Regarding Ducks and Universes

by Neve Maslakovic

  “I don’t plan on going into the kitchen.”

  The waiter reappeared with a large pitcher, poured water into our glasses with a flourish, and said, “Transported here weekly from hidden springs in the Sierras.”

  A strange mood had come over me. Recklessly for my identicard balance, I decided to order wine for the table. “We’d like some wine with our lunch. Do you have Napa Valley Zinfandel—?”

  “Of course.” He wrote the order down. “Our wine is made from pesticide-free grapes misted with spring water and when ripe picked by hand at sunset, then crushed the old-fashioned way and aged in oak casks. The wine is subject to the inter-universe import tax,” he added.

  “Inter-universe import tax?” I said. “What about the local wines?”

  “Scratch that,” interrupted Bean before the waiter could answer. “Water is fine.”

  As the waiter, looking miffed at the loss of the extra tip, stalked off, Bean explained. “Our Napa Valley isn’t producing any more. Too much precipitation. It rots the grapes. California B imports its wine from California A. It’s become somewhat of a luxury item.”

  “A consequence of the global warm-up,” muttered Arni. “On the plus side, all the rain means we haven’t had a drought in years.”

  “Why did you let the global warm-up get out of hand?” I asked sharply.

  They stared at me.

  “Never mind. I don’t know what made me ask that.”

  “Universes are like people,” Bean said. “It’s easier to see the solutions to other people’s problems. It’s the loop.”

  “Did you say the loop?”

  She reached over and selected a breadstick from the basket in the middle of the table. “Suppose you never made a single choice, like Passivists do. Don’t. Whatever. Just sat in a park under a tree all day avoiding trouble. It wouldn’t work. Eventually something would happen. Maybe not the first day, or the next—but wait long enough and something would. What, no one can tell you. You might be stung by a bee or bopped on the head by a falling branch or catch pneumonia from spending soggy nights in the park.” She poised the untouched breadstick over the table. “I’m going to let the breadstick fall in a moment. About all I can tell you in advance is that it’s going to roll about a bit on the table and then stop. I have no idea in which direction it will roll and I have no idea where it will come to a stop.” She let the breadstick fall. It immediately came to a wobbly rest on her silverware and did not roll. “Humph. You see? Arni here and I, we think that proving you and Felix B are the universe makers will bring us our PhDs, lead to good jobs, make you two famous—but who knows what will really happen? We’ll probably end up in a work camp for violating Regulation 19.” She shrugged, retrieved the breadstick, and took a crunchy bite.

  I reached across the table to take one of the breadsticks myself.

  “Life’s unpredictability is a good thing, in my opinion,” she went on after a moment. “The first adventurous marine creature that decided that it might be a good idea to crawl out of the seas onto that interesting, warm, dry stuff we call sand had no idea what it was getting into, I’m sure…I am getting off track. What was I saying?”

  “Why it’s hard to see the solutions to your own problems. What’s in these?” I asked, suddenly distracted from the topic at hand.

  “They’re just sourdough breadsticks,” Bean said.

  “I can taste them.”

  “Never liked sourdough myself,” said Arni. “Too sour. In my opinion, bread should be neutral.”

  “Anyway, as to the loop,” Bean went on, “we all know that we have the power to change our lives. But in the back of our mind is a tally of all the times that things didn’t turn out as expected because of random chance, other people’s behavior, false assumptions we’d made, or the disconnect between how we see ourselves and who we really are. We therefore know that most likely things will not turn out as we expect them to, so we try to take that into account but end up going in circles and doing nothing. It’s like that old bit of advice, how do you dress well?”

  “How?” I asked, reaching for a second breadstick. Just like that, Regulation 10 be damned, I found myself on board with Wagner’s plan to obtain the sourdough starter for Universe A.

  “By doing it with confidence. And how do you gain confidence?”

  “I get it. By dressing well,” I said through a full mouth.

  “The loop is one of the tenets of Passivist philosophy,” Arni threw in.

  “Yes,” Bean replied a trifle testily, “but that doesn’t make it wrong.”

