The Coincidence Engine

by Sam Leith

  ‘Uh?’

  Davidoff squinted.

  ‘This haulage company or whatever it is. Works for the same people we do. We should flash our lights.’

  Davidoff grunted again, plainly having not the faintest idea what Sherman was talking about. He pushed the pedal down and came up behind the truck, glanced in his wing mirror and pulled out round it. A corner of the silver car became visible again, back in the slow lane, a few cars ahead. As they got closer, though, Sherman frowned.

  As their angle on the front of the truck narrowed, a second silver Pontiac came into view, on the tail of the other. At this range it was hard to make out the number plates. One of them was their boy, but the other one…

  ‘Better get a bit closer. There’s another silver bloody car up there. We don’t want to lose -’

  There was a bang.

  Davidoff abruptly pumped the brake and Sherman was thrown forward. Something flew up from the road, very fast, and smacked the top half of the windscreen before bouncing up off and behind them. Sherman, startled, looked round and looked behind. Something black disappearing under the wheels of the car following.

  ‘What was -?’

  Davidoff, frowning a little but with the car under control. Up ahead Sherman could see the front tyre of the eighteen-wheeler flapping in rags. The driver was slowing down, trying to get a slight fishtail under control. Davidoff let the car fall back, then powered forward past it. They’d lost a couple of hundred metres on the Pontiacs.

  ‘Blowout,’ he said. ‘Step on it. We’re losing them.’

  Ahead, there was a cloverleaf junction and the traffic was slowing down as a column of cars joined the freeway from the right. The two Pontiacs, further on, went under the shadow of an overpass. A car joining the freeway shot across their bows without signalling. Davidoff muttered something and braked again.

  It was a silver Pontiac. It lurched out wide into the left-hand lane, accelerated round an SUV, waggled back into the middle lane and shot off up under the overpass.

  ‘It’s – hang on…’ Sherman could see, through the traffic ahead, the other two silver Pontiacs. The third caught them up. ‘We’ve got to catch up with the -’

  ‘I can see,’ said Davidoff in a voice at once distracted and alive with irritation. ‘I’m trying but these – SHIT!’

  The people in this place were maniacs. They were carved up again, this time someone swinging in from behind, then undertaking and cutting back in front of them, before going wide and, with a honk of horns, screeching round that SUV.

  Another – oh, for crying out loud.

  As Davidoff concentrated on trying not to be crashed into, Sherman scanned the road ahead. He could now see four identical silver Pontiacs. At least four. One of them – one of them was taking the exit. It was marked Arthur Langford Parkway East. He couldn’t make out the licence plate.

  ‘Davidoff – he’s leaving. He’s taking the exit.’ Davidoff wrenched the wheel. They were in the slip road. Just as they were about to be committed, Sherman had second thoughts.

  ‘No! It’s the other one! Don’t take the exit! Stay on the road.’

  Davidoff swore again, wrenched the wheel back and they crossed the stripy lines back onto the main road, narrowly missing the sand-filled oil drums protecting the junction. A dirty white Toyota behind them roared up the exit, missing their rear bumper by a smaller distance than Sherman was comfortable with, its horn emitting a wail of outrage.

  He could see three Pontiacs several car-lengths ahead. Davidoff was making valiant efforts to catch up with them, weaving freely in and out of all four lanes of traffic. To their right, Sherman became aware of another line of traffic sloping down a ramp and waiting to join the freeway – the westbound traffic from the road they’d just passed under. Rush hour was approaching and these would be the first people making their way out from the centre of town into the western suburbs. The Pontiacs, where he could make them out, glimpsing the tops of their roofs, were just past where the traffic merged.

  The traffic had slowed to twenty or thirty miles an hour. The sun winked off an angle of one of the cars waiting to join the freeway and Sherman glanced sideways. Just ahead and to the right of them, spilling into the traffic ahead, were three more silver Pontiacs, tailing a wood-panelled station wagon, which was itself tailgating another silver Pontiac.

