Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  I went upstairs to undress while he had his nightcap in front of the television in the library. I flipped on the set in the bedroom to see what was happening in the world. I’d missed the headlines, but I’d catch up with them later. My hands were behind my neck unfastening the top of my dress when film of Steve came on screen. It was cut together from his election campaigns and court appearances, both as a lawyer and a man accused of murder. I watched unblinking, holding my breath, as the newscaster intoned:

  “Steven Coleman, former lawyer and rising politician who was convicted last year of murdering his ex-mistress, was seriously injured today in a knifing incident in Ballard prison, where he is serving a life sentence. The motive for the attack remains unclear, but Coleman is undergoing emergency surgery at City Hospital, where a spokesperson confirmed that his injuries are life-threatening.”

  The next item continued at the same volume, but I heard nothing of it. I turned away from the screen, surprised by my inability to know how I felt about the news. It was something I hadn’t been ready for. I knew there were dangers in prison for men like Steve. Others would see him as a symbol of the world that had made losers out of them, and they would hit back. I had read that he was going into a protected wing in a special part of the prison. After that I’d tried not to think about the risks. But now…

  I felt closed in suddenly. Trapped. I needed air, but I didn’t want to go downstairs to get out to the garden. I didn’t want to see George. At least not just then. Almost certainly he would have seen the same item on the news and I didn’t know what I would say to him. I didn’t want to have to talk about it, not to him or anybody else.

  There was a door from the old nursery that led to a corridor off which there was another door. Since there were no children in the house these days, it was locked only from the inside. It opened onto winding steps that led in one direction down to the ground floor of the house, and in another up to the terrace on top of the clock tower. I started to climb. I hadn’t been up there for the best part of a year. We’d been having some work done, but it was all finished now. I stepped out under a clear but moonless night sky and took a deep breath of cool fresh air.

  As I stood there looking out over the darkened garden, I tried to analyze how much of me wanted to rush to the hospital to be at Steve’s side and how much of me knew it was an absurd fantasy that I should let drop at once. For one thing, what made me think they would even let me see him? After all, I had no claims, no legal rights—certainly fewer than his ex-wife or his children, or any of his family. What was I to him? Or he to me? Officially?

  I wondered whether she would even go to the hospital. Linda. Would she even call up to find out how he was? I doubted it. Her bitterness at what he’d done to her was total. If she had been handed the knife that had injured him she would probably have plunged it in herself.

  Could she, I suddenly thought, have been behind the attack? But that was unlikely. Linda would never do anything to endanger herself, however indirectly, and being exposed as the vindictive wife behind a prison “hit” would be far too risky. It had to be something that just happened. An incident. A prison incident.

  I wondered what was happening to him at that moment. Was he unconscious or awake? In pain? Alone or with someone—a nurse, a doctor, a guard? Was he even alive or dead? I was making such an effort to conjure up his image that I realized I was trying in a desperate way to reach out and touch him somehow.

  Stupid. That was enough. I had to stop. I was all right now. I must go back inside, back to George. He would be looking for me, anxious to see if I’d heard the news. I could talk about it now. I was over the worst. Under control.

  I turned to start down the steps, and gasped as something moved in the shadows. It was George. I hadn’t heard him follow me up, now he stood facing me, very still, like a statue.

  “You startled me,” I said—unnecessarily, with my hand clutched over my heart.

  He didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time. Then he took a step closer. For some reason I took a step back. Then he said, “You want to go to him, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s no point in lying about it. I know.”

  I tried to find his eyes in the darkness, but I couldn’t. Then he took another step toward me. I saw his eyes now. There was something strange in them, something deep and unfathomable, or maybe he was simply so drunk he was finding it hard to focus. At any rate he was gazing at me with an intensity I hadn’t seen before. It frightened me in a way I didn’t understand. It was as though he had suddenly become someone I didn’t know.

  “George, I’m not lying…”

  The unsteadiness in my voice betrayed the unease I felt, the sense that something was very wrong between us, though I couldn’t work out what. All I wanted was to get away from that place, to be back inside, in the warmth and the light.

  “Let’s go down,” I said. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go inside.”

  He didn’t move right away. When he did, it was to take another step toward me. I tried to take another step back, away from him, but found I couldn’t. I was already up against the crenellated wall around the tower.

  I sensed as much as saw his arms coming up in the darkness, and I leaned back, shocked by the depth of my sudden and inexplicable fear of him.

  “George… what are you doing?… Please stop…”

  I held up a hand to ward him off, at the same time stumbling against the low wall. I lost my balance and felt myself tipping over into space. With a stark horror that refused to accept that this could be happening, I realized I was falling…

  “GEORGE“

  Chapter 37

  I had seen Larry’s hand start to move out of the corner of my eye. I realized at once what a fool I was, sitting there protesting the morality of our situation when his only concern was to profit by it. My reflexes kicked in and I tried to beat him to the punch, but it was too late. I knew it, and he knew it. Our eyes met, and there was a glint of triumph in his look as his open palm crashed down on the button while my own was still a clear foot away.

