Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  The setting in the next two photos I thought might be the Presidio, the area just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. One was a close-up of a peeling eucalyptus tree, groves of which ran rampant all over the Presidio; the other was a shot of my family in front of (perhaps) the same eucalyptus, clearly taken by a kind stranger. “Cute hat, Felix,” Bean said. In addition to being cute in a powder blue hat, I was sucking on something and hanging on to my parents.

  “One eucalyptus tree is like another. It will be hard to pinpoint where those two were taken,” Arni said, sounding a bit disappointed.

  And the fourth photo—

  “Hey,” I said, “is that—?”

  Pak nodded. “It is indeed. The Universe B version of Photo 13.”

  The fifth and last of the photos, like the eucalyptus ones, wasn’t going to be of much use to the students. California sea lions lounged in the bright sun, packed like sardines on a dozen square wooden rafts anchored in a marina and looking magnificently content. Pak tapped the photograph lightly. “The marina near Pier 39. Nearby is the restaurant where Felix B and family went to lunch, and maybe Felix A and family as well.”

  “Never mind that,” Bean interrupted. “Did you say number 13?”

  “Indeed. Thirteen B, as it were.”

  She bent over the photo. “It’s not the same as 13A.”

  “No.”

  “So 13A and 13B were taken post-yabput.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And therefore not necessarily at the same time. That is to say, 13A could have been taken somewhat earlier than 13B, or vice versa.”

  “Indeed,” repeated Pak as I tried to work out in my head what Bean had just said.

  There was a noise in the hallway and Franny’s cousin stuck her head into the breakfast room. “Tulip needs to come in here and vacuum.”

  “Give us ten more minutes, please,” Pak requested.

  From the doorway Franny’s cousin surveyed the mess on her breakfast table. “I’ll tell Tulip to do the kitchen first. She needs to learn how to clean a stove properly anyway,” she added and left.

  Quelling a sudden desire to go help Tulip, whoever she was, by telling her all about Wagner’s Kitchen Cleaner—Spray Twice, Wipe Once, I asked the graduate students, “So—now what?”

  Arni had picked up 13B and was studying it so intently that his large nose was almost touching the paper; it was a wonder none of the ink had transferred to it yet. “It’s not that complicated, really,” he said. “The Sayers family drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, parked, walked a bit, took a couple of photos by a eucalyptus tree—then a bit later you or Felix B did something of momentous consequences, after which you took Photos 13 and went to lunch at Pier 39.”

  His remark prompted me to reach into the lunch pack we had picked up on the way back from Monroe’s house. “Not that complicated, you say,” I commented as I unwrapped a sandwich. I took a bite. The ham-and-cheese on wheat might as well have been pink-and-yellow plastic nestled in stale cardboard. I couldn’t taste a thing.

  “Not complicated, perhaps, but damn difficult,” said Pak and took a sandwich himself, though it looked to me like he had spent most of the morning engaged in snacking and making a big mess for Tulip to clean. “Not bad,” he said of the sandwich.

  “Wait—Arni, did you say it was something that Felix B or I did?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “You mean only one of us did something?”

  Arni had moved down to where a spidery chandelier hung above the middle of the breakfast table and had placed 13A and 13B side by side under the light. “I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. You and he were the same person up until the very moment the universes diverged. Whether Universe A split off and Felix’s Universe B is the continuation of the original, or whether Universe B split off and your Universe A is the continuation of the original, I don’t know that we can even say. It was a single moment in time. Does it even matter?”

  “Oh, it matters.”

  “Why does the camera never capture what people’s watches say?” Bean complained, moving in closer and jostling for the photos with Arni. “Pak, we’re going to need more copies. And it would help if we could enlarge them a bit.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What about Patrick’s navy hat?” Arni suggested to Bean as they bent their heads together over the two photos. “He’s wearing it in 13B, but not in 13A. And can you make out the number on the lamppost in 13B? Is that a 41 or 71?…The baby looks happier in 13B, doesn’t it?…”

  By the time Tulip came in and plugged in her vacuum cleaner, darting curious looks at the jumble of photos and enlargements on the breakfast table, even Arni had to admit that we were stumped. “Let’s run image analysis of the new photos and see if that tells us anything. The silver Ford in 13B was driven across the bridge several minutes after the yabput, I think. That will help pinpoint the time, at least.”

