by Yoav Blum
A half-extinguished cigarette was tossed to the edge of the sidewalk.
A valve stuttered in a passing car.
And then it happened.
Exactly at the designated hour, at the right second, he saw it. As if a camera inside his head had clicked and snapped a detailed picture of the street.
The sign the young woman was hanging in the display window was still not hung. But it was placed at her side and the arrow on it pointed to the right.
The arms of the policeman in the intersection were also raised in precisely the same direction at that moment. And the young man with the dreadlocks, who had lost his balance, raised his arm eastward during his small dance to regain his balance.
The barber was also looking toward the right, in the same direction the half-lit cigarette pointed after it fell to the sidewalk.
And above, high above, a flock of birds was moving in an arrow formation, exactly in the same direction.
He turned around and started to run.
What now?
What now?
Guy ran along the street, searching for the next clue.
Where was he supposed to go now?
And since when, in fact, had missions been assigned in this way?
He continued to run and saw a taxi stopping at the end of the street. The door opened and a tall well-dressed woman emerged, wearing the finest earrings that money could be wasted on. Yes, he decided, the timing was right.
Three steps, two, one.
And he was inside the car just in time for the woman to close the door behind him.
“Drive!” he shouted to the driver.
The driver turned toward him slowly. “Ha. Where?”
Guy’s eyes raced around. He saw a blue car exiting from a parking spot on the right and pointed: “Follow that car!”
The driver looked at him for a moment and turned back to the steering wheel.
“That’s a sentence you don’t hear every day,” he said.
“Go!”
They followed the blue car for nearly a quarter of an hour until Guy noticed three buses in the lane next to them. The three buses all had the same advertisement on them: “The time has come for a change. Cherry-flavored diet iced tea.”
“The time has come for a change,” he mumbled. “Now,” he said to the driver, pointing to a red Mitsubishi in the left lane, “now follow that car.”
“It’s your money.” The driver shrugged.
After a few minutes, the red car stopped at a small lookout point with a view of the sea. The driver got out of the car, walked slowly up the stairs, stood by the guardrail, and lit a cigarette.
Guy quickly paid the taxi driver, who looked at him, still curious. “Can I see what you’re going to do now?”
“No, just drive away.”
The driver sighed, disappointed. “Fine. Have a good one, bro.”
“You too.”
There was a pleasant morning breeze at the lookout point.
Two people stood by the guardrail. The driver of the red Mitsubishi, who smoked a cigarette and looked at the scenery, and a tall, thin man who listened to music through small earphones and quietly hummed under his narrow mustache.
Guy approached and stood by the smoker and cleared his throat.
The smoker took another small puff and glanced at him.
Guy looked back.
The smoker flinched a bit and returned the stare.
Guy continued to look at him and waited patiently.
A lot of looking took place.
The smoker cocked his head in question.
Guy smiled in response.
“Can I help you?” the smoker finally asked.
“I’m Guy,” said Guy.
The smoker was silent for a few seconds and then dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the heel of his shoe.
“Really?” he said.
“Really,” said Guy.
The former smoker took one last look at him, turned around, and walked toward his car, mumbling, “There are crazy people in this world, plenty of them.” He got into the car, started it, and drove away.
Behind him, Guy heard the tall one with the narrow mustache ask: “What’s the matter with you? People come here for a few minutes to clear their heads. Do you mind not disturbing them?”
Guy started to apologize but stopped.
He looked directly into the eyes of the mustachioed one and said: “And do you mind, perhaps, if I kick you in the head?”
The narrow mustache turned toward him.
And then lifted as the lips underneath it curved into a smile.
13
Pierre introduced himself as a rank five coincidence maker.
Guy immediately understood what this meant. Pierre was a “Black Hat”—responsible for particularly complex coincidences with extensive repercussions. The coincidences arranged by Black Hats often seemed terrible at first glance, but they contained the seeds of other coincidences and essential consequences. They dealt with illnesses, tragedies, horrible accidents, and things that only decades later could be understood as events that had changed the world for the better—and even then, they were not always understood.
Black Hats were admired, but they were loners. Their work had to be flawless, at a level of precision comparable only to the work of rank six coincidence makers, who were responsible for changes that shifted the histories of entire peoples. On the other hand, who wanted to become friends with someone who could make positive changes to reality that only became apparent in the distant future? Black Hats were called such not only because they were so invisible and successful in maneuvering the thin strings of reality without attracting attention, but also because their work was so black. No one wanted to be the one who generated tragedies, even if they had a justified reason.
They sat in a small café not far from the lookout point where they met.
Pierre was tall and skinny, his jaws and nose angular as if sketched by an engineer, and his narrow mustache, which danced a bit every time he smiled or spoke, adorned his thin upper lip. He wore a black suit, cuff links in the shape of a foreign letter Guy didn’t recognize, black socks, and five-hundred-dollar shoes.