  Arni shrugged. “Don’t try to change things. It’s a safe creed to live by.”

  “How many are there?” I said, having finished with the second breadstick and looking over the chicken sandwich the waiter had just brought.

  “Which?”

  “Tenets of Passivist philosophy.”

  “Seven.” She ticked them off one by one. “Disturb nothing. Be still. Stand aside. Do only what you must. Embrace the loop. Give everything. Keep nothing.”

  “Did you go to many Passivist meetings as a child?” I said. There was an inviting beet salad accompanying the chicken sandwich. I speared a helping onto my fork.

  “Every seven days.”

  “What did you do at them?” I asked, the sweetness of the beets awakening my palate further.

  “Not much.”

  A busboy had finished clearing the dishes off the neighboring table; he swept up the crumbs, then wheeled a cart stacked with dirty dishes through the swinging doors, permitting a brief glance of hanging pots and pans. “If Aunt Hen hadn’t left instructions in her will that a photo be mailed to me along with half of her porcelain dolphin collection, I wouldn’t be here today eating this delic—this sandwich,” I said. “I keep wondering if the pet bug quarantine was an unexpected outcome, as you say, or whether James and Gabriella did it on purpose.”

  “Does it matter?” Arni replied. “Maybe Granola James took his pet for a walk in the woods, Murphina partook of infected droppings, and, unaware, James brought her to Universe B where you petted her head—”

  “She licked my hand,” I corrected him.

  “Or he realized she’d gotten infected and took advantage of that fact to position himself in your vicinity. If he did plan it, he probably didn’t expect to see Bean there.”

  “Or that I’d be grounded by the pet bug medication in my room at the health center for much of my stay.”

  “Irrelevant in any case,” Arni said. “The law differentiates between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter, between deliberate pursuit of unauthorized research and a serendipitous discovery. Event chains don’t care.”

  I cared. Inconveniences were best left to fate, in my opinion.

  “Tell me more about your Passivist childhood, Bean,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the second half of the chicken sandwich. “Did you live on a farm?”

  “I had a veggie garden and made my own clothes. The clothes were not very good.”

  “What about your parents? Does it bother them that you’re not a Passivist nowadays?”

  “They neither approve nor disapprove. If you like we can take a drive down to the farm tomorrow—Saturday—so you can see what it’s like. Everyone sits around and talks and does nothing much after the day’s work is done. It’s quite pleasant, actually, now that I think about it.”

  “I have to go back to Universe A tomorrow. My entry permit expires midafternoon. I survived being turned into a number once, can’t say I’m looking forward to doing it again.”

  “Tomorrow? That doesn’t give us much time,” Arni said. “Anyone know hypnosis? Perhaps there is a chance your subconscious self remembers what you did with the duck pacifier. Did you say something, Felix?” He accepted a refill of spring water, then added in a low tone after the waiter left, “I’ve been sneaking looks into the kitchen whenever the waiters go in and out. Can’t see much from this angle, though.”

  “I wonder what kind of car
he drives,” I said.

  “Felix B? Why, do you need a ride somewhere?” Bean asked.

  I shook my head. The Organic Oven and an adjacent grocery store shared a parking lot, whose attendant had requested sixty dollars for an hour’s worth of parking. I had taken my time paying him, but didn’t spot a black car with darkened windows anywhere in the parking lot. I thought I might have caught a glimpse of a two-seater the color of a squishy apricot parked by the back entrance of the restaurant, however.

  “You ate that sandwich quickly, Felix,” Arni said.

  I balled my napkin onto the empty plate. “I guess I was hungry.”

  “Why don’t we ask our waiter if the head chef is here? I could say I want to compliment him on his Caesar salad with the wild caught salmon and the natural camel cheese. It was quite good. Just a hint of anchovies and lemon…scrumptious.” Arni scraped the last bit of salad from his plate and finished it off.

  Bean glanced over at me and pushed the leftover fettuccini strands around her plate with her fork. “My pasta is a little soggy.”