  His body continued the same fluid forward movement that had started with his hand and arm. He slumped forward in his chair, hung for a moment as though still held by the invisible restraints that hampered us both, then fell back, his head lolling to one side, his mouth open, and his eyes staring. It was an expression somewhere between astonishment and vacancy. He was, unless I was very much mistaken, dead.

  Dave stood over the body, nodding with satisfaction, as though this was precisely the outcome he had anticipated.

  It took me a while to find my voice. Then all I managed to say was, “What happened?”

  Dave looked over in my direction. “Pretty much what I thought would happen,” he said.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Oh, yes, he’s dead.”

  “But… he struck first.”

  “Right.”

  I realized that I was standing, looking down at the inert form across from me. The restraints, whatever they were, that had kept me in my chair had been lifted, and without being aware of it I had gotten to my feet.

  “Surely you knew he would,” I said.

  “It seemed likely.”

  I stared at him, incredulous. “You mean you rigged it?”

  Dave gave that oddly inscrutable little smile of his that I had grown accustomed to. “You could say that, I suppose, though I wouldn’t necessarily agree. What I did was design a strategy to find out what I want to know.”

  “And what is it that you want to know?”

  He continued to look at me. There was a stillness about him now that made his gaze oddly penetrating.

  “I want to know what you’ll do now,” he said.

  I looked at him, perplexed. “Why?”

  His eyes didn’t flicker as he continued smiling, watching me. “Figure it out,” he said. “I told you this was a research project.”

  It took a moment for it to sink
in. Then, as I finally understood the enormity of what had just been done to me, I felt as though a lead weight had been dropped into the pit of my stomach, knocking the breath and indeed the very life out of me.

  “You shit!” was all I managed to say.

  I must have looked away for a second, because when I turned back he was gone. So was Larry’s body. Nor, when I looked at the two chairs we had both been held down in, was there any sign of those strange buttons on the arms. I searched quickly from room to room. I was the only person in the apartment.

  Then I realized that the world outside was back to normal. Everything was moving again. I looked at my watch: It was a few minutes after three, but the information told me nothing. All I knew was that I was George Daly, and something had just happened to me that no one would ever believe. That was my first thought: I could never tell anybody about this. There was no imaginable way that any sane and normal person would take such a claim seriously. I would immediately be classified as clinically deluded, or at the very least a harmless crank.

  Then they would discover that I was far from harmless. In the few hours I claimed I’d spent talking with the man in charge of the computer in which—allegedly—our cyberworld existed, a whole eighteen months had passed back here in everybody else’s world. In that period someone had murdered Nadia Shelley and Clifford Edge. Edge’s death remained unsolved, but Steve was serving life for Nadia’s murder, of which I knew he was innocent. I knew that the real killer was someone whose existence I could not prove, but who had been living my life for the past eighteen months.

  Or was there a way to prove it? At least a place to start? Hardly more than an hour ago I had sat with Larry and Dave in a cafe just around the corner. Surely someone there, our waitress at least, would remember us. A few minutes later I walked in the door of the place. All the tables were taken, but I saw the waitress I was looking for across the room and went over to her. I had to wait till she finished taking someone’s order, then I asked her if she remembered me from an hour or so back with two other men. I described Dave and Larry in detail and pointed out the table we’d been at.

  She looked unsure and a little startled by the urgency of my question. I repeated it, insisting she couldn’t possibly not remember us. She kept saying she was sorry, but there were so many people through there all the time that she couldn’t remember everybody. I told her I wasn’t asking about everybody; I was asking about myself and two other men, and for Christ’s sakes it was only an hour ago!

  A man in a white apron came over from behind the counter. He was young, built like a football player, probably working his way through college. He asked if there was any problem in a way that made it sound like a warning. I told him what the problem was, and he said if Sharon—I think that was her name—didn’t remember me, then that was that. Now perhaps I wouldn’t mind if she got on with her work.

  She hurried off toward the kitchen as though glad to get away from me. I became aware that conversations had stopped and people were looking at us. I took advantage of that to ask the whole room if any of them had been there an hour ago and remembered seeing me with two other men. No one replied.

  I realized the football player had his hand on my upper arm and was steering me toward the door. When I tried to protest and pull free he tightened his grip painfully. “Okay,” he said, “you’ve asked your question and gotten your answer. Now I’m asking you to leave. We don’t want any trouble.”

  Followed by every eye in the place I was steered out to the sidewalk, where I finally shook myself free and walked away, feeling humiliated. I walked back to our building, where I had another idea.

  As I entered the lobby I saw one of our doormen, Joe, at his desk as he had been a few minutes earlier when I left. He’d also been on duty when I set out for my walk in the park before noon. I kicked myself for not having thought of this before.

