by Yoav Blum
About The Coincidence Makers
The first thing you should know is: there’s no such thing as coincidence.
There are beings that watch over you. Some of us were like you, once. Call us what you will, guardians, agents, sentinels or perhaps spirits, angels, demons. No matter how you think of us, we have one purpose. We are architects of chance, we make coincidences.
Of course, a Coincidence Maker always has the choice: fulfil the coincidence, or refuse. So when an assignment of the highest level is slipped under the door one night, it’s immediately obvious that the choice will have to be made. A choice that could change our understanding of coincidences, of fate, free will, and even perhaps, love itself . . .
An imaginative and page-turning debut that blends mystery, thriller and magic to ensure you’ll never look at a coincidence in the same way again . . .
YOAV BLUM
Contents
Cover
About The Coincidence Makers
Dedication
Epigraph
FROM INTRODUCTION TO COINCIDENCES-PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
CLASSICAL THEORIES IN COINCIDENCE MAKING AND RESEARCH METHODS FOR ENHANCING CAUSE SAND EFFECTS
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
FROM METHODS IN DEFINING GOALS FOR COINCIDENCE MAKING–INTRODUCTION
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
FROM THE WORKBOOK FOR THE COURSE FREE CHOICE, BOUNDARIES, AND RULES OF THUMB, PART III (HUMAN BOUNDARIES)
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
FROM KEY FIGURES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COINCIDENCE-MAKING PROFESSION, MANDATORY READING: H. J. BAUM
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
FROM THE LETTER DISSEMINATED AMONG STUDENTS IN THE COINCIDENCE MAKERS COURSE WITH THE AIM OF ENCOURAGING INITIATIVE
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
FROM INTRODUCTION TO COINCIDENCES, PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
About Yoav Blum
Copyright page
To my parents, who showed me how to find my own path, and to Rachel, who joined her path with mine
God does not play dice with the universe.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
—NIELS BOHR
FROM INTRODUCTION TO COINCIDENCES
– PART I
Look at the line of time.
Of course, it is only an illusion. Time is a space, not a line. But for our purposes, look at the line of time.
Watch it. Identify how each event on the line is both a cause and effect. Try to locate its starting point.
You will not succeed, of course.
Every now has a before.
This is probably the main—though not the most obvious—problem you will encounter as coincidence makers.
Therefore, before studying theory and practice, formulas and statistics, before you start to make coincidences, let’s start with the simplest exercise.
Look again at the line of time.
Find the correct spot, place a finger on it, and simply decide: “This is the starting point.”
1
Here too, like always, timing was everything.
Five hours before painting the southern wall in his apartment for the 250th time, Guy sat at the small café and tried to sip his coffee in a deliberate, calculated way.
His body was tilted back a bit from the table, leaning in a position that was supposed to suggest a calmness engendered by years of self-discipline, with the small coffee cup gently cradled between his fingers like a precious seashell. From the corner of his eye, he followed the progress of the second hand on the large clock hanging above the cash register. As always, in the final moments before implementation, he felt the same frustrating awareness of his breathing and his heartbeat, which occasionally drowned out the ticktock of the seconds.
The café was half full.
He glanced around at the people and again saw in his mind the spiderwebs that traversed the air, the thin and invisible connections that linked them.
Sitting across from him at the other end of the café was a roundfaced teenager, resting her head against the windowpane, allowing the music produced by marketing alchemists specializing in teenage romance to flood her thoughts via thin earphone wires. Her closed eyes, her relaxed facial features—everything radiated serenity. Guy didn’t know enough about her to determine whether it was indeed genuine. The young woman wasn’t part of the equation at the moment. She wasn’t supposed to be part of it—just part of the background buzz.
An insecure couple on a first or second date sat at the table opposite the young woman, trying to navigate through what was perhaps a friendly conversation, or a job interview for the position of spouse, or a quiet war of witticisms camouflaged by smiles and occasional side-glances in order to avoid the prolonged eye contact that would create a false sense of intimacy. In fact, this couple was an example of all hurried relationships that anxiously revolve around themselves. The world was full of such couplings, regardless of how hard it tried to prevent them.
A bit toward the back, in the corner, sat a student busy erasing the face of an old love from his heart, at a table full of papers covered in dense handwriting. He gazed at a large mug of hot chocolate, immersed in a daydream disguised as academic concentration. Guy knew his name, medical history, emotional history, musings, dreams, small fears. Guy had everything filed away somewhere . . . everything he needed to know in order to guess the possibilities, to try to arrange them in accordance with the complex statistics of causes and effects.
