“There’s loads of people.”
“I know. But can you see Dad?”
Someone whistled again, and someone else called out something rude, that I prayed Benjamin didn’t understand. The noise returned, men laughing and shouting.
“I can’t see,” said Benjamin. “I’ll have a quick look. Don’t move. I’ll come back for you.”
“Wait, Benjamin!” I said, but he’d gone, and then a couple of things happened at once.
I began to panic. My little brother was somewhere in a bar of guys all drinking and having loud fun, and I didn’t know where he was. That was the first thing, and the second thing was that my phone rang.
VoiceOver spoke the name of the caller to me. I didn’t catch it at first, but as it spoke the second time I held it to my ear.
It was Mum.
And just as I was wondering whether to answer it or not, I dropped it.
It was so loud in the bar I couldn’t hear where it landed, and I fell to my knees immediately, and began to sweep my hands around frantically.
There was laughter, shouts.
“Hey, sweetheart, take your shades off!”
“Forget that, take your clothes off!”
There was more laughter and I still couldn’t find my phone. It was still ringing but in all the din I couldn’t tell where it was, and I wasn’t looking for it properly, not sensibly, just waving my hands around on the floor, stupidly.
“Look at her go!” laughed another man, and then Benjamin was there, kneeling on the floor next to me.
“Laureth, get up. Get up, Laureth. Dad’s not here. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“He’s not?” I said.
“I can’t see him. I don’t want to be in here anymore.”
He was right about that.
“But my phone…”
“I’ve got your phone,” he said. We stood up and hurried out of the bar, as fast as we could, with more dirty comments following me.
We walked down the street, without stopping for ages.
“Where are we going?” asked Benjamin.
“Away from there.”
We walked on for a bit until the desire to cry had left me, and then I remembered something.
“Give me my phone,” I said, and Benjamin hesitated.
“Give me my phone. Benjamin. What is it?”
“Please don’t be cross with me,” he said, and he sounded so worried, I knew immediately what had happened.
The Benjamin Effect. My phone was dead.
THE HUMAN MIND
“She doesn’t mean to be cross,” Benjamin said.
He was talking to Stan but I knew it was for my benefit.
I sighed, heavily.
“I’m not cross,” I said. I held out my hand and after a moment Benjamin took it. I pulled him into a cuddle before he could argue, and then began tickling him and jabbing him in the ribs, till he was giggling wildly.
“Hey! Hey stop it!” he cried, laughing. “Hey, I’ve dropped Stan!”
I let him go then so he could rescue the raven.
There was a sudden silence and I knew what was coming.
“Raven attack!” wailed Benjamin and suddenly Stan was in my face, flapping his wings and cawing. I laughed and did the best job I could of being pecked at by Stan.
“No! No, stop! Oh, please stop!” I said, mucking about and Stan must have been satisfied because the attack ended abruptly.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Benjamin, just like that.
I tried my phone again, but it had had its brain fried for sure.
“Well,” I said.
“Are we going to that other street corner? The one the man said? Thirty-Fifth and Park?”
I hesitated. I really doubted there would be anything there, and I just couldn’t take any more disappointments, and I was pretty sure Benjamin couldn’t, either.
Maybe I had something at the back of my mind, something Dad had once said about near misses.
One day he came over to me and sat down with a heavy thump on the sofa next to me.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Steady now,” I said.
“Funny girl,” he said. “No, listen. You know the thing that really gets me about coincidences?”
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“The thing that really gets me is this; for all the times a coincidence happens, there must be just as many times when one nearly happens. In fact, there are probably thousands of near misses for every coincidence that does happen, but we just don’t know about it.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I got back from that Swedish book fair last week, and I came through the airport. And I came home.”
“So?”
“Exactly. So what? But supposing there was an old school friend, someone I haven’t seen in twenty years also coming back that day, and I missed him by seconds. Just around a corner, or something. Doesn’t that freak you out? That idea?”
“Dad,” I said. “I think you’ve been working too hard again. Or not hard enough. One of the two.”
“Maybe,” he said, and so I was thinking about near misses, and what if Dad was at that other street corner trying to count if there were 354 paving stones or something?
“Are we?” Benjamin repeated.
“No,” I said, trying to see if I felt better for making up my mind. I didn’t much, but it was a decision at least.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re too tired, and it’s too late, and I think we ought to go back to the hotel now. We’ll try tomorrow.”
“But won’t we be with Dad tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Of course.”
“I hope so,” said Benjamin, very quietly.
* * *
As we trundled along in a taxi, I held my phone, pressing the power button again and again, but there was nothing. I wanted to phone Mum back, I was desperate to speak to her, to hear her voice, and yet I couldn’t blame Benjamin; he’d only wanted to get us out of that bar as fast as possible and I had wanted that, too.