  As Pak packed up his laptop, I asked, “What constitutes a significant chain of events, anyway?”

  Arni sent a quick glance in the direction of Tulip, who was securing an attachment to the vacuum in a dilatory manner, and repeated, “What constitutes a significant event chain? Anything that creates a universe.”

  “And what creates a universe?”

  “Anything that constitutes a significant event chain.”

  “Anything that—oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, and stomped up to my room.

  Awhile later Bean knocked once on my door, called out, “I got it, meet us downstairs,” and left just as abruptly. I took a moment to stretch my limbs, having spent the past couple of hours doing about the only thing a person can do while a team (two teams counting James and Gabriella) endeavors to prove said person accidentally created a universe thirty-five years ago by poring over his childhood photos with a fine-tooth comb, or is it a brush or a microscope that one pores with? Anyway—I took a nap.

  Steep wooden stairs led from my Be Mine Inn tower room one flight down to where the graduate students had their rooms. (I was touched that they had given me what they clearly considered to be the best room of the four, though I found the round walls with their exceedingly narrow windows awkward to live in.) No one answered when I knocked on their doors, so I continued down two more flights of stairs to the breakfast room.

  The students were bent over something at the breakfast table, their backs to me. The flower-motif posters on the walls hung a little askew, having survived Tulip’s cleaning. Vacuum lines crisscrossed the carpet.

  I set down Franny’s paper book Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? which I had brought down to make it look as if I had been reading for the past couple of hours, but no one noticed. (On a side note, carting a paper book around while reading it had not turned out to be as much of a bother as I’d anticipated.)

  “Look closely,” Bean was saying to Arni and Pak. “As I understand it, though admittedly my experience with babies amounts to zero, if you have something that succeeds in soothing the kid, you stick with it come rain or shine.”

  Enlargements of 13A and 13B lay side by side.

  I moved closer. In the photo on the left, Aunt Henrietta’s number 13, there I was, in a baby carrier hanging on my father’s chest, my puny limbs dangling while I sucked on something; in the Universe B photo, 13B, Felix was in his baby carrier, his puny limbs dangling while he sucked on something. It was like one of those maddening games where you’re supposed to find ten differences between Picture 1 and Picture 2, or in this case Picture 13A and Picture 13B. I’d never been very good at those, and the two pictures in front of me were only similar in the basics anyway: both were father-son tableaux, but 13A caught my father in a serious moment, while 13B had him doing antics for the camera, making a pretend motion as if about to toss Felix B, safely strapped in his baby carrier, up into the air; 13A was a close-up shot, while 13B had several pedestrians and a car accidentally caught on camera; light gray clouds and vertical bridge cables were visible in both, though more so in 13B. It was impossible to tell what was crucial a
nd what was incidental.

  “I know the enlargements are fuzzy,” Bean said, “and the viewing angle is different, and both objects are yellow, but—”

  “I see it,” Arni said. “Banana. Duck.”

  “What?” I said and looked again.

  And there, as Pak would say, indeed it was. Yellow banana in 13A, yellow duck with no feet in 13B. Cutesy pacifier attachments.

  “Now that’s interesting,” Pak said.

  “The duck pacifier is there in 1B and 10B as well—the morning photo taken in front of the Big Fat Pancake and the later one by the eucalyptus tree—so the day started with Felix having the duck pacifier,” Bean told us, her voice rising with excitement. “But it’s gone in Aunt Henrietta’s Photo 13A. The change only happened in our Felix’s universe.”

  I winced. “Don’t call it that.”

  “Sorry. In Universe A.”