Finally, two waitresses with tired eyes—who were somehow still smiling and standing—conducted a quiet, intense conversation by the closed door to the kitchen. Or rather, one of them spoke while the other listened, nodding occasionally, offering signs according to the predetermined “I’m Paying Attention” protocol, though it seemed to Guy she was thinking about something completely different.
He also knew her history. Anyway, he hoped he did.
He put down the cup of coffee and counted the seconds in his head.
It was seventeen minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, according to the clock above the cash register.
He knew that each person in the café would have a slightly different time on his or her watch. A half a minute before or after didn’t really matter.
After all, people were not only differentiated from one another by place. They also operated in different times. To a certain extent, they moved within a personal time bubble of their own making. Part of Guy’s work, as the General had said, was to bring these times together without generating the sense of an artificial encounter.
Guy himself didn’t have a watch. He’d discovered that he didn’t ever use one. He was so conscious of time that he had no need for it.
He always loved this warm sensation, which nearly permeated the bone, during the minute preceding the execution of a mission. It was the sensation that came from knowing he was about to reach out a finger and nudge the planet, or the heavens. The knowledge that he would be diverting things from their regular and familiar path, things that until a second ago w
ere moving in a completely different direction. He was like a man painting great and complex landscapes, but without a brush and paint—simply with the precise and gentle turn of a big kaleidoscope.
If I didn’t exist, he’d thought more than once, they would need to invent me. They would have to.
Billions of such movements happened every day, corresponding with each other, offsetting each other and swinging each other in a tragic-comic dance of possible futures. None of the protagonists were aware of these movements. And he, in one simple decision, saw the change that was about to happen, and then executed it. Elegantly, quietly, secretly. Even if it were exposed, no one would believe what stood behind it. And still, he always trembled a bit beforehand.
“First of all,” the General had told them when they began, “you are secret agents. All the others are first of all agents and secondly secret, but you are first of all secret and to a certain extent, also agents.”
Guy inhaled deeply, and everything started to happen.
The teenage girl at the table across from him moved a bit as one song in the playlist finished and another began. She shifted the position of her head on the windowpane, opened her eyes, and stared outside.
The student shook his head.
The couple, still sizing each other up, chuckled in embarrassment, as if there were no other type of chuckle in the world.
The second hand had already completed a quarter of its circuit.
Guy exhaled.
He pulled the wallet out of his pocket.
Exactly on time, a short and irritable summons tore the two waitresses from each other, sending one of them into the kitchen.
He placed a few dollars on the table.
The student began to collect his papers, still slow and pensive.
The second hand reached its halfway mark.
Guy put down his cup, still half full, exactly three-quarters of an inch from the edge of the table, on top of the money. When the hand on the clock reached forty-two, he stood and waved to the waitress who remained outside the kitchen, in a motion that communicated both “thank you” and “good-bye.”
She waved back to him and started to move toward the table.
As the second hand passed its three-quarter mark, Guy walked toward the sun-drenched street and disappeared from the view of the café patrons.
Three, two, one . . .
The cute student in the corner prepared to leave.
Though it was Julie’s table, Shirley would apparently have to take care of it, now that her coworker was in the kitchen. Not that she minded. She liked students. She liked cute young men. A cute student was a winning combination, as a matter of fact.
Shirley shook her head.
No! Stop these thoughts immediately! Enough with “cute” and “charming” guys and every other adjective you feel obliged to toss around.
Been there, done that. You tried, you checked, you soared, you crashed. And now you’ve learned. Enough. It’s over. You’re taking a b-r-e-a-k.
The other young man, the one with the melancholy eyes, waved to her as he began to leave.
She knew him, if one could know a man from weekly, silent visits. He usually drank every drop of coffee, leaving the half-muddy sediment at the bottom, as if waiting for a fortune-teller who would never come, and the money gently folded underneath the cup. He left the café, and it seemed to her that she detected some tension in his steps. She approached his table and made a point of not looking at the student.
After all, she was only a human being. And an entire year had passed. Clearly, she still felt the need for some type of human warmth. She still could not get used to the thought that alone was the new together. That she needed to be strong, genuine, a lone and beautiful wolf in the snow, or a leopardess in the desert, or something like that. Years and years of chick flicks, sugary pop songs, and superficial books had managed to construct a well-built fortification of romantic illusions in her mind.
But it’ll be okay.
It’ll be okay.
She reached out her hand, a bit lost in her thoughts.
She heard a soft noise behind her and turned her head. It was the girl with the earphones, humming to herself.
Even before turning her head back, Shirley realized she had made a mistake.
Her brain now perceived the events as they transpired, predicting them, timing them with the precision of an atomic clock, but always a thousandth of a second late.
