The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

23

“Oh,” she said. “My. God.” Her eyes, not that far from mine, were bluer than ever. “Could that happen?”

“How do I know?”

“You’re the one who read the book. Fredric Brown, remember? What Mad Universe?”

“I read the book,” I agreed, “and between the time I closed it and the time I opened my eyes in the morning, which I’ll point out was something like twenty-one hours ago—”

“Really? Shit on toast, is it really four-thirty in the morning? Where did the time go?”

“Wherever it went,” I said. “I’d say it was well spent. And sometime a wee bit more than twenty-one hours ago, while I was sleeping, I must have done something to launch us out of one world and into another. I don’t know what I did, and God knows I don’t know how I did it, but I can’t argue that it wasn’t my doing, even if I didn’t know I was doing it.”

“Bern, I’m just glad you took me with you. But to get back to the book—”

I held up a hand. “It’s just a book,” I said. “A novel, and you know Randall Jarrell’s definition of a novel, don’t you? He said it’s a book-length work of fiction with something wrong with it.”

“What’s wrong with What Mad Universe?”

“What’s wrong with it is that it’s not an instruction manual. It’s fiction, it’s a work of the imagination. Now Brown’s imagination was second to none, and he took the longstanding notion of parallel worlds and made a rich and satisfying story out of it, but that doesn’t mean a person can read his book and learn how to go world-hopping.”

“But isn’t that exactly what you did, Bern?”

“Um.”

“And I know the book is a novel, and that all he was trying to do was write a story. But how can you be sure it’s pure and simple fiction?”

“Fiction is never pure,” I pronounced, “and rarely simple, and if that has a familiar ring to it, it’s because that’s what Oscar Wilde said about the truth. You think Brown was drawing on more than his imagination?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it? Isn’t that what writers do?”

“I don’t know what they do,” I said, “or how they do it, but if they didn’t do it I’d have a store full of empty shelves.”

“And nothing to read.”

I thought about Fredric Brown. As productive as he was, it was hard to believe he ever did much of anything that took him away from his typewriter. But how could I know where he went in his dreams, and what world he was in when he opened his eyes? “Where do you get your ideas, Mr. Brown?” “Oh, they just come to me. Or, in special cases, I go to them...”

“Bern,” she was saying, “I really like the universe we’re in right now.”

“So do I.”

“I haven’t used my SubwayCard yet, but I figure I’ll like it just as much as my old Metrocard. Just so it gets me through a turnstile, or onto a bus. And I have to say Amazon was handy, I could order anything from a T-shirt to a trilobite and they’d deliver it in no time at all. But I’ve got more T-shirts than anybody needs, and what do I want with a trilobite?”

“I was wondering.”

“And I like a world without security cameras, and not just because it makes it possible for my best friend to go on doing what he does best. And I even like having Bowl-Mor back where it used to be, and who knows? Maybe one of these days Two Guys will find itself between owners again, and we’ll skip lunch and bowl a few frames.”

“It might be fun.”

“If this lasts,” she said. “But you’re not sure it will?”

“What I think,” I said, “is that anything’s possible. We could spend the rest of our lives in this tailor-made world. Or we could drift off to sleep and wake up in yesterday’s universe.”

“And if you had to guess?”

“If I had to guess, that’s all it would be. A guess.”

“And?”

“I think this is going to turn out to be temporary,” I said. “And I think the time frame is more a matter of days than years.”

“Days.”

“It’s just a feeling. I’m not basing it on anything. I could be completely wrong, and we could remain here forever.”

“But if your gut feeling is right—”

“There’s a backward somersault in our future.”

“While we’re asleep.”

“I don’t know that being asleep is an ironclad requirement. I suppose it could happen while we were awake. But I think it’s more likely while we’re unconscious, and presumably dreaming.”

“If we fell asleep now, Bern, and it happened now—”

“I hope it doesn’t.”

“Me too, but if it does. Would you wake up back home on West End Avenue?”

“Would I do a backflip of my own?” I thought about it. “I don’t see why unintentional teleportation should be part of the picture. I’d probably wake up in the same place I went to sleep.”

“In bed with me, and both of us naked.”

“Oh.”

“Which at the moment feels perfectly wonderful, but how would it feel in another universe?”

“Oh.”

“Bern, wherever we wind up, we’ll still be best friends, won’t we?”

“Forever,” I said.

“But will our friendship still have this, um, new dimension?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

She reached out a hand, touched me. We were best friends, and it was not unusual for us to touch one another, on the arm, on the shoulder, even a light pat on the behind.

But she was touching a part of me it would never have occurred to her to touch a day earlier.

“Bern,” she said, “could we do it one more time? Just in case we never get to do it again?”