The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  I felt a bit deflated. I had asked Dr. B to send me to Vonnegut’s New York residence in the hopes that the book club had come to pay their respects to the famous author. But they weren’t here.

  I poked my head around a parked car to check again, and a yellow cab whizzed by with an irritated honk. I jumped back toward the curb but took one step too many and bumped into a fast-moving pedestrian. Both of us lost our balance, though a last-second acrobatic twist on my part made me land on my bottom and not on the backpack holding the Slingshot. We disentangled ourselves and I offered the fortyish-some woman sporting a leopard-print pantsuit a hand up. She accepted it, got to her feet, and helped me dust off the city grime that had collected on my coat. I picked up the purse she had dropped and handed it to her. It was all very civil and quite unlike the mental image I had of Manhattanites. I apologized for tripping us both, and she said, “No harm done, darlin’. Have you voted? Very important to vote.” I nodded yes without meaning to, and she continued on.

  I nursed my sore elbow and watched her walk away. My quick stop in Manhattan was turning into a bit of an embarrassing disaster. I tried to look on the bright side. At least I hadn’t twisted an ankle or wrist—or crushed the Slingshot, which would have been the most disastrous of all possible scenarios.

  A second taxi honked at me and I waved a no in its direction before retreating back into the shadow of the stairs, protectively holding the backpack with the Slingshot to one side. The question facing me now was whether to wait a bit in the hopes that the book club would choose this particular moment to arrive—granted, highly unlikely—or to type into the waiting Slingshot the coordinates Dr. B had prepared for me and jump to St. Sunniva campus to meet up with Dr. Little and Abigail. I did a quick mental calculation. Thornberg to New York could probably be done in a full day and night’s drive if the students took turns at the wheel and made no long stops along the way. Given that they had left yesterday morning and it was now midafternoon, if they made good time it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they were just around the corner, inching their way closer through Manhattan traffic. I decided sticking around an extra half hour or so couldn’t hurt. Besides, I could use the time to leaf through the Vonnegut biography and see if there was anything in there that might help with our current problem.

  I leaned back against the stairs with one of my feet crossed over the other and got out Dr. B’s e-reader from my coat pocket. Luckily, it had been undamaged by my fall. Also luckily, Dr. B had it in a brown leather case, so at first glance it’d be mistaken for a hardbound book by pedestrians going up and down East Forty-Eighth.

  I took a quick look at the contents and jumped to a chapter about the author’s early life. I wanted to find out about his background, because I figured Udo probably identified with him for reasons other than just the desired fame. Apparently Vonnegut’s parents (like Udo’s own, I suspected) were wealthy…or had been until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. I jumped a bit further ahead and stumbled across something even more interesting. Vonnegut had left college midway through his studies.

  In Vonnegut’s case, it sounded like he had been pushed into studying the sciences by his father and older brother, and it hadn’t been a great fit, and then the war had come. Vonnegut had left Cornell to join the war effort. I skimmed the Dresden part of the biography, which sounded like a positively awful experience for the twenty-three-year-old Kurt as well as everyone else involved. He had returned from Europe with a Purple Heart and a ceremonial Nazi saber, and re-enrolled in school, this time at the University of Chicago, but his idea for a master’s topic (comparing Cubist artists in Paris with nineteenth-century Native American uprisings) was turned down by the anthropology department for being too ambitious, and he had left school for a second time.

  I considered all this, pausing in my reading. If Udo was not coming back to St. Sunniva after the CSI visit, was he leaving school to follow in Vonnegut’s footsteps? I knew that United Nations Plaza, where I had once visited on a high school trip, was a short walk from here. Was he planning on joining the Peace Corps? Did the Peace Corps have anything to do with the UN? I had no idea, but Udo volunteering for it was as likely a possibility as any.

  I shifted in my spot by the railing. The problem with Udo trying to emulate his hero Kurt Vonnegut was that it wasn’t how life worked. Even if you have similar roots and try to take the same path, it doesn’t mean you grow to be an equally tall tree. I had seen enough siblings come into the science departments and leave with very different outcomes, from successful PhDs to dropouts in the first semester, to know that. And Udo was trying to force his transformation into one of the American greats.