  “Or one of us could pretend to be looking for the bathroom and accidentally walk into the kitchen—”

  “Let it rest, Arni,” Bean said.

  “Really? Why? I’m curious. Isn’t anyone else curious?”

  “Compliments of the chef.”

  The waiter was back. He was brandishing a large dessert plate with cheese balls, chocolate chunks, and a medley of nuts on it.

  We split it three ways.

  [25]

  THE OLD GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE

  The sidewalk along the length of the bridge had, on one side, a shoulder-high railing preventing a fall into the cold and hostile water below; on the other side, a single step led down to (equally dangerous) noisy and speeding traffic. Tourists moved along, not staying in any one spot too long. The increasing wind was bringing in low-lying fog, chilling intrepid walkers and threatening to obscure the sun and the two bridge towers.

  If Arni and Bean were to be believed, the old Golden Gate Bridge was the scene of the crime.

  Nor were they the only ones who thought so. We had overtaken Gabriella and James at the elevator which carried pedestrians from the parking lot to the bridge deck. The representatives of Past & Future were trying to get the almost-dog Murphina, who had her considerably large backside firmly planted on the ground, to consent to an elevator ride. As we passed them, we heard James say, “Murph, come on, I know it’s not the woods, but it’ll be fun…we can climb the stairs to the top of one of the towers if you like—and look for lampposts number 30 and 41 on the way—”

  I zipped up my jacket, conscious of being in a state of ambivalence. The signals my stomach was emitting—excellent meal—struggled against those from my brain—damn him, he’s good in the kitchen, what if he’s equally good at writing mystery novels? I couldn’t decide if it was worth swallowing my pride and calling Felix to find out which sauce he’d flavored the chicken sandwich with or to ask for the beet salad recipe. Subduing a digestive aftereffect, I joined Arni and Bean, who were counting off lampposts, many of which had their numbers worn off by age. “Eleven…twelve.” Bean raised her voice above the din of the traffic. “I wonder what the professor and Pak are doing.” She took a slurp through a straw of the drink she’d gotten to go at the Organic Oven while I took care of the check.

  “What is that, anyway?” I asked equally loudly and pointed to the oversized cardboard cup in her hands.

  “A smoothie.”

  I shrugged in ignorance.

  “You know, fruit blended with juice, yogurt, and ice?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You mean you’ve never had one? This one is orange-banana-raspberry. Want a sip?”

  The smoothie was like a melted fruit sorbet, only less sweet, and was quite refreshing, even more so on a hot day, I imagined. “I wonder if it’s a copyrighted Universe B idea,” I said, passing the large cup back to Bean via Arni who was walking between us. “Wagner might want to look into it.”

  “Fifteen…” Arni counted off.

  As we continued on, an odd thought crossed my mind—what if the pacifier episode, as I had started calling it, had initiated a chain of events whose consequences had yet to occur, like the assumed anger of Pak’s mother at her wilted birthday cactus? Bean had said that the Y-day event chain would last nine hundred years. Nine centuries. A millennium, almost. The time scale was so large I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Had I set in motion a slow cooker of an event chain, one that would simmer and bubble away quietly for years before finally blowing off its lid and spewing stew everywhere? Unlike the cement structure firmly under our feet, the Universe A bridge was no longer there; but could the duck pacifier, after thirty-five years, still be hidden in a crevice in one of the bricks or stones reused in building the new Universe A bridge, poised to—do what? Catch the attention of a curious seagull who’d try to make a meal of it, then, disappointed by the rubbery consistency of the item in question, lurch into the path of one of the traffic control fliers that occasionally buzzed the bridges, making the flier crash and causing an untold number of casualties that would all be my fault?

  “You don’t get a sense of just how long the Golden Gate Bridge is until you try to walk it,” Bean said. She was limping slightly. (“Belly dancing injury,” she’d said.) “From afar, the turreted towers and the terra cotta color, like that of a flower pot, make it look fanciful, smaller than it really is.”

