The Coincidence Engine

by Sam Leith

  Alex walked past the office and onto the broad highway: three lanes in either direction. He turned right. There wasn’t much traffic. To his left, a pickup and a family car waited for the overhead lights to turn green.

  There were no pedestrians. On the opposite side of the road was a long car park on the other side of which was a Pet Superstore, a CVC chemist and a 7-Eleven. On his side of the road was nothing at all: a pavement, a broad grass verge, a low hedge. There was some sort of office building set back from the road behind a network of drives and flower beds.

  It took him ten minutes to reach the end of what he presumed to be the block, and still there was nothing doing. He kept walking. He assumed that this was not downtown.

  It took him another ten minutes to reach the end of the next block. There was a twenty-four-hour photo shop. It was closed. He kept walking. It took him twenty minutes more to reach a drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of the road. Alex felt a shade ashamed to have travelled to America and to be eating at McDonald’s, but he was now tired and he thought that something comforting and familiar might see off his self-pity if it didn’t exacerbate it.

  He walked up towards the ordering window. There was one car – an SUV – pulled up by it, a meaty forearm and a measure of beard protruding from the driver’s window. It rolled on with a jerk, and Alex walked up to the booth.

  ‘Ah.’ He tried to see past the kid behind the microphone to a menu somewhere, though he didn’t need it. ‘I’d like… two plain hamburgers please. Small fries.’ This had been the food Alex had ordered while alone, and passing McDonald’s, for years. ‘And a -’

  He was interrupted by the blare of a horn, close enough to cause him to jump with fright. Ice-white headlights washed past him, and the horn went again.

  ‘Hell do you think you’re doing? I could have killed you! Get in line, you little prick!’ a woman with a frightened face shouted at him from the driver’s window of her station wagon. He realised that behind the SUV had been a queue of two cars, one of which had not seen him walk past it in the pool of dark beside the cashier’s window and had nearly broken his legs.

  The cashier looked amused. ‘Ma’am?’ he said.

  Alex, hot with shame, retreated and let the car jounce up to the window. The woman’s attention left him. He walked down the curved grass verge. The car behind pulled up to the station wagon’s bumper as if pointedly. Alex walked down further.

  He stood by the offside back wheel of the car behind. Whoever was in it showed no sign of acknowledgement. Another car pulled in behind. The station wagon lurched off from the window. The car behind which Alex was queuing moved off to take its place – and the car behind Alex, as if he were invisible, moved up in turn behind its bumper.

  ‘Hey!’ Alex felt himself saying – or would have, had he not felt the ridiculousness of him saying it before it left his lips. ‘Ahem!’ would have been no more dignified or effective. He didn’t think he had the courage to go and remonstrate with the driver. He was a pedestrian. He was nobody.

  Alex stepped off the verge and stood behind the rear bumper of the car that had jumped the queue. He didn’t look to see what if any expression the man in that car was making in his rear-view mirror.

  It took about a minute for the car to move off. Another had pulled in behind him. He could see the shadow of his own legs across the bumper and boot of the car in front. Then it was gone, his shadow lengthened across the tarmac, and the car behind him honked its horn.

  He held his ground, and moved forward deliberately. Finally, he reached the window.

  ‘Two hamburgers. Medium fries. Regular fries. And a Sprite please.’

  He ate his supper out of the paper bag on the verge. The burgers were not like they were at home. They were hotter, flimsier. The buns were different. More scrunched-up, somehow.

  He felt, again, lonely. He walked back to the motel without meeting another pedestrian.

  When he got up the stairs the man on the balcony was there again. He couldn’t reach his door from the staircase without walking ten feet towards him, so he bobbed his head and said: ‘Night.’

  ‘Night,’ said the man, in what sounded like a British accent.

  Chapter 6

  Davidoff was lying on the bed nearest the window when Sherman came back in. He had his white earplugs in and was rapping his knuckles in the same annoying way on the wooden bed frame. That was what he had been doing to cause Sherman to go outside in the first place, Sherman remembered.

  On the table was the wreckage of a service-station sandwich.

