Then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. The I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes. I’d come across it first of all in college, not long after first discovering synchronicity in school. At the time it was enjoying a certain fashion that was a hangover of the sixties. Kids consulted it over their love affairs, their careers, whether or not to major in this or that subject, where they should go on vacation. I remember even then thinking they were trivializing something that was more deeply rooted in the fabric of reality than they realized. In fact I became aware that if you asked it too often about trivial or irrelevant things the answers it gave would become increasingly meaningless and unhelpful. It seemed to have an in-built resistance to being misused. But I had taken it seriously for a while, and been startled more than once by the sharp pertinence of its answers to my questions.
The I Ching goes back to around 3000 B.C., and its origins are inevitably shrouded in a certain amount of myth and mystery. Some authorities attribute the main body of its worth to one Wen Wang as early as the twelfth century B.C. It has remained always a profound influence on Chinese thought and philosophy, but did not reach the West until the nineteenth century. Jung seized on it as being central to his theories of synchronicity and the collective unconscious. It rests, like astrology, on the notion that all things in the universe are interrelated, and chance is the key to our understanding of our place as individuals in the great scheme of things.
The way the I Ching works is you throw three coins six times. (The Chinese originally used a more complicated system involving yarrow sticks; many still do.) Each throw, according to the distribution of heads and tails, gives you a line that will be either unbroken, broken, or changing. The pattern of the six lines (the hexagram) that you eventually assemble will correspond to one of sixty-four oracular pronouncements that have evolved over the long period of the book’s use.
These pronouncements do not amount to direct answers to whatever questions or problems you may have on your mind. It is up to you, the reader, to divine the personal meaning of your hexagram from a close perusal of and reflection on the several pages of text that accompany each one of the sixty-four possible patterns.
To the more fundamentalist type of Western mind, with its dependence on strict logic, the whole thing smacks of empty superstition. To anyone with an element of mysticism in their being, however, it makes an interesting kind of sense, and its use frequently throws up startling insights and remarkable shafts of self-knowledge.
So it was that at almost four in the morning I pulled down my twenty-year-old copy of the I Ching from its shelf, picked out three nickels from my loose change on the dresser, and prepared to consider my fate.
Uppermost in my mind, when I thought about it, was not the question “What is this all about?” It was, rather, “Shall I go on with this thing or get out now?”
I felt sure that if I did go on, what it was about would be made plain to me in time, perhaps painfully so. There was a passage of Koestler’s that I’d come across a few days earlier. Describing a brush with synchronicity, he said:
“[It is] as if some mute power were tugging at your sleeve. It is then up to you to decipher the meaning of the inchoate message. If you ignore it, nothing at all will probably happen; but you may have missed a chance to remake your life, have passed a potential turning point without noticing it.”
Confident that I could “ignore it” if I chose without fear of repercussions, I decided to let the I Ching guide my decision to stop now or go on.
I shook my coins and threw them, six times in all. My hexagram was:
The interpretation of that was “Revolution,” for which the original Chinese character meant an animal’s pelt, which was changed in the course of the year by “molting.” It spoke of the need for change everywhere in time, but urged extreme caution.
Because three of my lines were “changing” lines, meaning I’d thrown three heads or three tails at the same time, I had an alternative hexagram to look up before I came to a conclusion. The “changed” hexagram was:
This was “Treading”—literally treading upon something, though it is also defined as the right way of conducting oneself. I read:
Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite the man. Success.
I took the combination of the two hexagrams to mean that, although I was dealing with something dangerous, luck was on my side. Things would turn out for the best.
So I decided to go on.
Did I really believe that randomness, or chance, was some sort of key to the universe? I suppose that what I thought, more or less, was why not? The idea made as much sense as anything else. I know Einstein refused to believe that God “played dice with the universe,” but he’s been proved wrong about other things. For example, he believed that “spooky” action at a distance (information traveling faster than light) was impossible. But since Bell’s Theorem and the Aspect experiment in 1982, we’ve been able to demonstrate it routinely in the lab.
The physicist John Wheeler, who taught Richard Feynman and who despises anything that smacks of superstition or the paranormal, once suggested that the reason all electrons behave alike is that there is only one electron in the whole universe, and that it zips back and forth painting reality as we know it like an image on a television screen.
He also came up with the idea that the Big Bang didn’t happen until consciousness evolved many billions of years later and was able to look back through time and become aware of its own origin.
Go figure.
That was something I would try to do in the book.
Chapter 9
Sara got back on Wednesday afternoon as planned. Although I had intended telling her everything that had happened, including my having spotted her almost exact double while she was away, we didn’t have a moment to talk before the evening, when we were due to go to a charity gala at Lincoln Center. One of her wealthier clients had bought tickets and insisted we come along as his guests. It was hard to refuse, but even harder to keep my mind on the string of celebrities paraded before us doing their various party pieces.