  Sherman had lost count. Seven, was it? Maybe eight. A rise in the road a little later on allowed him to see them all at once, spread out across four lanes and a couple of hundred metres of the road ahead.

  Sherman had by this stage formed a hunch. The boy was leaving town, and he was most likely to head west. West was where the aeroplane thing had happened. West was where he was supposed to be flying, or had at least bought a ticket to. West was the best bet. Two Pontiacs whose numbers were impossible to see took off along the eastbound exit.

  The main pack of Pontiacs carried on. Sherman leaned forward in his seat, his jaw working. The exit for the westbound carriageway of the interstate came off the left, the fast lane. One of the silver cars, its indicator winking for a good forty seconds before it made its way into the faster traffic, pulled out. The indicator stayed on. It was travelling slightly too slowly – as if its driver wasn’t confident about what he was doing.

  He had slowed enough to give a glimpse of the first two digits of the number plate… B4… 84… B4? Was it?

  ‘Got you,’ said Sherman. ‘Follow that one.’

  Davidoff swung out across two lanes of traffic and entered the slip road only three cars behind the target. None of those cars was silver. ‘Hope you’re sure about this,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Sherman. The slip road rose in a gentle left-hand curve from ground level up and over the southbound carriageway of the 285 before cresting and then sloping down to join the fat interstate heading west. The silver car disappeared round the curve ahead of them, and as they coasted over the top of the rise and faced down, they were momentarily dazzled by the sun.

  The silver car must have already joined the main road. Cars were shuffling between lanes just off the slipway. The I-20 ribboned off towards the horizon, and as far as Sherman and Davidoff could see – three lanes of faded blacktop – the roofs of cars reflected the sun’s coppery light like the scales of a snake. It was beautiful, all those cars crawling westwards together.

  Every car for as far as the eye could make out was silver. Every one – Sherman knew at that moment in his guts – was a Pontiac.

  ‘Let’s go back to the motel,’ he said. ‘We may have to think again.’

  Davidoff steered them off at the next exit and they looped back round towards Atlanta, Sherman dialling Ellis’s number, letting his thumb hover over the green button to call, and then thinking better of it.

  Chapter 8

  There did seem to be an awful lot of silver cars on the road, Alex thought as he drove out of the city. Odd. Perhaps there was a factory nearby.

  Then he was back into his thoughts. Those thoughts. They seemed less pernicious, less circular, less – if he was honest about it – thinky than the thoughts he had been having beforehand. Always nearer by not keeping still. Now he was moving and his thoughts were calm to the point of being almost contentless.

  He was even able to avoid thinking about some of the things he usually found himself thinking about. He had decided not to think about the effect on his credit card of hiring a car for two weeks, and lo and behold, here he was, not thinking about it. He had decided not to think about the likelihood that he’d fail to finish his PhD, lose his funding and have to move back in with his mum, and lo and behold, here he was not thinking about it. He had decided not to – well, he was really not thinking about that. He ran through a whole list of the things he wasn’t thinking about – some more quickly than others, and none of them bit him.

  ‘I might take up not thinking for good,’ he said aloud to himself – something he realised he had started to do over the last couple of days. Not thinking was wo
rking splendidly. He knew from the atlas on the passenger seat that he was headed for the west, and that it would take him a few days to get there. All he knew was that the next big town was Birmingham. That was fine.

  He weaved past another of those silver cars. They seemed to be thinning out. This was much better, he decided, than driving in the UK. Once you got the hang of driving on the right, obviously. No roundabouts. No changing gear. As a teenager, Alex had driven into the back of a stationary Volvo as a consequence of a misunderstanding that had involved both roundabouts and changing gear.

  Now, here, this was very satisfactory. No roundabouts, no gearstick – no corners, practically. The highway was dead straight, and cool air from the air con blew onto his arms.

  The car had a docking station for his iPod. Letting his eyes leave the road in brief guilty bursts, he put on the Talking Heads. ‘Things fall apart,’ David Byrne announced to the car. ‘It’s scientific!’