  Still standing up, Sherman plugged his own iPod into his ears and pressed play.

  There was a high squalling guitar noise and then what sounded like a teenage girl’s voice even higher through a gale of feedback. Sherman winced: a teenage girl with serious emphysema, apparently.

  ‘Waaansathoudahsawyou…’ the girl’s voice wailed, ‘… innacrowdiyazybaaaah…’ A drumbeat started to thump insistently in the background, and another wave of guitarry fuzz came over the top. Sherman pulled out the headphones.

  ‘This is pointless,’ he said, just loudly enough to break Davidoff’s reverie. The younger man picked his big head up a little and looked at him. He stepped over and pulled out one of Davidoff’s earbuds, at which he frowned. Music leaked from the dangling earbud: ‘… bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS, bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS.’

  ‘What?’ said Davidoff.

  ‘Are you receiving your directions from the cosmos all right there, mate?’

  ‘No,’ said Davidoff. ‘I’m listening to REO Speedwagon.’

  Sherman dropped Davidoff’s earbud so it dangled by the bed, inhaled, and shuffled impatiently. It bugged him to be doing so little. It also bugged him that Davidoff pronounced REO ‘reeyo’, but that was just part of a wider discontent.

  They had arrived late the previous night into an airport still clogged with backlogged passengers, and after picking up a car and driving around had finally hit on this unlovely motel. They had spent the day getting the lie of the land.

  Davidoff had either bought the daft idea that this next-generation weapons system could be tracked down with the use of a last-but-one-generation MP3 player; or he had embraced the possibilities Ellis’s plan offered for bunking off. He had spent most of the day with the earbuds in, nodding away to himself, now and again saying something moronic like: ‘I’ve just had “Love in an Elevator”, “The Only Way is Up” and “Stairway to Heaven”. Do you think we’re closing in on it?’

  ‘Fuck. Do. I. Know, mate,’ Sherman would respond with unfailing regularity.

  His own iPod was clearly broken. Since they’d arrived in the motel it would play nothing but that Neil Young racket over and over again.

  The money on this job was good – if Ellis was going to pay them to listen to music, on his own head be it – but the doing nothing was not. Sherman would have been happier back in the desert, slotting ragheads from a long way away. He wondered about slotting Davidoff from less far away.

  He took another can of Mountain Dew from the small fridge, cracked it open, and went outside to drink it and wonder what to do next.

  ‘So we got this.’

  Red Queen showed Hands another photograph. It was the satellite image of the aeroplane.

  ‘It’s an airplane,’ said Hands.

  ‘Yes,’ said Red Queen. ‘This is a satellite image taken from space. When the weather is doing what the weather was doing over most of the Southern states last week, satellites can’t see much of anything. There’s cloud, rain, electrical interference. This is the only image we’ve got.’

  The image, though distinctively the shape of a plane, was blurry and pixellated. It was more than half obscured by a wisp of grey-white that Hands assumed must be cloud.

  He adjusted his glasses with his right hand and looked at it again.

  ‘I still see a plane. I only just see a plane. As you say, it’s not a very accurate picture. So what’s special about it? What do
es it have to do with me?’

  ‘What’s special about it is -’ Red Queen hesitated. ‘There are two things special about it. First, this plane is sitting on the ground, nowhere near anything that looks like an airport. It’s in the middle of a field. So how did it get there? And second is that this plane doesn’t exist. Didn’t exist.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a 737. There aren’t that many of them made. They register every one. We have access to those registers. All accounted for. This one not. This plane appeared from nowhere.’

  A look passed across the professor’s face that conveyed, with a pink wrinkling of the forehead from eyebrows to scalp, that he was still wondering, from time to time, whether he was the victim of a practical joke.

  ‘Ri-i-ght.’

  He decided to show willing.

  ‘So how do you think the plane appeared from nowhere?’

  ‘This image was taken not far from a large scrap-metal disposal facility in Alabama, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Jody. We think the hurricane assembled the plane.’

  ‘That’s completely absurd,’ said Hands. ‘Hurricanes don’t build planes anywhere outside undergraduate philosophy lectures.’