There was a dinner afterward, which I got through on automatic pilot as I always did those affairs. It was when we were leaving that I saw Sara talking to some woman I didn’t know, a statuesque blonde in an elaborate brocade dress and some ostentatious jewelry. Not someone with a gift for understatement. Sara waved me over and introduced me.
“This is my husband, George,” she said to the woman. “George, this is Linda Coleman.” We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. She was a good-looking woman, but behind the fixed smile she wore as a social mask I sensed an ice-cold nature and a will of steel. I wondered who and what Linda Coleman was. As we talked, her gaze wandered off to one side where she had seen someone. “You must meet my husband,” she said.
I turned—and saw the tall blonde man I’d seen with Sara, or her double, the previous day.
“Darling,” Linda Coleman said, “come over and meet Sara’s husband, George.”
Steve Coleman and I shook hands. The four of us chatted for a while. I didn’t say anything about having seen him yesterday, and of course absolutely nothing about having seen him with Sara’s double. I did, however, say that he seemed vaguely familiar. His wife seemed pleased by that and told me proudly that I might have seen his picture in the papers or on television. He was a lawyer who had been involved in a number of high-profile cases and was now about to enter politics. He would be a candidate the following year for state Senate, and she managed to imply that this was only the beginning of what promised to be a glittering career. I sensed at once that her ambitious eyes were already fixed on the ultimate prize: the White House, no less.
Sara and I didn’t talk much in the car on the short ride home. She seemed a little tense, I thought, though trying not to show it. She was avoiding my eyes, looking out of the window, pretending to be preoccupied. At least that was how I read her mood. It was only when we stepped
into the apartment and I closed the door behind me that I said, “So that was the great love of your life. Steve Coleman. Right?”
She turned with a gasp. “How did you… ?”
I smiled. “We’ve been married a long time, Sara. I think I’m getting to know you a little by now.”
She relaxed and smiled back. “It was a long time ago.”
“The thrusting young lawyer of legend.”
“That’s the one.”
“So what happened? He ran off with the ice queen?”
She shrugged. “It just petered out. The way these things do.”
“Lucky for me,” I said, and took her in my arms. “I love you, Sara.”
“Careful, darling,” she said softly, “you’re getting makeup on your jacket.”
Next morning I checked the yellow pages for a detective agency. I found an advert that read “Overseas Investigations Undertaken.” Their address was some way downtown between Broadway and Fifth. That was good too. Less chance of being seen going in or out.
I felt quite strongly that I wanted to keep this whole thing to myself for the moment. I had decided against saying anything even to Sara, and in fact was quite relieved that she had never asked anything more about the strange photograph I had told her about of myself with Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige. Fortunately she seemed to have forgotten that whole conversation we’d had on the day of my father’s funeral, and I was glad to leave things that way. Partly, of course, it was because I had made up my mind to write a book about coincidence, using my own experiences over the past few days as a way into the subject. Like most writers I had an almost superstitious fear of talking too soon about something I was working on. It’s a fact that if you talk too much about it, you’ll never write it. I’ve known very few writers who’ve felt otherwise.
But there was another element to my thinking. I felt that the fewer people I involved at this stage, the less likely I was to upset the delicate balance of what was going on. Something was taking its course, and I was now a willing part of the process. I wasn’t sure how much baggage it could handle.
I called the agency; it sounded reassuring. I made an appointment. It looked reassuring. I suppose I’d half-expected men who never took their hats off, lounged back with their feet on the desk, and tipped shots of whisky into their coffee from bottles kept in a drawer. Instead I was greeted by a matronly receptionist with a pleasant smile who invited me to wait for a few minutes in a comfortable room with fresh flowers and a stack of current magazines and newspapers.
The associate I saw looked like a junior partner in a midsize law firm. I explained I was tracing a family tree, but he didn’t seem concerned about my motives. It was routine, he said. He asked one question: If these people were found, did I want them approached? I replied no, just tell me where they were, and I’d take it from there. He asked me to give what information I could to his assistant in another office, a Miss Shelley. Nadia Shelley, I remember. I saw the name on her desk and thought how striking it was. Striking girl too, as I recall, but businesslike and efficient. She assured me that everything would be passed on to their associates in London and the search would begin at once. A routine search of this kind, she said, was really very simple. I paid a surprisingly modest retainer, which she told me they would not exceed without my written agreement. I should expect to hear from them within a couple of weeks.
I spent much of the next few days thinking about the law of large numbers. This is the paradox at the heart of probability theory as well as the foundation of all statistics. It is also, of course, central to the notion of coincidence. Yet, like so many of these things, the closer you examine it the harder it is to see and the more difficult to grasp.