Now, her hand was moving the cup a bit instead of grabbing it.
Now, the cup, which for some reason was placed so close to the edge, was losing its balance.
Now, she was reaching with her other hand, trying to catch the falling cup; and she was failing and the cup shattered on the floor and she cried out, a sharp, frustrated cry.
And now, here was the student—that is, a young man, a young man who wasn’t interesting at all—lifting his head toward the cry, moving his hand in the wrong direction, and inadvertently spilling hot chocolate on his papers.
And now, Bruno was coming out of the kitchen.
Shit.
“Sometimes you’ll need to be a bit ruthless,” the General would say. “It happens. It’s necessary. I, myself, really enjoyed this. But you don’t have to be little sadists in order to understand. The principle is quite simple.”
Guy walked down the street, counting his steps until he could permit himself to turn around and look from afar. The cup should have already fallen. He would take a look, just one quick glance, to be sure everything was okay, to confirm. This wasn’t childish, this was healthy curiosity. No one would notice. He was on the other side of the street. He was allowed to do this.
And then he would go sabotage the pipe.
Shirley saw the student curse, his arms flailing in an effort to rescue the pages covered in dense handwriting.
She bent down quickly to collect the broken pieces of the cup, and bumped her head on the table.
Shit #2.
She tried to collect the large pieces without getting cut. Her shoes were spotted with small coffee stains, like the splotches of a hesitant giraffe.
Did coffee stains come out in the laundry? Were these shoes even washable?
She quietly cursed everything and everyone. It was the third time this had happened to her at the café. Bruno had made it very clear what would happen the third time.
“Leave it,” she heard a quiet voice say.
Bruno crouched next to her, crimson with anger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. It . . . it was an accident. I just lost my concentration for half a second. Really.”
“It’s the third time,” Bruno muttered angrily. He didn’t like to yell in front of customers. “The first time, I said it wasn’t a big deal. The second time, I warned you.”
“Bruno, I’m sorry,” she said.
Bruno glared at her.
Oh. Big mistake.
He really didn’t like to be called by his first name. She didn’t usually make mistakes like that. What was going on with her today?
“Leave it,” he said quietly, accentuating each word. “Return the uniform, take your share of today’s tips, and leave. You’re not working here anymore.” And before she could utter a word, he stood up and went back into the kitchen.
Now Guy was running.
He still had a lot to do. Everything could not be prepared in advance. There were things he had to execute at the last moment, or at least check that they were occurring as they should.
He had yet to reach the point where he could let the cups fall and then sit and watch one event follow another. He still needed to give the events a small push, in real time.
He would need to photocopy most of the material again.
One of the waitresses—not the one who was collecting the pieces from the floor and looked like she was about to burst into tears—came to him with paper towels and helped him mop up whatever the pages had not yet absorbed. In silence, they quickly cleaned the table.
He left most of the papers there. “You can throw these away,” he said to her. “I’ll just photocopy them again.”
“What a bummer,” she said and pursed her lips in sympathy.
“Bring me the bill please,” he said. “I think I’ll get going.”
She nodded and turned around, and he caught a whiff of her perfume. A small, old alarm quietly resonated in his head. Sharon’s perfume.
He needed this like a hole in the head.
He blinked and continued to stuff the papers that were still dry into his bag. Then, with the table sparkling, the waitress gave him the bill.
He didn’t even notice that he had stopped breathing when she came near, just to avoid smelling her by mistake.
When she moved away, he lifted his eyes from the bill and saw the second waitress, the one who knocked the cup over, leaving the café, dressed in regular clothes.
Guy sat at the bus stop and opened the little notebook.
He was in a spot where she wasn’t supposed to see him, but just in case, he pretended to be reading the notebook.
He opened it to one of the first coincidences he had worked on. The mission was to cause a particular employee at a shoe factory to lose his job. The person was a brilliant composer who had never discovered his talent for music. In the first stage, Guy had to arrange for him to be fired; in the second stage, he had to expose the man to music in a way that would induce him to try to compose something.
It had been a fairly complicated task for a fledgling coincidence maker, and less exciting than other missions he dreamed of.
Guy remembered being quite pretentious at that time. He tried to do something that far exceeded his planning abilities. Reading from the notebook, he remembered that he used a particularly jumpy goat, flu shots, and a power outage that paralyzed the entire factory.
He failed, of course. They fired someone else because he didn’t correctly calculate the employees’ times of arrival. That was back when he only took the individual person into account, instead of looking at that person’s connection to the broader picture. He hadn’t paid sufficient attention to the pattern of traffic jams on Thursday mornings in his composer’s neighborhood, and someone else was at the factory at the time Guy thought his mark would be present.