  ‘Who knows,’ said Red Queen levelly. ‘Perhaps the hurricane was showing off. But that’s the only working explanation we have. And we got this.’

  Red Queen showed Hands the Intercept. Hands frowned at it. Noting the spots of pink on his cheeks, Red Queen expected him to dismiss the Intercept one sentence in. He got to the end, though – and again, there was something indecipherable in his expression as he read.

  ‘I don’t know anything about engineering, or about satellites, or about – whatever this is supposed to be. But I’m afraid this is complete garbage,’ he said. ‘The whole thing. Impossible.’

  ‘Improbable,’ said Red Queen.

  ‘Garbage. Impossible.’

  ‘Improbable enough to be effectively impossible.’

  ‘No, just impossible.’

  ‘We think that what Banacharski was making was a machine that would make impossible things probable.’

  Hands looked uneasy at this point. Red Queen watched him very closely.

  ‘That sounds highly -’

  ‘Yes. Improbable. Extremely improbable, in fact.’

  ‘So where is this plane, then? Surely your… men in black helicopters -’ Hands pronounced the last phrase with notable distaste – ‘will already be halfway to Area 51 with it.’

  Red Queen looked pained.

  ‘Our men in black helicopters, if you want to be crude about it, didn’t get anywhere near it. Professor Hands: do you remember what happened twelve hours after Hurricane Jody?’

  Hands looked blank.

  ‘Hurricane Kim.’ The second storm had been even faster and more violent than the first, curving in from the north. ‘By the time another human being was in a position to stand where the satellite image shows that plane, there was nothing but fragments of twisted scrap metal spread out over the surrounding area as far as the eye could see.’

  ‘So who wrote this?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Hands emitted a long sigh, and decided it was time to come clean.

  ‘Me,’ he said. He took a sip of the coffee from the paper cup. It was stone cold.

  Red Queen’s eyebrows climbed half an inch. ‘Really?’

  Alex woke up feeling better. He showered, trying not to let the discoloured nylon shower curtain touch his body. The curtain sucked onto the whole of his flank in a big wet kiss, held there by static electricity. But the towel was clean enough, and Alex stood on the scrunched, wet mat in front of the sink afterwards and in the yellow light shaved for the first time since he had left London.

  He dressed in jeans and a clean white T-shirt, then put on his blue denim jacket, then opened the curtain onto the scrubland out behind the motel. The sun was dazzling white and the sky pale. He thought better of the jacket and took it off, rolling it up under two straps of his rucksack.

  You are always nearer by not keeping still. That was a line from a poem Carey had quoted to him. It had made him think of centrifugal force – the way the earth falls constantly away from us.

  He wondered, fleetingly, about calling Carey. But he didn’t know yet what he was going to say to her – and he didn’t want to spoil what was supposed to be a surprise. He realised, though, that he’d now been gone long enough that he’d be missed. It was – what?

  His watch said 9:50.

  He wondered if Saul would be at home. He grabbed his phone from the bedside table, thumbed two buttons to unlock it and prepared to dial. Before he was able to touch a button, though, the screen said ‘Unknown’ as if there were a call in progress.

  He held it to his ear. There was silence at the other end, but an open silence, a breathing silence, like the sea in a shell.

  Alex listened, then he said: ‘Hello.’

  As he did so, another voice said ‘Hello’ simultaneously. It was a girl’s voice.

  He said ‘Hello’ again, quicker this time, and her voice, once more at the same moment, like an echo so instantaneous as not to be an echo at all, said ‘Hello’. Then he paused and heard the breathing sound.

  He had had his own voice in his ear when the girl had been speaking, but he was pretty sure now that the girl’s voice belonged to Carey.

  He felt a chill. He must have speed-dialled her by accident. He pressed the red button and spiked the call.

  He dialled his brother, listening to tiny, insect click-clacks and then the long distant ring of a transatlantic connection. Saul answered on the third ring.

  ‘All right, bumface?’

  ‘All right, Saul.’

