Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  That was the biggest weakness of my whole story, the most clear-cut proof that I had imagined it all.

  On the other hand, of course, it was possible that Dave was more than just a caricature of some computer nerd invented by my sick and befuddled imagination. It was conceivable—certainly not impossible, not something I could totally rule out—that he was actually God, or some emissary thereof. If that was the case, then all bets were off. He could present himself in any form He chose and describe reality in terms of any paradigm He wished, including ones that were familiar to me. So the fact of my not having learned anything totally new from Him was not inevitably and necessarily damning.

  But why would God do this? To test me? Like some character in the Old Testament? To that extent, God’s motives were indistinguishable from those that Dave had claimed for himself: that he wanted to find out how his programmed creation (me) would play the hand I’d been, however unjustly, dealt. That’s what he’d said: “I want to know what you’ll do now.”

  The questions were infinite and unanswerable. The more I thought about them, the more I began to spin in dizzying circles. Eventually I found myself thinking about something I’d written only that morning. At least it seemed to me that it had been that morning. According to the calendar I must have written it eighteen months ago. All the same, when I went into my study I found the notebook where I remembered leaving it. I opened it at the last page that bore my handwriting, and read:

  Or is all this speculation simply missing the point? Is something quite different going on?

  Is it all about something else?

  I took a long bath and stared at the ceiling. Sara would be back soon. What would I say? What would I do? I felt myself suffused with a strange lightness of being. I checked and rechecked aspects of my mind—memories, senses, sensibilities—like a crash survivor realizing he’s come through alive but needing to be reassured that his body is still in one piece and his limbs in working order. So far as I could see, I was still functioning more or less as usual.

  By the time she let herself into the apartment I was stretched out on the bed in my robe. I pretended not to hear her when she called out to see if I was home because I didn’t know what to say. I had a moment of panic. This was the confrontation I had been dreading, yet at the same time was impatient for.

  “George? Are you all right?”

  She was standing in the door. I turned to look at her and said, “Fine.”

  “I called, you didn’t answer.”

  “I took a bath, fell asleep. I was thinking.”

  She came over and bent down to kiss me on the forehead. “If we’re going to Rob and Charles’s party,” she said, “you need to get ready. Me too.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  I rolled off the bed looking at my watch, grateful for the chance to escape into my dressing room. The moment she had mentioned it I had known that we had to be at Rob and Charles’s loft by seven. What I didn’t know was how I knew. I hadn’t known the last time I remembered leaving the apartment. How could I have? It was eighteen months ago.

  Then again, if time and space did not exist…

  That was the thought I had to hold on to, my lifeline to sanity. Because if time and space did exist, I was almost certainly both insane and a murderer.

  Chapter 39

  For a moment in the elevator, when she asked me again if something was wrong, I hovered on the brink of coming out with the whole story. But I realized, faced with the prospect of putting it into words, how impossible that was. I made some anodyne reply, but was convinced from then on that she suspected something was seriously wrong. More than once during the evening I caught her watching me oddly when she thought I wasn’t looking. As a result I found myself watching her more closely than usual, and probably feeding her suspicions even further. We were getting caught up in a vicious circle. I had to find a way out.

  The next day was a Sunday. It was a relief to me that Sara would be spending most of it at the gallery, where they were still preparing for their opening the following Tuesday. I decided to make some kind of inventory of what I knew and what I needed to find out about my situation. Most of all I still needed to find some evidence of Larry Hart’s existence. I thought that perhaps I might return the following morning to the agency I had originally hired to track down Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige. According to Larry, who had intercepted their report to me, they had come across records that proved his existence—though of course I only had Larry’s word for that.

  But did I dare go back to that office where Nadia Shelley used to work? Could I risk opening up that can of worms by probing into one of the last cases she was involved with? Even if Larry Hart had existed, the fact was that she had always known him as George Daly. To all intents and purposes it was George Daly who had murdered her and framed Steve Coleman. On balance, I decided, it would be wise to stay away from anything that might connect me with that crime.

  I remembered that after coming across all that stuff in my father’s trunk I’d gone to a specialist movie store to see what I could find on Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige. There wasn’t much, but the guy there had searched the Web and given me a printout of their shabby careers. I had no idea what I’d done with those details; if Larry had come across them among my things he would undoubtedly have destroyed them when he destroyed all the other evidence of his existence. But he couldn’t, I supposed, have wiped the Web—although, of course, the computer could. All the same, I decided to see what I could find.

  Sure enough, I found that between 1953 and 1967 they had played together in a handful of small British pictures called Spring in Piccadilly, Whistling Through, Girl Scout Patrol, and There’s a Spy in My Soup. In 1973 Jeffrey alone played in The Silver Spoon. There was no mention of their son, Larry, in fact no reference of any kind to their private life.

