The Coincidence Engine

by Sam Leith

  ‘Boo who.’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Bree. ‘It’s only a joke.’

  Jones continued to stare out of the windshield. Bree reached into the glove compartment and took out a Slim Jim and unwrapped it and began to chew. That hadn’t been a success.

  ‘Slim Jim, Jones?’ she said.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Jones.

  ‘OK,’ said Bree, a mile or so later on. ‘Not big on sense of humour. No GSOH, like they don’t say in the lonely hearts listing. Jokes don’t make you laugh.’

  Jones didn’t say anything.

  ‘Jeezus, Jones. I’m trying to needle you here. Throw me a bone.’

  Jones continued to look out of the windshield with bland attention to the road.

  ‘OK. Needle means like… Bone means like… Means say something.’

  ‘What would you like me to say?’ said Jones.

  ‘Make conversation.’

  Jones left it a while. He seemed to be involved in some sort of mental effort. Bree could have sworn the hand with which he ordinarily smoked – the main hand with which he ordinarily smoked, given he seemed to be ambidextrous in this regard – twitched towards his pants pocket.

  ‘Knock knock,’ said Jones eventually.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said Bree.

  Jones didn’t say anything for a bit.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said Bree. ‘Jones, you have to -’

  ‘Mister,’ said Jones.

  ‘Mister who?’ said Bree.

  ‘Mister Jones,’ said Jones. Bree laughed. Jones didn’t.

  ‘Hah, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘I like it. You were joking… Nice work…’

  She cracked open another Slim Jim – they were minis – by way of celebration. Jones continued to stare benignly at the road, but she saw something around his eyes, in his frown, that looked a little haunted.

  She waited a bit.

  ‘You weren’t joking,’ she said. ‘Were you?’

  ‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I was trying.’

  ‘You were funny. Sort of… inadvertently.’ After the highway had gone by for a bit more, uneventfully, Bree continued. ‘Knock knock jokes aren’t really funny, anyway,’ she said. ‘They’re more like corny. So it’s funny when they’re not funny?’

  ‘I know that,’ said Jones. ‘I know other people find things funny. It’s one of the concepts I find difficult to understand. Funny is what?’

  ‘Do you not laugh, Jones?’

  Jones thought quite hard about this; as did Bree, who was trying to remember if she’d heard him laugh since they’d met.

  ‘No,’ he said eventually, in a tone of voice that suggested that the question was an odd one.

  ‘Not even if I tickle you?’

  ‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I think that reflex is attached to anticipation. I don’t have that. But I don’t laugh. I know a lot of jokes. I remember every joke anyone tells me. I remember everything anyone tells me. I have an eidetic memory. It’s one of the things that allows me to function. Someone tells someone else a lie and they laugh. I know that’s how it works. But it doesn’t work for me. If I know the joke, I know what’s going to happen. If I don’t know the joke, I often don’t know it’s a joke. It’s just – nonsense. It confuses me.’

  Bree remembered, suddenly, the way her own daughter had been when she was five or six. That was when they’d been living in Washington, again, in the long narrow apartment with the air-con unit in the window at the end of the hallway that made all that noise.

  Bree remembered Cass saying two things, the two things connecting up. First was when she had overheard Bree talking to Al, when they were still talking, and Al had said something that had made Bree laugh. A joke, not one of his dirty ones. Bree had been a couple beers in, probably laughing harder than whatever Al had said deserved.

  ‘What, Mommy? What?’ Bree had repeated the joke, but Cass had just looked confused. Did that really happen? Why not? Why did you say it did?

  That phase lasted months – a curiosity about jokes, matched with a total failure to understand them. They seemed to be everywhere. Suddenly her schoolmates were all telling these jokes and Cass would bring them home, wondering, almost to the point of tears.

  Cass – prim with indignation, hands behind her back in the blue dress, toe of the red shoe pivoting on the linoleum. ‘No, Mommy. That’s not true. No. That’s a lie.’

