Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  My number. A feeling of panic swept over me. I had no number. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Any moment now I was going to be exposed as having entered under false pretenses, and who knew what the consequences of that might be? I started to mumble something about having forgotten, but then I realized I hadn’t forgotten at all. I’d been given the number, surely, in my dream.

  “Nine-one-one,” I said impulsively, and with a conviction that I frankly didn’t feel.

  “That will be over here,” she said without a blink of hesitation. “If you’ll step this way, sir.”

  I followed her to my left, through an opening the size of a door but with no door in it. She gestured to the wall in front of me, about halfway up. There, sure enough, I saw a drawer-sized steel door marked “911.”

  “If you require privacy to deal with any business you may have, remember we have individual cubicles for that purpose.” She indicated four more doors, one in each corner of the room. “If you need any further assistance, just call me, or press the buzzer on the wall.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “you’ve been very helpful. Thank you very much.”

  I waited till she had gone before trying my card in the door marked “911.” I didn’t want to discover at this final hurdle, and under her inscrutable gaze, that my dream had been inaccurate or incomplete. As I slipped my card into the slot provided, there was an immediate soft click. I breathed a sigh of relief mixed with apprehension as the small door sprang open, revealing a flat steel box with a handle attached. I pulled it out. The top was hinged, but I didn’t open it right away. I headed for the privacy of one of the corner cubicles, knowing with a sickening and terrible certainty what I was going to find.

  The only thing in the box was a clean white envelope, not even sealed. It contained a clear plastic bag in which were the remains of a pair of pantyhose. I could see a couple of dark stains that I took to be blood, and they were shredded where Larry had hooked them on Steve’s fender to leave the traces that had sealed his guilt.

  Instinctively I reached out to check the lock on the door of the little boxlike cubicle in which I sat. I knew I’d locked it when I entered, so the action was merely a response to the wave of panic that surged over me. For a moment I wondered if I would ever be able to leave that tiny cell-like place. Maybe I would stay there till they broke the door down and found my putrefying corpse. The impact of my discovery had been worse than I had imagined even in my darkest moments. I didn’t know how to go out and face the world again. I think I had a kind of brief nervous breakdown sitting there on that plain bench before an equally plain table, hypnotized by that open box and its dreadful contents.

  I tried to look at things logically. Had the chain of events that had brought me to this point been truly synchronicitous or in any other way out of the ordinary? Was I the victim of a fate over which I had no control, or the perpetrator of crimes that my unconscious was finally forcing me to face up to? Surely—Occam’s razor again—I had to choose the latter as the most likely explanation. Being haunted in my dreams by what I’d done made a lot more sense than the idea that the whole universe was merely the plaything of Dave and his computer.

  But how about that strange business of waking up three times at exactly 4:44 A.M.? What explanation was there for that? Well, I told myself, it’s a known fact that some people can set themselves to wake up like an alarm clock, right on the dot. Maybe it’s a faculty we all possess but just don’t normally use. Furthermore, who’s to say I hadn’t been lying there with my eyes open waiting for 4:44 to come up, and only consciously registering the clock face when it did? Nobody could say that wasn’t how it happened, including me.

  Same thing with the pantyhose commercial on TV. I’d fallen asleep but unconsciously registered it, maybe just the sound track, when it came up. I’d seen it before, so it had already connected—unconsciously—with the terrible secret that I was keeping hidden from myself.

  I was beginning to sound in my head like a phone-in shrink, but that wasn’t going to get me off the hook. Nothing was. Everything pointed to my guilt.

  Except the possibility that Dave was real and had told me the truth.

  So who had hidden that damning piece of shredded, bloodstained, DNA-rich nylon in this place? George Daly calling himself Larry Hart? Or Larry Hart calling himself George Daly? In either case the motive was the same—to keep the evidence safe until it had to be planted on Steve. And if that did not become necessary, the next logical step was to destroy it—wasn’t it?

  I wondered if that was why I was there. To destroy the evidence. Was that what I wanted?

  My mobile rang with a startling loudness in that tiny space. I plucked it from my inside pocket and answered. It was Lou, waiting for me in the restaurant and wondering where the hell I was. I said I would be there in fifteen minutes and hung up.

  I remained motionless a few seconds more. I had responded to his question with total spontaneity; now I had to reflect whether I intended to do what I had said I would. I decided I did.

  All I had to make up my mind about now was what I was going to do with that white envelope and its contents. Should I lock them up again? Or take them with me and decide what to do with them later?

  Another moment’s hesitation. Then I stuffed the envelope into my jacket, unlocked the door, and left.

  Chapter 44

  There’s a story scientists like to tell,” I said to Lou over my risotto al mare, “about some great luminary, an Einstein or a Bertrand Russell, someone like that, who’s giving a public lecture on astronomy. He explains how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around a vast collection of stars in the galaxy, and so on and so forth. At the end of the lecture a little old lady gets up at the back of the room and says, ‘Everything you’ve told us is rubbish. It’s perfectly obvious that the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle.’

