Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  It was true: The afternoon, after lunch with Lou, was invariably shot so far as work was concerned. Lou beamed broadly as the old dust-covered bottle was produced. He had a double, but I drew the line at a single. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who could drink as much as Lou and yet continue to function efficiently throughout a long day. He must have been almost seventy, but had a constitution of toughness I’m not sure they make anymore.

  “The point is,” I said, sitting back and letting the warmth of the liquor spread agreeably through my being, “there isn’t anybody alive who hasn’t had some kind of strange coincidence happen to them at some time, and maybe more than one. It’s a universal experience. How about you, for instance? Surely some unlikely coincidence must have happened to you at least once in your life.”

  His eyebrows twitched up a notch. “To me? Jesus, nothing happens to me. I’m just an agent. A second grappa after lunch is as exciting as my life gets.”

  “Come on, Lou,” I said, determined to drag some kind of confession out of him. “Don’t tell me you’re the one person in the world who’s never experienced a peculiar coincidence, because I’m not going to believe you. Maybe you just don’t bother to remember them like most people, but I’ll bet you can think of something if you try.”

  Lou shrugged, like an old man who’d seen it all before: still on top of his game, a master player, no longer easy to impress or concerned about impressing other people. His attention was focused for the moment on getting his cigar out of its cellophane wrapper. He’d smoked the same brand as long as I’d known him and seemed never to have quite mastered the trick of getting those wrappers off. Eventually he got it lit, then shook out his match and exhaled a cloud of rich blue smoke. (Another reason why I suspect Lou ate there every day was that Dino’s made up its own rules about who could smoke what and where, and anybody who didn’t like the arrangement could stay away.)

  “Well, I suppose,” he said, “there was a thing one time. A few years ago I was doing some business in L.A., and as always when I’m out there I called up an old friend of mine, a producer. We met for lunch, and he told me about something that had happened about a month earlier. He’d been out at the Film Fair at Santa Monica, and he saw me there talking to some guy. So he goes over and says, ‘Lou, how can you be in town and not call me?’ I mean, he was really pissed. We were friends. I always called. But this guy just looked at him like he was crazy. It was some other guy, not me. But not some guy who looked a little like me. According to this friend of mine, the guy was me.”

  Lou held out his hands, palms up, his cigar clamped between two thick but perfectly manicured fingers.

  “What can I tell you?”

  “There you are, you see,” I said triumphantly. “Something did happen to you. I don’t believe there’s one person you’ll ever meet who hasn’t had some extraordinary coincidence happen to them.”

  “To be exact,” he said, “it didn’t happen to me. It happened to this friend of mine who thought he saw me. In fact, when you think about it, it isn’t really a coincidence at all. It was a mistake—this friend of mine mistaking somebody else for me. That’s not a coincidence.”

  “Two people looking alike is a coincidence,” I said.

  Lou shrugged. “They say everybody has a double.”

  “Maybe. There certainly seem to be plenty of look-alikes. Think of movie stars and politicians. They all have look-alikes.”

  We sat in reflective silence for a while. Lou finished his brandy and set down the glass with an air of finality. “Well,” he said, “if this is the book you want to do, just go ahead and do it. I think we’ll hook Mike on a couple of chapters—and probably make a better deal.”

  With that, he signaled for the check, which I tried to pay, but Lou insisted it was his and scribbled his name across it. When we parted on the sidewalk, Lou shook my hand, grasping my elbow at the same time, as he always did.

  “Let me know how you’re getting on with the book,” he said. “And give my love to Sara when you talk to her.”

  He walked off toward his office, still puffing great clouds of smoke from what remained of his cigar. I set off in the opposite direction.

  The actor Anthony Hopkins, asked to play a role in the film The Girl from Petrovka, wanted to read the novel by George Feifer on which it was to be based, but could not find a copy in any London bookshop. Waiting for an Underground train at Leicester Square station, he came across a book left on a seat. It was a copy of the novel, with some scribbled notes in the margin. Meeting the author later, Hopkins learned that a friend had lost Feifer’s annotated copy of the book. It was the copy Hopkins had found.

  I was standing in a secondhand bookshop that I’d strolled up to in the Village. There is something called “the library angel” with which all writers and students are familiar. It refers to the way in which, whenever you start researching some particular subject, relevant books and pieces of information start falling into your lap as though by magic. It’s a little like those times that everyone has experienced, not just writers, when you come across some new and rather obscure word, then for the next few days find it being so widely and frequently used that you can’t believe you hadn’t been aware of it before.

  Anyway, there I was trawling the shelves in search of anything on coincidence or synchronicity. This 1990 book by Brian Inglis was the first I pulled down, and the page at which I opened it carried the story about Anthony Hopkins and The Girl from Petrovka.

  The extra little bit of weird spin on all this was that The Girl from Petrovka was directed by Robert Ellis Miller from a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant—all three of whom were friends of mine.

