The Categorical Universe of Candice Phee (4 page)

Mum says that men are just little boys deep down. Sometimes not so deep down. Sometimes not deep at all, but right on the surface. He could've bought a whole Toys“R”Us shop, being Rich Uncle Brian, but this wasn't about money. I held his jacket and watched the ducks fall.

“Hah!” said Rich Uncle Brian in triumph, one hundred dollars later. The man handed over the deformed camel/gnu and RUB passed it on to me. I knew he would.

“I don't want it, Rich Uncle Brian,” I said. “It's vile.”

His face crumpled in disappointment. I felt bad, but I couldn't lie to him. The toy
was
horrible.

“But I won it for you, Pumpkin,” he said. “If you don't like this, what do you like?”

“That,” I said, and pointed.

A goldfish in a plastic bowl. It sat on a shelf to the right of the ducks, which were still going round cheerfully despite being targets. I say it sat, but that was the bowl. The fish was swimming. It was gold and beautiful.

“We'll have that instead,” said Rich Uncle Brian, pointing.

The man shook his head.

“No can do, mate,” he replied. “That's not a prize. That's my pet. Time was, you could give away goldfish as prizes, but no more. Against the law. I could lose my license.”

“Your pet?” asked Rich Uncle Brian. There was that cynicism in his voice again.

“Yup. Very attached to him. Very.” The man stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Then again, if the price was right . . . not against the law to sell your pet, is it?”

Rich Uncle Brian sighed.

“How much?”

“A hundred bucks.”

“WHAT?”

“Very attached to him, I am.”

Rich Uncle Brian looked down at me and then at the fish and then at the man. He sagged a little and got out his wallet. Again.

“Tell you what,” he said to the man. “Fifty and you can have your stuffed prize back.”

“Deal.”

Rich Uncle Brian handed over the cash and the gnu/deformed camel and the man handed over the fish and the bowl.

“Tell you what, mate,” said the man. “Since you've just bought the world's most expensive fish—about ten thousand dollars a kilo, I reckon—then I'll throw in the bowl for free.”

Rich Uncle Brian smiled, but it didn't come out right. It was like one of those smiles when someone has pointed a camera at you for half an hour and neglected to press the shutter.

Later, in the car as we drove home, he asked me what I was going to name it.

“Earth-Pig,” I said. He sighed.

“It's the translation of the Afrikaans word
aardvark
,” I continued. “It is an anteater and means ‘earth pig.' ”

“Is there any reason, Pumpkin, why you want to name a goldfish after an African anteater? I mean, I can't think of too many similarities. Color, size, presence or absence of gills, that sort of thing.”

“You're right, Rich Uncle Brian,” I said. “But it's the first proper word in the dictionary.” The dictionary is my favorite book. I often read it at bedtime. It has thousands of different words and it doesn't try to tell a story and fail. It just deals in words for their own sake. It is pure.

The only other things I read are books by Charles Dickens. He has taken many of the trickiest words from
the dictionary and put them in interesting orders. This is clever and admirable.

“Won't it be confused by being called a pig?”

“Maybe,” I said. “It could suffer an identity crisis.” I thought for a few minutes. “I will call it Earth-Pig Fish. That is a good name.”

We drove in silence for about twenty minutes.

“Do you know what the best thing about you is, Pumpkin?” said Rich Uncle Brian finally.

“No.”

“You sing your own song, Pumpkin, and you dance your own dance. You see the world differently from the rest of us. And you know? Sometimes I think I wish everyone saw it the same way you do. I know the world would be a better place.”

I didn't say anything. But I must admit I was very surprised. He didn't use one maritime metaphor.

Douglas Benson told me his secret ten minutes into lunch. The librarians loaned him a chair, though they didn't encourage him to eat. They didn't forbid it either, though.

“I am from another dimension,” he said.

“That's nice,” I replied.

“Well, not really,” he said. “You see, I like the dimension I came from, whereas this one sucks big-time.”

I considered that for a while, but it didn't do any good. I still had no idea what he was talking about.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” I said.

Douglas Benson has an interesting face. His eyes crowd toward the middle, as if they are trying to merge together but are prevented from doing so by the barrier of his nose, which is larger than you'd wish if you were designing it from scratch. He has eyebrows like hairy caterpillars and a mouth that is very wide. His fingers are thin and long, though they are not part of his face, obviously. He would make a good pianist. Anyway, Douglas's interesting face was screwed up in concentration.

“You know about M-theory, I imagine,” he said.

That wasn't a question so I said nothing.

“It's a multidimensional extension of string theory in which all universes—the multiverse, if you like—are created by collisions between
p
-branes . . .”

“Pea brains?”

“Yes.” He spelled it. He said some other things, but I missed some of the details because I was thinking about colliding pea brains creating universes. We have a lot of pea brains at my school. Remember pencil-sharpener-sucker Darren Mitford? He and other pea brains often collide in the playground, particularly when they play ball games. I enjoyed the image of their collisions spawning universes inhabited by pea-brained sports enthusiasts. I shook my head and tried to focus on what Douglas was saying.