  The problem was that Cass didn’t understand the difference between a joke and a lie – and Bree, though she knew there was one, had not been able to explain it to her daughter. She had not, come to that, even been able to explain it to her own satisfaction.

  Later, when Cass started to lie in earnest, the thing recurred from the other end. ‘Did you do your homework?’ ‘Did you study for the test?’ ‘How was school?’ These routine questions would be answered yes, and yes, and lovely thank you, Mommy. It was only when the teachers called to ask why Cass had failed the test, why she’d come to school without her homework, why she’d bitten another child so hard she’d drawn blood, and Bree confronted her, that she’d protest, ‘I was joking! It was a joke!’

  ‘Cassie, did you take Mommy’s keys, honey?’

  ‘No, Mommy, I promise. Daddy took them.’

  And Cass would have a blazing row with Al. And then the keys would show up, in Hampton Bear’s bear house in the corner of Cass’s room.

  ‘I was joking, Mommy! I was joking!’ she would shriek as Bree, especially if it was late in the evening, smacked the backs of her legs red. Long time gone.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Jones said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bree. ‘Bit of my Slim Jim went the wrong way.’ She coughed and thumped her chest and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and went into the glove compartment and came out again.

  ‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Irish knock knock joke. You say knock knock.’

  ‘Knock knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Mister.’

  ‘No, it’s -’ she started. Jeepers he was hopeless. Then she realised he was, earnestly, trying. That made her feel…

  ‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother. Just drive.’ Trying, she thought.

  The light was going down ahead of them, spreading out over the sky. It was cloudy in that direction. They drove on through Birmingham without stopping, at Bree’s suggestion, and got takeout from a Wendy’s on the outskirts, also at Bree’s suggestion. Jones ordered what Bree ordered, which was one fewer burger than she would have liked. Bree liked Wendy’s. The hot foil wrappings felt classier than Mickey D’s, and she liked the way the burgers were square even though the buns were mostly round. She liked that you could nibble the corners off, salty and greasy and chewy and hot.

  They ate leaning back against the doors of the car where it was parked in the lot. The restaurant was light and the light spilled into a kids’ play area with a slide in the shape of an elephant and a see-saw anchored to the PlayCrete by a spring. It had a smiling plastic Wendy face, with ginger bangs and braids, atop the central boss. Wendy’s eyes were dark.

  Bree felt tearful. She slurped her big orange soda. Jones, on the other side of the car, smoked gratefully, and the drift of the smoke smelled good.

  As they drove, afterwards, Bree stopped trying to establish what went on in Jones’s head. That was Jones’s business, she reckoned. She liked him.

  They drove on from the Wendy’s and kept going to Tupelo, where when Bree saw the illuminated vertical beacon of a Motel 6 glowing she asked Jones to pull in and they decided to stop for the night. They would contact Red Queen in the morning. Bree wondered what had happened about the disappearing case – the one he’d had at the airport and then hadn’t had.

  They booked two adjacent rooms, both for cash. Jones helped Bree with her small travelling bag, put it in her room for her then came out to the walkway. It was round ten thirty, maybe eleven.

  ‘Jones,’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. You sleep well also.’


  There was a moment of neither moving. Jones seemed to be looking for a cue.

  She stood opposite him a minute, and thought of hugging him and then laughed aloud, a little nervously, and turned round and went into her room before she had time to register his quizzical expression.

  Bree lay on her back on her bed in her clothes and looked at the ceiling. She thought of Cass. It was some time before she went to sleep. She wasn’t aware of falling asleep at all. But she woke still in her clothes and with the lights on, where she had been lying earlier, with a disoriented feeling. That meant she had been asleep. The clock on the wall said it was 2 a.m. She could hear a noise.

  Cheap thin motel walls, she thought, as her startlement abated and she got a sense of where she was. Barely more than partitions. It would be some couple going at it. But the noise wasn’t the grunt and huff of sex, not even the stagy wailing some women seemed to put on when they found themselves in motel rooms with thin walls next to Bree when she was trying to sleep.

