The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

34

At Arbor Court, with the cats fed and tea made, she said, “Bowling.”

“I had to get away from the bookstore,” I said, “and there were things I needed to do, but I wasn’t ready to do them yet. And every once in a while for the past few years I’ve told myself that I really ought to go over to Bowl-Mor, and I never did, and then the building came down and all I had left was a resentment.”

“‘It was my bowling alley, and those heartless bastards knocked it down.’”

“Something like that, along with some guilt at having missed my chance. And now the universe was handing me a second chance.”

“The new universe.”

“Right, and how would I feel if I let it slip out of my grasp?”

“It might wind up in the gutter. So how’d it go?”

“It was okay,” I said. “Once I got past the fact that I was wearing shoes that had been worn by hundreds of people before me, I managed to get into it.”

“Were you any good?”

“No, but that wasn’t the point. I kept score, but only because that’s what you do. I think my worst game was around 120 and my best was something like thirty points higher.”

“Three hundred is perfect, right? So half of that would be—”

“Mediocre at best,” I said, “but I didn’t care about the score. It was more of a meditation.”

“I’ve heard of a walking meditation, Bern. I don’t suppose a bowling meditation is too much of a stretch.”

“The bowling was what my body was doing,” I said, “while my mind was doing something else.”

“And it worked, didn’t it?”

“Well—”

“It must have worked, because as soon as you got your own shoes on again you hurried over to the Bum Rap and told Ray it was game on. So I guess that means you’ve got everything figured out.”

I gave her a look.

“You don’t?”

“What I figured out, or maybe I should say what dawned on me, is that there’s nothing to figure out.”

“Huh?”

“There are enigmas,” I said. “There are elements that need to be figured out, but they’re not going to be figure-outable.”

“Is that a word?”

“Not in the real world.”

“The real world.”

Her words, an echo to mine, seemed to hang in the air, and we both sat up and listened to them.

“Bern, you’re saying this world we’re in right now isn’t real.”

“It is and it isn’t.”

“It feels real,” she said, “and it doesn’t, both at the same time, so I sort of know what you mean. We’re right here now, aren’t we? We’re not holograms of ourselves and this isn’t going to turn out to be some horseshit dream.”

“We’re here,” I said, “and we’re not dreaming.”

“That’s good,” she said, “because that was the one thing that pissed me off royally about Alice in Wonderland. At the end, where she wakes up and her sister tells her it was all a dream. I was five or six years old when my father read me the Alice books, and even at that age I knew Lewis Carroll was copping out.”

“You’re still mad at him, aren’t you?”

“You’re damn right I am. Wonderland was real. What’s the matter? Did I say something?”

“The Alice books. That’s where they came from.”

“It’s where who came from?”

“I didn’t pick up on it at the time, but Ray already rang that bell for me.”

“What bell?”

“And I heard it, but I wasn’t paying attention.” I was on my feet, pacing. “What was it he called them? ‘Stumblebum and Stumblebee?’”

“Oh, the bodyguards.”

“First they were the bodyguards,” I said, “and then they were the bodies. And who were the two brothers Alice ran into in Wonderland?”

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” she said, “but that wasn’t in Wonderland, Bern. She met them in the second book, Through the Looking Glass, so that would have been in Looking Glass Land.”

“Spawned in the fertile mind of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—”

“Alias Lewis Carroll.”

“—and right at home in our brave new world, except they didn’t get to enjoy it for very long. Look at their names, will you? They were straight out of Central Europe by way of Central Casting, and they should have had names appropriate to their origins—”

“Horvath,” she suggested.

“—but instead they were Jason Dilbert and Mason Philbert.”

“I think it was the other way around, Bern.”

“What difference does it make? I went to sleep reading What Mad Universe, and I woke up a bench press away from Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Now they’re both dead and I’m supposed to figure out who killed them, but I’m not sure anybody cares. You saw what an impression their deaths made on the man whose body they were guarding.”

“He said he’d replaced them.”

“Like a couple of burnt-out light bulbs, as opposed to the irreplaceable Kloppmann Diamond. And did you get a load of the pair he found to fill the shoes of Dum and Dee?”

“They were quite a pair.”

“A Sikh who was tall enough for the NBA, even without the turban. And his silent partner, wrapped in a cloak of ninja invisibility.”

“They looked familiar, Bern.”

“I had the same thought. But did you ever see either of them before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mr. Tall and Mr. Small, together again for the first time.”

“They looked as though they belonged together,” she said. “Like if you saw one you’d expect to see the other.”

I told her we could expect to see them both on Saturday.

That got us back to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and Carolyn decided she wanted to refresh her memory of the boys — not Vandenbrinck’s twosome, but Lewis Carroll’s. Some years back a small library I’d purchased had included a Cadwallader Club limited edition of the two Alice books, bound in red leather with gold stamping. John Tenniel’s illustrations are the ones everybody knows, but the Cadwallader edition featured two dozen dazzling color plates by Michael Trossman.

I never did get around to shelving the books, because I couldn’t figure out a price, and then Carolyn had a birthday coming up and that settled that. And now she curled up on the couch with Through the Looking Glass while I had another go at The Screaming Mimi.

If you want something badly enough, you’ll get it.

Right.