  “Joe,” I said, going up to him, “you saw me go out of here just now, didn’t you?”

  He looked a little puzzled but answered politely. “Sure I did, Mr. Daly. Ten, fifteen minutes ago.”

  “And do you remember what time I went out this morning? You did see me, I know, because we spoke.”

  He frowned, thinking about this, but only to establish the time. “Must’ve been around noon. Maybe a little before.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since then?”

  “Haven’t left this desk.”

  “Perfect. So tell me, Joe, between seeing me go out around noon and go out again fifteen minutes ago, did you see me come back at all?”

  He frowned again, but seemed a little more uncertain this time. “I believe I did, Mr. Daly, but, you know, sometimes you can’t be sure. People come and go and I don’t keep a list or nothing…”

  I looked up at the security camera on the wall behind his desk. “But that,” I said, pointing at it triumphantly, “sees everything—right?”

  “Well, I guess it does, Mr. Daly. That’s what it’s there for.” He continued to look at me uncertainly, curious about what I was driving at, but I knew I could count on his cooperation.

  “Listen, Joe,” I said, “this is very important to me, but for reasons I don’t want to go into. Can you play back the tape that camera recorded and show me exactly what time I came back from my walk in the park, and whether I was alone?”

  His expression changed from puzzled to concerned now. “That’s kind of difficult, Mr. Daly. I’m not supposed to touch that stuff, except maybe in an emergency, and even then I’m supposed to call the security company that installed it.”

  “But you’d know how to do it if you had to, wouldn’t you? You’d know how to look at the tape?”

  “Oh, I’d know how. Sure I’d know.”

  I watched his eyes as they followed the movement of my hand to my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. “Joe,” I said, “I’m not going to get you into any trouble, but I really want you to do this for me. Will you play me that tape showing me when I came in between going out at midday and going out again fifteen minutes ago?”

  “Well, I guess I could, Mr. Daly, but…”

  I placed a fifty-dollar bill on his desk and pushed it toward him. He looked at it with interest but made no effort to take it.

  “… thing is, you see, I’d have to make it all right with this guy I know at the security firm, so no one’ll know I stopped the tape. I could lose my job for this.”

  Whether or not he was telling the truth, another fifty did the trick. He disappeared into a back room. While he was gone a senator’s widow who had a pied-a-terre on the third floor left, and a dog walker returned with two poodles belonging to an Italian couple we’d had drinks with one time. When Joe returned he resumed his seat and told me to watch one of the four monitors in front of him. He fast-forwarded till I recognized the caricatural flash of my own outline crossing the floor. I asked him to rewind.

  An image reappeared, walking backward, then froze just beyond the door and started in again. A readout in one corner gave that day’s date, and recorded the exact time as 13:05:17.

  The figure was unmistakably me.

  Alone.

  Chapter 38

  I went through every drawer and closet in the apartment, desperate to find one detail, however tiny, that might offer some proof of Larry Hart’s existence. There was nothing, but that didn’t exactly surprise me. I knew that Larry himself, after getting back from that last trip to England when he’d murdered Clifford, had destroyed every shred of evidence that he’d ever lived. I knew that because Dave had told me.

  There was something else Dave had told me, something about how the computer operated, something that I had later explained to Larry: how it would always do everything possible to rationalize and straighten out any loops and glitches that might arise, even by retroactive action if necessary. Could it be that I was looking for something that had once existed, but that now, because the past had been redrafted, never had? In which case I, because I and I alone could recall this delet
ed past, was the anomaly?

  I pondered this elusive notion for a few moments, turning in circles but always returning to the same point, the point I realized now that I was trying to avoid: that there was another and far more reasonable explanation to what was going on. I had to face the fact of how alarmingly well everything fitted into the scenario of a jealous husband suffering some psychotic break, a fugue—whatever the clinical term for it might be—and committing two murders about which he recollected everything, aside from the fact that he had committed them himself. Larry and Dave and the whole crazy thing about a computer universe were, by any rational analysis, more likely to be fictions than fact—fictions I had invented in order to hide from myself the terrible truth that I was a killer, and insane.

  That explanation was supported by the security tape I had seen downstairs—myself walking into the building alone at the time when, in my subjective memory, I had somehow made a magical transition with Dave and Larry from the cafe to the apartment. Obviously it didn’t happen like that, except in my head.

  Unless—that thought again—the computer was busily ironing things out to make them appear “normal.”

  But could anyone in their right mind take such a proposition seriously? That it was “all just a computer”? Could anybody accept such a notion as sufficient explanation for the existence of the Parthenon, the works of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven—et cetera? The list was arbitrary and endless. The idea was cheap, cynical, and frankly stupid.

  Furthermore, when I thought about it, I realized that I had learned nothing from Dave that I hadn’t already known or at least speculated about in the past. I knew, for example, that the physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term “black hole,” had said, “There is no space and no time. There is no out there out there.” I hadn’t heard it first from Dave.