  Alex sang along with ‘Road to Nowhere’, and then ‘Psycho Killer’, and just as his own jollity started to sound forced to him, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ came on and his mood turned.

  It was a song about a man waking up to find himself in and out of time… Then a rushing chorus, something about water rushing over and under and everywhere. Was it a song about drowning? If so, it was a very exultant one. Alex felt uplifted and estranged. Nobody was with him. He realised he didn’t know, again, whether he was happy or sad. The music decided for him.

  When he’d been a child, sitting in the back of the car, the music on the radio had been the soundtrack to his life. He’d watched fence posts, pylons, stanchions tick past – slowly up ahead, then too fast to see when you looked at them right at the side of the car, then slowlier behind. He had sat, entirely absorbed in himself – or, rather, himself entirely absorbed in what was around him. Watching the English countryside roll by. On the long journeys from Cambridge down to their Cornish holidays in summer: red clay churned in fields to each side. This was where his mother was from. Eurythmics. His father taking him to boarding school. Springsteen. Coming back late at night, sleepy, from the airport when they’d taken their first holiday to Corsica. He must have been ten, then. Tom Waits singing about an ‘old ’55’.

  Alex started experimenting with the cruise control button. If you pressed it, the car kept to its speed. You could put your feet on the floor – even dare yourself, just momentarily, to take your hands off the wheel until the car, very gently, started to slide towards the lane markers at the edge of the road and you grabbed the wheel again, just between finger and thumb.

  He remembered hearing about ‘cruise control’ as a child, and imagining it at first to be something they had in America where the car drives itself. Someone later had told him a story of how someone had put on cruise control on a long desert highway and fallen asleep. A very slight bias on the steering – no more than a fraction of a degree – had caused the car to wander off the road and out into the flat scrub desert. The man had woken up maybe half an hour after the the car had coughed its last of petrol and rolled to a halt. There had been no sign of a road or a river or another human being in any direction: just level low scrub, and dry dirt, and behind his car a long and imperceptibly curved pair of tyre tracks in the dust, slowly being erased by the evening wind. Nobody had come to get him. He had died there.

  This story had stayed with Alex. What looks like a straight line turns out to be a curve. A tiny fraction of error could scale; a trivial multiplier could propagate into a cascade. A fragment of a degree in the angle of approach was the difference between a stable orbit and slingshotting into deep space; a fraction of a second’s lag in a clock could make a GPS system put an aeroplane into a mountain. The curvature of a miniscus could scatter light, or focus it to a point.

  When Alex had been travelling in his gap year, he’d gone to Tibet. He’d left Lhasa on a local bus bound across the Himalayas for Kathmandu, him and his big brother – then on his summer holidays from university. It had taken a couple of days, rattling over the passes where the air was thin and the sky was blue-white. The high points in the passes were marked with cairns of stones, and bleached prayer flags, muddy snow in pockets of the ground.

  When they stopped to get out at one place to take photographs, Alex remembered thinking how you could plot lines radiating out from his position there by the bus. At any moment, to move along one of those lines in one of those directions would be to die. He was entirely safe in the bus – but walk thirty feet to the left and you’d tumble down a steep bank of scree. Set off to the right, let the bus leave you behind, you’d be dead of exposure in forty-eight hours, maybe.

  You could do that at any time, anywhere. You were almost never more than a strange decision or an accident, or a movement of a few feet, from extinction. Alex had started to imagine himself as the centre of a spiderweb of lines, constantly adjusting, on the map. At the end of each one a black X. As you walked beside a busy road, on the road side of you the lines would be compressed to no more than a couple of metres – to the other side they’d extend hundreds of metres, maybe. Stand on the edge of a cliff and the lines would fan out from your feet all along the clifftop – and the same would be true of every other human being. Everyone would carry their own invisible, unmonitored, 360-degree asterisk of harm.