  And it hadn’t worked, had it? Because Udo was nowhere to be found in modern literature.

  Realizing I had lost track of the time, I glanced up to see a tall man approaching from the direction opposite to the flow of traffic. I snapped the e-reader’s case shut. The man had curly hair and a bushy mustache and eyebrows, like a Mark Twain look-alike. His pace was slightly impatient, that of a resident returning home. Was he was coming back from voting, a meeting with an editor, or an early celebration lunch for his upcoming fifty-fourth birthday?

  My feet shuffled me out of the shadows of their own accord, not propelled by History but by curiosity. Kurt looked a little taken aback by my sudden appearance and flicked away the match he had just used to light a cigarette. He took a long drag off it, then offered me one out of the red-and-white pack of Pall Malls cupped in his nicotine-stained hand.

  “No, thanks, Mr. Vonnegut.”

  “What can I do for you, young lady?”

  “Uh…”

  I was speechless for a moment, as (a) I had never met a famous historical figure before, and (b) I didn’t know where to begin or what to say.

  “Well?” Another drag on the cigarette.

  “Have any students made a pilgrimage to your place today? They would have arrived in a red Ford Mustang and a painted VW van.”

  “Odd question.” He took another long drag. “To answer it—no. They used to come more when I lived in Barnstable. Anything else?”

  I shook my head, staring at this middle-aged man whose life story I now knew from beginning to end, having skimmed most of the biography. I could tell him what year his divorce would become final and how well his not-yet-written novel Timequake would sell. It was an odd feeling, to say the least. Had I told him right then and there that thirty years from now he would trip on a dog leash at the bottom of these very stairs and hit his head on the pavement and not recover, I imagined his reply would have been “So it goes,” with an accompanying shrug.

  But I didn’t say anything, of course.

  “You don’t have a book you want signed? Or even a manuscript you want me to read?”

  I shook my head again.

  With a touch of disappointment, as if he took it personally, he said, “Well, then.” He continued up the stairs, unlocked the door, and went in. The door closed behind him.

  That was that.

  I pulled my mind back to the reason I’d come. There was clearly no sign of the book club, and it was time for me to get going. Abigail and Dr. Little would be wondering where I was. Dr. B had written down the coordinates I needed to enter into the Slingshot—the first time I had actually been given the responsibility of doing so. I was a tiny bit pleased that I had been entrusted with the task.

  The coordinates were in a small wallet, safely ensconced in one of my coat pockets. Or they should have been. I felt around for the wallet, then checked the other pocket of the coat.

  The wallet was missing.

  The leopard-suit lady so intent on getting me to vote hadn’t been as nice as she’d seemed. I had been mugged.

  18

  It was cliché, getting mugged in Manhattan—unless getting mugged in 1976 Manhattan was not yet cliché. I didn’t know, but either way I gave myself a mental kick for not being more careful. I had been so buoyed by the hope that the book club would be in
Vonnegut’s vicinity that I’d forgotten to be nervous about time traveling on my own. Now I felt panic rising up in my belly. I tried to take a deep breath, then another. Nate and Dr. B knew where I was. They would send someone to fetch me. I was not stuck here, doomed to roam the city like a displaced person forever.

  Still, my quick stop in Manhattan could now definitely be considered a disaster. It was one thing to be held in place by History, or to accidentally fall into a ghost zone; it was entirely another to get self-stuck.

  I slid down to the ground, my back against Vonnegut’s staircase, to weigh my options. One, I could run after the pedestrian I had bumped into, although she was by now long gone, and demand the return of my wallet. She would have found it empty except for the sequence of numbers, so the disappointment she was bound to feel gave me a small sense of satisfaction. Two, I could knock on the door of the brownstone and enlist Kurt’s help in calling the police and trying to get my wallet back. Three, I could sit tight and wait to be rescued by Dr. B.