  It was the high, animal, keening sound of someone in distress. Bree rolled her feet onto the ground and reached into her bag for the small, light handgun she carried and had never had to fire. She knew that this was a serious job. If this thing was as powerful as she understood it to be, she knew the DEI would not be the only people looking for it; they probably weren’t even the only government agency looking for it. There were interests at work in it that would use violence. Red Queen had as much as told her so.

  She sat with the gun in her two hands, getting her breathing steady, listening. The sound rose and fell, came and went. It wasn’t the sound of someone being hurt. It was the sound of crying: the jagged hee-hawing of someone winded by grief. It was coming through the wall separating her room from Jones’s. It sounded too high to be a grown man’s voice.

  Bree got up, rolled on the outsides of her feet to her door, and slowly turned the handle. Outside the air was still muggy. There was a dirty yellow halogen light illuminating the porch, and mosquitoes blatting against it. She eased the door behind her closed – a soft click, and a moment of panic before she remembered her key card was safe in her pocket – and she could no longer hear the bellow of the air conditioner.

  She took a couple of steps down to Jones’s door. It was closed. The sound was coming through the thin plywood. She kept the gun in her right hand, but let it fall down behind her thigh. She knocked, softly, with the knuckles of her left hand on the door.

  The sound stopped, abruptly. She stood breathing there for a minute, then knocked again.

  ‘Who is it?’ It was Jones’s voice. She had, momentarily, a flash of remembering the knock knock jokes.

  ‘Jones?’ she said.

  ‘Bree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The door opened. Jones was there, and from behind him there came a gust of old cigarette smoke. He had his trousers on, and no top. He was well muscled. In one hand he had a toothbrush and in the other a lit cigarette, and his eyes were red and sore. He looked at her a moment, winced, and resumed brushing his teeth. Foam appeared around his mouth.

  ‘Jones?’

  ‘What?’ he said, removing the toothbrush. He put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a pull. The end was dabbed with shiny foam when he took it out. Then he turned round and went back into the room. His room was exactly like Bree’s, except that beside the laminated no-smoking sign on the bedside table was the polystyrene cup from the bathroom, filled with butts.

  Jones tapped his ash into this cup, went into the bathroom and spat noisily.

  ‘I was just going to bed,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell’s up? Was that you crying?’

  Jones looked at her as if slightly affronted.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘My mother is dead,’ Jones said.

  ‘Oh, Jones. I’m sorry. Shit. You should have said. What happened?’ Bree moved in, awkward because of her bulk and because of Jones’s semi-nakedness and his being a colleague and being covered in toothpaste and waving a cigarette. She thought she ought to hug him but contented herself with reaching up and squeezing his shoulder. Jones’s face crumpled, then recovered. He sat down on the bed.

  ‘Jones, look, we’ll – where’s home? Do you want to drive there? Did you just hear?’

  Jones sat down on the bed, and Bree sat down with him.

  ‘No,’ said Jones. ‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’

  Bree didn’t say anything for a bit, then she said: ‘Twenty-four years?’

  ‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’

  ‘I heard you, Jones. I mean: what? What’s making you cry? Twenty-four years is a long time.’

  ‘She’s still dead,’ said Jones.

  ‘Jesus, Jones. Of course. I know, but it’s like you just found out -’

  ‘It is like I just found out. I always cry before I go to sleep,’ said Jones. ‘I have emotions. I don’t have an imagination: I can’t see things that aren’t there. But I have emotions. I had something and it made me happy and I lost it and now I don’t have it.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ said Bree. Bree thought of Cass again, and then stopped the thought. ‘What do you remember about her?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Jones.

  ‘You’re -’

  ‘I remember everything she ever said to me. Everything she ever wore. Every time she touched me. Every smell and taste of her.’ Jones sighed. ‘I have an eidetic memory. That is my condition. Everything that ever happens to me I remember it exactly. If I didn’t have that I couldn’t function.’

