Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

A young inebriated couple who had been scouting seats at the end of the table seemed to change their minds and staggered onward.

  “Give me five minutes,” said Mr. Esposito. “You can leave your chips here, I’ll make sure nobody touches them. I’m still asking, but the thing is …” he paused, nodding over his shoulder to the two men behind him, “… I don’t have to ask.”

  Derek examined the other two men, neither of whom seemed to share Mr. Esposito’s pudgy physique or his fundamental good cheer. One of them rolled his shoulders and worked his neck from side to side.

  “Five minutes,” said Derek, “and my bags come with me.”

  “Of course. You ever had a Sazerac?” asked Mr. Esposito, as they walked off the floor and into a wolf-den themed bar only a few steps away. At a nod from him, his two compatriots did not follow. “It’s different. From New Orleans. The original cocktail, they say. Our bartender here makes them the best. Well, to be completely honest with you, I’ve never had one anywhere else, but these are pretty damn good. Bert, get me and Mr. Field a couple Sazeracs.”

  Derek did not protest.

  “Look, Mr. Field,” said Mr. Esposito as Bert got busy with the cocktails, “I want nothing more than to let you play in peace, but your behavior is making that hard for me. You’re spooking our other guests–you cleared out that whole table. I even heard a couple people walking away talking about things like the odds of the game and the house edge, and–I’m going to be painfully frank with you–those are details we prefer our guests don’t think about.”

  “I can’t control what your other guests say or do.”

  “But can you control what you say and do?”

  “Maybe I got a little excited once or twice. My bad. I’ll rein it in. But I don’t understand why a man can’t get a little excited when his roulette system is working. First no smoking, now no celebrating. Is this a library or a casino? Or should I just head across the river to Foxwoods? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “By all means, get a little excited when you win. We love that, it’s all part of the Mohegan Sun experience. But–there’s really no delicate way to put this to you, I’m just going to say it–your system isn’t working. You’re not winning.”

  “I haven’t blanked on a spin all night.”

  “You’re hitting the spin, but you’re losing money. I don’t mean in the ‘house always wins eventually’ way–I mean you’re losing money on each and every spin of the wheel. You’re betting every square every time, Mr. Field. That’s not gambling–that’s absolutely 100 percent guaranteed to lose. You seem like a smart guy–you have to see how that’s not going to work out for you.”

  “It’s working out for me just fine.”

  “Okay, forget the big bets you’re tossing around, I’ll make this simple: let’s say you put a dollar on every square, 1 through 36, and both the zeroes. That’s 38 dollars. Whatever number comes up, you’re going to win 35 bucks back, plus your original bet. That’s 36 dollars. You just won 36 dollars on 38 ventured. You’re down two bucks on every spin. It’s mathematically guaranteed.”

  “Isn’t it fantastic? The system is perfect.”

  “See, that’s the kind of remark that’s weirding our guests out, and me too. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “You don’t have to understand, Mr. Esposito.”

  “Still, I’d be grateful if you could make me understand.”

  “Two Sazeracs,” said Bert, depositing the highball glasses on the bar. The liquid inside was a rusty color, not at all like the bright green that Derek had imagined from the name, and the frosty glass felt good on his fingers as he picked it up. He realized that he had been sweating since Mr. Esposito had appeared behind him.

  “You want to understand my thinking?” said Derek, pausing to take a sip of the Sazerac–it tasted like licorice. “All right, what the hell. You have a coin handy? You flip, I call. You good for a dollar a toss?”

  * * *

  “In sixth grade,” Maxwell said, “when I was twelve, right in the middle of January, some jerk super-glued my locker shut.”

  “Did you know who it was?” said Shannon.

  “I’m pretty sure I know who it was–I was too scared to rat, though. But the point is, my coat was in that locker, and I was too ashamed to tell anyone what had happened, so in the middle of January I walked home without it, wearing just a t-shirt.”

  “Uphill in the snow?”

  “What?”

  “Both ways?”