Pierre was a gentleman, or it was important to him to look like a gentleman, which was actually the same thing, Guy reminded himself.
“Do you know what the most beautiful thing is?” Cassandra had once asked him.
“What?” he asked.
“That I don’t know how you really look and you don’t know how I look.” She straightened her dress a bit.
“What do you mean?”
“We look, sound, and smell exactly as my girl and your boy decided to imagine us. If I ever saw you on the street, imagined by someone else, I wouldn’t know it was you.”
“Because they’ll imagine me in a different way?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m a bit thirsty,” she added. He took a short breath and she sipped from a cold glass of juice that appeared in her hand.
He thought a little. “I think I could always identify you anywhere, regardless of your appearance. I could identify the look in your eyes, your laughter. There are things that don’t change.”
“I doubt it,” she said pensively. “But in any case, I think it’s beautiful.”
“That we don’t appear as ourselves?”
“Not exactly. That we’re not confined by our appearance.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“There hasn’t been a single moment when I didn’t feel that I was imprisoned by the way they imagined me. After enough time in this profession, you’re no longer sure whether you are you, or someone they wanted you to be. I nearly lost myself. If no one wants to see me in reality, perhaps I’m not really worthy of being seen?”
“Of course you’re worthy of being seen,” he said.
“We absorb our appearances inward more than we outwardly project who we are inside. No?” she asked. “That almost happened to me too.”
“I met you,” she said. “I was saved.”
He was silent, embarrassed.
“We need you,” Pierre said.
“Me?” Guy asked.
“What other ‘you’ do you see here?” Pierre asked. “Yes, you.”
“I think I’m not at the right rank for the things you need,” Guy said.
“That’s right”—Pierre nodded—“but I need you just for a very specific piece of a coincidence I’m trying to create, and I received special approval to use a rank two coincidence maker for my mission.”
This was very usual. Coincidence makers like Guy were not supposed to deal with materials CMs like Pierre handled. That is, he wasn’t even supposed to be able to understand the scope of this mission.
A mission Guy worked on for several weeks was liable to be only one detail in a rank five mission. Coincidences Guy planned on an entire wall could fit into a single page in Pierre’s notebook. That’s the way it was after you got used to seeing reality from far enough away, apparently. Everything was connected to everything; big became small.
Guy understood that this wouldn’t be the first time a coincidence he performed was part of a larger mission. Each time the objective of a coincidence didn’t appear sufficiently defined or justified, the chances were good that this coincidence was just outsourced from another job. Guy never knew whether his coincidence was part of a broader picture, but he occasionally guessed that it was. After all, why would he receive an envelope directing him to arrange for a particular person to cross a particular street at a particular hour while wearing a blue shirt?
But a direct approach by a coincidence maker of rank five seemed very strange to Guy. He didn’t think he was suited for such a collaboration. He wondered whether he even wanted to do something at rank five.
“Listen,” he told Pierre, “are you sure you want someone like me? I only recently completed my two hundred fiftieth coincidence. . . .”
“I know.”
“Even if what you need is a rank-two mission, I’m sure there are better and more experienced coincidence makers than me. . . .”
“That’s true.”
“Not that I’m so bad. . . .”
“You’re not.”
“But perhaps when it comes to things like this . . .”
“Listen.” Pierre leaned toward him. “Before you start getting all confused trying to find the best way to tell me that you’re not suitable without calling yourself a failure, maybe you should listen to what I have to say.”
“And what is that?” Guy asked.
Pierre leaned back with a smile. “Let’s call it ‘The Story of Alberto Brown.’ ”
14
Alberto Brown was born on a particularly rainy Tuesday, after a difficult labor that lasted for thirty-five hours. He didn’t cry, and the doctor had to hit him on the backside four times before he deigned to adopt this infantile method of communication. It was only after the baby cried that the doctor allowed himself to inform the mother that she had given birth to a wonderful boy.
Alberto was a big baby. Ten pounds of scowling sweetness and an extraordinary ability to raise one eyebrow in a worried gesture, which became evident just hours after he was born. His father didn’t choose the name Alberto to honor a grandfather or uncle; he simply liked the name. Perhaps it reminded him of a movie he once saw. Alberto’s mother objected halfheartedly, but she accepted it in the end. After fewer than two months, her husband disappeared, leaving behind a modest amount of debt, a used pipe, and a child with a name whose origin she didn’t understand.
She considered changing the baby’s name but felt it had become part of the small face she loved. She also believed in fate and didn’t want to change her son’s name because she feared this change would send him down a strange and unworthy path in life. Perhaps if she had known what the future held in store for him, she would have decided to change his name nonetheless.
The years passed and Alberto grew.
That is, really grew.
When he was two years old, everyone thought he was four.
When he was five years old, he looked like an eight-year-old.
He was a big boy. And extraordinarily strong.
