The Coincidence Makers

by Yoav Blum

  “I . . . that is . . .” Guy took a quick look at the table, trying to understand the balance of power between the balls and the impact the General’s stroke would have on them. “I think you’ll hit the yellow, and the yellow will hit the orange and will almost knock it into the center pocket there.”

  The General struck the white ball, which hit the yellow one, which moved forward, spinning a bit, and hit the orange ball, which curved straight into the center pocket on the other side.

  “I’ll give you a hint for the rest of the lesson,” he said. “I’m not in favor of the ‘almost’ method of playing.”

  He walked around the table to the other side.

  “And stop with all the ‘orange ball, yellow ball.’ This is nine-ball pool. There are numbers on them for a reason. So here’s the first difference between billiard balls and real life: if you want to predict what will happen in the next move, you’ll discover that in billiards it gets easier as time passes. Fewer balls cause fewer events to happen. There are also very clear rules. You’re permitted to hit some balls and prohibited from hitting others. You may not hit balls off the table, and so on. In this game, as you advance, you simplify the statistics that physics needs in order to explain to itself what the hell is going on here. I remind you: as coincidence makers, your goal is to discover the right ball to hit, and how and where. But in life, no element disappears and simplifies the problem. On the contrary, when you instigate an action, you make the situation more complex, if anything.” He bent over the table. “Emily, what’s going to happen now?”

  Emily was almost ready. Almost.

  “The one ball will hit the six ball, which will hit the one next to it, which will . . .”

  “Too long. What’s going to happen now?”

  Emily took a deep breath. “The three ball in the corner pocket.”

  The General struck the cue ball that hit the six ball that hit the one next to it and ricocheted a bit to the left. In the end, it was the six ball that fell into the corner pocket opposite the one that Emily had intended. She clenched her face.

  “A second difference,” the General said. “In life, there are no ‘theories.’ Seven billion people strike seven billion balls at any moment throughout the planet. And these are only the human beings. You’ll be surprised to discover how many other elements of reality correspond with each other and affect us. Words, thoughts, beliefs, fears. And we have yet to begin to talk about the objects around us. Eric, what’s going to happen now?”

  “Okay.” Eric took a deep breath and looked at the table. “The three ball in the pocket next to us.”

  The General shook his head in frustration. “You’re making assumptions that are based on where I’m standing and aren’t based on these balls.” He walked around the table, bent over, and without aiming at all, sent the cue ball in the direction of the one ball, which flew straight into the opposite pocket.

  “The balls don’t care,” the General continued, leaning on his cue stick. “They don’t care about which pocket they fall into or how hard they’re hit. You’ll never feel uncomfortable vis-à-vis the six ball just because the seven ball reached the pocket before it. No ball will cry if it’s alone in the corner. It’s much easier to manage events when you don’t care about them. But the people you’re going to make coincidences for can break your heart. If you don’t learn to be mean sometimes, if you don’t realize that sometimes you need to give someone a little whack to get them going in the right direction, if you don’t disengage from what’s happening—you won’t be able to make coincidences. On the other hand, if you don’t care, if you start with the assumption that the world is your playground, you’ll be even worse coincidence makers. Guy?”

  “The two ball hits the seven ball, the seven into the corner.”

  The General bent over the table and hit the balls. The seven ball dropped into the corner pocket.

  “Nice,” Eric said with admiration.

  “Thank you,” Guy said and smiled.

  “Quiet down. We’re not done yet,” the General said.

  “Three ball in the right corner pocket,” Emily said.

  “You’re a bit quick, no?” the General asked. “And you’re also wrong.”

  Emily looked again at the table. “Then the two ball in the nearleft pocket. But it has to be quite a shot because you also need—”

  “Wrong again,” the General said.

  “Nine ball? To the right corner? It’s not too far? And it’s also behind the three ball, so . . .”

  “It’s not the nine ball.”

  Emily shook her head in disbelief. “Eight? The black ball? But you’re only supposed to knock it in at the end.”

  The General bent over and raised the cue stick. “This is nine-ball pool, not eight-ball pool. You chose to draw your conclusions based on the wrong set of rules.” He sent the eight ball racing into the center pocket and looked at Emily, who pursed her lips. “Indeed, all of these balls operate according to general rules that we’re all familiar with, but it’s even more complex with people. Because people define rules for themselves that are more hidden and strange. Customs, ridiculous table manners, social stipulations, and whatever. And that’s not all. If you have someone who’s unwilling to have the meat on his plate touch the peas, who checks whether he locked the door fifty times, or who tries to rudely turn away every young woman he meets because he feels insecure—you need to know this. Every ball in your system will have a separate world of rules of its own.”

  Three balls remained on the table: the blue, the two ball; the red, the three ball; and the white-yellow, the nine ball.

  “Okay,” the General said. “Who wants to predict now?”

  Eric cautiously raised his hand.

  “The clown,” the General said.