  “Ah, right. Actually, it was uphill going home, but it wasn’t snowing–it was too cold to snow that day. From school to my house was almost two miles, and all these cars would slow down as they passed me. I could see worried mothers peering through their windshields, waving and trying to get my attention. A bunch stopped and offered me a ride. One woman was so insistent that I had to run down a side street to get away from her.”

  “Why didn’t you just take a ride?”

  “My mom–may she rest in peace–was pretty big on my not talking to strangers.”

  “She’d rather have you freeze to death?”

  “Hold that thought. So finally I got home, and I tried to sneak in the house without my mother seeing me coatless, but she happened to be right there when I came in. She totally lost it. Why hadn’t I called her, why hadn’t I gone to the office, or borrowed a jacket, I was going to catch my death, all that stuff, and meanwhile I’m trying to calm her down by telling her that I wasn’t cold–which was true.”

  “After a two mile walk in sub-zero temps? With only a t-shirt?”

  “Her objection precisely. So she drags me upstairs, still flipping out, and fills the bathtub with water you could steam a lobster in, and leaves me to it, but she’s screaming through the door to lower myself in gently, and when she hears me plop in all at once she loses the shred of sanity she’s been clinging to and bursts into the bathroom.”

  “And you were twelve? That must have been a traumatic experience. Is your condition that you’re unable to bathe without symptoms of PTSD? Because I would understand.”

  “Yeah, even though I live alone now I lock the bathroom door religiously. But anyway, after a bunch of screaming back and forth, and her trying to pull me out of the water, and me trying to cover myself with a towel, she starts to get it–that I should be shivering from the walk home, but I’m not–that I should be screaming in pain from the bath, but I’m not–and I finally manage to convince her that I really can’t feel the scalding water–just like I couldn’t feel the cold outside. And thus began my march through an army of doctors and specialists.”

  Shannon put down her fork and looked at him.

  “That’s it? Maxwell, I have to be honest: you had me hoping for something more twisted and exotic. I thought maybe you needed chicken blood transfusions twice a week, or you had a miniature conjoined twin in your abdomen who was going to pop out at some point, like ‘Heeeere’s Johnny!’ Now those would be conditions. You’ve just got that thing where you can’t feel hot and cold? Can you feel pain?”

  “There are a bunch of such things: CIPA, Riley Day Syndrome. Thermoanesthesia. But I don’t have any of them. I feel pain just like anyone else, and I can probably feel hot and cold just fine too.”

  “You just told me a long story about how you couldn’t feel them.”

  “Do you have a lighter?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Why do you want my lighter?”

  “Pass it over.”

  “First tell me why.”

  “If you don’t give it to me, I’ll just get some matches from the waitress.”

  “Be careful,” said Shannon. “My cousin gave me this–it’s my good luck charm.”

  Maxwell took the reluctantly proffered lighter–a well worn Zippo with a Grateful Dead logo on the side. After two tries it struck. He transferred the lighter to his left hand with a theatrical slowness, and–avoiding Shannon’s eyes–p
laced his right index finger directly into the flame. He held it there.

  “Stop that,” said Shannon. “Maxwell, stop it. I said stop!”

  She reached over the table and batted the lighter out of his hand. It skittered across the tile floor of the diner, stopping near the foot of the waitress, who had just been heading in the direction of their table to check on their coffee situation, but now thought better of it.

  “I’ll get that,” Maxwell said.

  “Shut up and give me your hand,” said Shannon, fishing some ice from her water and wrapping it in a clean napkin. “You idiot.”

  “Shannon, it’s fine.”

  “Give me your hand.”

  “No, look,” said Maxwell, holding up the finger he had been cooking. “I don’t mean that it doesn’t hurt. I mean it’s fine.”

  * * *

  “Six months after Hsiao took over Tilanqiao,” said Dr. Gibbs, “it was still the largest prison in China, but no longer the most overcrowded. This achievement, if you want to call it that, was due to Hsiao’s ‘Scientific Overcrowding Relief Initiative’–a whitewashed, bureaucratic term for the practice of building a quantum suicide box and forcing a stream of inmates to enter it and pull the trigger 100 times each.”

