The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

38

A shower, first.

Then a sandwich, peanut butter and jelly. And then, finally, chamomile tea and The Screaming Mimi. I turned the last page, read the last line, made sure the envelope and its $16,000 was tucked under my pillow, and reached to switch off the light.

And after all that, I told myself, you won’t be able to fall asleep.

Shows what I know.

When I opened my eyes, I was eight hours older and surprisingly eager to meet the day. The first thing I checked was the envelope, still under the pillow and still stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills. The next thing I checked was my wallet, and what I found was what I’d expected to find — a Metrocard.

I didn’t waste too much time examining it. It was a bright and brisk Friday morning, and a few miles to the south I had a store that needed to be open and a cat who needed to be fed. I put on fresh clothes, picked out a tie, slipped the envelope of cash into my blazer’s inside pocket, and went out to greet the day.

In the elevator, I smiled at the camera. I was almost glad to see it.

A few hours later I was at the Poodle Factory, dishing out Laotian food. “I had this dream,” I told Carolyn. “I was on a bus.”

“That’s how I got here this morning, Bern. The M10 crosstown.”

“This one was in some other city. Possibly Tucson.”

“Tucson?”

“It could have been Tucson. I’m sort of inferring, because I know that’s where Fredric Brown spent his later years.”

“Fredric Brown? Our Fredric Brown?”

“We were on the bus together.”

“You and Fredric Brown.”

“Right.”

“On a bus in Tucson.”

“When he was trying to work out a plot,” I said, “he would ride buses all night, and thoughts would come to him.”

“I’ll bet they would. ‘Why am I up so late? What am I doing on this broken-down rattletrap?’”

“Thoughts about the plot,” I said. “Look, I read this somewhere years ago, I don’t even know if it’s true. Maybe it was just something he told some pest who asked him where he got his weird ideas. But it stuck in my mind, and there we were in the dream, up all night on the bus.”

“In Tucson. Do they even have buses there?”

“They have buses everywhere, don’t they?”

“But at that hour? Does a Tucson bus run all night long?”

“Doo-dah,” I said. “We may have been the only two people on the bus, aside from the driver. And Brown did all the talking.”

“What did he say?”

“I can’t remember.”

“That’s great, Bern.”

“It was a dream, dammit. Everything he said was interesting, but nothing would stick. He’d say the sentence and I’d take it in and then it would be gone.”

“So you sat up all night with one of your all-time favorite writers and you can’t remember a single thing he said?”

“There was one thing.”

“Oh?”

“He stopped in mid-sentence,” I remembered, “and took hold of my shoulder. He was this meek-looking little guy, but his eyes were very intense, and they bored into mine. And he said, ‘There’s just one thing I have to tell you, and if you forget everything else, make damn sure you remember this.’”

“And?”

“And then he just sighed, and shook his head, and moved his hand as if to wave the world away. ‘Never mind,’ he told me. ‘It’s not important.’”

“‘Never mind?’”

“Right.”

“‘It’s not important?’”

“Right.”

We turned our attention back to what was on our plates. She said she didn’t think much of my dream, and I admitted I wasn’t proud of it myself.

“But it got me through the night,” I said, “and we’re here eating a tasty lunch from Two Guys.”

“And the two guys are from Luang Prabang again.”

“Oh, right. In the other world, the restaurant’s ethnicity kept changing.”

“It keeps changing here, too, Bern. But it takes a more reasonable amount of time to do it. I’m sure the clock’s ticking for the two Laotian guys, but in the meantime we can have some good lunches.”

“In this best of all possible worlds.”

She nodded. “Bern? How come you’re here?”

“Huh? I don’t know. Wasn’t it my turn to bring lunch?”

“I think it may have been mine.”

“Oh.”

“But I’m not talking about lunch and whose turn it was. Look, I got up this morning and I thought, well, time to head east for a long day of washing dogs.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am. And you got up this morning and thought, well, time to feed the cat and drag the bargain table outside.”

“Actually,” I said, “what I thought was maybe it was time to retire the bargain table altogether. But I came down and opened up, and before I knew it I’d schlepped the thing out there. And just as well, because it was my only sale of the morning, and—”

“Bern.”

“What?”

“We both did what we did because we knew what day it was.”

“Thursday,” I said.

“Right.”

“So?”

“And last night was—?”

“Is there a point to this? Last night was...”

We looked at each other. You could have heard a chopstick drop.

“Oh,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Last night was Saturday night, and I went to sleep and woke up on Thursday morning.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How is that possible?”

“I was hoping you could tell me, Bern.”

We went on eating, and I thought about it, and we finished eating, and I went on thinking about it.

And eventually I said, “Okay, I see what happened.”

“So do I, but I can’t make sense out of it. We went to another world, and I don’t know how much time we spent in it, but it was more than a week, and now we’re back where we started and it’s the same time it was when we left. There’s probably a better way to put it—”

“There would almost have to be,” I said, “but what you said will have to do for now. We stepped back into this world and found it unchanged. The neighborhood’s the same, the security cameras are the same, and even the clocks and the calendars are the same.”

She frowned. “This isn’t some Alice in Wonderland crap, is it? If this all turns out to have been some horseshit dream—”

“No, it happened.”

“But did it? I went to Paula’s, you went bowling, we both went up to Abel’s apartment—”

“It all happened.”

I took the envelope from my jacket pocket.

“Oh.”

“I put it under my pillow last night,” I said.

“That’s what I did with mine. Then I closed my eyes and thought about the Tooth Fairy, and the next thing I knew it was morning.”

“And the Tooth Fairy—”

“Must have given me a pass,” she said, “because I still had my envelope. And I checked, and it was chockful of hundreds.”

“Just like mine,” I said, “A person can dream about money, but if it’s there when you wake up—”

“Then it wasn’t a dream.”

And so on. I’d figured on spending most of the lunch hour going over what I’d told to the assembled company in the bookstore, laying it out for Carolyn as best I could. But we never got there. About all we could do, besides admiring the culinary arts of Luang Prabang, was work at getting our minds around the fact that we’d gone to sleep on a Saturday night only to wake up nine or ten days earlier.

Nine or ten days, because I think our week away had had an extra Tuesday in it. I can’t be absolutely certain of this, but—

Never mind.

Anyway, since no time had passed in what we found ourselves calling the real world, that explained why nothing had changed. How could it? It hadn’t had time.

Even without an explanation of Edgar Margate’s master plan and Peter-Peter’s perfidy and all the other loose ends, lunch ran a little past its allotted hour. You’d have thought I might have had people lined up outside Barnegat Books, but I was back in the world of eBay and Amazon, and nobody was waiting. A few souls found their way in and out of the store during the course of the afternoon, but my only cash customer was Mowgli, who loaded up on poor old Jeffrey Farnol, including his 1931 novel, A Jade of Destiny.