  “Terra cotta? It’s always seemed more of a faded mahogany red to me,” Arni said, glancing up at the thick suspension cables, where a recently cleaned section revealed the original color undulled by car exhaust fumes and salt corrosion. At the far end, fifteen stadia from where we’d started, the bridge met the yellow-brown cliffs of the Marin Headlands.

  “It’s international orange,” I said, striding on.

  “Really? I didn’t know that,” Arni said with interest. “Twenty six…But do you know where the strait gets its name?”

  “Because of the yellow-brown Marin cliffs that it abuts?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the gold rush of 1855?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “Lamppost twenty-eight…I’m glad we don’t have to walk all the way across, it’s too cold today. The strait was given its name by one John Fremont, explorer, politician, military officer. Apparently it reminded him of a historic harbor in Istanbul called the Golden Horn. Twenty-nine…thirty. That’s it.” Arni stopped. He pulled out Aunt Henrietta’s Photo 13A. “Why don’t you stand by the lamppost, Felix, and take the place of your father holding you. It will help us visualize the moment in time.”

  We had already paused at the seven-minutes-from-the-tollbooth spot and found nothing remarkable there.

  I obliged, aware that the last time I was here—on this very bridge? On a bridge identical to this one, brick by brick and cement slab by cement slab?—I hadn’t even known how to operate my own two feet. Arni commanded something as I took a position between lamppost number 30 and the bridge railing, but it was impossible to hear what over the din of the cars crossing the bridge and the wind whipping my hair back.

  “What? I can’t hear you,” I cupped my ear.

  “Take a step back,” he bellowed and gestured toward the bridge railing.

  I took a step back.

  “One more half step,” he bellowed again.

  I took a half step to the railing, feeling the cold metal through the back of my jacket. Below, the ocean water churned about, its tint deepening to gray-blue as the sun went behind the low clouds again. It seemed a long way down.

  Arni handed Bean the photo and framed the tableau in front of him between his hands. “What do you think?” he spoke into a sudden brief drop in traffic.

  “That’s the spot,” she concurred. “Lamppost 30 on the left, vertical bridge cables in the background. Move toward us a little, Felix, maybe a quarter of a step, and imagine yourself holding you
r six-month-old self. I wonder,” she added, “if your mother took the photo on your way to the first of the bridge towers—everyone climbs at least one of them for the view—or on the way back.”

  I edged forward, my eyes still on the water. “What if a school of seals—smallish ones—made Meriwether’s tour boat swerve and thus initiated the Y-day event chain?”

  “Meriwether didn’t mention seeing any seals. Why, do you see any down there?” Arni asked. I shook my head. It was impossible to see anything in the choppy, white-capped water. A minute or two later, they joined me at the railing as Arni explained, “A group of seals is called a pod or herd or rookery, not a school. Or—pretty oddly, considering their flopping skills on land—a harem.”

  “I think I’m a seal when it comes to belly dancing,” said Bean. “I don’t seem to be able to do much other than flop around.” She limped aside to let a bicyclist pass.

  “No seals today, but we do have an occasional bicycle.” Arni nodded toward the retreating back of the brightly and tightly clad cyclist. “And pedestrians, strollers, buses, cars. Also seagulls and other birds,” he added, echoing my earlier thoughts. “Moments before this photo was taken on this very spot, Felix interacted with someone or something from his baby carrier, thereby setting off a nine-hundred-year lasting event chain, unless we’re completely wrong about the whole thing. Could the pacifier have landed on a car and been driven away? How far can a six-month-old throw anyway?”

  We looked at each other blankly.

  “I’ll add it to my research list,” Arni said. “Come, people, think. Professor Maximilian needs us to figure this out. The bookmark placing Felix on the bridge is not enough—even two of them, when and if the professor gets the other one. We need a solid event chain.”

  “Maybe a couple driving by saw Felix B happily sucking on his duck pacifier and thought, what a cute baby, and went on to have a dozen children of their own,” Bean said.

  “What if I took the damn thing—” I began.

  “And those children will beget their own children, and those their own children, and so on for nine hundred years.”