  “The two ball in the far-left corner,” Eric said.

  “Think again,” the General replied.

  “But you need to hit the two first,” Eric said. “And if you do, you can’t hit the other two because they’re in the opposite direction.”

  “I want to put the three ball in the lower-right pocket.”

  Eric looked at him from the corner of his eye. “It’s not possible. . . .” he said hesitantly. “The red one—that is, the three ball—is in the opposite direction of the two. And you have to hit the two ball first because it’s the lowest number.”

  “Unless you intend to break the rules,” Guy said.

  The General circled the table pensively.

  “That’s not a suggestion I expected to hear from you,” he said to Guy. “Innovative thinking is not supposed to be your strong suit.” “But that’s what you’re about to do, right?”

  “I could,” the General said, “but I don’t need to.”

  “And if you needed to?” Guy asked.

  “Break the rules?” the General asked.

  “Yes,” Guy said.

  “It depends,” the General said. “There are rules that can be broken and rules that cannot. In the case of some rules, it would be detrimental to your objective to break them, while that isn’t the case for other rules. There are rules that really exist and there are those that are present only in your mind. In order to know whether you can break a rule, you first need to clarify quite a few things about it. Would you break this rule?”

  Guy thought it over a bit. “Am I allowed to?” he finally asked.

  The General laughed a short, choked laugh. Sort of a cough with an identity crisis. “Yes. That’s what I thought. When you’re going to ignore a rule, you prefer to receive permission first.”

  He moved closer to Guy and looked into his eyes.

  “Check what you’re breaking, then simply decide,” he said. “Most of your rules are simply an invention you designed to protect yourself. Breaking those rules is courageous. Breaking the rest of the rules is just lazy.”

  He raised the stick and hit downward, strongly with both hands, knocking the thicker part of the stick against the cue ball. The ball f
lew into the air and, when it fell, it hit the two ball and caromed in the opposite direction, hitting the three ball and knocking it into the lower-right pocket.

  “Nice,” the General said. “Emily, you should know what’s next.”

  “Two ball in the top-left corner,” Emily said in a flat voice.

  “Oh, don’t get too excited,” the General said, placing his stick at the correct angle on the table.

  “It’s easy,” Emily said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that after I failed the previous two questions, you’re giving me something easy so I’ll feel better about myself. So thank you, but it’s quite clear.”

  “And because it’s easy, it’s less important, of course. Yes?” the General asked.

  “For me,” Emily said.

  “And for the two ball?” the General asked.

  Emily stuck her hands in her pockets. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that with all due respect, if you classify the coincidences you perform only by the level of challenge they pose to you or by how good they make you feel about yourself, you’ll forget that what’s important is the change you’re creating in the lives of other people, and you’ll reach the stage where you become confused between what is essential and nonessential. People who fall in love after you worked on a coincidence for five minutes do this with the same passion and the same sense of destiny as those who meet as the result of a coincidence you worked six months to arrange.”

  He moved the cue stick in a sharp movement. The two ball went into the top-left pocket.

  Then he stood upright and looked around, a half smile trying to sneak onto his face.

  Two balls remained on the table facing each other. One of them was white.

  “What will happen now?” the General asked.

  “Nine ball in the far-right corner,” Emily said.

  “The far-left corner,” Guy said.

  “It’ll hit the side and fly to the near-right corner,” Eric said.

  The General leaned over the table and aimed the cue stick.

  “What will happen now,” he said, “is that the couple next to the bar will kiss.”

  They turned in the direction of the bar and saw the heads of the couple by the bar moving closer to each other, slowly and hesitantly. The sound of the impact of the balls was heard and the couple kissed.

  The General stood behind the table now, the stick upright in his hand. Only the white ball remained on the table.

  “And perhaps that’s the most important thing,” he said when they turned toward him again. “There’s always a broader picture. There’s always something beyond the system you’re concentrating on. Never forget that. There are no clear boundaries. Life doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the table. And there are always more than six pockets you can fall into. There is always something beyond. Always, always, always.”

  Emily wanted to ask something but decided not to. It could wait.

  “The last question,” the General said. “Where did the nine ball fall in the end?”

  They were silent. None of them had noticed.

  “Mark down your first and last failure,” the General said, placing his stick on the table. “With all due respect to the broader picture, you don’t keep track of an entire game only to miss the last play. Start getting used to it. You need to notice many more things than you’re aware of.”

  FROM METHODS IN DEFINING GOALS FOR COINCIDENCE MAKING—INTRODUCTION

  Even if we limit ourselves to only the past five hundred years, we cannot summarize the development of the field of happiness sciences in this short introduction. Nonetheless, we will try to highlight a few key points. You will find more details in the sources appearing in the appendix. We particularly recommend “Development of the Happiness Model—The First Thousand Years, ” “Development of the Happiness Model—The Last Thousand Years,” and “Theories of Happiness for Beginners”—all by the theoretician John Coochy.

