Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  Mrs. Noor looked at me kindly. “Parents. We do try our best, you know. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to know what’s best. Take my daughter, Daisy—she likes her work here at Noor & Brood, enjoys the unpredictability of it all, the potpourri of people who walk in here every day. Pip too. But Ham, I’m not so sure. Sometimes I wonder if he’s here only because we’ve kept it a family business. I can’t come out and simply ask, that’s what’s so difficult.”

  I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Noor being uncomfortable talking to anyone.

  “Perhaps your parents simply wanted to shield you from the knowledge that you had an alter,” she added. “You have to understand what it was like. All the uncertainty, the turmoil we were thrown into after we found out we were connected to another universe. I was a young girl then, just starting in life and in the detective business. And here I am thirty-five years later running my own agency, unlike my alter, who—well, that’s neither here or there.” She sighed and wagged a finger at me. “But your little difficulty, now we can do something about that. We’ll begin, of course, by finding out where Felix B lives. That might take some time. You live in San Francisco A, but for all we know he might live in the Nevada desert or in an Alaska hunting lodge or in a Carolina greenhouse.”

  “The DIM official at the crossing terminal tagged my identicard with an Alter in the Area tag.”

  “That simplifies matters.” She jotted that down in spidery, Miss-Marple-like handwriting. “And we have the parents’ names, Klara and Patrick Sayers of Carmel, you said? Are your parents still living?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry. What happened, if I may ask?”

  “Boating accident.”

  “And his parents, I wonder? A boating accident is unlikely to have happened in both universes, but you never know.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I need you to find out these things for me, Mrs. Noor.”

  As she jotted down a few more things, my eyes went to the articles strewn across her desk. The range of topics was wide—I suppose everything is of interest to a detective—and the headlines were just like the ones that sold Universe A newspapers, only printed. There was a large, alarmist one warning that a new disease, something to do with pets, was close to making its way from Universe A into Universe B; a medium-sized one lamented the diminishing numbers of elephants and giraffes; and a small one (often the most useful) gave a positive review to a newly renovated downtown restaurant, the Organic Oven.

  “You keep client information in notebooks?” I pointed out the obvious as Mrs. Noor put down her pen.

  “My notepad? Entirely the best way. Nothing safer than taking notes in your own handwriting and keeping them in your own pocket.”

  “Do you often get clients seeking information about their alters, Mrs. Noor?”

  “We get them occasionally.”

  “How will you find out more about Felix B? Without incurring the attention of DIM, I mean.” I glanced around. The small, windowless office seemed to harbor many secrets of its own on its shelves and in its corners.

  She opened a desk drawer, reached inside, and handed me a business card. “In case you need to contact me, Felix. As for DIM—the laws are here to protect us all, especially citizens whose unscrupulous alters might try to take over their lives, which, as you probably know, is not unheard of. That’s not the case here, of course,” she said, giving me a quick appraising glance. “We merely require some information about Citizen Sayers B, after which you’ll go back to your own universe.”

  “You understand, Mrs. Noor, that I don’t want him to know that I know about him?”

  “Leave it to us. We will tread lightly.”

  Having paid a moderate advance to Noor & Brood, I hurried across the street to make the city tour. It being Saturday, the bus was full and the only seats left were in the back. I made my way down the length of the diesel-powered monstrosity, which long ago had been banned in my California, and took a seat by the window. A couple of minutes later a jovial-looking woman took the seat next to me as the doors closed and the tour guide tapped a microphone and spoke into it from his position near the front of the bus. “My dear guests, how many of you are B-dwellers?” A hand went up next to me, as did a few others. “And how many of you are visitors from Universe A?” I raised my hand, along with most of the passengers; not among them, I was glad to see, was the man who had disliked bookstores and eaten my almond thins.

  “My name is Lard—that’s right, Lard, like in pork.” The guide tipped his cap, which had the logo See B from a Bus on it. “And it’s my pleasure to welcome you all to San Francisco B.”

  “Thanks, Lard,” came the cheerful response from the B-dweller in the seat next to me. (Every tour has a talker. They invariably seem to end up in my vicinity.)

