The Coincidence Makers

by Yoav Blum

  His coffee sat in the third aisle, behind a different type of coffee that was a bit more expensive. He placed the jar in his empty cart and after taking three more steps he saw fortune cookies on the shelf, on sale.

  Two for the price of one.

  Emily let the phone ring three and a half times, then answered.

  “Just a moment,” she said.

  She held the phone away from her ear and counted in her heart to ten. Her heart counted too quickly, so she counted a few more seconds, this time in her head.

  “Ah, yes.” She brought the phone back to her ear. “Excuse me, I was in the middle of something.”

  “Hi,” Guy said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Remember those cookies we used to eat?”

  “Yes, sure,” she said. “I think they even had accurate predictions a few times.”

  “Do you remember which brand they were?”

  “No . . . it was in a sort of tin box, no?”

  “Brown with a red stripe, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m at the supermarket now and came across them. It seems like years since I’ve seen a box like this.”

  “Wow, what nostalgia,” she said. “Buy one for me too.”

  “Um, you know what?” he said.

  Of course I know what. It’s clear that I know what. I hope you know what! “What?”

  “How about stopping by? We’ll munch on some cookies, like old times.”

  “I guess I could postpone a few things till tomorrow. . . .” she said, slowly enough to sound like she was trying to make up her mind.

  “Come, come, it’ll be fun,” he said.

  “You know what? Let’s do it,” Emily said. “And let’s watch a movie. Your turn to pick!”

  “Done.”

  “Terrific. I’ll get dressed and leave in a few minutes.”

  They ended the conversation, and Emily felt as if she had finished hanging on the wall of her den the head of the bear she had hunted. She began to bounce around the apartment, trying not to scream too much. The neighbors, you know. So she just skipped like a little girl to the other room, stood close to the wall, rose on tiptoes, and kissed the wall where Guy’s name was written.

  It could be nice, Guy thought, to end the day in conversation with another breathing creature. He looked at the recommended titles on his Netflix app.

  The Blind Side

  Life Is Beautiful

  Never Say Never Again

  It’s a Wonderful Life

  Pretty Woman

  It Happened One Night

  He shook his head. He felt a bit strange.

  He wasn’t used to finding romantic comedies on his recommendations list, but it wasn’t just that. There was something else. He ignored the feeling and randomly selected a movie, his eyes closed as he pressed the button.

  Catch Me If You Can

  Emily would be pleased. She loved Tom Hanks.

  Only when he got back home did he realize the significance of his proposal.

  It had been ages since he’d hosted anyone. Actually, how much time did he have now, ten minutes?

  Clothes were strewn all over the living room, an old stain looked at him reprovingly from the tablecloth, and a large pile of books, pamphlets, and notebooks from the course was still in the corner, a monument to procrastination. Not to speak of newspapers that were spread by the wall he’d repainted yesterday.

  He quickly collected the clothes and pushed the books behind one of the sofas. A quick glance through the blinds revealed that Emily was already on the street. He hurried along the wall, scooped up newspapers, tossed them into one of the other rooms without thinking, threw himself onto the sofa, and turned on the television so it would look like he had been doing exactly that when Emily arrived.

  On the screen appeared a smiling, bearded man against the backdrop of a snowy, majestic mountain. The man’s face was red and sunburned, and a thick down jacket covered him to the neck, but his eyes sparkled a deep blue.

  “First of all, congratulations,” said the interviewer, who was out of camera range except for his hand holding the microphone. “I understand this is your second attempt to conquer the summit.”

  “Yes,” the bearded man said. “It didn’t really work out last time. It was even quite horrendous, to tell you the truth. I broke my leg . . . quite a mess.”

  “Nonetheless, you decided to try again.”

  “You know how it is,” the bearded man said, expanding his smile. “That’s why they invented second chances. You can’t give up on something that you know you must do. It was clear to me that I needed to try again. And besides, this time I also had especially good support.” He reached out his hand, and a tanned woman with short hair entered the picture, wrapped in a jacket just as thick as the man’s. She waved her hand and giggled when the man pressed his whiskers to her forehead.

  Emily knocked on the door.

  They sat together on the sofa and tried to remember how it went. After all of the meetings in which Eric also participated, with him always saying the right idiotic sentence, some adjustments were apparently required. They were a bit rusty at being together one-on-one.

  “You can still smell the paint,” Emily said, the automatic pilot flying the friend inside her still trying to control things.

  “Yes, it . . . it lingers,” Guy said. On the screen in front of them, the bearded mountain climber continued to talk silently.

  Emily got up and opened the blinds a bit. On the way back, she picked up the box of fortune cookies and offered it to Guy. “One for you . . . ,” she said as Guy took one with a smile, “and one for me,” she said, extracting another random cookie.

  She sat opposite him on the sofa, her legs folded underneath her.

  “I’m really happy you invited me,” she said. “We haven’t done this in a long time. I missed it.”