  I racked my brains to think of some other avenue of inquiry I might explore. The only thing that came to mind was that secret trip back to New York—to murder Nadia—that Larry had made on his own passport while he was staying in London as George Daly. Sara and I had a friend with a travel company who made all the arrangements for her business trips as well as private travel for both of us. I was pretty sure that Larry would have used him to book his flight to London in my name, so I called him at home to see if he recalled doing so. I made some excuse about needing to check dates because of a book I was writing. He remembered perfectly well making my reservations for the flight as well as my hotel in London. (It’s amazing how any question, no matter how absurd, intrusive, or even offensive, becomes acceptable when you explain that you’re writing a book.) Using the same excuse, I then said I had a favor to ask him.

  “I’m trying to trace the movements of a man called Hart, Larry Hart,” I said. “Full name Laurence Jeffrey Hart. He might have made a round-trip between London and New York during the period I was in London. He also might have made a New York-London-New York trip a few weeks later. I’ve called a couple of airlines but they won’t come up with the information without asking a lot of questions that I don’t want to go into. Can you help?”

  He said he’d get into it, sounding as though he quite relished the challenge of showing off his expertise.

  “Who is this man?” he asked. “Who is Larry Hart?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ I said.

  I had a subscription to a couple of news services on the Web. It occurred to me that although I knew all about Steve’s trial, I had neither seen anything of it firsthand nor had I watched the daily TV or press reports. At least, that was how it seemed to me. Of course if Larry Hart and I were one, then I must have read them in the persona of my murderous alter ego and forgotten. Either way, it would be interesting to read or reread them now.

  Within a few minutes I was scrolling through the reports and accompanying photographs. There was nothing new, no revelations that I hadn’t been prepared for—until I came across one passage that shot through my brain like a bolt of l
ightning. Fibers of the pantyhose that had been used to strangle Nadia Shelley had been found on the fender of Steve’s car. They matched exactly the traces of fibers found on her body, and they also carried traces of blood that had been matched to hers. This was a key part of the forensic evidence that had helped convict Steve.

  But the pantyhose themselves had never been found. The presumption was that Steve had gotten rid of them somewhere, most likely destroyed them.

  I, however, knew differently. I knew they had never been found because Larry had hung on to them in case he needed them later to incriminate Steve yet further. I knew this because I had been told it by Dave.

  What I did not know, however, was what Larry had done with them. He must have hidden them somewhere, but where? And were they still where he had hidden them, or had he eventually destroyed them?

  Why did I not know that?

  If I were Larry, if Larry was my own insane and self-exculpatory invention, then I knew somewhere in my subconscious exactly what had happened to those pantyhose, but I was concealing that knowledge from myself.

  If, on the other hand, they were hidden in some place I could not possibly have known about or had access to, then I, George Daly, could not be Larry Hart. Which meant that the whole mad metaphor of Dave and our computer universe was not a metaphor at all. It was the plain unvarnished and outrageous truth, which I had stumbled on by probing too earnestly into the mysteries of synchronicity.

  But how to prove it either way? Still that warning note of Dave’s lingered at the back of my mind—the notion that the computer always strove to iron out contradictions and rationalize inconsistencies. Even if a “loop” of the kind he had described had arisen, it had by now been closed. The glitch had been resolved with Larry’s “death” and things had reverted to their previous state. The past had been revised. Larry had never existed; only his crimes remained.

  And they didn’t commit themselves—did they?

  Whichever way I looked at it, fate seemed determined not to let me off the hook. Guilt was closing in around me like a fog. But I refused to be overwhelmed by it without a fight. If there was any way out of this impossible situation, I determined I would find it.

  Chapter 40

  That evening, Sunday, I joined Sara at the gallery around eight and we went out to eat with a couple of the people she worked with. When we got home she was tired and went straight to bed. I was lucky that she was so preoccupied over those few days; it kept questions and awkward conversations to a minimum, and left me with time to figure out where I went from there.

  I slept barely at all that night and spent hours pacing the apartment, trying without success to distract myself by reading. I climbed back in bed alongside Sara and managed an hour or so of shallow sleep before her alarm went off at 7:30. After that I slept fitfully a while longer, but was up and having breakfast by nine. Shortly afterward my phone rang. It was my friend in the travel business with the information I’d asked him for.

  “A passenger named L. J. Hart made two round-trips within the periods you mentioned,” he said, and gave me the details—exactly as I had expected, and feared, I would hear them. I thanked him and promised him I’d give him the full story in time, if there ever was a full story—which of course, so far as he and perhaps everybody but myself was concerned, there never would be.

  What I knew now was that a man calling himself Larry Hart had actually taken those flights, which coincided (coincidence again, but of a more sinister kind than had begun this story) with Nadia Shelley’s and Clifford Edge’s murders.

  But if I had been that man and blocked out the memory, where in God’s name had I gotten the extra passport, the one in the name of Larry Hart? I had no idea how to go about obtaining such a thing. True, I’d read Day of the Jackal years ago and vaguely remembered how you could look around a graveyard, find the name of someone who’d been born about the same time as yourself, then apply for a copy of his birth certificate and use it to get a passport in his name. So had I found Larry Hart’s grave? But how? Where? It didn’t hang together.