  As the engine shuddered to life and we headed out the firehouse doors and down Lombard Street in the direction of the Embarcadero, Lard expertly balanced himself in the aisle and spoke into his microphone. “My dear friends, let me tell you the story of the California Gold Rush and the fifty-fivers, the prospectors who in 1855 arrived seeking gold and baking their sourdough bread—”

  Lard’s words reminded me that Wagner hadn’t called yet to say that he had secured a contact for authentic sourdough starter. Hoping that that meant he’d been unable to find anyone, I shaded my eyes from the sun with my hand and gazed out the window at Lombard Street—and immediately pulled back in a reflex action. A vehicle had zoomed by. The next car went by just as fast, and the next, each seeming like a near miss; there couldn’t have been more than an arm’s length separating us from the ten-thousand-libra machines thundering by in the opposite direction like stampeding, angry buffalo. A sudden swerve on the part of our driver—sneeze, heart attack, whatever—and we’d all morph from happy tourists to crushed tourists.

  “Are you all right, honey?” the B-dweller in the seat next to me whispered.

  I was unsuccessfully feeling around for a seatbelt. “The cars—from the sidewalk they look close when they pass each other—from in here they look really close.”

  “It takes some getting used to for A-dwellers, I’ve heard. You mostly have one-way streets?”

  “And people movers. Crowded but reliably computerized.”

  She patted my hand, which was gripping the armrest between us. “My husband used to say, ‘Danger makes life worth living.’”

  “Did he?”

  “Of course that was before the hang-glider malfunction, the poor dear.”

  The bus driver turned a corner in a wide arc, tilting us sideways and narrowly missing a pedestrian. I locked my gaze up, at the buildings and billboards. As minutes passed and nothing drastic happened, I loosened my grip on the armrest. The B-dweller next to me gave me a reassuring smile and went back to listening to Lard. I cracked the window open a bit and, wincing every so often at another close traffic call, settled back and let Lard’s words wash over me and played the spot-the-differences game. As I had found out while searching for the Queen Bee Inn, chance and man had done their bit in three-and-a-half decades.

  Faded nineteenth-century building façades sat where I was used to seeing new construction that had followed our quake. Where the buildings looked the same, their occupants weren’t. The familiar City Art Gallery had a drugstore and a shoe store in its place. Farther down the Embarcadero we entered Fisherman’s Wharf, its piers as I remembered seeing them in old photographs, not a hint to be seen of the transit-boat marina that had taken their place in San Francisco A. Only Pier 39 looked the same with its tourist shops and restaurants.

  When we stopped at a traffic light and the bus engine quieted for a moment, I could hear the seagulls thronging Pier 39, but missing from the cacophony of urban and sea-life sounds penetrating the open bus window was the swoosh of the people mover lines. In its place was the steady hum of car engines. But all the cars (if one ignored their inherent dangers) did make the town seem quite cheerful, the fruit-basket effect of the reds and greens a
nd yellows boosted by the midday sun.

  There were billboards on practically every building we passed, I noticed. Did we have quite so many?

  And was there this much trash on the streets of my San Francisco?

  The real question, I thought, leaning back and hastily removing my elbow from the armrest, having set it down on the arm of the friendly B-dweller in the adjoining seat, the real question was, would Mrs. Noor report cosmetic differences between Felix’s life and mine—or cosmic differences? Did we part our hair on the opposite side and that was it, or was he a self-made trillionaire with a mansion with private beach access, two tennis courts, three saunas, and an orange tree grove?

  He was somewhere nearby, according to the Alter in the Area tag on my identicard, going about his daily business. For all I knew, he could have been driving the eggplant-purple car that had carelessly changed lanes in front of the bus, making our driver slam on the brakes and jolting everyone forward. More likely, I thought, if he was anything like me, he’d be getting around on a bicycle, though now that I thought about it, where were all the bicycles? We had passed only a couple, nowhere near the number that thronged the streets of San Francisco A and kept us efficient, alert, and fit. The few bicyclists I did see sported tight-fitting clothing in bright colors, as if biking were an activity one needed to be specially dressed for, like going to the opera, and not a practical pursuit.