  Guy smiled at her, broke his fortune cookie, and took out the small piece of paper. In the short moments before the power outage snuffed out all of the lights, he managed to read the sentence and raise his eyes toward Emily.

  “ ‘Don’t look far. The answer to the most important question is likely to be in front of your eyes. ’ ”

  The darkness covered them in a silence rife with expectations. Emily sat upright, holding her breath.

  She knew that the pale glimmer of the streetlights entering through the blinds would fall exactly on her eyes in a white diagonal line, making them sparkle. She heard heartbeats and wondered whether they were hers or his. When the flow of electricity resumed, he was still looking into her eyes. They remained silent.

  Finally, he put down the broken cookie and said, “I think I realize something now, something I should have realized a long time ago.”

  She trembled slightly. “Yes?” she said quietly.

  “I don’t want us to meet again like we once did,” he said, and she saw a flush of red spreading across his cheeks. “I want us to meet in a new way, completely new. I want us to try something else.”

  “That sounds excellent to me.” She was still unable to speak in a full voice.

  “I’ve lived in the past for too long.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And I didn’t notice certain feelings until today.”

  “Guy . . .”

  “And to hell with Cassandra. It’s you I want.”

  “Oh, Guy.”

  When the lights went back on, Emily shook herself and returned to reality, awakening to the real world in which Guy sat in front of her and stared at the broken cookie and the piece of paper in his hand. He raised his eyes toward her and asked, “Emily, what’s going on here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Something inside of him seemed to have toughened. He got up and went behind the sofa, rummaged around, and pulled out a faded notebook that was falling apart. object selection techniques, part b was written on it. He thumbed through it until he found the page he was looking for, the
n placed the notebook on the table. The title of the page was “No. 73: Choosing from a Box Prepared in Advance, a Variation on the Viton Exercise.” The illustrations explained how to turn the box so that the subject would think he was randomly taking an object from it, but would actually take an object determined in advance.

  Emily looked silently at the open notebook.

  “You arranged for me to take this cookie, right?”

  She remained silent and crushed her cookie between her fingers.

  “Right?”

  She still didn’t answer. He threw the notebook to the other side of the room and sat down opposite her. “What’s going on here?”

  “Someone, a good friend of mine in a course I once took, told me about his first love,” Emily said quietly. “He said he once thought love was a type of admiration, only with a pleasant smell. That it’s a situation in which you become enslaved to thinking about someone else, that you become a groupie of someone for all sorts of reasons, and that this someone becomes your groupie too. After all, this is how everyone talks about it, no? Blinding lightning that hits you one clear day, or a cake of admiration that quietly rises in your belly, the realization—like a bright white light—of a connection to a twin spirit and all that bullshit.”

  “You also arranged for the cookies to be in the supermarket? You arranged for the woman at the toy store?” He couldn’t really be angry with her, not with her, but he had to pretend to be. She must understand that this can’t be. Can’t. Be.

  “And then, when a someone arrived in his life, my friend understood that they had lied to him, that he had lied to himself. It wasn’t admiration, not even something close to that. The beginning was similar, but very quickly this superficial admiration grew and became something else, something truer. He felt like he was back home again. That he had come to a place where he was wanted and felt worthy and fitting. And, in particular, a place where he belonged. He felt, so he said, as if they had already met or had done something together a long time ago, and had been forced to take a break and then were able to do it again, though he had no idea what ‘it’ was. He never felt like it was a beginning, he told me. He always felt like it was a continuation.”

  “Emily, listen . . .”

  She tried her best not to sound like she was begging. Just not begging. “Guy . . . you look around at the world,” she said, “and you never see love that suits you because you are just not looking for it. You’re looking for Cassandra and giving up in advance. You’re looking for someone who was once there and no longer exists. You’re a captive of something that is over, gone. And it’s sad for me to see you like this, trying to fill in the colors in a picture whose lines were erased long ago, imagining something in which there is no—”

  “I’m not imagining anything. I’m remembering. Only memories remain for me,” he interrupted. “There’s a difference between—”

  “Still, you’re a captive,” she interrupted in return.

  “It’s good for me this way.”

  “But not for me.”

  They sat in silence.

  Slowly, all of the circles of understanding came together. Tick, tick, tick. He knew what she wanted, what she was trying to arrange, and she knew that he knew. And he knew that she knew that he knew . . . and so on. . . .

  What the hell was she thinking?

  “Where was the beginning of all the . . .”

  “For a very long time, I’ve been thinking about how to tell you this, how to give this to you, how . . .” She shivered. I need a hug, said her body. No, said his.

  “I meant today. When did you start to make coincidences for me today?” he asked cautiously.

  “At the beach,” Emily said.

  “The boy and the dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “The street full of couples.”

  “Yes, and a few other things. . . .” And I need a hug, can’t you see that?

  Oh, what the hell, let it out already.

