Regarding Ducks and Universes by Neve Maslakovic

Author:Neve Maslakovic [Maslakovic, Neve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-02-21T23:00:00+00:00

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 and what was incidental.

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