Numbers Don't Lie (15 page)

Candy was cool, though. As soon as supper was finished, she helped Aunt Minnie with the dishes (not much of a job), and joined her on the front porch for her Kent. And, I supposed, girl talk. I took the opportunity to go upstairs and strap the legs of the twin beds together with the $1.99 Honeymoon Bungee I had bought in Little Korea. The big evening was almost upon us! There on the dresser was the sleek little package from Sweet Nothings: Candy's Honeymoon negligée. I was tempted to look inside, but of course I didn't.

I wanted to be surprised. I wanted everything to be perfect.

From the upstairs window I could see the big maple tree in Studs's back yard. It was getting dark, and blue light spilled out through every crack in the tree house, of which there were many.

I heard the doorbell chime. That seemed strange, since I knew Candy and Aunt Minnie were on the front porch. Then I realized it was the phone. I ran downstairs to pick it up.

“Diagonal, right?”

“What?”

“The screen, Irving! On the Dumont you had in the tree house. You said it was a six-inch. Was that measured diagonally?”

“Of course,” I said. “It's always measured diagonally. Wu, what's this about?”

“Blonde cabinet?”

“Nice blonde veneer,” I said. “The color of a Dreamsicle™. It was a real old set. It was the first one Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had bought back in the fifties. It even had little doors you could close when you weren't watching it. I always thought the little doors were to keep the cowboys from getting out.”

“Cowboys in Brooklyn?” asked a strangely accented voice.

“Butt out, Dmitri,” Wu said. “Irv, you are a genius. We have found the twist.”

“I am? We have?”

“Indubitably. Remember the big Dumont console payola recall scandal of 1957?”

“Not exactly. I wasn't born yet. Neither were you.”

“Well, it wasn't
really
about payola at all. It was about something far more significant. Quantum physics. Turns out that the #515-gauge boson rectifier under the 354V67 vacuum tube in the Dumont six-inch console had a frequency modulation that set up an interference wave of 8.48756 gauss, which, when hooked up to household 110, opened an oscillating 88-degree offset permeability in the fabric of the space-time continuum.”

“A twist?”

“Exactly. And close enough to ninety degrees to make a small leak. It was discovered, quite by accident, by a lowly assistant at Underwriters Laboratory eleven months after the sets had been on the market. Shipped. Sold.”

“I don't remember ever hearing about it.”

“How could you? It was covered up by the powers-that-be; rather, that-were; indeed, that-still-are. Can you imagine the panic if over a quarter of a million people discovered that the TV set in their living room was pinching a hole in the Universe? Even a tiny one? It would have destroyed the industry in its infancy. You better believe it was hushed up, Irv. Deep-sixed. Three hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred seventy-seven sets were recalled and destroyed, their blonde wood cabinets broken up for kindling, their circuits melted down for new pennies, and their #515-gauge boson rectifiers sealed in glass and buried in an abandoned salt mine 1200 feet under East Gramling, West Virginia.”

“So what are you saying? One got away?”

“Exactly, Irv. Three hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred seventy-
seven
were destroyed, but 337,87
8
were manufactured. Numbers don't lie. Do the math.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Could be that Aunt Minnie missed the recall. She hardly ever opens her mail, you know. Studs and I found the set in Uncle Mort's basement workshop. It hadn't been used for years, but it seemed to work okay. We didn't notice it twisting any hole in Time.”

“Of course not. It's a tiny hole. But over a long period, it would have a cumulative effect. Precisely the effect we are seeing, in fact. Many millions of connective milli-seconds have been drained out of our Universe—perhaps even stolen deliberately, for all we know.”

I was relieved. If it was a crime, I was off the hook. I could concentrate on my Honeymoon “Then let's call the police,” I said.

Wu just laughed. “The police aren't prepared to deal with anything like this, Irv. This is quantum physics, Feynman stuff, way beyond them. We will have to handle it ourselves. When Dmitri finds the address for Dr. Dgjerm, I have a suspicion we will also find out what became of the legendary Lost D6.”

