by Yoav Blum
“Look at yourself. You’re a domino tile, waiting for someone to knock you over. That’s your whole impact on the world. You’re a stationary target. Besides that heroic rescue operation of yours—has there been one thing, just one, that you’ve done in life that came from within you, and not because someone told you to do it?”
Guy tried to maintain his composure. He stared at the ground with pent-up anger. “I loved,” he said quietly.
Pierre gagged. “You loved? You loved? That imaginary friend of yours? Since when is imagining the same as loving?”
He shook his head in disbelief.
“Love demands change. Love demands work. Love isn’t a piece of candy you get for being a good boy so you have something that makes you feel good. It’s hard work. The hardest in the world. What effort exactly did you invest in your imaginary friend? You took a character that pleased you and showered it with enough sweetness until you convinced yourself that you were ‘in love.’ Lazy people have no love.”
Pierre was fuming now, unable to stop. “Oh my God, I knew I should’ve given up on you. I knew. This was a mercy mission from my point of view. You don’t think I could’ve organized a hit in an abandoned park? An elevator accident? You really think that I need you dressed up as a damned imaginary friend in order to persuade him to leave the building and cross the street at the right time? For someone who arranges halves of accidents and calls himself a coincidence maker, you think a bit too much of yourself. You’ve been doing the same things for too long, deliberating for hours about organizing a little stomachache for a five-year-old girl. Yes, yes, I know all about you. I reviewed your missions. This was supposed to be a mission that would boost your advancement, that would force you to make a ballsy decision. You think the world can be changed with flowers? No, no, sweetheart. Flowers have never yet changed the world. Spears, perhaps. Rifles, definitely. Bombs have changed the world and will continue to do so, trust me. But not flowers. And if you want to start to move things in the world, big things, you should stop this emotional touchy-feeliness of yours.”
“I like to change little things,” Guy said quietly.
“So stay here, in your small, protected square. Organize meetings of couples who will divorce after five years, make people understand their ‘dreams’ only to discover ten years later that they have no way of realizing them and that they gave up everything for them—for nothing. Sketch drawings on the walls to the end of your days. Until you sign the Waiver, bitter and full of frustration. Like your friend.”
Guy looked up in shock. “What?”
“Emily,” said Pierre with a contented smile. “She too didn’t have what it takes, apparently.”
Guy’s face became ashen.
Emily signed the Waiver. What the hell was she thinking?
He tried to concentrate on his thoughts but discovered that Pierre’s scornful voice was still penetrating his mind.
“Do you think she actually realized that she was doing the mop-up work of other coincidence makers? Organi zing in patterns the sawdust that falls on the floor when real coincidence makers are sawing? Perhaps. Maybe she was just fed up. That happens when you feel your role is insignificant.”
Pierre turned back toward the street. A small dot came into view on the horizon.
“The bus is approaching, sweetheart. You still have time to develop a backbone. You can still get your first taste of how it feels to generate real change in the world. Or you can stay here, tell yourself how ethical you are, and remain as significant as a banana peel on the sidewalk. That can cause someone to slip and fall, you know.”
Guy heard the bus engine roaring forward.
The hot air at the bus stop swirled around them. Pierre was still standing erect, facing the street. Guy was still sitting, slouched on the broken seat.
“How dare you?” Guy said finally.
“Excuse me?” Pierre raised an eyebrow.
“When exactly did this happen to you, huh?” Guy asked, raising his voice over the sound of the approaching bus. “When exactly did you reach the level of hubris that made you lose your sanity and think that you’re so special that you can decide on the death of someone, simply because it serves your purposes?”
“Listen now—”
“No, you listen to me!” shouted Guy. “You’re a creator of presidents and organizer of revolutions, but you can’t arrange a way out of this situation without an unnecessary death? No, no. I don’t believe it. You can! You could organize much more than this. But it wouldn’t be dramatic enough, right? That wouldn’t give you the tingle that makes you feel powerful, that you’re somebody! Those bits of reality that I change, sir, are people’s lives. At what stage exactly did you forget that? At what stage did you start to treat everything like a big game in which you needed to accumulate points?”
“Calm down. That’s not what I meant when I said ‘develop a backbone,’ ” Pierre said coldly.
“Shut up!” Guy screamed. “I prefer to remain ‘small and insignificant’ forever rather than lose my soul in order to look at things like you do. You choose how to make your coincidences. You choose. They don’t happen on their own. And now I’m choosing how to make my coincidences, and it’s not going to include anyone’s execution.”
“Calm down—”
“Shut up! My whole existence, I’ve been carrying out orders. All this time, while I’ve been running around like crazy, organizing and preparing and making coincidences, I’ve actually been passive. As an imaginary friend, I was passive because I had to be. I was forbidden to express my opinion or to change anything that was contrary to the feelings of my imaginer. One time I rebelled and dared to stand up to my imaginer and I was punished with years of nonexistence.