  “Wait,” I objected, “there are a thousand tiny differences between the two photos. My father’s navy hat, for one thing. He’s wearing it in 13B but not in 13A. What about that? How do we know the pacifier switch is important?”

  “We don’t,” Arni said. “But it’s very suggestive. It was windy, so hats on or off, not a big deal.” He produced a thick round magnifying glass and bent over the eucalyptus photo of my family like an old-fashioned detective. “Yes, I see it—the duck kind of blends in with Felix’s chin—that’s a magnificent eucalyptus specimen, isn’t it—”

  I picked up 13A and 13B. There was one additional difference. The infant in 13A (me) wore a sullen, almost peevish, expression on its round face, while the infant in 13B (him) seemed content in his baby carrier, rather like the seals lounging in the Pier 39 marina. Holding us in the two photos was my father, dressed in jeans and a striped windbreaker, having taken his family out for a Monday drive. I wondered if he was smiling and clowning around in 13B because Felix B had been better behaved—unlike Felix A, who had managed to lose his pacifier.

  What had I done?

  [15]

  FACE-TO-FACE

  “You think the duck pacifier started an event chain?” Arni said to Bean. “How?”

  “I have no idea,” Bean admitted frankly, taking a chair at the Be Mine Inn breakfast table. “Maybe Felix got bored while his parents were admiring views of Alcatraz and Angel Island and chucked the pacifier at a passing bicyclist who stumbled and broke his leg—all right, it can’t have been anything that big, we’d have heard about it in other Y-day interviews…er…well, there’s a chance a photo taken by another tourist might have captured the moment.”

  “Not with our luck.” Arni tapped Photo 13B with the magnifying glass. “Duck in this one, banana in the other. I don’t know how we missed that. Why are they both yellow anyway? Ducks aren’t yellow. Only their bills or feet, maybe.”

  “All bananas aren’t yellow either,” I said distractedly. “There are red and purple bananas too. Are you suggesting that all the grand differences between our two universes stem from these…these artificial nipples that my parents gave us to keep us occupied?”

  “Yes and no.” Arni scratched his ear. “There was a brief moment when everything in A and B remained exactly the same, except for whatever it is you and Felix B did differently at 11:46:01. Then a commuter missed her train, lightning hit a tree, a dog bit a man, sperm found an egg—some of it in A, some in B, some in both. The current state of Universe A is partly due to the original Y-day event chain, but also to independent event chains that emerged as time went on. Think of two snowballs poised at the top of a hill. Give them a nudge and they both head downhill. Where they end up at the bottom depends not just the direction they were pushed in, but on the stuff they encounter along the way, rocks and trees and snowdrifts and such.”

  “So some things are your fault, others aren’t,” Bean summarized.

  “Gee, thanks,” I said.

  “However,” said Arni, “only one event chain will lead all the way back to 11:46:01.”

  Bean brushed off a few crumbs that Tulip had forgotten to sweep, and started to drum on the table gently with her fingers. “The event chain…what could it have been? Felix loses his duck pacifier and doesn’t like the back-up choice, the banana”—drum, drum—“maybe it didn’t squeak the same way the duck did—and Felix’s complaining prompts his parents to run into a toy store”—drum, drum—“but in doing so they delay an aunt buying a birthday gift and cause her to miss her bus and instead take a car to her niece’s birthday party and accidentally run over the neighborhood cat”—drum, drum—“an event that doesn’t happen in Universe B, where the cat goes on to mother a new breed of super-cat destined to achieve dominance over the human race,” she ended, taking a deep breath.

  Pleased with the scenario in which I save Universe A from a terrible fate, I applauded, then said, “Well, I’m still not convinced that my parents just took me out for a simple Monday drive up to the city. There had to be more to it. A reason why they closed the gallery and went to San Francisco that day.”

  “Unlikely feline world domination scenarios aside, Bean is right,” Arni said. “We need to sit down and brainstorm and make a list of possible event chains.”

  “I’ll run some simulations,” Pak said.