  ‘But.’

  ‘Why would I not be sad when I am alone?’

  ‘Jones, people get over things. They have to. You can’t just -’

  In the light from the wall lamp, Jones’s face was a sick yellow. He looked miserable. He got up and went to the sink, rinsed his toothbrush and stood it in the other polystyrene cup.

  ‘I can’t. I know that this is not like other people. It’s not important. It is what happens to me. But I have no way of “getting over things”. I have no expectations, no desires that live in what you call the future. That is what apsychosis means. Everything I want is in the past. Everything I want to happen has already happened. Everyone I love is already gone, and I can remember everything about them.’

  Bree didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Jones lit another cigarette from the butt of the last. Bree felt sad and annoyed and a bit awkward.

  ‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t…’

  ‘OK, I get it. You don’t know what it would be like. But you must know – from your experience – if you’re happier when you have someone with you or if you’re happier when you’re alone.’

  ‘I’m happier when you are with me,’ said Jones.

  ‘OK then,’ said Bree. And she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. When he finished smoking he turned off the light and lay down, apparently without self-consciousness, on the bed next to her. The keening noises he made rose a little, then settled, as Bree put one of her arms over him and held him as he fell to sleep.

  Chapter 10

  Isla walks up between two rows of beanpoles towards the cabin. She thinks: nobody is here.

  A cane chair, empty, sits outside the cabin. The windows are shuttered. There is an outer door, with a gauze screen in it, that looks like it once had some paint on the wood. It’s very slightly ajar, and she pulls it open. She waits a minute, listening to nothing, then knocks on the inside door. She waits, turns on her heels and looks around her. There’s no reply, still, from inside, so she walks round the side of the cabin. There’s a sloping roof coming off the wall a bit below shoulder height – mossy slates, sheltering a pair of tall red gas canisters and a neat stack of chopped wood.

  The back of the cabin is windowless, and faces an escarpment – there’d be room to wriggle past, but not com
fortably. As she peers round she sees a cat vanish into the crawl space under the cabin. It smells of sawdust and wet earth. He’s in the woods somewhere, presumably. She wonders about leaving a note, decides against.

  She puts her face up against one of the windows, cups her hands around her eyes so she can see in. The room looks bare – there’s a dark rug of some sort on the floor, some sort of pallet up one end, drifts of yellow paper stacked on and around a table on the blank wall. On the table is an old-fashioned hurricane lamp.

  The yellow paper… This is it. The letters all came on long sheets of ruled yellow paper from legal pads. The writing disciplined, intense, very small. She is remembering the first letter she had: two years ago, out of the blue, apparently in response to something she had written about him.

  ‘Dear Miss Holderness,’ it had begun. ‘The order of things is changing.’ The letter was written in English, albeit some of it curiously constructed.

  It had been addressed in scrawled block capitals with her first name gone over several times in ink, care of ‘EtUdes/RecOltes’, University of Nice. On the back was a poste restante address in Carcassonne.

  He had read, he said, the short introductory commentary she had written – there’d been some sort of dodgy French translation – on the value of his work to number theory for this small mathematical journal with its tiresome capitalisation.

  She hadn’t believed it at first. Clearly Mike was winding her up. But would even Mike write forty pages just for the sake of a joke? And Mike didn’t know the maths well enough, she realised as she went on, to have written some of the material in the letter. Then she thought that it meant something momentous: if it was Banacharski, and he was still reading journals, it meant he might still be doing maths.

  A subsequent page suggested otherwise. He had bought some artichokes at the market, and they had been wrapped in a photocopy of her article. This, Banacharski said, was of tremendous importance.

  ‘I ate these artichokes. There were four of them. And I counted each one the number of their petals, and counted each one the number of the fibres around their hearts. This took me several days. I have started to see what you are talking about. Your article shows a deep grasp of theory. Not in the meanings of your words, which are banal, but in the patterns of your words. You know this. I am now starting to learn. The problem is in disorder.’