“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 u
niverses. 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.
As I scanned the nearby posters of upcoming releases for my shared name and finished the last of the lukewarm parsley tea, I wished that Professor Singh hadn’t been quite so creative, however.
Having given up on the idea of purchasing a book (there were so many I couldn’t decide on one to buy) I walked out of the Bookworm empty-handed and set a course along quiet Starfish Lane toward busier Lombard Street and the tourist bus depot. As I stepped into the first intersection on the way, a car as sleekly black as—really, nothing in a kitchen except perhaps the inside of a nonstick pan—approached fast, like the driver behind the tinted windows was in an awful hurry, and would have splattered me if I hadn’t jumped back onto the sidewalk at the last moment.
The car continued on its way without slowing down.
[4]
A BIT OF BAD NEWS
“Best do nothing, citizen.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“You look like you’re trying to decide something. But you must be prudent with your power, citizen. Careless choices create new worlds, thoughtless actions spawn new places, a misstep might be the seed to a new universe—”
I shook my head at the Passivists, who moved on, and eyed the office building across the street from where I was, about to enter the renovated firehouse that served as a tourist bus depot. The office building was one of those rundown, depressing places with peeling paint and neon signs advertising moneylending and such—except for a discreet plaque near the front entrance, which simply read, Noor & Brood, Investigative Services. Leave It to Us.
The building had tall, narrow windows through which little could be seen. Several cars were parked on a rooftop parking lot.
There had been nothing bearing Felix B’s name in the Bookworm and all its books, which was all well and good. But what if in his computer sat a finished first draft? Or second draft? Or the final version of his masterpiece, ready to be sent out at the touch of a button? It wasn’t like I could knock on his neighbor’s front door—that’s if I managed to find out where my alter lived—and ask, “Is Felix Sayers B writing a cooking-themed mystery, do you happen to know?” Nor could I pretend to be Felix B and glean information by getting together for dinner with his close friends, whoever they were (here I thought of Murphina’s owner and the tangerine-dress woman from the crossing, both of whom had seemed to recognize my face). It wouldn’t have worked either way—I couldn’t pose questions as a stranger because I looked an awful lot like him, nor could I get away with pretending to be Felix B because I probably didn’t look exactly like him. Visions of fake mustaches, tinted contact lenses, and wigs flew through my brain, but I ruled them out, for the moment at least, as being undignified and impractical.
Hiring a private detective was something that had simply not occurred to me. Like mustachioed disguises or those other mystery staples, a message written in a strange cipher or a dead body in a locked room, it’s not something that often comes up in real life, at least not in mine.
I watched as a man came out of the office building, glanced around furtively, pocketed an envelope, and hurried away. I hoped he had been there for the moneylending and not as a typical client of Noor & Brood.
The clang of the firehouse bell alerted me to get out of the way as a bus packed with sightseers exited the firehouse behind me and made a wide right turn into traffic. The bus headed down Lombard Street and I went to join the short line already forming at the back of the firehouse. As I waited to buy my ticket for the city tour, I toyed with the idea of hiring Detective Noor (or Detective Brood) to see what he could do for me. Would he take my money, tell me to come back in a few days, and then put his feet up on his desk and take a nap on my dime because there was no alter-surveillance he could do under the law? Or would he laugh me out of his office and call the neighborhood DIM bureau to report me? DIM took its job of protecting citizens’ privacy very seriously, along with their other duties: raiding data black markets; overseeing the destruction of old phonebooks, maps, and other documents; inspecting scientific research centers; and so on.
The next tour wasn’t scheduled to leave for forty minutes. I took it as a sign.
Besides, I reasoned as I headed across the street, what aspiring mystery writer would miss a chance to talk to a real-life detective? If nothing else, I could ask Detective Noor for tips on how to make my fictional sleuth, whose name I hadn’t decided on yet, not come out looking completely amateurish. Tips on police procedure, or how someone stuck in the Sierra Mountains would go about analyzing various types of cigarette ash without having access to a well-stocked lab. That sort of thing.
The detective turned out to be an affable, stout B-dweller who exuded a connectedness to the city and everyone in it, rather like an urban Miss Marple (that is, if Miss Marple had been dark-complexioned, middle-aged, and ran a business in a town that dwarfed the fictional village of St. Mary Mead). I introduced myself and said, “And you are Citizen Noor…or Citizen Brood?”