  Or maybe it did, but I just didn’t want to see it. Maybe I was more determined to prove that Larry Hart had existed than to uncover and face up to the truth that he never had.

  Or maybe I was still just going around in circles, asking all the wrong questions.

  Maybe, as I had written once, it was all about something else.

  But what?

  That night I knew again I wouldn’t sleep, and told Sara I would use a guest room so as not to disturb her with my restlessness the night before her opening. She asked me if I was sure I was all right and suggested I see our doctor for a checkup. I assured her it was nothing more than a little temporary insomnia, but I’d get a checkup anyway.

  Around one, desperate for release from the agony of self-questioning and endless speculation, I took a sleeping pill. It was something I so rarely did that I fell asleep within half an hour. That was the first time I had the dream.

  I knew it was a dream, yet it had such an extraordinary clarity that I had no doubt I would remember it when I awoke; indeed, I was convinced it was important that I should, though I had no idea why.

  In the dream I was riding in the back of a New York cab, heading somewhere downtown, when I observed one of those odd little coincidences that happen all the time but are usually meaningless. I, however, knew by now—even in the dream—that coincidences were never meaningless. What happened was that just as the taxi meter registered a tariff of four dollars forty-four cents (4.44) a digital clock on the dash registered a time of 4:44.

  Aside from the coincidence, I knew at once that something was wrong. It was broad daylight. Manhattan was bustling with shoppers and visitors and people hurrying between appointments.

  “Your clock’s wrong,” I said to the driver. “Shouldn’t it read sixteen forty-four?”

  He shook his head briefly. “No,” he said in a guttural Slavic accent, “that’s how it works.”

  At that moment I noticed a woman on the crowded sidewalk. She was tall and beautiful in a top model sort of way—poised, cool, impeccably elegant. The dress she wore was as striking as she was herself. It was high-collared, tight-waisted, and long-sleeved, patterned in broad stripes of black and white that seemed to coil around her body like a giant snake. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, also in black and white but with a single dash of red—a flower of some kind. The skirt was long but slashed up one side to the hip, revealing legs of utter perfection moving with a hypnotic and gazellelike grace. She was an image of such unlikely theatricality on that dusty and mundane sidewalk that I was amazed she wasn’t the center of general and excited interest. Yet no one paid her the slightest attention. She moved through them like a star through a milling crowd of extras, all of whom had been instructed not on any account to acknowledge her presence.

  But of course that made perfect sense. This was, after all, a dream—in which, I reminded myself, everything was choreographed to some specific and intended point. The only question, I thought to myself as I continued dreaming, was: What point?

  The strangest thing of all was that I recognized her, though I didn’t know why or from where. But I knew at once and with absolute certainty that I had to get out of the cab, catch up with her, and speak to her.

  I pushed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand and told him to drop me right there. Then I got out of the cab and started after the woman along the busy sidewalk. Strangely, although I was hurrying as fast as I could, even breaking into a run at times, I seemed unable to catch up with her. She strolled on at her leisurely, untroubled pace, forever the same frustrating distance ahead of me.

  “It’s all right,” I told myself, “it’s just a dream, that’s why you can’t catch her. The dream is trying to tell you something. You’ll catch her if you’re supposed to.”

  Suddenly, as though that thought had been the key to closing the gap between us, I found myself right behind her, close enough to touch. I reached out for h
er shoulder, afraid she would get away again before she’d seen me.

  She turned. Her face, beautiful in its surprise at first, took on an expression of horror as she recognized me. She threw up her hands and gave a piercing scream.

  I awoke with a gasp, bathed in perspiration as though I really had been running along that warm Manhattan sidewalk. I looked at the digital clock beside my bed.

  The time was 4:44.

  Chapter 41

  The opening party at the gallery was a great success, with an even larger turnout than usual of media celebrities, well-heeled collectors, and members of lofty museum boards. Personally I found the work on show to be trash, but you can’t say that without having a degree in fine arts, preferably a doctorate, and the ability to write the kind of impenetrably meaningless prose in which art critics specialize. I smiled my way around the room, conversing on autopilot. But I was happy for Sara, who looked particularly beautiful that night and was clearly basking in her triumph.

  We didn’t get home till after two in the morning. I climbed into bed and gave Sara a big hug of congratulation—the first time I’d had the chance all evening. She fell asleep in my arms. I would normally have said she fell asleep “happily” in my arms, but I knew now that she had not found happiness with me. That knowledge hurt. Badly. After a while I gently disengaged myself and lay staring at the darkened ceiling.

  It was no good. I couldn’t sleep, and if I couldn’t sleep I was going to scream. I slipped quietly out of bed and went to my study. I sat in the dark looking out at the lights of Manhattan for almost an hour. Suddenly I became aware of Sara watching me from the door. She was genuinely concerned and made a real effort to encourage me to talk about whatever was worrying me. I managed to reassure her and sent her back to bed; the fact that she was exhausted helped a great deal. I promised I would come to bed just as soon as I’d finished working through some ideas for my book—the usual old reliable standby of an excuse.