  “My favorite actress,” the B-dweller next to me elbowed me in the ribs and pointed.

  We had stopped at a red traffic light under a billboard.

  “You don’t have them anymore, do you? Movie theaters.”

  “Nope,” I said. Dashing in her khaki explorer’s outfit and wide-brimmed hat, the movie star in the billboard ad swung jauntily on jungle vines from tree to tree, her long ice-white hair sailing behind her, a python loosely wrapped around her neck. With a start I recognized her as the traveler who had garnered attention in the crossing chamber, the one in the tangerine dress. So she was a B-dweller, after all, and a famous one at that.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? That’s Gabriella Love. I’ve already seen Jungle Nights six—no, seven times back in New Jersey. I’ve never understood why movies went out of style in your Universe A. I thought you preferred group activities—more environmental and all. If you get a chance, honey, you should go see the movie while you’re here.”

  The star of Jungle Nights was now on foot, trying to evade an energetic pack of angry monkeys. How curious it must be for people to recognize your face wherever you went, I thought. Even if an author achieved fame with his keystrokes, his visage remained hidden behind a curtain—

  “Mint?”

  Lard, having temporarily put down his microphone, was handing out treats. As I unwrapped the mint, my omni buzzed. I fumbled to answer it, got it tangled in its neck cord, and finally managed to flip it open. “Wagner,” I hissed (thereby disproving anyone who claims a sibilant-free word can’t be hissed), “Wagner, I thought you were at the Pretzel Makers competition.”

  “I am. The dough is rising and the judges are on a break. Listen to this. Baguette slicer. Four speed. Vertical cut, horizontal cut, lateral cut. What do you think?”

  Wagner liked to try out new ideas on me. The focus this month at work was bread of all kinds, from buns to baguettes to brioches.

  “What do New Appliances think?” I spoke more loudly than I meant to as I popped the mint into my mouth. The B-dweller next to me put a finger to her lips.

  “Sorry. What do New Appliances think?” I repeated more quietly.

  “They are looking into it. I asked them to design the slicer to look like a mock guillotine.” He was standing in front of a door-sized pretzel (a fake one, I was almost sure) and had taken a Napoleonic stance, whether as a nod to his short stature or the French character of the baguette slicer, I couldn’t tell.

  “Not a bad idea,” I whispered. “We wouldn’t need to actually use any French in the user guide or the ads.”

  “Where are you anyway?” he asked as the bus went over a bump in the road and the omni and I flew up briefly.

  “Sightseeing.”

  “You’re aware of the Lunch-Place Rule, Felix, aren’t you?”

  “I’m nowhere near my apartment, the office, or Coconut Café. We’re headed first to the old Golden Gate Bridge, then the Baker Beach Ferris wheel, then the zoo, Strawberry Hill, a peculiar part of Lombard Street that’s crooked for some reason…” I remembered something. “I’ll send along the Golden Gate Bridge write-up when I finish it.”

  “Good. I’m still working on arranging you-know-what.” Just before Wagner disconnected, I caught a glimpse of a team of contestants hastily re-braiding the large pretzel behind him, which apparently was real and which had started to sag. I turned off the omni, mulling over that I still wasn’t sure that I wanted anything to do with obtaining sourdough bread starter on the Universe B black market. The yeast strain responsible for the tangy bread enjoyed, as Lard had said, by the fifty-fivers of the California Gold Rush, as well as the builders of the bridge we were nearing, had been lost over the years in Universe A. The replacement was, everyone agreed, not that great. If we were able to get our hands on the starter for the Universe B sourdough, which I had yet to try, we’d probably have a hit on our hands with the new Bygone Times Sourdough Bread Maker. It was just that, Regulation 10 (workplace information) aside, I wasn’t sure that it was right to underhandedly obtain a trade secret in order to produce our own version of it in Universe A. With any luck, I decided, Wagner would be unable to find anyone willing to sell the starter and the question would not come up at all. In the meantime it was probably safest to stay away from sourdough bread completely. No one could accuse me of wanting to bring a flavorful taste to the Universe A masses if I had never partaken of it myself.