  “So the great scientist gives a condescending smile and says, ‘Then perhaps you can tell us, madam, by what is the turtle supported?’

  “’You’re very clever, young man,’ says the little old lady, ‘but you don’t fool me. It’s turtles all the way down.’”

  Lou chuckled merrily.

  “Scientists tell that story,” I said, “not because it’s a putdown of little old ladies and stupid superstitions, but because it expresses their own worst fears.”

  A bushy eyebrow lifted in mild surprise. “How come?”

  “We know there are limits to logic, limits to what we can prove, limits to what can be known about the quantum world because it’s inherently unknowable. And yet scientists go on probing, discovering new particles, coming up with new theories, refining equations, all in pursuit of the Holy Grail of a unified theory—one theory that explains everything. One particle, one force, instead of the four we have now; one equation that describes the single basic building block of the universe.”

  I scooped up another forkful of my lunch, which was probably as excellent as ever, though frankly I was in no frame of mind to appreciate such things. I leaned slightly toward Lou to make sure he was paying attention.

  “But suppose,” I said, “just suppose it’s a hopeless quest. Suppose the universe isn’t made up of any one thing that we can finally put our finger on and say, ‘That’s it.’ Suppose all that ever happens is that when we look at something closely enough, it turns into something else? Mass becomes energy; a wave becomes a particle; a particle becomes a superstring; so on ad infinitum. In other words, reality is a stack of Russian dolls—open one and there’s another one inside. All we’re really doing is chasing our own tails. Sure, we’re building rockets to Mars and microwave ovens, but those are by-products, not the goal. It’s a scary thought that maybe there is no goal. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down—turtles or whatever. But no final answers. Because we’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Lou thought this over for a moment, then said, “So where should we be looking?”

&n
bsp; “Ah, if I knew that, Lou, I’d be able to write a really interesting book.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “All I know is that maybe it’s all about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  I thought about it for a while, then took a shot. After all, it was only a conversation between old friends.

  “Maybe it’s not what we are that matters so much as what we do.”

  Lou gave a grunt of surprise and mild disapproval. “Are you getting religion or something?”

  “Maybe ‘or something.’ Mystics would know what I’m talking about. They find the idea that we can ever define reality and hold it in our hand as laughable.”

  “But mystics, as you pointed out, don’t build rockets to the moon or invent nonstick frying pans.”

  “That’s not necessarily so, Lou. You don’t have to spend your life on a mountaintop contemplating infinity to be a mystic. You can perfectly well be a chemist or a plumber or an engineer. The point is you know that reason and logic and the technology you build on them aren’t going to give you all the answers.”

  “Because it’s all about something else that’s got nothing to do with reason or logic?”

  There was a glint of amusement in his eye. I suspected that Lou thought all speculation of this kind was a fool’s game, albeit one that he enjoyed playing sometimes. Or maybe he was simply humoring me.

  “Right,” I said. “Reason and logic are not the way to truth.”

  “Maybe we should just say fuck the truth.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. Frankly, I don’t know.”

  I finished eating and sat back. Lou had ordered a dessert, but all the same he lit up one of his cigars while he was waiting for it. I watched him as a haze of blue smoke curled around him.

  “Tell me, Lou,” I said, “the last couple of times we had lunch together, do you remember what we talked about?”

  He looked mildly surprised. “Not specially. Why, what was it?”

  “I don’t recall. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  He shrugged. “The same kind of stuff as usual, I guess.”

  “You mean like this? Ideas, stuff I might turn into a book?”

  “Yeah, like we always do. I forget the details. Why d’you ask?”

  “Oh, no reason,” I said, feeling suddenly that it was futile to pursue the question; after all, what would it prove? “It’s not important.”

  “One thing I remember,” he said after a while, gazing ru-minatively at the glowing tip of his cigar, “you told me you were giving up on that book you’d been planning to write about coincidence.”

  “I did? Did I say why?”

  He shrugged. “You said it wasn’t going anywhere. Which I thought was a pity. I always liked that idea. If you change your mind, we can still make a deal.”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking over what he’d said. Then I shrugged. “It’s still not going anywhere, and I doubt if it ever will. It turned into a dead end.”

  “Turtles all the way down, huh?”

  I looked at him, surprised by how quickly he’d picked up on the metaphor. He looked back at me across the table with an expression of shrewd amusement, though I doubted whether he had any idea how shrewd he’d just been, or how bleakly amused he had a right to be.

  “Something like that,” I said. “Turtles all the way down.”

  Chapter 45

  According to Sara, it had been my idea to go up to East-ways that weekend. I had made some casual remark about not having been there for a while, and she had seized on it and decided we should go. She sensed the strain between us that week and felt, I suspected, that we needed to spend some time together alone.