“Isn't this a bit of a coincidence?” I asked. “What are the odds that the very thing that is messing you up in Quetzalcan is right here in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn? It seems unlikely.”

“That's because you don't understand probability, Irving,” said Wu. “Everything is unlikely until it happens. Look at it this way: When there's a ten-percent chance of rain, there's a ninety-percent chance it won't rain, right?”

“Right.”

“Then what if it starts raining? The probability wave collapses, and the ten-percent becomes a hundred, the ninety becomes zero. An unlikely event becomes a certainty.”

It made sense to me. “Then it's raining here, Wu,” I said. “The probability waves are collapsing like crazy, because the TV you are looking for is still in the tree house. Turned on, in fact. I can see the blue light from here. It's in the maple tree in Studs's back yard, three doors down.”

“On Ditmas?”

“On Ditmas.”

“So your friend Studs could be involved?”

“That's what I was trying to tell you!” I said. “He runs the baggage carousel at LaGuardia that the phone was hidden under.”

“The plot thickens,” said Wu, who loves it when the plot thickens. “He must be draining off the connective time to speed up his baggage delivery! But where is it going? And what is Dgjerm's role in this caper? We'll know soon enough.”

“We will?”

“When you confront them, Irv, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. You said it was only three doors away.”

“No way,” I said. “Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Guess who?” I felt hands over my eyes.

“Candy, that's why,” I said.

“Right you are!” Candy said. She blushed (even her fingertips blush), and her voice dropped to a whisper: “Coming upstairs?”

“You mean your Honeymoon?” Wu asked.

“Yes, of course I mean my Honeymoon!” I said, as I watched Candy kiss Aunt Minnie goodnight and go upstairs. “I don't want to confront anybody! Any guys, anyway. Can't you just turn the TV off by remote?”

“There's no remote on those old Dumonts, Irv. You're going to have to unplug it.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Tonight,” said Wu. “It'll only take you a few minutes. If the leak is plugged tonight I can redo my calculations and release the first moth in the morning. Then if I catch the nonstop from Quetzalcan City, I'll make Huntsville in time to pick up my tux. But if I don't, you won't have a best man. Or a ring. Or maybe even a wedding. Don't forget, this moth works for Ido Ido, too. What if it rains?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You convinced me. But I'm just going to run over there and unplug it and that's all.” I kissed Aunt Minnie goodnight (she sleeps in the barcalounger in front of the TV with Uncle Mort's ashes in her lap), then called up the stairs to Candy, “Be up in a minute!”

Then headed out the back door.

 

* * *

 

I'll never forget the first time I visited my cousin Lucy in New Jersey. Lots of things in the suburbs were different. The trees were skinnier, the houses were lower, the cars were newer, the streets were wider, the yards were bigger, and the grass was definitely greener. But the main thing I remember was my feeling of panic: There was nowhere to hide! The picture windows, one on each house, seemed to stare out onto a world in which nobody had anything to conceal, a terrifying idea to a pre-teen (I was eleven going on fifteen) since adolescence is the slow, unfolding triumph of experience over innocence, and teens have everything to hide.

I was glad to get back to Brooklyn, where everyone knew who I was but no one was watching me. I had the same safe feeling when I slipped out the kitchen door into Aunt Minnie's tiny (and sadly neglected) back yard. The yards in Brooklyn, on Ditmas at least, are narrow slivers separated by board fences, wire fences, slat fences, mesh fences. Adulthood in America doesn't involve a lot of fence climbing, and I felt like a kid again as I hauled myself carefully over a sagging section of chainlink into the Murphys' yard next door. Of course, they weren't the Murphys anymore: They were the Wing-Tang somethings, and they had replaced the old squealing swing set with a new plastic and rubberoid play center in the shape of a pirate ship, complete with plank.

The next yard, the Patellis', was even less familiar. It had always been choked with flowers and weeds in a dizzying, improbable mix, under a grape arbor that, properly processed, kept the grandfather mildly potted all year. The vines had stopped bearing when “Don Patelli” had died the year I started high school. “Grapes are like dogs,” Uncle Mort had said. “Faithful to the end.” Everything Uncle Mort knew about dogs, he had learned from books.

