Get Me to the Church on Time

5.

Every bad pizza is bad in its own way, but good pizza is all alike. Bruno’s on the corner of Ditmas and MacDonald, under the el, is my favorite, and Aunt Minnie’s too. A fresh pie was being popped into the oven as Candy and I walked in the door, and Bruno, Jr., assured us it was ours.

We were headed for home, box in hand, when a battered Buick gypsy cab pulled up at the curb. I waved it off, shaking my head, figuring the driver thought we’d flagged him down. But that wasn’t it.

The driver powered down his window and I heard Wu’s voice over the static on the two-way radio: “Irv, you can head for Brooklyn after all. I found it. Irv, you there?”

The driver was saying something in Egyptian and trying to hand me a little mike. I gave Candy the pizza to hold, and took it.

“Press the little button,” said Wu.

I pressed the little button. “Found what?”

“The leak. The 5.211 was the clue,” said Wu. “I should have recognized it immediately as a special two-year cadmium silicone battery for a low-frequency, high-intensity, short-circuit, long-distance cellular phone. Once you tipped me off, I located the phone hidden underneath the old Eastern/Braniff/Pan Am/Piedmont/People baggage carousel.”

“I know,” I said, pressing the little button. “I saw it there. So now I guess you want me to go to La Guardia and hang it up?”

“Not so fast, Irv! The phone is just the conduit, the timeline through which the Connective Time is being drained. What we need to find is the number the phone is calling—the source of the leak, the actual hole in Time, the twist. It could be some bizarre natural singularity, like a chronological whirlpool or tornado; or even worse, some incredibly advanced, diabolical machine, designed to twist a hole in space-time and pinch off a piece of our Universe. The open phone connection will lead us to it, whatever it is, and guess what?”

“What?”

“The number it’s calling is in Brooklyn, and guess what?”

“What?”

“It’s the phone number of Dr. Radio Dgjerm!”

He pronounced it rah-dio. I said, “Help me out.”

“The world-famous Lifthatvanian resort developer, Irving!” said Wu, impatiently. “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Real Estate in 1982! Remember?”

“Oh, him. Sort of,” I lied.

“Which was later revoked when he was indicted for trying to create an illegal Universe, but that’s another story. And guess what?”

“What?”

“He lives somewhere on Ditmas, near your aunt, as a matter of fact. We’re still trying to pinpoint the exact address.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “We’re on Ditmas right now. We just picked up a pizza.”

“With what?”

“Mushrooms and peppers on one side, for Aunt Minnie. Olives and sausage on the other, for Candy. I pick at both, since I like mushrooms and sausage.”

“What a coincidence,” said Wu. “I like it with olives and peppers.” He sighed. “I would kill for a hot pizza. Ever spend six weeks in a tree-house?”

“Ever spend six months in a space station?” asked a strangely accented voice.

“Butt out, Dmitri,” Wu said (rather rudely, I thought). “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for that address?”

“I spent three nights in a treehouse once,” I said. “Me and Studs. Of course, we had a TV.”

“A TV in a treehouse?”

“Just black and white. It was an old six-inch Dumont from my Uncle Mort’s basement.”

“A six-inch Dumont!” said Wu. “Of course! What a fool I am! Irv, did it have…”

But we were losing our signal. Literally. The driver of the gypsy cab was leaning out of his window, shouting in Egyptian and reaching for the phone.

“Probably has a fare to pick up,” I explained to Candy as he snatched the little mike out of my hand and drove off, burning rubber. “Let’s get this pizza to Aunt Minnie before it gets cold. Otherwise she’ll cook. And she can’t.”

Different cultures deal with death, dying, and the dead in different ways. I was accustomed to Aunt Minnie’s Lifthatvanian eccentricities, but I was concerned about how Candy would take it when she set Uncle Mort’s ashes at the head of the table for dinner.

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 negligee. 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 backyard. It was getting dark, and blue light spilled out through every crack in the treehouse, 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 treehouse. You said it was 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 permeabihty 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 gone 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. Then 337,877 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. Only 337,877 were destroyed, but 337,878 were manufactured. Numbers don’t he. Do the math.”

“Hmmmm,” 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 10 percent chance of rain, there’s a 90 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 treehouse. Turned on, in fact. I can see the blue light from here. It’s in the maple tree in Studs’s backyard, 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 La Guardia 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 two 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.