  As the week passed, I dreaded the prospect increasingly. My feelings toward Sara were becoming unbearably painful to me. Whoever had been with her over the past months, whether it was Larry assuming my identity or myself in some kind of split-personality phase, had established a very different relationship from any that I was capable of living with. The gulf between my feelings for her and her feelings for me (or whoever had been in my place and whose relationship with her I had now inherited) was deep and unbridgeable. I felt the same love for her I always had. I was still suffering from the—for me—recent bombshell of learning that she loved someone else. At the same time I was living the endgame of that story. In what was for me a period of days, I had gone from a state of unblemished happiness with a wife I loved and who I thought loved me, to heartbreak when I discovered she was leaving me for someone else, then almost at once to this strange limbo in which she had come back to me for companionship and kindness, which I now had to accept was all she had ever really wanted from me. I did not know how to play the role in which I had been cast. I did not want to play it.

  Throughout my lunch with Lou, the envelope and its incriminating contents had remained in my inside jacket pocket. Not for one second during our whole conversation had I forgotten its existence. When I got back to the apartment I hid it carefully at the back of a drawer in my desk, buried under a stack of old notebooks and articles I had collected for research. Almost afraid that I had imagined the whole episode, I had checked three times the same evening that it was still there. Afterward I had been forced to accept not only that it was a physical reality: It was also going to have consequences. Whatever they might be, there was no escaping them.

  By ignoring or even destroying the evidence I condemned an innocent man to rot in jail for a crime he had not committed. By producing it, I would almost certainly condemn myself to take his place. I had few illusions about how far a defense of “it wasn’t me but a doppelganger because, you see, we all live in a computer’” would, as lawyers say, fly.

  For me, of course, that defense would be no more than the truth. I had no doubt about what I had experienced. The question was to what extent could our own experiences lie to us? It was a fact that the human mind could deceive itself to an extraordinary degree. In the end, both in theory and in practice, it was impossible to draw a clear line between the real thing and a hallucination. Maybe it was best just to accept that fact and stop worrying about it. Maybe the distinction between illusion and reality was unimportant.

  But what about the distinction between truth and lies? Was I lying when I said I hadn’t killed anybody? Was I lying even though I believed I was telling the truth but couldn’t prove it?

  If I was George and only George and had been all along, I had nothing to reproach myself with.

  On the other hand, if I had turned into Larry and committed murder, I’d gotten away with it. I’d won. So why quit now? The only possible reason would be that I’d turned back into George, and as George I couldn’t live with my terrible secret.

  But suppose I turned back into Larry? Or suppose in some part of myself I still was Larry? Suppose the only reason my unconscious had prompted me to recover those pantyhose was so that I could destroy them and ensure my safety forever?

  The more I thought about it, turning and turning with the permutations of it all till my head spun, the more I wondered if Lou was right and we should just say fuck the truth.

  Only time would tell: time, which was a subjective concept anyway. And events, which, if mind really cannot be separated from matter, are at least partly what we make them.

  At any rate, something would happen. That was my only hope.

  And fear.

  We arrived at the house late on Friday evening. Martha had prepared something simple, which we ate in the library with the television on—something we tended to do increasingly when we found ourselves alone together. I took a sleeping pill because I didn’t want to find myself awake and restless again in the middle of the night. It was agreeable to wake up to brilliant sunlight at 8:15 next morning. I pulled on a robe and found Sara already drinking coffee and reading the papers downstairs.

  The day got off to an unproblematic enough start. In the morning Sara did some shopping: There were a couple of craft shops locally where sh
e stocked up periodically on things that she could use as little gifts whenever the need arose. I tried to read, but concentration was impossible. I took a long walk, and as I returned found myself gazing up at the clock tower, remembering what Larry had planned for that night when Sara had driven up to join him. She would never know how close she had come to death that night. If she had not had Steve with her…

  There was a message waiting for me from Sara. She’d run into a friend and wondered if I would like to join them for lunch in a restaurant nearby. I called her on her mobile and said I thought I’d stay home and get on with some work. Martha made me an omelette, which I ate while watching more television.

  That night we had dinner with a couple of old bores called Tom and Cecily Winters. The only people I ever met who were invariably more boring than them were their guests. It was a godawful evening, which for some reason irritated me even more than usual. They had always, I suspected, felt that Sara had married beneath herself. Who was this so-called author whose name they never saw in the New York Times or Readers’ Digest? Still, I was tolerated for Sara’s sake, though that evening I sensed something new in the air. It was as though they knew that Sara and I had drifted apart and that maybe they wouldn’t have to tolerate me for much longer. It was a feeling they made plain in all kinds of subtle ways: References to people, places, and upcoming events were aimed, it seemed to me, deliberately over my head, as though by general consent I would not be around by then to participate. No effort was made to include me in discussions of subjects about which I knew nothing and cared less. I neither bred, raced, nor rode horses, therefore was irrelevant to a discussion about Henry’s new mare or the prospects of a win at wherever-the-hell. If I went to Aspen or St. Moritz in the winter it was not to see my friends but Sara’s, therefore my views on so-and-so and someone else were not canvassed. No one thought to ask if I would be going to Gertie Buggerheim’s (or whoever’s) party in Venice at Easter, only whether Sara would.