Regarding Ducks and Universes (25 page)

“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.

T
he 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 your 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.”

“—and pitched it over the railing—”

“Or the couple driving by saw our Felix A here raising a ruckus about losing his duck pacifier and they thought, what a cranky baby, and went on
not
to have a dozen children of their own.”

“—and a seagull caught it midair and swallowed it and then, startled by the experience, flew over to Fort Point and caused a surfer to fall off his surfboard and forever eschew surfing from that point on and take up politics instead?”

“No one reported anything like that,” said Arni.

We recreated the Photo 13B tableau near lamppost 41 a bit farther on, then went into the first of the two castle-like towers. Spiral stairs in the center of the tower offered alternating views through slit-like windows, first of the bay, then the Marin Headlands, then the ocean, then the city, and finally the bay again just before we reached the mesh-enclosed top of the tower where a 360-degree view unfolded. The fog was making quick strides and had already engulfed the south end of the bridge. The level of humidity in the air had risen, and Arni’s long curls were beginning to frizz up. I eyed the various nooks and crannies in the aging bricks, which, like the trash-filled bottom under the spiral stairs, offered plenty of places in which a pacifier could have hidden (and been carted away or ended up at the bottom of the bay as the result of the 8.1).

We continued past the first tower onto the drawbridge segment between the towers—the bascule, as I had learned it was called. As we neared the halfway point, I expected to see a gap where the two sections met. None existed. A flap extended from one bridge section onto the other.

Suddenly there were signs of action all around us. A cargo ship had cleared the seawall and was getting bigger by the minute. We were about to have the ultimate bridge-walker’s experience—the raising of the drawbridge. Traffic quickly ground to a halt, leaving the bascule section empty; harried city employees ushered citizens behind safety gates. We found ourselves herded onto the Marin side, giving us a view of the city as a backdrop to the passing of the ship. With an eerie grating noise and the clanging of chains, the two halves of the drawbridge commenced lifting, rattling the section we were on and sending several seagulls away. The ship sounded its horn. Tourists were snapping photos all around.

“Franny and Trevor, the innkeepers of the inn where I’m staying, grew up on a ship this size,” I said as we watched the cargo vessel, loaded with immense shipping containers piled neatly like kids’ multicolored building blocks, glide through. “Had to have been quite an experience. What kind, whether insular or worldly, depends on how often they pulled into port, I guess.”

No one was interested in talking about innkeepers. I couldn’t blame them. There’s always something mesmerizing about the working of heavy machinery, partly an expectation that things might go wrong, causing the whole thing to come crashing down on your head, but also a sense of accomplishment that the human race had built something so grand. (Along with which comes the realization that
you
, an individual member of that same human race, would have no idea where to begin, bridge-building wise, even if you had a large pile of bricks and the several million years or so it took to get from apes to this point.)

“You know what puzzles me?” Bean said as the drawbridge descended to the level position and we turned to the railing to watch the cargo ship churn toward the port of Oakland. She moved closer to Arni and me so we could hear her as vehicle traffic resumed in the four bridge lanes, two in each direction. “How did DIM agents know to wipe Monroe’s computer? Was it just routine destruction of old information or something more, like Professor Maximilian said? In which case, how did they find out that we’re looking for the universe maker in the first place? We’re pretty careful.”

“You think DIM has been spying on you?” I said.

“Of course,” Bean said.

“Undoubtedly,” Arni said.

“We even thought that you might be a mole.”

“A what, Bean?” I said.

“A mole—you know, an operative, a DIM agent trying to catch scientists breaking Regulation 19.”

“Oh, a spider. No, I’m not a DIM spider or mole. But come to think of it, when I asked my boss to help us locate Olivia May Novak Irving A, otherwise known as Mango Meriwether, he called back with her number awfully fast—perhaps they knew that it would be a dead end and that we would learn nothing of consequence.
And
Wagner knew about me being in quarantine even though our names were never released to the public.” Put that way, my boss and his network of acquaintances sounded positively sinister.

Bean frowned. “Has anyone given you anything since you got to Universe B?”

“Not really,” I said. “Well, just a book.”