He was a quiet and introverted boy. Even apathetic, you could say. Sometimes it wasn’t clear whether his tranquil demeanor derived from his strength and that he wasn’t bothered by other children who occasionally tried to challenge him, or from his being so lost in thought that he simply didn’t notice they existed.
Alberto encountered violence for the first time in kindergarten.
He didn’t really chance upon it, of course. The violence was there, saw him, and raced toward him. It appeared in the form of Ben, a big child himself, who feared the new boy would steal the element of dominance he had so enjoyed till then. The fact that Alberto got along fine with the rest of the children and was gentle and compassionate to everyone made no impression on Ben. In his eyes, Alberto was an enemy. Ben would push children, bite them sometimes, and run them down with his tricycle in particularly extreme cases. He wasn’t one of those children who was willing to take “no” for an answer, even if reality itself, in all its glory, was the one issuing this negative response.
Since he viewed the situation with Alberto as an “extreme case” and a real threat to the fragile hierarchy on which the kindergarten was based, he got onto his tricycle and raced toward Alberto with a mighty battle cry. Alberto turned his head and saw the boy moving rapidly toward him, and he realized that even though his body would apparently absorb the blow and not even budge, it would hurt. He felt a sort of fear, a pinch of anxiety, and a clear understanding that he really didn’t want the tricycle to hit him.
As this thought occurred to him, at that very second, the front wheel of Ben’s tricycle fell off, and the vehicle veered off its path, bypassed Alberto, and crashed into the wall behind him.
Ben suffered a fractured arm and a sprained knee. He didn’t return to kindergarten for two months. When he did, he was very nice to Alberto.
In high school too, Alberto was well liked by everyone who met him. The girls liked his impressive physique and simple smile, and the boys treated him like they always treated someone they knew they were supposed to fear, but who had yet to give them a sufficiently good reason to do so: they idolized him. The teenagers who hung around Alberto in high school had only one wish—that someone would be stupid enough to try to hit him.
Wow, what would happen then? It would be great, wouldn’t it?
In private meetings, they would discuss the way Alberto could break someone’s neck with one hand or tear out someone’s throat by smartly squeezing it between his pinky and thumb and turning his wrist slightly. They wanted so much to see that happen.
No one had ever seen him hurt a fly, but it was clear that he could if he only wanted to. They quietly tried to instigate disputes between Alberto and new pupils who arrived at school, hoping that an altercation, even a small and quick one, would expose the abilities of the friendly giant. But it soon became apparent that Alberto had become one of the new pupil’s good friends or, alternatively, that the pupil himself was sharp enough to realize that it wasn’t advisable to mess around with Alberto.
Therefore, one can understand the great excitement at school when Miguel entered the library one day, just when Alberto was sitting there. Alberto loved the library and spent quite a bit of time there. As a result, a considerable number of enamored girls and hopeful boys hung around, waiting for someone, perhaps, to come and smack him.
Miguel was a problematic pupil in every school he passed through, and he passed through quite a few—enough to write a short travel guide reviewing the schools in three different districts. If only his writing abilities were suitably developed and he were willing to use some of his rolling papers for creative writing instead of for cigarettes. Only when he became an adult and was arrested for committing three armed robberies would the authoriti
es realize, in retrospect, how disturbed Miguel really was.
Miguel’s problem—that is, his first problem—was his great fondness for fast cars and cheap alcohol. Each of these things was problematic, but the combination of wild driving under the influence of low-quality vodka was even more problematic, primarily because it led Miguel to forget the most basic rule: don’t get caught. The policeman who arrested him was humorless and dedicated to his job. When Miguel sobered up and realized what had happened, he cursed his bad luck.
And thus, without a car and without a license, and after discovering that his favorite place to hang out had become a construction site, he had no alternative but to go to school that day, and to be angry.
The young fellow who would later become a gang leader in prison had no intention of going to class, of course. He had to find a place to sit where he could quietly be angry at the world. The library was ideal. There were a lot of things he could destroy and lots of quiet, innocent pupils who could be harassed with verbal or physical bullying. Miguel didn’t come to school often enough to know that Alberto existed. For Miguel, sitting idly in the library for a quarter of an hour was all he could stand. He wasn’t a person of existential thoughts. In order to attract a bit of attention, he had no choice other than to decide, let’s say, to rearrange the books in the library according to an index system called “on the floor.”
“Knowledge for all!” he shouted, “Knowledge for all!” He started knocking down books and dancing around them like an Indian.
About thirty pupils stared at him in shock, first in disgust and finally in great hope. He was crazy enough and perhaps even intoxicated enough for there to be real potential here for a confrontation.
Even the librarian saw this, and hope awakened in his heart too.
They sat and waited patiently for Alberto to notice.
At the point when Miguel was dancing on a large pile of volumes in an aisle between two rows of books, Alberto looked up. Miguel pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket, and Alberto glanced around to see everyone staring at the scene without budging. He mistakenly interpreted this tense watching as a type of shock and called toward Miguel: “Hey!”