“Call me Mrs. Noor or Detective Noor. I don’t like all that citizen nonsense.” She offered me a chair and refreshment from a small fridge squeezed under her desk. “This office is my center of operations. Pip, Ham, and Daisy—my two sons and my daughter—do most of the footwork.”
“Lovely nature names,” I said, accepting a glass of water and a cheese ball and taking the chair. Documents and news articles lay strewn across the detective’s desk. Uneven stacks of papers rested against the back wall of the cramped office, and maps and photographs covered most of the available wall space. There was a rack with clothing on it (for disguises?) in one corner.
“And what can we do for you? A lost love, perhaps? A background check on your fiancée?”
“No, nothing like that. Er—”
Mrs. Noor waited a moment for me to speak, then pointed, without turning around, at a brass plaque mounted on the wall behind her. “Up there. Read it to me.”
Feeling like a schoolchild, I read the two-word phrase out loud. “Hypothetically speaking.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”
“Hypothetically speaking,” I repeated more loudly.
“Now you can say whatever you like.” She moved a few papers around on her desk and dug up a pen and a tiny plum-colored notebook. “It’s perfectly legal to say anything as long as you are not planning on actually doing it. Not wise, perhaps, but legal. You could come in here and suggest that I follow your wife and report on her daily activities—which, if I did it, would be a clear violation of her privacy and Regulation 3. But I would not be obligated to report you for merely suggesting it. If you tried to pay me to do it, that’s another matter. Another cheese ball?”
“I’m not married.”
She partook of a cheese ball herself. “It was just an example. I can see that it’s nothing that simple.”
“I was born before Y-day.”
“An alter.” She wiped her hands, uncapped her pen, and opened her notebook to a fresh page. “Tell me.”
Aware that the only person I had chosen to confide in thus far was a complete stranger who was probably out to con me, I told Mrs. Noor, who took notes as I spoke, about the call I had received early one morning about a month ago informing me that my Aunt Henrietta had passed away. From his office in Miami, as I lay in bed making sure my pajamas were buttoned, Aunt Henrietta’s lawyer had said, “To you, her great-nephew, she left her collection of—let me see, here it is—one half of her collection of porcelain figurines. Dolphins. Your share is forty-two of them. You can expect them in the mail.”
“How big are they?” I’d asked, a trifle concerned. I remembered Aunt Henrietta’s Florida home as being a sort of museum for all the knickknacks she had acquired during her work abroad. Some of the knickknacks had been quite la
rge.
“Each dolphin is about the size of an orange, I believe, and comes with its own individual stand. She left you something else,” he added.
“Yes?” My hopes raised, I sat up, accidentally knocking the lamp off my bedside table.
“It’s a photograph.”
“A photo—oh.”
“Henrietta generously gave the bulk of her money to charity while she was still alive,” he said, his tone carefully devoid of anything but professionalism. “I’ll send the photograph with the figurines.”
A couple of days later on my doorstep there arrived a large wooden crate in which forty-two dolphin figurines sat carefully packed in bubble wrap. At the very bottom of the crate was a plain manila envelope. In the envelope was a photograph. In the faded photograph was my father, and in his arms was an infant.
Me.
On Y-day, according to the date on the back of the photo. Ten days before the official birth date listed on the identicard that I’d carried all my life.
Which meant that I had an alter. Everyone born before Y-day did.
I don’t know why, but the news had hit me like myriad bricks. It’s the kind of thing you expect to find out as a small child from your parents who reassure you lovingly and often that in their eyes you are unique and that having an alter is like having a brother or sister, not the kind of thing a grown man expects to hear, along with the news that he is a bit older than he thought. Why my parents had bribed someone to change my birth date, I had no idea. Some digging around had revealed that the true date of my birth was not in January but July, a full six months earlier.
“It was all—a bit of a surprise,” I said to Mrs. Noor. “Why Aunt Hen—my great-aunt, really—why she had a baby photo of me in the first place, I don’t know. She was a relation through marriage, my Uncle Otto’s second wife, and came into the family when I was already at the San Diego Four-Year. None of it makes much sense.” I shook my head.
Regarding Ducks and Universes Page 4