  Unless—

  Leaving the backpack by the railing, I went back to the curb where I had fallen. There, on the edge of the road, among the discarded cigarettes butts, used bus tickets, and other trash, lay my wallet. The Slingshot coordinate note stuck out of it slightly, but it was otherwise undisturbed.

  I picked up the wallet, feeling the red rise up my cheeks. The clichéd thing had not happened—I hadn’t been mugged. My assumption had been the clichéd part.

  I had much to learn about History.

  “You did what?” A bit of spittle flew out of Dr. Little’s mouth and landed on my neck.

  I wiped it away. “I made a side stop at Kurt Vonnegut’s place in New York City.”

  “On whose authority?”

  I tried not to get defensive and to keep my tone even. “No one’s—my own. I asked Dr. B to send me. She agreed that it was worth a try to see if the book club went there. Nate thought it was a good idea, too.”

  “Since when does Kirkland make decisions in the TTE lab? Last I checked, he was neither a professor nor a financial backer.”

  “I suggested a course of action, and everyone who happened to be in the lab—Dr. B, Nate, Kamal, and Jacob—agreed with me.”

  “To send someone with no formal training, someone unfamiliar with the subtleties of time travel, to a busy downtown…and to send them alone. Well, you’re lucky nothing went badly wrong.”

  “It was just a short hop, cosmically speaking.” I didn’t think my wallet adventure counted as things going badly wrong. Still, I saw no reason to mention it. I had typed Dr. B’s coordinates into the mini-keyboard of the Slingshot just fine—having triple-checked the numbers before hitting the Enter button—and had arrived behind the Open Book as expected. Once there I’d radioed Abigail and Dr. Little, and found them by Hypatia House.

  Before Dr. Little could disagree that 1976 Manhattan was a short hop, cosmically speaking, I added, “Nate did find out one interesting item—Udo will leave school this semester. He may not return with the rest of the book club. Well, I imagine he will, if only to pack up his stuff. Did you learn anything at this end?”

  They had. While I’d been to the TTE lab and the Vonnegut brownstone, they had searched Udo’s room. Abigail told their story, pacing back and forth under the canopy of trees all the while; Hypatia House had a rarely used back exit, and the birch and oak trees offered the cover we needed. Dr. Little had taken up a leaning position against the brick wall, his arms crossed.

  They had stayed out of sight, Abigail said, until Udo’s roommate, Sam, the budding engineer, had left for a midday class with a book bag on one shoulder. He had locked the door behind him, but once again the lock proved to be no problem, Abigail explained without any false modesty. We all had skills that came in unexpectedly handy on occasion, and this was one of hers.

  Inside, with the door closed behind them, she and Dr. Little had paused to take stock. Two beds—one made and one unmade—stood against opposite walls. There were also two dressers and two desks, one set for each side of the room. They could tell which side belonged to whom based on the posters on the wall—or the lack of them on Udo’s side. Sam’s wall was covered in science-related posters. Setting the scene for me, Abigail described one showing a Nikola Tesla lighting experiment. I vaguely remembered having seen that particular black-and-white photo before, of the famous inventor reading a book in a chair while large electrical bolts crackled and sparked above his head. The poster had apparently led to a discussion as they poked around, with Dr. Little claiming the photo was a publicity stunt, a double exposure, and Abigail suggesting that a STEWie run to get unaltered photos of the famous inventor might be in order.

  “There were also posters of Edison, Faraday, and Hertz,” Dr. Little said. I got the sense that he had been uncomfortable rifling through Udo’s personal belongings, so he’d studied the wall posters while Abigail combed through Udo’s neatly organized desk and dresser. The desk, she said, held a powder-blue Smith Corona typewriter with a blank page in it. She checked under the typewriter and also looked inside notebooks for anything Udo might have jotted down, such as a hotel name or the road routes the book club planned to take.