A light came on in the house, and I remembered with alarm that the Patellis no longer lived there, and that I was no longer a neighborhood kid; or even a kid. If anybody saw me, they would call the police. I stepped back into the shadows. Looking up, and back a house or two, I spotted a shapely silhouette behind the blinds in an upstairs window. A girl undressing for bed! I enjoyed the guilty, Peeping Tom feeling, until I realized it was Candy, in Aunt Minnie's guest room. That made it even better.

But it was time to get moving. Unplug the stupid TV and be done with it.

The loose plank in the Patellis' ancient board fence still swung open to let me through. It was a little tighter fit, but I made it—and I was in the Blitzes' yard, under the wide, ivy-covered trunk of the maple. The board steps Studs and I had nailed to the tree were still there, but I was glad to see that they had been supplemented with a ten-foot aluminum ladder.

At the top of the ladder, wedged into a low fork, was the tree house Studs and I had built in the summer of 1968. It was a triangular shed about six-feet high and five feet on a side, nailed together from scrap plywood and pallet lumber. It was hard to believe it was still intact after almost thirty years. Yet, there it was.

And here I was. There were no windows, but through the cracks, I saw a blue light.

I climbed up the aluminum ladder. The door, a sheet of faux-birch paneling, was padlocked from the outside. I even recognized the padlock. Before opening it, I looked in through the wide crack at the top. I was surprised by what I saw.

Usually, when you return to scenes of your childhood, whether it's an elementary school or a neighbor's yard, everything seems impossibly small. That's what I thought it would be like with the tree house Studs and I had built when we were eleven. I expected it to look tiny inside.

Instead it looked huge.

I blinked and looked again. The inside of the tree house seemed as big as a gym. In the near corner, to the right, I saw the TV—the six-inch Dumont console. The doors were open and the gray-blue light from the screen illuminated the entire vast interior of the tree house. In the far corner, to the left, which seemed at least a half a block away, there was a brown sofa next to a potted palm.

I didn't like the looks of it. My first impulse was to climb down the ladder and go home. I even started down one step. Then I looked behind me, toward Aunt Minnie's upstairs guest room window, where I had seen Candy's silhouette. The light was out. She was in bed, waiting for me. Waiting to begin our Honeymoon.

All I had to do was unplug the damn TV.

It's funny how the fingers remember what the mind forgets. The combination lock was from my old middle school locker. As soon as I started spinning the dial, my fingers knew where to start and where to stop: L-5, R-32, L-2.

I opened the lock and set it aside, hanging it on the bracket. I leaned back and pulled the door open. I guess I expected it to groan or creak in acknowledgement of the years since I had last opened it; but it made not a sound.

The last step is a long one, and I climbed into the tree house on my knees. It smelled musty, like glue and wood and old magazines. I left the door swinging open behind me. The plywood floor creaked reassuringly as I got to my feet.
Look who's back.

The inside of the tree house looked huge, but it didn't
feel
huge. The sofa and the potted palm in the far corner seemed almost like miniatures that I could reach out and touch if I wanted to. I didn't want to. They sort of hung in the air, either real small, or real far away, or both. Or neither.

I decided it was best not to look at them. I had a job to do.

Two steps across the plywood floor took me to the corner with the TV. It was better here; more familiar. Here was the ratty rag rug my mother had donated; the Farrah Fawcett pinups on the wall. Here was the stack of old magazines:
Motor Trend
,
Boys Life
,
Playboy
,
Model Airplane News
. Here were the ball gloves, the water guns, right where Studs and I had left them, almost thirty years before. It all looked the same, in this corner.

The TV screen was more gray than blue. There was no picture, just a steady blizzard of static and snow. The rabbit-ears antenna on the top were extended. One end was hung with tinfoil (had Studs and I done that?), and something was duct-taped into the cradle between them.

A cellular phone. I was
sure
we hadn't done that. They didn't even have cellular phones when we were kids; or duct tape, for that matter. This was clearly the other end of the connection from LaGuardia. And there was more that was new.