  “The Universe A receipts should be coming in soon,” Bean said. “We’ll have a better idea of how the day played out.”

  “We should study traffic patterns too. And check store receipts—” Arni said.

  “—and accident reports—”

  “—and the Y-day photoboard, in case we missed something—”

  Wolves intent on their chase. I felt a sudden loathing come over me, disgust not at their prying, but at my own. Everyone is entitled to privacy. Even an alter.

  “I need to make a call,” I said and went out of the breakfast area into the hallway.

  There was a message from Wagner. “Wanted to run an idea by you, Felix. Self-cleaning refrigerator. Remove food, push button, water shoots in from all sides and washes interior. Automatic dry. One more thing. I’m hearing some things—just be careful, that’s all. Oh, and don’t forget the Salt & Pepper Bakery.” The omni beeped to signal the end of the message, leaving me to wonder what Wagner had meant by the warning. He had a large network of professional contacts—everyone had to eat, as he often pointed out—and on occasion those contacts operated in unlikely places.

  Everyone knew that DIM’s official motto was, Information is best managed number by number. Rumor had it, however, that the unofficial motto was, Information is best managed by ELIMINATING it number by number. I suddenly realized how chilling that last verb was. The students had assumed that the computer in Monroe’s attic had been wiped clean by James and Gabriella to ensure that Past & Future stayed ahead of Professor Maximilian’s team. But what if DIM wanted to keep the idea that humans created universes out of the public eye? Removing key evidence from our path was certainly one way of doing it.

  I shook my head and made the call I had come out into the hallway to make. Mrs. Noor answered at once.

  “There’s been a change of plan, Mrs. Noor,” I said. “I won’t require any more information about—about the party in question.”

  “I see. All right. I do have one morsel for you, courtesy of my daughter Daisy, but I understand if you’re not interested anymore.”

  Wanting to cut the conversation short, I spoke a tad more abruptly than I intended. “Just send me a bill. And thanks for your help, Mrs. Noor.”

  “Call if you need anything else, Felix.”

  “Mrs. Noor, wait,” I said just before she disconnected. “What do you have?”

  She paused, hand midway to her omni. “You mean my morsel? Just this. Your alter is in Carmel. And he had a visitor join him. His fiancée.”

  “You don’t have an alter, do you?”

  I received a puzzled look from Bean.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  We were on a public path that meandered along Carmel’s sandy beach, our way illuminated by
a full moon in a star-dotted sky, which might have been quite a romantic experience had Pak and Arni not been a few steps behind us enumerating the defects of outdated computer technology and snickering occasionally. Carmel being the kind of seaside town that shuts down not long after sunset, we had all gone out for a post-dinner beach stroll.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” Bean said as we walked along the sand-swept path. (I kept an eye out for intertwined couples, checking each time whether the guy looked anything like me.) “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  People always say that, but it makes you look small if you decide that, in fact, you’d rather not answer their question. “Go ahead,” I said, resignedly.

  “What are you stuck on?”

  “Er—?”

  “You can write, yes?”

  “I can put together a decent culinary user guide, according to Wagner.”

  “I meant the mystery novel.”

  “It’s not that easy. I mean, on one hand, it is. A murder early on, then another or two to thicken the plot, a sleuth on the case, a few red herrings thrown in for good measure, and finally the climax as the culprit is revealed to everyone’s surprise and you flip your omni shut. I’ve been reading Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?—good title, that—who could catch sight of it and not wonder who Evans was and what he or she should have been asked? Or,” I said, expanding on the issue, since she had been the one to bring it up, “one could go short and to the point, like The Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle, by the way, bestowed sixty-some titles in all—not counting the fairies stuff—and Christie, even worse, eighty mystery novels. Eighty! Where did they find the time?” Various and sundry murder scenarios—to be brought to life in a book, of course—did often drift into my head as I sat at my desk at Wagner’s Kitchen, but I’d quickly remember I needed to pay rent and give my attention back to the vegetable peelers and the rice cookers.