“And then I got the opportunity to be active, to change things, to move them to what I feel is the right place. But instead of that, I became subservient to envelopes. I let myself become part of the system, simply because it was comfortable and pleasant and offered a sense of belonging. From my first envelope until today, I only saw a mission that had to be performed. I advanced along the safe path to become like you, someone so absorbed in self-admiration for excellent performance that he doesn’t see the souls of those affected by his coincidence making. But no longer.”
The bus was thirty or forty yards away. They could smell it now.
“I’m not getting on it,” said Guy. “You can do it yourself.”
“You will get on it,” said Pierre. “There’s no other option. With all due respect to your fiery speech, we need to carry out a mission.”
“And with all due respect to your fiery speech,” Guy said, “you know where you can stick it.”
The bus stopped next to them.
The door opened.
“Two things,” Pierre said, placing his foot on the first step, “I’ll do this now, but you, my friend—you’re not going to make any more coincidences involving people. I’m going to personally make sure that you’ll be assigned the matchmaking of reptiles and bugs for the rest of your life.
“And secondly, with all the bullshit about how you’re sick and tired of being passive, maybe you should consider the fact that your little rebellion is based on not doing something. Not very active, if you ask me. As always, even when you rebel, you choose the easy way.”
The door closed behind him with a dense blast of air. The bus started to drive away until it was out of sight.
Guy sat there for nearly another minute, and the blazing sun illuminated the spiraling clouds of dust around him.
And then he got up and started to run.
24
Okay, that could’ve been handled better, he thought.
The surroundings quickly swept past him through the windows of the bus.
He didn’t have to get so carried away. And he should’ve stuck with his original plan and refrained from improvising. But he didn’t go beyond the limits he had set for himself. No big deal. We’re still advancing according to plan.
&nbs
p; He felt uncomfortable about the things he’d said. Guy didn’t deserve to hear those things. He was really okay, all in all.
Yes, he had gotten carried away.
The bus entered the city. Here, it was about to happen.
What was that stuff about “organizing the births of presidents”? That was really a critical mistake. There was no such thing as “organizing the births of presidents.” People choose to become presidents after they were born, not before. The fourth rule of free will. It was included in their exams. If he noticed that mistake, it could ruin everything. After all these years, he still made rookie mistakes sometimes. “Births of presidents”—come on, really?
In any event, he had to hope that there’d be no more disturbances and that all of the calculations were correct.
After all, this was only one small hitch; this feeling of disgust was completely unnecessary.
Here’s the intersection.
In a moment, the bus will need to turn right.
And here he is, still not suspecting anything. And now, just at the right second, he needs to lean forward a bit and . . .
“Hey, weren’t you supposed to stop at that bus stop there?”
The bus driver turned his head toward him. “What?”
But he wasn’t looking at the driver. He was looking at the person who now appeared in front of the bus. He saw his hands waving, and for one second their eyes met before the crash.
He couldn’t help thinking, Mission accomplished.
FROM THE LETTER DISSEMINATED AMONG STUDENTS IN THE COINCIDENCE MAKERS COURSE WITH THE AIM OF ENCOURAGING INITIATIVE
To all of the students in the course:
As you know, in about a month you will complete your course of studies and begin a period of apprenticeship as coincidence makers.
PLEASE NOTE!!!
Over the years, a regretful practice has taken root: Graduates of the Coincidence Makers Course have created what they call “Graduation Coincidences” (GCs).
The consequences of an “amusing,” “cool,” or “clever” coincidence performed without professional guidance and without prior approval are liable to be severe!!!*
There is a strict prohibition on all activities of unapproved coincidence making, as funny as they may be!!!
A student who creates a GC risks being disqualified and expelled from the course!!!
You have been warned!!!
Let’s complete the course safely and quietly!!!
* Coincidences that are ostensibly harmless, such as two Hollywood actresses arriving at a ceremony in the same dress, organizing strange hitches in live television broadcasts, or filling a café with people who all suffer from diarrhea are also liable to have far-reaching repercussions. Any irresponsible organizing of coincidences is liable to pose difficulties for coincidence makers, who will have to work hard to mitigate the cumulative impact.
25
The room was a bit cool when Alberto entered.
He always turned on the air conditioner before he left. It was important to come back to a pleasant room. But now he wasn’t paying any attention to that.
He didn’t lie down on the bed and gaze outside either, or sit on the balcony with a glass of whiskey and ice. He simply started to pack, wondering whether he was pleased or terrified. A hit man wasn’t supposed to be terrified. He was pleased, apparently.