  Well? Odd or not? At least I felt oddly encouraged in some pleasantly postprandial way. I bought a dozen or so books on the subject that I hadn’t come across before and took a cab back to the apartment. The traffic was still as dense and slow-moving as it had been in the morning.

  That was when I saw her—Sara. My cab was turning off Third when it got caught in one of those gridlocks that fan out in all directions. I was looking wearily around and thinking how much I would prefer to walk if it wasn’t for the parcel of books I had to carry, when I saw her unmistakable profile in the back of another cab two rows over in the stalled traffic. At least I thought it was unmistakable. It was just a glimpse before she turned away, talking to somebody in the cab with her whom I couldn’t see. I was on the point of throwing a bill at my driver and getting out when whoever it was with Sara obviously had the same idea. The far door of the cab opened and a tall, well-built man with thick blonde hair got out, bent down to say something or maybe to plant a brief parting kiss—I couldn’t see from where I was—then shut the door and strode briskly up the sidewalk, disappearing quickly in the crowd. My hand was on the door handle to run over and find out what was going on, when the line of traffic that Sara was in lurched forward and was siphoned off in a fluid movement that made catching up with her on foot impossible.

  If, of course, it was Sara. I could have been mistaken. I’d caught only a glimpse. And of course I’d just been having that conversation with Lou about people having doubles. I was unquestionably primed, as a psychologist would say, for some fleeting misperception of this kind to happen.

  Besides, Sara was in Boston. It was inconceivable she could be back in Manhattan without my knowing.

  My taxi also began moving, though hers had by now long disappeared from view. I had an idea. After taking out my mobile phone, I auto-dialed her mobile number. She replied at once.

  “Hi,” I said, “how are you? I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting in a cab between Lex and Park. Just had lunch with Lou.”

  “How is he?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Busy. I’ll be back tomorrow, midafternoon.”

  “Where are you? Is that traffic I can hear in the background?”

  “Yes. I’m in a cab
too.”

  “A cab where?”

  “In Boston, of course.”

  “Where in Boston?”

  “Between… I’m not sure, let me see… just coming up to the Hancock Building. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. A coincidence, both of us being in cabs.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is rather.”

  “I love you, Sara.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 7

  I spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the sleepy postprandial haze that lunch with Lou always left me in. The more I read, drifting into a doze occasionally and waking with a start, the more I realized how elusive and unreliable the notion of coincidence was. I had long been aware that if you were really determined to believe in something, whether mysteries, conspiracies, or deep significance of any kind, then by and large you would always find evidence for it. When I thought about it, for example, I realized that I could make up a dozen coincidences right there and then, just looking around my own office in the apartment. Two identical pens lay at exactly the same angle on opposite sides of my desk. The color of a rug on my floor was reflected in the color of a car I could see out of my window. A plane crossed the sky immediately after I glimpsed the picture of a plane on the front page of my crumpled morning newspaper.

  But things like that didn’t count. I was looking for them and I imposed the connection between them. A real coincidence has to sneak up on you and surprise you, like the punch line of a joke, except that there’s no lead up to it, no structure. It doesn’t make sense, yet it makes sense of an unexpected kind.

  There didn’t seem to be much new or startling in any of the books I’d bought. The examples presented were mostly of the “just fancy that” variety:

  A man lost his engraved fountain pen in Florence, South Carolina. Three years later he and his wife were in New York City. As they left their hotel, she spied a pen in the street. It was her husband’s, his name clearly inscribed.

  Some of them were so unlikely I almost had to laugh out loud:

  When his station’s phone number was changed, an English police constable accidentally gave a wrong version of the new number to a friend. A few days later, while checking over a factory in the middle of the night, he noticed that a door was open and a light on in the manager’s office. He went to investigate. Nobody was in the office, but while he was there the telephone rang. He answered it. The caller was his friend, ringing the wrong number that the police constable had mistakenly given him—which turned out to be the ex-directory number of that particular office.

  One or two were a little spooky:

  In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” describing how three survivors of a shipwreck killed and ate the ship’s cabin boy, whose name was Richard Parker. In 1884 The Times reported the trial of three survivors of a shipwreck on charges of murdering and eating the ship’s cabin boy—whose name was Richard Parker.

  This one was perhaps my favorite:

  In 1893 Henry Ziegland of Honey Grove, Texas, jilted his sweetheart, who killed herself. Her brother tried to avenge her by shooting Ziegland, but the bullet only grazed his face and buried itself in a tree. The brother, thinking he had killed Ziegland, committed suicide. In 1913 Ziegland was cutting down the tree that the bullet had hit. He had trouble getting the tree down, so in the end he used dynamite. The bullet was still lodged in the tree, and the explosion sent it through Ziegland’s head—twenty years after it had been fired with intent to kill him.

  Toward dusk I began to feel restless and decided to take a walk. I’d already made up my mind to skip dinner, but thought I might drop into a bar I liked over on Broadway and have a couple of drinks. As I walked, I turned over in my mind an argument I had been reading about between Freud and Jung. Freud regarded all talk of the paranormal—including things like synchronicity—as nonsense. Jung, on the other hand, always had an open mind, refusing, as he put it, “to commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” He grew increasingly frustrated as he listened to Freud ranting on against ESP, eventually feeling what he described as:

  “a curious sensation… as if my diaphragm was made of iron and was becoming red-hot…. At that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over us.”

