someone else has
just
purchased the book you want and the shelf sits empty?”

“I don’t know what happens.” I was watching a customer who’d come up the stairs carrying an armful of books. She set them down on the table next to us, then returned with a pastry. It didn’t seem like the merchandise had been paid for, yet neither she nor anyone else seemed concerned about potential fruit smudges from her scone or tea spills or wrinkling of book pages. Wished I’d known about that policy, I thought. Could have brought up a book or two to browse. It would have made me look busy and kept any chatty co-dwellers away.

The chatty co-dweller took a final slurp of his tea and peered into the empty glass. “Not bad for tea. Something called
ooh-long
. I’m off to meet my alter. I’ve heard through a neutral party that he’s filed paperwork giving me permission to visit him. He is a lawyer and I run a paper products conversion business—we turn old documents into cereal boxes. Good for privacy and Regulation 3, good for nature. Mind if I have another?”

He took the last of the almond thins and walked out of my life before I could make one or two additional points that had just occurred to me.

One, how curiously—well,
satisfying
it had been to touch a book. Solid, tangible, earthy.

Two, so what if there was no practical side to it? The Venus oil painting that had hung on my parents’ living room wall and fascinated me as a teenage boy had required a canvas, something to paint on. On the other hand, I had to concede immediately, paper books far outnumbered oil paintings (how many reprintings of
Twelfth Night
to two
Starry Nights
?) so perhaps that wasn’t a fair comparison after all.

My hand found its way to the omni hanging in its usual spot around my neck. It knew my preferred audio level (five) on days I felt like being read to and my usual font (Helvetica, size twelve) and background color (wheat) on days that I didn’t. It kept a list of my favorite authors and notified me of upcoming releases and offered reading recommendations from friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, the Queen of Lichtenstein…And yet this place felt right too. I realized I had come prepared to dislike everything about Universe B, mostly because it wasn’t mine but
his
. Franny of the Queen Bee Inn had been right to warn me not to be judgmental.

It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t really have any idea what materials got squandered in the making of an omni and its yearly batteries, or how that would compare to whatever percentage of a tree it took to make a paper book.

I picked up half an almond, all that remained of my almond thins, and considered whether that most famous scientist of all, Professor Z. Z. Singh, deserved all the blame heaped on his head. Creativity, the force behind all the books spread below me, applied to physics as well and had led him to make a copy of the universe in his laboratory just before noon on January 6, 1986, earning him the title universe maker. In fact, the only non-creative side to the whole incident was the name Professor Singh—by then two Professors Singh—had given the newly branching universes. Rumor had it that they’d tossed a coin, or whatever the physics equivalent was, and that there had been plans to produce additional universes further down the alphabet. Ridiculously, I had always felt rather proud to be from Universe A.