  ‘I would like you to know,’ said Saul, in a voice of some seriousness, ‘that I have now owned every last level in Peggle.’

  ‘Saul, I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Is this one of your computer games?’

  ‘Not just any computer game, my friend. I’m talking Ultra Extreme Fever, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, Magic Hats… Compared to this, Plants Versus Zombies sucks balls.’

  ‘Plants Versus Zombies? Was that the one with the -’

  ‘…Plants and the… zombies? Yes. And the sucked balls. I knew that hoity-toity Oxbridge education wasn’t lost on you. Now I’m insis-’

  ‘Never mind that. Saul: I’m in America…’

  There was a pause. The forward progress of Saul’s onslaught had been impeded, momentarily, by this new piece of information. The phone was on the end of the breakfast bar in Saul’s flat, and he imagined Saul’s whole-body gesture of surprise and interest catching Tim’s peripheral vision. Tim’s Evening Standard would go down and he would make a silent question mark with his face.

  ‘Alex. He’s in America!’ Saul would be mouthing to his boyfriend, his eyes wide. The image was so clear to him Alex felt homesickness lurch in his stomach.

  Saul started to sing ‘I wanna be in Ameh-ri-cah’ but Alex cut him off with ‘Saul -’, and his voice changed, became more serious. ‘Skidoop, what are you doing in America? Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, Saul. I just had a thing where – I wanted to get away. It’s not a big deal…’

  A thought occurred to Saul.

  ‘Are you with the girl?’

  Alex said nothing for a moment and Saul ran, in triumph, with the silence. ‘My God! Tim! This is so exciting. This is more exciting than anything that’s ever happened. Alex has eloped with the American girl! He’s going to go live on a farm in Iowa and make sweet love to livestock and breed adorable little one-eyed children in dungarees…’

  ‘I haven’t eloped,’ Alex said. ‘Saul, I’m not with Carey. Look, I haven’t got long – I’m calling on my mobile phone. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, and I’m fine, but I don’t want people to worry about me or call the police or anything.’

  ‘Where are you? Where in America?’

  Alex looked out of the window.

/>   ‘Atlanta,’ he said.

  ‘Atlanta?’

  He ignored the question. ‘Can you call Mum and tell her – I don’t know what you tell her, actually. Don’t tell her I’m here, though. Please. Tell her I’m staying with you if you have to. Make something up.’

  ‘What happened, little brother? Are you alone?’

  ‘Nobody’s here. I’m fine,’ Alex said. ‘I’m going to go and see Carey, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen.’

  Saul seemed to digest this.

  ‘You’re not going to go all Thelma and Louise on us, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Alex said. ‘I’m not going to go all Thelma and Louise. I promise.’

  ‘Well, you have a fabulous holiday, then. And seriously: take care.’

  ‘Thanks. See you soon, Saul.’

  ‘Laters, bumface,’ said Saul. And he rang off.

  Alex put the phone in his hip bag. He had a plan in mind. On the road, he’d be able to think. He opened the door of the room and stepped onto the balcony. The man who had been there last night was nowhere. He walked down the stairs and across the car park to check out.

  The clerk said the nearest Hertz office was back out by the airport. Alex crossed the highway and waited for the bus. The bus shelters here didn’t have benches, like in the UK. This one didn’t even have a shelter. Alex dropped his rucksack between his feet and leaned back on a concrete post. A tramp with a piled shopping cart was approaching from the direction Alex was watching for the bus. He was the only other person Alex could see, and wore a grey felt hat of shapeless design, filthy brown trousers hanging low on his waist, and some sort of twist of webbing slung round his bare chest. He was barking like a seal. ‘Raup! Arrp!’ he said. ‘Aaarrp!’

  Alex could hear it from some way away. With each exclamation, the shopping trolley, with its cargo of stuffed 7-Eleven bags, would take a jolting bunny-hop forward and its owner would whip his head round to the left. It looked like a nervous tic, or like he was anxious that something unwelcome was on the point of arriving unannounced on his left shoulder. Alex couldn’t think of why exactly anything would want to go near the man’s left shoulder.