  The classic period of mapping happiness was characterized primarily by attempts to develop a single general formula that would encompass its main features.

  According to Vaultan, for example, happiness will always be the ratio between personal happiness potential and the

  difference between what an individual wants and what he has in reality.

  H = p / (w-h)

  Where H is general happiness, p is personal happiness potential (or php in some professional literature), w represents want, and h represents have.

  Vaultan argued that the maximal level of personal happiness depends on each individual’s personal happiness potential, and that the smaller the differential between want and have, the greater the level of general happiness will be. Thus, there are two main ways to maximize happiness: lowering w (defined as “lowering expectations” or “low expectations”) or increasing h (defined as “ambitiousness” or “luck” depending on the school of thought).

  CENTRAL PROBLEMS IN VAULTAN’S FORMULA

  The Problem of Range: a utopian situation in which a person who has everything he wants is not defined in the formula, or alternatively leads to infinite happiness.

  The Problem of Negativity: a situation in which a person who has more than he wants is defined as negative happiness, which is considered particularly problematic.

  The Problem of Self Influence: the strongest argument against Vaultan s Formula was raised by Muriel Fabrik, who demonstrated in her book Embedding the Also that p in itself, if it indeed exists, must also be influenced by w and h, which makes Vaultan’s Formula nonlinear and unsolvable with existing tools.

  FABRIK’S FORMULA

  Fabrik also succeeded in proving that it is impossible to define standard units for measuring w and h, and that sometimes even the same person uses different units of measurement. Nonetheless, most of her critics argued that the formula Fabrik proposed was a variation of Vaultan’s Formula. At first, Fabrik proposed a formula that treats happiness as a relative object, measured only relative to other factors—usually, the happiness of someone else. However, toward the end of her life, she presented a new formula, which describes happiness as a product of pleasure or personal satisfaction multiplied by sense of meaning (or illusion of relative meaning) squared.

  H = pm2

  This formula paved the way for thinking about happiness in terms other than profit and loss and emphasized its subjective nature.

  THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE OF GEORGE GEORGE

  The Icelandic theoretician George George argued that it is impossible to measure either the quality or size of any of Vaultan’s classic characteristics without influencing their value by the very fact of looking at them. In fact, it is impossible to examine happiness without changing it, whether it be the one-dimensional happiness Vaultan defined or the multidimensional happiness of Fabrik.

  The problem that George George noted is still defined as

  “George’s Uncertainty Principle” by leading scholars, and the literature also refers to it sometimes as “The Problem of Self-Analysis.”

  THE POSTMODERN METHOD OF HAPPINESS

  The crisis in happiness sciences became more severe and the field had nearly reached a dead end when Jonathan Fix raised the argument that all of the formulas proposed by scholars over the generations had actually examined the concept of “satisfaction” rather than “happiness. ” As a result of this far-reaching argument, researchers were required to redefine the essence of the happiness they were trying to quantify.

  On this basis, the Postmodern Method flourished. This method seeks to disassociate itself from the solutions that the classic theories had proposed for the problem of definition. Paul MacArthur was the one who laid the foundation for this method by defining happiness as “something that people simply decide they have, and that’s all. ”

  As in other fields, the transition from the classic definition of happiness to the modern definition and then to the postmodern definition made a decisive impact on the operational methods of coi
ncidence makers throughout the world.

  12

  A bicycle rider quickly rode past Guy, the wheels of his bicycle making a soft whish sound, and he suddenly understood.

  You’re a coincidence maker. So what exactly did you think you were supposed to wait for?

  Did you expect that exactly at the appointed hour someone would ring a bell? A fancy car would stop next to you and the window would open? A helicopter would fly by and drop proclamations?

  No, that would be too obvious.

  You’re supposed to be the one who notices nuances, the one who sees the thin connections. If this envelope was assigned to you, it means that at the designated hour there should be something here that only someone with your training is supposed to see.

  “I hope I’m good enough at what I do,” he said to Cassandra once, in another life, before all this.

  “And if not?”

  He was silent for a bit and said, “It would be very disappointing.

  “I think you’ll be satisfied if you become disappointed in yourself,” she said quietly. “It would further support the conclusion that you’ve already drawn anyway. It would reinforce your negative opinions about yourself. You don’t do enough and then become angry at yourself for not doing enough.”

  He didn’t answer, wondering whether it was okay to be annoyed at the fact that someone else knew you better than yourself.

  “Lazybones,” she said with fondness that flooded him with warmth.

  He looked up and started to survey the street with the eyes of a coincidence maker. There was the girl with the braces on her teeth who was walking, focused on her iPhone and about to bump into the young man with dreadlocks in just a few seconds; the elderly woman at the bus stop who was dozing and about to miss her bus; the barber standing at the door of his barbershop, watching the passersby and failing to notice that he left the faucet running in his barbershop. . . .

  Five windows opened in the building across the street. In just one of them, someone stood and looked down at the street.