  “I think that we started something together once and we had a break, and now we can continue,” Emily said. “You don’t feel like this sometimes? Not even a little? Because I do. Every time you’re around, every time you’re near me, I come home. I want to continue from the point we left off. I . . .”

  “Emily,” he said.

  “Believe me,” she said, “there is such a place.”

  She should have arranged a longer power outage, much longer. Now it was possible to see that she was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re great, you’re really great. You know how much fun I have with you. But . . .”

  There had to be a “but,” right? A mental U-turn.

  He took a deep breath. “It doesn’t work this way. Not with me. You can’t arrange a coincidence for us when ‘us’ cannot happen.”

  She didn’t stay much longer.

  There was no point.

  She had asked the question and presented her complex gift of courtship, this possibility she had worked on for so long. And he had answered. A quiet but resounding “No.”

  Walking slowly down the hallway, trying not to fall, she realized the cookie was still in her hand. She had arranged a lot of things in advance today, but her cookie was really completely random. She broke it and took out the little piece of paper that was inside.

  “Sometimes,” it whispered to her, “disappointments are new and wonderful beginnings.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. The light in the stairway went off, and she felt her way down.

  10

  Dammit, get in already!

  Eddie Levy, an accountant, stood in the stairway, bent over, struggling to get the key into the lock.

  His hands were steady, his teeth clenched in irritation, but somehow the simple act of inserting the key and turning it had become complicated. He cursed quietly.

  He shot a glance at his watch. His internal turmoil had lasted for nearly eight minutes. It was hard for him to define this vague feeling, but he knew it was the last thing he needed at the moment.

  The key finally slid into the cylinder, and he shoved the door open. When he entered and turned on the lights, he thought about the small scratches he had surely made around the keyhole, like some lowlife drunkard.

  He tried to breathe deeply, calm down, clear his thoughts.

  Deep breaths would bring more air into his lungs, more oxygen into his bloodstream, so the brain would receive the portion it needed to go into a lower gear and return to normalcy. He felt as if someone had shot one of those little rubber balls into his head and now the ball was bouncing in all directions.

  But there was no need to exaggerate. It was okay. He wasn’t an emotional person. He was very proud of that.

  While people around him became servants to elusive urges, he had already mapped that territory long ago. He no longer tried to explain it. There was no point. People wanted to convince themselves that they feel. Recognition of the fact that this was nothing but a chemical reaction, a small electric surge among neurons, made them feel too mechanical somehow.

  Eddie had no problem being a machine. It was the truth, and one should acknowledge it. A chunk of meat, a capsule of DNA, a system of organs with self-consciousness. Well, so what? That’s how it was.

  But now he found himself pacing back and forth in the small apartment, slicing the dense air between the walls covered with crowded shelves, trying to understand the source of this disquiet and stuff it back into the irrational hole from which it had crawled.

  He stopped and shook his head.

  Music. He’d listen to a little music. Somewhere, on the bottom of one of the shelves, was a dusty collection of CDs. It had been a long time since he’d listened to them. He had one CD of concertos for piano and orchestra and had listened to only four tracks—decisive tracks, with a structured musical theme, with development that could almost be presented as a formula with two unknowns.

  His music, that’s what he needed.

  He pulled out the old battere
d Discman, with the earphone wires wound around it like a snake coiled around prey, and sat down in the armchair. The first sounds started to restore familiar order to the universe.

  He closed his eyes, and the clear, almost militaristic tempo swept over him. He was no longer a grumpy man sitting in an old armchair. He looked at himself, at the whole world, from a distance and with a single thought; the armchair became a cloud of synthetic molecules, and sitting on the chair was a system of pumps and pipes, bellows and air openings, levers and tissues. He went still further in his thoughts, into cold outer space, and saw the small, blue, pathetic ball circling around the big burning ball. And still further, until everything became motionless specks in empty space. If one looked from high enough, everything appeared the same—atoms arranged in complex forms. Whether it was a random block of granite passing through a galaxy, or a blood pump made of muscle that someone at some point in history decided was the seat of human emotion.

  The track ended.

  There was no point in listening to the next track, which was slow and annoying. On any other day, he would turn it off and quickly move on to the rest of the evening. But perhaps because of his fatigue from walking or perhaps because he was sitting comfortably in the armchair and the Discman had slid far, far below to the floor, he found himself swept onward to the next part of the concerto. The soft, seductive, sentimental part that he hadn’t listened to in ages.

  When he woke up, the Discman next to him was dead.

  The battery had run out in the middle of the movement but he had continued to hear it in his dream. His body was heavy, and when he raised his hand and touched his face, he felt wetness.

  He was sweating.

  Just a moment—no, he wasn’t sweating.

  Aghast, he realized that it was the trail of a tear. He had shed a tear while sleeping. This was the last thing he needed.

  But now his fingers had touched this horrible salinity, and like the fading flash of a camera, all of the precious distance he had achieved disappeared. And the complex and random system in the armchair was replaced by a lonely, melancholy man, sitting in an apartment with the blinds closed.