It had seemed to me as though the smelly tramp had been sent to us. It had seemed to me that he was the Hound, come to find us and nudge us on our way, but as we rode silently back to the hotel, I knew it was something else that had been at work.
I’d had a long conversation with Dad about this, a while ago, and it was something called apophenia.
There was, of course, stuff about it in The Black Book.
APOPHENIA
Apophenia is a fancy word, but all it means is that thing we all have inside us, a desire, a tendency, a need in fact, to spot patterns. The human mind is very good at spotting patterns.
It’s an evolutionary development. To spot faces, for example. We’re so good at spotting faces, that we see them all over the place: all it takes is a line and two dots above it for us to see one. Even the front of a car, or a house with two windows above a central door, or in fact anything with two blobs and a line reminds people of a face.
To be able to quickly spot faces, and therefore friendly faces from hostile ones, would have been really important to our distant ancestors.
Other patterns would have been important, too, like seeing the marks of a leopard camouflaged among the grass, or the spots of a jellyfish in the shallows. Maybe basic pattern recognition is even how sight started in the first place.
Patterns aren’t just visual though: it must have been important to our ancestors to spot that autumn came after summer, which came after spring, so they knew when to plant things. The ability to spot the patterns of the moon and the sun must have come along around then too. All very useful. Essential in fact, if you’re a caveman.
It might not seem like much, but it’s a very impressive skill. One of the biggest challenges facing scientists working with Artificial Intelligence is getting a computer to spot patterns. They’ve had some success, which is why Jane’s got a digital camera that knows where people’s faces are. She laughed when it
tried to focus on that snowman Benjamin made, but the camera had spotted a face; two blobs of coal and a carrot.
But if you try and get a computer to spot unspecified patterns between things, they’re almost totally useless. And yet your average five-year-old can work out the simplest connections better than the smartest computer.
That’s why a small child can tell you the connection between Santa Claus and Rudolph is that they both have something red about them, while a robot will spin around screaming “does not compute” and “illogical” until steam comes out its ears and it blows up.
So we’ve evolved to become very good at spotting patterns, and more than that, we actually LIKE to spot patterns.
We like it SO MUCH, we even do it when there isn’t actually a pattern there to be spotted. We easily make one up, we find it among all the information presented to us, even if all that’s in front of us is no more than random noise.
* * *
That’s apophenia. Finding a pattern when it isn’t really there.
And that’s what Benjamin and I had just been guilty of.
We’d wanted to find meaning in the number 354, and with thousands, no wait, millions of numbers at our disposal in New York, we’d turned it into an address and duly trotted off to find out that we were deluding ourselves.
It’s that same business as the birthday problem again; with enough numbers to choose from, of course you’re going to find the odd coincidence sooner or later. Like Carl Jung. He got all freaked out because of what had once happened in the case of the scarab beetle and his patient. The key word in all that is “once.” Given that he must have conducted thousands of therapy sessions in his life, it would have been more remarkable if he’d never experienced some kind of coincidence connected to one, wouldn’t it? And to make matters worse, it wasn’t even a real scarab beetle trying to get through the window, just something like a scarab beetle.
And yet that simple thing was enough to set Jung on a lifelong mission to find out what coincidences mean.
We could have walked back to the hotel faster than the taxi, and as we trundled long, Benjamin flicked through the notebook.
Coincidentally, you might say, the pages he read were about Jung. Jung, and some other people, including the man that Benjamin’s “effect” was named after Wolfgang Pauli.
And what Benjamin read, I didn’t like the sound of at all, not one little bit.
THE FATAL IDEA
Needs must, I always say, and right now I NEED to find out THE TRUTH about all this so I can put it in MY DAMN BOOK!
* * *
Let’s recap
Protagonist finds out the truth.
Tips him over the edge.
What is this truth? Something bad? I have been supposing that the truth behind coincidences is something positive, something good. But why did I assume that? Supposing it’s not?
Something bad tips him over the edge and leads to the inevitable.
Which is?
Think more about this … Still need a plot!
* * *
There is some idea, some fatal idea lurking. The Hound is not a force for good, but one of destruction?
* * *
Jung’s search for meaning.
1930: Pauli publishes major work on the neutrino, immediately has a nervous breakdown. He consults the top psychiatrist—Carl Jung.
Jung finds Pauli’s dreams fascinating, and soon they begin to discuss the connections between their two apparently very different sciences; psychology and physics. They seek the connections between the mind and the universe.
Pauli becomes convinced that the link between physics and psychology is Jung’s synchronicity—COINCIDENCE.
Jung and Pauli discuss the underlying nature of the universe. They believe there is a single number that explains everything, and begin to wonder if the number is the weird choice of a certain three-digit number: 137.
Pauli becomes obsessed with the number.
But Pauli’s number was 137. The number is known as the FINE-STRUCTURE CONSTANT and the discovery of its true value has been the obsession of many great physicists. The fine-structure constant, 137, is critical in explaining the behavior of light, among other things.
