Elliot was over seven feet tall; his hair was a sunny yellow and his skin was greenish. Lindsey had noticed the way that Alan looked at him when they first came in. Alan had been in this universe before.

Elliot sang that song about the monster from Ipanema. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he made Lindsey laugh so hard that whiskey came out of her nose. After the song, he came over and sat at the bar. He said, “You’re Alan’s twin.” He only had four fingers on each hand. His skin looked smooth and rough at the same time.

She said, “I’m the original. He’s the copy. Wherever he is. Passed out in the bathroom probably.”

Elliot said, “Should I go get him or should we leave him here?”

“Where are we going?” she said.

“To bed,” he said. His pupils were oddly shaped. His hair wasn’t really hair. It was more like barbules, pinfeathers.

“What would we do there?” she said, and he just looked at her. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn’t. That was the fun of it.

She thought about it. “Okay. On the condition you promise me you’ve never fooled around with Alan. Ever.”

“Your universe or mine?” he said.

Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it, and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida.

Her mother had gone on vacation in a pocket universe when she was first pregnant with Lindsey. Now people knew better. Doctors cautioned pregnant women against such trips.

For the last few years Alan had had a job with a tour group that ran trips out of Singapore. He spoke German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, passable Tibetan, various pocket-universe trade languages. The tours took charter flights into Tibet and then trekked up into some of the more tourist-friendly pocket universes. Tibet was riddled with pocket universes.

“You lost them?” she said.

“Not all of them,” Alan said. His hair was still wet with rain. He needed a haircut. “Just one van. I thought I told the driver Sakya but I may have said Gyantse. They showed up eventually, just two days behind schedule. It’s not as if they were children. Everyone in Sakya speaks English. When they caught up with us I was charming and full of remorse and we were all pals again.”

She waited for the rest of the story. Somehow it made you feel better, knowing that Alan had the same effect on everyone.