The paradox is this. If I toss a coin in the air, there is a 50 percent chance it will come down heads and 50 percent it will come down tails. No matter how many times I toss it, the odds are fifty-fifty each time. But if I toss it a thousand times, it will come down more or less exactly five hundred times heads and five hundred times tails. Why this should be so is a mystery.
To many people, I confess, it doesn’t seem like a mystery. It seems somehow—if obscurely—obvious. So try this.
Radioactive substances decay at an absolutely fixed rate, which is known as their “half-life.” This is so precise that archeologists routinely measure the age of fossils using radiocarbon tests. Yet the decay of each individual atom composing that radioactive substance is totally unpredictable and spontaneous. So what is the mechanism that causes large numbers of these unpredictable and spontaneous events to average out with a smoothness that allows the overall decay of the substance they constitute to be used as the most accurate historical clock we have yet discovered? The fact is that nobody knows.
The mathematician Warren Weaver once came up with another famous demonstration of the improbability of probability. He noted from the New York Department of Health records that between 1955 and 1959 the average number of people reportedly bitten by dogs each day in the city was 75.3 (1955), 73.6 (1956), 74.5 (1957), 74.5 (1958), and 72.4 (1959).
Even assuming (and it is only an assumption) that the human and dog populations of the city remained relatively stable throughout that four-year period, how did each dog know when it was his turn, or that when he’d had one bite, or maybe two, he was not to have a second or third?
There are many such intriguing examples. Most interesting to me was the idea that the law of large numbers seemed to be the only thing running seamlessly from the microscopic world and into the macroscopic. We are told that subatomic particles behave according to quantum indeterminacy: In other words, their behavior is inherently unpredictable. However, when there are enough of them, the law of large numbers causes them to average out sufficiently to constitute the atoms and cells that make up, say, a chair and table, a horizontally revolving wheel, and a human being sitting at the table watching the wheel spin as he plays roulette.
Why this should be so also remains obscure.
We are further told that by the time we get to the level of the macroscopic world (the casino in which the game of roulette is being played), the quantum fluctuations on the microscopic level of reality are too small to be of significance. And yet the game of roulette (like all games, including the insurance business) is governed by the same principle—the law of large numbers—that has assembled the casino and the player out of their anarchic fundamental elements in the first place.
All gambling is a quixotic joust against the odds, and the odds are no more than another manifestation of the law of large numbers. But the roulette ball does not know that, in the long run, zero must come up once every thirty-seven times if the casino is to stay in business. Yet, in reality, on average, that is what it does.
Again, go figure.
Chapter 10
Sara was going to Philadelphia the following morning, which was a Saturday. I had been sleeping badly, and that night was no exception. I lay in the dark, watching her, listening to her breathe. I don’t know why, but suddenly I knew she was awake. And I knew she knew that I was awake. Which meant that she was pretending to sleep to avoid talking to me. I knew in that moment that I knew a great deal, and had known it for some time. I just hadn’t been willing to admit it to myself.
As though she read my thought, or perhaps she merely sensed my stillness and divined what lay behind it, she opened her eyes and turned to look at me. The words came from my mouth through no conscious decision on my part. It was as if they had spoken themselves.
“It’s Steve, isn’t it?” I heard myself say.
“Yes,” she said simply.
There was silence. I remember I lowered my head slightly. She may have taken it for, and perhaps it was, a nod of acquiescence, a passive acceptance of the worst blow that had ever been dealt me. My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard. She began to speak. She was trying to apologize, telling me how sorry she was. I cut her short. I couldn’t bear to hear it. I didn’t want to think about it. I was numb and I want
ed to stay that way.
Then she said she thought we ought to separate. I looked at her, still hardly able to believe that this was happening. “I’ll move out,” I said. “While you’re away I’ll find somewhere. I’ll arrange it.”
“Yes,” she said in a voice that was barely a whisper, “perhaps that’s best.”
I don’t remember much else. I recall making some kind of promise not to cause trouble, at the same time wondering why I wasn’t raging and breaking things and threatening to kill them both. This sense of inner dislocation between what I wanted to do and what I was actually doing served only to heighten the unreality of the moment. What was happening was impossible. And perhaps because it was impossible I didn’t believe that it was happening. I moved through events as though they were unreal, a dream from which I would awaken and everything would once again be normal. I moved from our bedroom into one of the guest rooms. I took a sleeping pill, and then another one, because I wanted oblivion. More than that, I needed it, because I feared without it that I might go mad.
Next morning I woke abruptly just after seven. My head was clear, in fact unusually so, and I remembered everything that had happened. I still felt strangely distanced from it all, like a sleepwalker going through the motions but not connecting with the world around me.
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