  Dr. Gibbs paused to make sure the horror of this statement had sunk in, but it was difficult to make out individual faces in the audience.

  “By all accounts Hsiao did not consider the practice either an experiment or a pretext for execution. A true believer in parallel universes, he saw the ‘initiative’ as a cutting-edge application of quantum physics to the real-world problem of prison overcrowding. He believed that, by sending prisoners to their deaths in this fashion, he was merely shuffling that prisoner’s consciousness into other universes, in which they survived unharmed. At his trial he argued that every prisoner he ever sent into the box, from the prisoner’s point of view, had suffered no ill effects, merely exiting the box 100 trigger pulls later, none the worse for wear, to serve out the remainder of his sentence in a facility that the party–at least the party in this universe–did not have to pay for.

  “It is not clear how much the broader government knew, and when, about what Hsiao was doing. Of course the official statements from the party have consisted of nothing but denials of any involvement and blanket assertions that Hsiao acted alone. But Hsiao was recognized twice in two years for improving the numbers in Tilanqiao, and other prisons even shipped him prisoners–by some accounts as many as 20,000–in order to ease their own overcrowding.

  “To this day we might not have heard anything about Hsiao’s practice if it weren’t for the guard who released the videotapes of a number of prisoners actually entering the boxes–including the single prisoner who survived all 100 trigger-pulls. Yes, in the front row?”

  “Dr. Wilbur Mayberry, Harvard University. I understand that a number of people–yourself included perhaps–interpret this lone survivor as proof of parallel universes. But if Hsiao put so many prisoners through the box–50,000 was the number I heard–weren’t one or two bound to survive?”

  “Dr. Mayberry, do you have any idea how slim the odds are of anyone surviving 100 trigger pulls? Far slimmer than one in 50,000. The actual number is one in two to the hundredth, which is, let’s see: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …”

  * * *

  “That’s 100 even,” said Derek.

  “Impossible,” said Mr. Esposito. “Can’t happen.”

  “Did happen. So it’s not impossible–just very unlikely.”

  “So unlikely it’s impossible.”

  “Do you happen to know the exact odds of winning 100 coin flips in a row?” Derek asked. “I do–it’s kind of a bar bet for me. The odds are one in two to the hundredth power, which is: one nonillion, 267 octillion, 650 septillion, 600 sextillion, 228 quintillion, 229 quadrillion, 401 trillion, 496 billion, 703 million, 205 thousand, three hundred and 76. Which, technically, is how many dollars you now owe me. You want to go double or nothing again? You still flip, I still call?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Which means you accept it’s happening, even though it’s impossible.”

  “It means I’ve got no idea how you’re manipulating a coin that came out of my pocket and that you’ve never touched and that I’m flipping, but it’s the best magic trick I’ve ever seen.”

  “Problem being: it’s not a trick.”

  “Mr. Field, there are plenty of things I don’t know anything about. My daughter–she’s in middle school–she already knows more than I ever did or will about history, science, art, and all that jazz. But I do work at a casino, so if there’s one thing I understand, it’s basic odds. Please don’t insult my intelligence. If this is some kind of guerrilla audition for a show, it’s working. I’m already a fan–you belong on the stage here. I’d be glad to introduce you to the program manager.”

  “We can do this all night, with any game of chance you want. Dice, cards, it doesn’t matter. We can pick sports teams. Or how about this? Choose a number between one and 1,000,000, all right? A buck if I get it right.”

  “I don’t want to play this game.”

  “But you picked one despite yourself, didn’t you? A dollar says it’s 3,261.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Now,” said Derek, leaning back on the high-top chair and tapping his empty glass to get Bert’s attention, “you’re starting to get it.”

  * * *

  “You’re fireproof?” said Shannon.

  “No. At least, I don’t think so. I think that if you could get me hot enough, I would burn. You just can’t change my temperature enough to make me hot or cold.”

  “That’s …”

  “Yeah, I know. Weird? Impossible?”