  “Folks, our first stop will be the old Golden Gate Bridge.” Lard’s microphone was back on. “The one and only, the original, the edifice that has lasted a hundred years. That is, if we ever get there in this traffic.”

  It was a relief when we finally reached the bridge. Navigating the steep San Francisco streets, awkwardly turning corners, the bus had rumbled and shook as if its tires were made of wood instead of rubber and I had gotten increasingly queasy. The driver took the bus across the bridge, an experience I would have otherwise enjoyed, maneuvered up a narrow, winding road, and pulled into the overlook parking lot and turned off the engine.

  Lard offered a steadying hand and the words, “Please watch your step,” to his passengers as we exited via three narrow steps to the ground. The bus driver already had his feet up and his omni tuned to a sports channel.

  As I climbed the unpaved trail to the overlook, the gusty wind inflated my jacket like a life preserver, carrying with it the cool ocean air, and my nausea subsided by the time I reached the top. The overlook itself was sparsely populated. There was a lone macar tree, with its luxuriant insect-eating blossoms, and a couple of low bushes. A handful of tourists milled around taking photos and exploring Battery Spencer, a nineteenth-century gun battery standing guard over the Golden Gate, according to Lard. (The Golden Gate was the strait—the water entrance to the bay—but why golden, I’d never known. The bridge spanning the strait was built of cherry-red brick, the water was a deep blue, the city white, and the hills a dry brown.)

  “Go to the bridge, Felix,” Wagner had said before I’d left, “and write me some poetry.” He didn’t really mean poetry, of course, just some pretty words that we could incorporate into the ads, brochure and user guide for the Bygone Times Sourdough Bread Maker.

  Nothing beats a first-person account of a place, Wagner had said.

  He was right.

  The cliff we were on rose above the bridge, the bay to the left, open ocean to our right, the city spread out beyond like a miniature of itself. Something was missing from the scene and it took me a moment to realize it was the transit ferryboats, which in Universe A crisscrossed the bay and connected the city to the sur
rounding suburbs and towns. Here only sailboats, clearly weekend diversions with their white sails swelling proudly in the wind, dotted the bay, along with a few tourist boats. On the open ocean side, the gated wall that protected the city from rising ocean levels peeked out of the water in a massive semicircle.

  As to the bridge across which we had just rumbled—

  The two turreted towers, with their famous red brick, soared up out of the water. A line of cars snaked across the drawbridge segment between the brick towers, to and from the cabled suspension side-spans. I could see tiny tourists ambling in and out of the towers and along the bridge sidewalks, which were lined with lampposts on both the bay and the open ocean side. A wide girder the same color as the cables—red, like the bricks—connected the upper levels of the two towers.

  The last time I’d laid eyes on this scene, I had been about twelve. I realized I had been expecting the bridge to be smaller and less grand, like things remembered from childhood often are when you see them again as an adult.

  I swatted a fly off my arm. Their Golden Gate Bridge was still here, and ours had been lost in the quake and not rebuilt right. For one thing, it wasn’t a drawbridge at all—the new bridge curved in an elegant arc to accommodate ship traffic. It had exactly zero towers. People mover line number 88 crossed the bridge and allowed for an easy connection to the Marin Peninsula. It was a nice, practical bridge. There was not a thing wrong with it.

  The fly came back and this time I smacked it flat.

  A few strides brought me back to Lard’s tour group, which stood gathered far closer to the edge of the cliff than seemed reasonable.

  “—the brick towers were completed in fourteen months,” Lard was saying. “Quite a feat.” He had taken off his cap and was holding it in his hand. “The builders suspended a net under the bridge during the construction phase. Nineteen workers fell into the net and lived. Rumor has it they dubbed themselves members of the Halfway to Hell Club.” He paused to let a loud seagull squawk away and I took a couple of photos to aid me in composing inspiring prose that would sell myriads of Bygone Times Sourdough Bread Makers. Lard went on, “The color of the cables and the girder, officially called international orange but which frankly looks more like rusty red to me, was chosen to match the tower bricks. Nowadays, my dear visitors, there’s still plenty of work to be done to keep the bridge in shape. The rain, the fog, and the salty ocean air are constantly eroding the paint and crumbling the bricks.”