  If you credited the alternative universe idea, in every one of those universes there would be a you who had taken a different one of those decisions, suffered a different one of those accidents. There were versions of you who would have jumped or stumbled across every micrometre of that cliff face. And every moment spawned a new position of you in the world, a new 360-degree signpost to catastrophe, a new sheaf of alternative yous in alternative worlds around each of whom radiated another set of fresh positions, divergences, threats.

  That idea had struck Alex most vividly when he was eighteen, but it had stayed with him. He became aware of it re-entering his thoughts: not threatening, but a source of wonderment. At any moment at all he was one sharp twist of the steering wheel away from the universe not existing. How on earth, with all that risk, had it survived so long?

  A game he started to play with himself was to see how long he could keep cruise control on. He fixed it for the speed limit, and everyone was overtaking him. He dabbed the brake to override it, then tried to keep a steady distance behind the car in front and thumbed the button.

  Over a few minutes, he found, his car was up towards the back bumper of the car in front. The trick then was to signal and move out without touching either brake or accelerator. You had to be lucky – if a big truck was passing you at the wrong time and you were boxed in, you’d have to brake… but you could cut it pretty fine.

  It was absorbing. As the sun got lower and redder, and the mile markers told him Atlanta was further and further behind him, he felt settled again.

  He’d never done anything like this before. He felt in and out of himself, lost and in charge. Nobody now knew where he was. Not his mum, not anybody. He was starring in a film that nobody was watching. He was unobserved.

  It reminded him of his friend Rob’s joke when they’d been undergraduates together.

  ‘Erwin Schràdinger’s bombing down the M4 in his Porsche.’ He remembered Rob saying this, and just how he’d said it – Rob in his horrible velvet jacket and his black corduroy trousers, lolling on Alex’s green beanbag. Rob’s voice cracked and dry from weed.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, Rob. It’s not Schràdinger.’

  Rob, pink-eyed, thinking.

  ‘No. Crap. Heisenberg, right. Sorry. Heisenberg is bombing along the road…’

  Now Alex laughing very hard, helium-pitched giggles. Carey, then, who they were both trying to impress, simply looked perplexed, smiling her oval smile. The joke – Heisenberg is pulled over by the police, and when asked if he knew how fast he had been going retorts: ‘No, but I can tell you exactly where I am’ – had taken Rob hours to tell, and even longer to explain afterwards.

  ‘It
’s – you know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, right?’

  ‘I heard of it,’ she said. Carey was doing English and American Studies on a two-year exchange scheme. She was a year older than either of them. Her hair was brown and curly, and she was better at smoking weed and holding it together than either of her suitors. She’d done it all through high school.

  As Rob had lumbered through the contrived explanation of the contrived joke, she had smiled at Alex with a studied bashfulness he thought might, just, be coquettish. Then Rob, still on the edge of hysteria, had moved onto a joke whose punchline was ‘Zorn’s Lemon’ – he remembered that, and Carey, not understanding the joke at all and finding it even funnier because of that, burst with laughter. She fell back on the scratchy old carpet and lay there with her knees up and her chest shaking with laughter. Her mouth was pink and her teeth were very white, and she snorted a little when she breathed in. Alex could have died with love, then, just looking at her.

  Three days later, to Alex’s astonishment, she kissed him after the college dance. He was drinking vodka and lemonade out of a plastic cup, and the room was very dark and very, very noisy. The lights were maybe ten minutes away from coming up. In the middle of the low-ceilinged common room drunken undergraduates were staggering and stamping in a big hairy many-legged alcohol-smelling tangle. Alex was looking into the middle of it, a little glassily, when Carey appeared beside him. She had taken the plastic cup out of his hand and put it on the floor, and then she leaned in decisively and kissed him on the mouth.

  That had been – nice. And afterwards they had staggered out of the room like a three-legged race and into the midnight air smelling of grass from the lawns. Without the darkness and the thumping noise, Alex had felt drunkenness wearing off and self-consciousness intruding. But then, quite briskly, she had taken him to her girl-smelling single bed in her room across the quad and had taken charge of getting the sex out of the way, as if her soft belly and miraculous breasts and unexpected tattoo had been no more to her than the facts of her own body.