  “I was going to say ‘disappointing.’ When you offered me your coat back at the club, I thought you were being chivalrous.”

  “I was!”

  “That’s not chivalry–chivalry means giving up something you actually need. If you didn’t need the coat, then at best it was–thoughtful.”

  “Just so I’m clear,” said Maxwell, “you’re docking me points for offering you my coat while you were clearly freezing, because I happen to have a condition where I don’t get cold.”

  “Hey, I didn’t make up the definition of chivalry, so don’t get mad at me when you don’t live up to it. So, have you seen a doctor about this whole temperature thing?”

  “Only the 100 or so that my mother marched me through, until one of them–this huge German with a handlebar mustache–told her that he had no idea what was wrong with me, and no one ever would, but that if she didn’t want me spending the rest of my life as a freak in the medical circus, she should stop bringing me to doctors–because sooner or later one of them was going to use me to get famous. My mother–this was unusual for her–listened to him, kind of. She decided, by her own unique brand of logic, that if a normal doctor couldn’t help me, that meant the condition was in my head. And if the condition was in my head, I needed a psychiatrist.”

  “Wait, so she thought you had a mental block against cold and heat?”

  “You’d have to have met my mother to understand how something like that could seem totally rational to her. She basically picked the first psychiatrist she could find and sent me to him.”

  “Did he help you?”

  “No, not at all–I mean, he didn’t cure my condition. He had no more idea what was going on than anyone else. But it made my mother happy, I guess, to feel like she was doing something, so she kept sending me, and Dr. Gibbs is a stand-up guy, so I kept going. He doesn’t even charge me any more. And it’s been kind of–helpful, I guess–to have someone to talk things through with as my condition got worse. We mainly talk about its effects on the rest of my life. Like–with women, for example.”

  “It got worse? I totally take back what I said earlier about hoping for something more twisted, by the way–you have totally under promised and over delivered. This is way weirder than chicken blood infusions.”<
br />
  “Thanks, I think. But yeah, it got worse as I got older–you know what? I can show you. The waitress poured our coffees at the same time, right? From the same pot? Taste yours and tell me how hot it is.”

  “Like, lukewarm at best. Grounds for a lousy tip.”

  “Now sip mine.”

  Maxwell pushed his mug across the table, and Shannon stopped even before she took a sip, noting the steam that still skated and puffed on the surface.

  “It’s still hot because it was close to you?” she asked.

  “It’s still hot because it’s mine. I could go to the bathroom for a half hour, and when I came back it would be exactly this temperature. I could put it outside. And it’s not just hot things. I could put a cold beer in the microwave–a bottle of course, not a can, that would be dangerous–for twenty minutes. I’ve done it–there was still frost on the bottle.”

  Shannon laughed–and not the kind of laugh that Maxwell was used to hearing from a date. There was nothing nervous or derisive in her amusement–it was the laugh of a child delighted by the quarter a favorite uncle had just pulled from behind her ear.

  “You like that?” said Maxwell, growing bold. “Then how about this: during the huge thunderstorm last August, when almost the whole city lost power, I discovered after three days that none of the food in my refrigerator had even started to turn. I haven’t plugged the thing in since. I keep ice cream next to the bed and it’s still frozen when I wake up and want a midnight snack. I can cook chicken by throwing it in a pan on the stove–no flame needed. I can boil water. I can leave a sheet of cookies in the oven while I sleep, and they’re perfectly brown and gooey the next morning, or …”

  “You’re like a superhero! Like the Human Torch or something.”

  “Yeah, right, only much, much lamer. I’m more like–the Human Thermostat, or the Human Pink Fiberglass Insulation Guy. Wait, how about the Human Thermos? Cold coffee and melted ice cream everywhere, beware!”

  “Oh my God,” said Shannon, covering her mouth with both hands for a second. “Oh. My. God. I’ve got it. Your superhero name should be one of those names that sounds like a normal name but has a double meaning, like Jack Hammer or Max Payne–and I know exactly what it should be. Are you ready for this?”