“. . . operating with either eleven or twenty-six dimensions. As a result of these collisions a universe is created within its own
D
-brane and there are, clearly, an infinite number of such
D
-branes and therefore an infinite number of universes, of which this is just one. Now the point is . . .”

I was glad he was getting to the point because my brain was hurting. Or was it my brane?

“. . . each universe is locked from the other universes because each object, including forces and quantum physics itself, is restricted to its own
D
-brane. Except gravity. You see? Except gravity. The only force not restricted to its own
D
-brane. Thus it is through gravity that transference between universes is possible. It is how I came to be here. Consequently, gravity is the key to me returning.”

He gazed at me triumphantly. I gazed back at him blankly. He sighed.

“You haven't understood a word I've said, have you?”

I ripped a sheet of paper from my pad and extracted a black pen from my pencil case. If ever there was a time for such a maneuver, it was now.

On the contrary. I understood nearly all the words you said
. Brane
was, I think, the only exception, unless it is a contraction of
membrane,
in which case I understood
all
the words you said
.

Words are not a problem. It is their order which can be. For example, here are some simple words:
jumped;
desks; happy; will; aardvarks; in; back.
All can easily be understood in isolation (maybe not
aardvark—
it is an anteater indigenous to South Africa). But if I put them together thus
—back desks in aardvarks happy will—
then you would have difficulty understanding my meaning and might interpret it as a particularly bizarre pronouncement from Yoda, of
Star Wars
fame. So it is with your expressions, Douglas. I understood the words. I missed the meaning entirely. Explain in simple terms, please
.

Douglas read this and frowned again. I think he might be a huge fan of frowning.

“Okay,” he said. “This universe you know. All the stars, all the space. Everything that exists. It is not the only one. There are an infinite number of such universes. Millions upon millions, billions upon billions. And then more . . .”

“I know what infinity means.”

“Okay. That means that there are an infinite number of Earths. And each will be slightly different. There will be an infinite number of Candices, for example. In one you might have brown hair. In another . . . well, the combinations are . . . infinite.”

So somewhere
, I thought,
there is a world where pen pal Denille replies to my letters. Just my luck to be in one where she doesn't
.

“The other universes are separated from this one,” he continued, “not by space and time, but by a different dimension. I came through that dimension. Another universe.”

“How?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question. And it was short.

“You wouldn't understand. It involves manipulating dimensions and invoking gravity, of course.”

“How?” I asked. I was on a roll.

“I jumped out of a tree.”

I could understand that bit.

“And found yourself here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So jump out of another tree and go back.”

He sighed and frowned, confirming my earlier suspicions.

“It's not as easy as that,” he said.

Nothing is
, I thought.

Dear Denille
,

I have a goldfish called Earth-Pig Fish. She lives in a bowl on my bedside cabinet. I say “she,” but, to be honest, I can't be certain about her gender. I think you need to have studied veterinary science for a number of years, since there are no outward indications, at least not that I can spot
.

Earth-Pig Fish is an interesting fish. She doesn't do anything that most people would categorize as interesting. In fact, she is fairly predictable and swims around her bowl, opening and closing her mouth. Sometimes she goes clockwise and sometimes she goes counterclockwise. I do not think there is a pattern, and I should know, because I have spent a lot of time with her. What I think is interesting is how she
might
view her world. I stressed the word “might,” because obviously I can't know for sure
.

Bear with me on this
.

Look at the world from Earth-Pig Fish's perspective. As far as she knows, her universe is bounded by plastic. She cannot experience life outside it (because she would die).
She probably thinks it's an okay universe, if only because she doesn't know any other
. But
(and this is my point) occasionally a human face (
my
face) looms up outside her universe and interacts with her
.

I mouth things through the plastic. I talk to Earth-Pig Fish a lot, for reasons I don't want to go into right now. What does she make of this? Does she think, maybe, that I am God trying to communicate with her? I balloon into view (on account of the refractive nature of certain types of plastic) and then I balloon out again. This could be a mystical experience for her. Does she think I am giving her a message about how she should live her life?

Maybe. Maybe not
.

But what if the God so many people believe in is something like that? A presence ballooning into our consciousness from time to time—a presence we think is telling us something profound, but is actually only thinking it's time to clean us out?

I have a friend. Douglas Benson from Another Dimension. I sometimes think he feels like he is swimming around in a bowl and wants to know what it is like on the other side of the plastic. Sometimes I think we all feel like that
.

I would be interested in your views
.

Your pen pal
,

Candice

About three weeks after I first met Douglas Benson from Another Dimension, he invited me to his house. For afternoon tea. This was both amazingly exciting and deeply troubling. Exciting, because no one had ever invited me to afternoon tea before, and troubling because, as Rich Uncle Brian has often remarked, I can be somewhat socially challenged.