  Her attention was then drawn to the side of the desk, where books were stacked all the way up to desk level. It sounded like Udo’s reading tastes coincided with what I would have called Books I was forced to read in school.

  Abigail then moved to the dresser, but before she could do more than open the top drawer, Dr. Little had turned away from the wall posters and tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m starting to feel light-headed—History might be getting ready to send me back.”

  But apparently Abigail had started to feel light-headed, too.

  They heard the key turn in the lock and did the only thing they could do: hide.

  “Typically the air under a bed isn’t necessarily what one wants to be breathing,” Dr. Little said, “but there were no dust bunnies under Udo’s.”

  Abigail had taken refuge under Sam’s bed. A pair of feet wearing brown leather shoes, presumably Sam’s, passed her on their way to the messier desk. Their owner shuffled around a bit, found what he had forgotten, and left, closing and relocking the door behind him.

  “Wow, that sounds like a close call,” I commented.

  “Not really.” Dr. Little shook his head. “If he had seen us, most likely all that would have happened is that we would have been promptly propelled out of the room.”

  “So why did you bother hiding?” I asked.

  “We weren’t done looking through Udo’s effects. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Turns out I made the right call.”

  Abigail stuck her hand out. “This is what we found.”

  19

  “It was with Udo’s socks,” Abigail explained. “Which were all black, by the way.”

  Whatever the paper was, it had to have been important for Udo to have carefully folded it and stashed it inside the top drawer of his dresser. The letter-size white sheet wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be—a hotel reservation or a mapped-out route. A man after my own heart, Udo had typed up a list. There were only three items on it, about halfway down the page.

  I could not make any sense of them.

  “We had the same reaction, Julia,” Abigail said. “It’s almost like he really, really didn’t want anyone to know where they were going.”

  She was right. The list read like a cheat sheet Udo might have used to work out the location of his CSI, or clues he had jotted down for his book club members to keep them guessing and invested in the location. He had typed up the following:

  The chrono-synclastic infundibulum is…

  1. …by a river. The animal KV wants to be lives in it.

  2. …in a garden. The man at whose company KV worked built it.

  3. …and beneath a tree. But not KT’s money tree.

  I assumed KV was Kurt Vonnegut (with the last KT a mistyping), but otherwise it was all very cryptic. I looked up from
the list. “You had no problem walking out of his room with this?”

  “I would have taken a photo, but my cell phone battery died,” Abigail said.

  “I brought you a charger,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I suppose I could have taken a photo with my laptop,” Dr. Little said. “It didn’t occur to me. My runs usually don’t require that sort of thing.”

  I couldn’t imagine not wanting to take pictures of any past place and time, but to each his own. “Should we take a photo now or hand-copy the list, then sneak it back in his dresser? Though it would involve breaking into Udo’s room again.”

  Dr. Little shook his head. “We don’t need to. Udo will assume he misplaced the list, forgot where he put it. We wouldn’t have been able to walk out with it otherwise.”

  Abigail wrinkled her nose. “Wouldn’t it be funny if each time any of us lost something, it was actually a visitor from the future swiping it?”

  “I don’t know if it would be funny exactly,” I said. “But it would be interesting, that’s for sure.”

  Dr. Little looked from me to Abigail as if we were nuts. He shook his head. “We did ask around the dorm to see if anyone could make sense of the list, but no one could. We were just about to head to the library to do some research when you radioed.”

  I tapped a pocket. “We don’t need the library—I came prepared.” A postdoc or young professor came out of the back door of Hypatia House and gave us an incurious glance, then lit a cigarette (Was there anyone who didn’t smoke in the seventies?) and I suggested, “Let’s find a free bench.”

  “And do what?” Abigail asked.

  “Research—twenty-first-century style.”

  We found a free bench table by the biology building. Students streamed around the Science Quad—classes were letting out for the day and people were headed to dorms, dinner, or voting. At the neighboring bench a love-struck couple had their books open but were not doing much studying. Some distance away, students were playing a late-afternoon football game on the green. A bird or two chirped in the trees. No one paid us much attention.