  Freud refused to believe there was any connection between this phenomenon and Jung’s pent-up emotions. Jung insisted that there was, and to prove his point he predicted that in a moment it would happen again.

  “Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.”

  At that moment I felt as though I’d jumped about a foot off the sidewalk—because just as I imagined that second “detonation” in Jung’s bookcase, a car backfired in front of me.

  At least I think it was the car in front of me. It had stalled and the man behind the wheel appeared to be having some trouble getting it going. An older man with him was giving him advice, repeating a small and precise movement with his hand.

  I didn’t know that cars were still able to backfire. I thought that the well-timed backfire went out as a dramatic device with old black-and-white thrillers on late-night television. But then I asked myself, what did it matter if it wasn’t a backfire? What if it had nothing to do with that car at all? It was a noise, a loud noise, a detonation. It came from somewhere, and it happened just then, at the very moment I was thinking about one.

  As I walked on, I replayed the incident in my head, recreating it as exactly as I could from the still-fresh memory. I realized there was something I’d overlooked in my anxiety, however unconscious, to find another coincidence. There had been other noises in the air—all kinds of noises, a rich tapestry of noises all happening at the same time. It just so happened that the one I’d heard was the nearest and loudest. Had it not occurred, I was quite sure when I thought back on it that I could have picked out any one of a number of other noises going on around me and chosen to synchronize it with the story I was telling in my imagination. The whole incident was, on reflection, a clear example of how careful you have to be before claiming some perfectly normal phenomenon as a paranormal one. I went on my way, reassured in my skepticism.

  It couldn’t have been Sara I had seen that afternoon, I told myself. It was out of the question. A near double, that’s all. Like Lou and his friend in California. A coincidence. Without significance.

  I had a couple of drinks at the bar as planned, then a couple more. As I was leaving I ran into some friends who insisted I join them for dinner. It was still early and I had nothing else to do, so I abandoned my pledge not to eat and had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon while they had steaks and roast potatoes. I was in bed by eleven and dozing fitfully as I watched the late-night talk shows. Before finally switching off the TV and going to sleep, I made a last desultory flip through the cable channels and came across an image that at once had me sitting bolt upright, not sure at first whether I was awake or dreaming. An instant later I was out of bed and flying across the room to shove a tape into the VCR and hit the record button.

  What I was looking at was a somewhat labored comedy scene—all dialogue and lots of theatrical arm-waving—featuring the two people whose photographs I had found in my father’s trunk and with whom I myself had been photographed as a child sitting on an unknown terrace wall at some equally unknown time or place.

  Then something else hit me. I realized that the clothes they were wearing were the same as in that photograph. Of course, his white tie and tails were pretty much anonymous, but it was her dress, the cut of the neckline and the orchid at the shoulder, that convinced me.

  On top of that, I then saw something else that took my breath away. Exasperated by their argument, she flounced up a short flight of steps. He followed her, protesting, and they continued their quarrel on a terrace overlooking an ornamental but obviously
studio-bound garden. It was then that I recognized the stone balustrade on which the three of us had been photographed together. What clinched it was the large ornamental urn visible behind me in the picture, and which, as I watched, they flounced past several times.

  I didn’t need to check it out later, though I did all the same when the credits rolled. I had been watching Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige in There’s a Spy in My Soup.

  Chapter 8

  By three in the morning I had watched the video several times, fast-forwarding between the scenes involving either Jeffrey Hart or Lauren Paige or both. In particular I scrutinized the scene that featured the wall on which I had apparently at one time sat with them. Now, with the photograph in my hand and comparing it with stop-frame images, I was more than ever convinced that I was right. At some time in my childhood, a time of which I had no recollection, I had been photographed on that studio set with two people I had no memory of ever knowing, but who were clearly good friends of my parents.

  I lay awake long into the night, turning things over in my mind, trying to make sense of what was going on. It seemed undeniable that something was going on; but then again, why should it “make sense”? Nothing that I had ever read about synchronicity suggested that its meaning was accessible to logical analysis. The very essence of “noncausal connection” amounted to a defiance of logic. If there were any overall pattern to these random subjective events, it would emerge of its own accord and in its own time. I felt a growing conviction that something had started and was taking its course. I had no idea what, but it was not over yet.

  As I gazed up at the dim chiaroscuro patterns on the ceiling, the prospect of what might lie ahead, where I might be going on this journey, began to fill me with an apprehension that was not entirely pleasurable. In truth, I was beginning to be more than a little afraid. All right, maybe I was going to get a book out of this thing, but was it worth the risks that I felt lurked somewhere just beneath the surface? Was I unwittingly starting something that I would be unable to stop? Which was stronger, my writer’s curiosity or this sudden inexplicable unease? I would have to make up my mind soon. But how?