Light is energy.
Energy, as Einstein tells us in E=mc2, is the same as matter.
Therefore light IS matter and therefore EVERYTHING can be explained by the number 137.
Jung and Pauli wrote a book on the subject together, each of them writing one half. It is a book that few people understand, and one that greatly damaged Pauli’s reputation as a reputable scientist.
But Pauli continued to see this number underlying many values in physics, like a fingerprint. He believed it was a number with special significance in the universe, and it appeared to him continually, not only inside his lab, but outside it, too.
As he pursued his hunt for the meaning of 137, his life and career sank into increasing chaos.
Toward the end of his life, he contracted cancer. He was wheeled into a hospital room. The number on the door was 137.
He told his friends he would not be leaving the room, and they told him he was being foolish. But he was right. He died in room 137.
* * *
Other disciples of coincidence:
Albert Einstein.
Carl Jung.
Arthur Koestler.
Paul Kammerer.
Today,
I put the following initials into the anagram server website at http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html
Albert Einstein – AE
Carl Jung – CJ
Arthur Koestler – AK
Paul Kammerer – PK
There is only one result. A result that has scared the hell out of me. When I saw it on screen I did not believe it. Thought someone was playing some weird joke on me. But the only one who could be playing a trick on me is the universe. The Hound of Heaven.
I know about Einstein and Jung, but only a little about Koestler and Kammerer. READ MORE:
Paul Kammerer, a contemporary of Jung. Most notably a geneticist, he also developed an elaborate theory of coincidences, called The Law of Seriality. Wrote a book with the same name.
In 1926, Kammerer committed suicide. He went out into the Schneeberg Forest in the Austrian Alps, put a gun to the left side of his head, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Koestler also wrote a whole book on coincidence.
As he wrote it, while researching Kammerer, a shower of coincidences happened to him. He thought Kammerer’s ghost was guiding him.
In “The Roots of Coincidence” he discusses probability, and its relation to apparent coincidences. He wrote about how the universe seems to stop existing at the quantum level. He discussed physics’ weakness; that it only considers matter, and, as Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV would also do many years later, asked, “Where is my mind?”
By which he meant: What is the universe if it is not understood by a human mind? Does it exist at all?
His thoughts therefore echo Jung and Pauli; that to understand the universe we must unify psychology and physics. Mind and matter.
Arthur Koestler committed suicide in 1983. He made a suicide pact with his wife and she killed herself alongside him.
* * *
George Price, one of America’s greatest thinkers. Also a geneticist. Inventor of the Price Equation.
Price began to be obsessed with coincidence. After an incredible series of coincidences happened to him, he, being a clever mathematician, calculated the odds of what had happened, and found it too much to believe.
He “gave in and had to admit that God existed.”
As a result he had some sort of religious conversion. He walked into a church in London on June 14th 1970 and pressed the priest to give him the answers he sought. He gave away all his money and possessions, invited tramps into his home. He also became interested in a three-digit number, though HIS number was 666. An infamous number, popularly known as
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, though Price believed it had a true and hidden meaning.
He calmly committed suicide in 1975, opening his carotid artery with a pair of nail scissors. He put a note on the bathroom door warning whoever it was that would find him.
In his suicide note, he quoted from a poem.
The poem was “The Hound of Heaven.”
TWO DRIED MICE
That passage in the Black Book horrified me.
Benjamin didn’t understand everything he was reading. In fact, neither did I, but I understood enough to become seriously worried.
Benjamin was still reading as the taxi reached the hotel, and he finished the notebook sitting on the bed, with me sitting next to him, half wondering why I could still hear the sounds of New York in the street below, when all I should have been wondering about was whether Dad had followed the path of those other men, those other men who’d become obsessed with coincidence, and had ended up taking their own lives.
I wanted to scream, and to cry, but I couldn’t do either.
Benjamin was talking to Stan, just chatting away as if nothing odd were happening. I couldn’t believe he was still awake; I was exhausted, I wanted to curl up and sleep and pray that when I woke up, it had all been the strangest dream, and nothing more.
“Is that it?” I asked Benjamin.
“I told you,” he said. “That’s the end of the notebook. There’s nothing more than that. The end.”
“What was that web address? In the notebook?”
Benjamin sighed.
“You said we’d get some food. There’s a café. Just down there. We could go there.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I promise. Just point me toward Dad’s laptop first, will you?”
“Okay, Laureth,” Benjamin said, and I realized, once again, not only how much I needed Benjamin, but how much I loved him, too.
I booted up Dad’s MacBook and had Benjamin read me that web address.
I entered the initials Dad had put into it; Albert Einstein AE, Paul Kammerer PK, Carl Jung CJ, Arthur Koestler AK.
I hit enter, and before I could even tab VoiceOver through to read me the result, Benjamin saw it.
She Is Not Invisible Page 12