He had seen his target leave the building. Tall, dressed in a dark blue suit, quick steps, precise, hands clenched inside his pockets. Another target. All in all, just another target. But then, three surprises occurred.
The first surprise was that his target suddenly turned and decisively started to cross the street.
He had expected him to go to the parking lot. But Alberto discovered, as if for the first time in his life, that targets had lives of their own and could decide to cross the street as if there were something interesting on the other side.
He tracked the man in the suit in his gun sight, trying to calculate the best time to shoot him before he reached the other side of the street and went out of his range of sight.
The second surprise was that his man stopped in the middle of the street.
For a moment it seemed like he intended to go back. Alberto had no idea what could distract someone to the point of stopping in the middle of the street and contemplating like that. A second later, he understood.
It’s going to be an accident, he thought. Excellent. The whole thing lasted just a second and a half. His target hesitated for a moment, looked back, and stopped for another moment, which was just long enough for Alberto to focus the crosshairs on his chest, to get to the point between inhaling and exhaling, to switch the rifle to single-shot mode, to place his finger on the trigger, and . . .
And then came the third surprise.
A short screeching of brakes, a white taxi that stopped in front of his target, an irritable driver who put his head out the window and shouted. The man in the suit raised his hands apologetically and continued to slowly walk to the other side of the street, out of the range of his gun’s sight.
Alberto’s finger was still on the trigger, and he felt like he was choking.
Nothing. Nothing happened. He knew it was the moment when it was supposed to happen. He felt that tingle, that strong desire blended with a sense of confidence, the slightly heavy breathing that had marked these moments for him in the past.
This moment came and went, and nothing happened.
And if he didn’t get ahold of himself now and kill his target in the two and a half seconds that remained, it wouldn’t happen.
Everything moved in slow motion.
The target down below, walking contemplatively to the other side of the street.
His gun sight, which ran after the target until it closed in on him.
The clear understanding that now he had to kill a person—for real. Not wait for him to die on his own. Kill him.
The crosshairs positioned exactly in the right place.
The finger on the trigger. The decision to shoot. The command his brain sent toward the finger, which ran down the back of his neck, turned right by his shoulder blades, moved across the shoulder, slid like black oil down his arm and reached the finger, and then, and then, and then . . .
And then, the defiant finger refused to execute the command.
The target disappeared out of sight.
Alberto Brown wasn’t really capable of killing a human being.
As he sat on the plane and the runway started to pass in the window alongside him, he realized that he wasn’t pleased and that he wasn’t terrified. He simply felt a great sense of relief. He had withstood one real test. One simple choice, after which the quietest and most efficient killer in the Northern Hemisphere became just a man with a hamster. Just a man.
A man who now would go into hiding, who would have to change his identity, and perhaps would be unable to stay in the same place for very long; a man who left a loaded rifle on the roof of a building because he was so full of frustration and fear and happiness that he purchased a plane ticket to the first place he saw on the Departures board.
But just a man.
The door closed gently behind Michael, as if he were being careful not to wake anyone, though he knew that she—the only person in the house—was probably not sleeping, even if she was lying in bed.
It was late. He hadn’t come straight home from the office.
After he crossed the street to a store on the other side and made his small purchase, he felt something different, new. The air outside was cool, and the first breath he took after leaving the store was like an infant’s first breath: really surprising. As if only now he remembered how to breathe, as if he had died and returned to life. And then he shook his head and looked at the small bag in his hand and wondered, almost out loud, how he had ever thought this could change something.
He quietly leaned his briefcase against the door, and gently laid the keys on the table by the entrance. One of his hands moved automa
tically toward his neck, ready to loosen the tie, and he remembered that he had already done that earlier, when he let his legs and thoughts carry him along the streets. He’d roamed around for hours, asking himself again and again what the hell he thought he was doing, and why this attempt would succeed unlike all the rest, which had failed.
A light was still on in the kitchen, and he entered and poured himself a glass of cold water. His legs quickly and decisively kicked off his shoes and lovingly accepted the coolness of the floor through his socks. He stood in the kitchen and drank the glass of water in small sips, stopping every second or two and breathing a bit. He was surprised to discover that he was actually excited.
Less than an hour ago, it had looked like a closed case. After returning to the office parking lot after his roaming, the bag in his hand was unbearably heavy, full to the brim with exaggerated expectations. He had opened the trunk of the car and tossed it inside, almost with loathing, and cursed himself for his naïveté, cursed Medium John for the illusion he had planted in him, and cursed the entire world.
As he drove home he felt like he was returning to himself slowly. The oppressive feeling, to which he had grown so accustomed that it had become second nature, returned. This is your life, this is who you are—now deal with it. The book lying in the trunk was just one more desperate attempt at love, but this time he nipped it in the bud. It would only be a waste of time. Of his time and hers.