The Coincidence Makers

by Yoav Blum

  Regret. The client returns again and again to the point of choice and reexamines it until there is no choice that fulfills its objective anymore, and all of them become erroneous choices. One of the first rules of Michaelson’s method of “Golden Coincidences” derives from this mistake: “Do not allow the client to go back and deliberate, particularly if he is a level B idiot or higher.”

  Surplus of options. Many clients try to organize as many choices as possible in order to be certain that they are indeed “choosing.” Coincidence makers also sometimes err in thinking that the choices are better and more meaningful when the number of possibilities is greater. In fact, Fabrik argued, starting from a certain threshold and above, a multiplicity of possibilities harms our ability to make a good choice and does not help us, and it significantly raises the likelihood of making one of the four mistakes outlined above.

  Originality. Clients who suffer from a lack of self-confidence and an anxiety of influence tend to choose a particular possibility only because it seems to them to be original or extraordinary. The data Fabrik collected indicates that over 80 percent of choices made with the aim of being extraordinary are ultimately categorized as “banal, stupid, and disastrous.”

  When you come to make a coincidence, remember: while a coincidence maker is forbidden to influence the client’s free will, he is permitted to preempt possible mistakes or, alternatively, to use standard mistakes of choice in order to steer the coincidence in the right direction.

  17

  Michael sank into his executive chair and tried to read the same paragraph for the third time. He sat in his office on the thirty-fifth floor, inhaling the furniture’s oak aromas, surrounded by oil paintings made by Dutch artists in the mid-seventeenth century, and was still unable to calibrate his mind for work.

  There were days like this.

  He’d had too many days like this since that wintry day. He tossed the document he was reading onto the desk and got up from his chair, turned to the large window behind him, and looked out at the city.

  At first, he tried to fight against these days. He tried to understand exactly what was making him feel so bad about himself, what was distracting him so much. That recurrent dream at night? The fact that his wife again didn’t bother to turn over in bed toward him when he got up in the morning and left the house? A baby carriage he passed on the way to work?

  He thought that if he could put his finger on what had upset his equilibrium that day, he would be able to sweep away this daily malaise and again become the efficient, astute, charismatic businessman he was supposed to be.

  As time went by, he had learned to accept that there would be days like this.

  Days when he would get up in the morning and feel the hole that gaped in his heart. The black hole that swallowed up the ghostly figure who was once his wife, the optimism that once accompanied the mornings they woke up together.

  A quiet knock on the door.

  It opened a bit and his secretary appeared.

  “Michael?” she asked.

  He turned around, slipping into the role of the smiling boss. “Yes, Vicky?”

  He always told his secretaries to call him by his first name. In fact, he instructed all of his employees to do so.

  “There are a few things here I need you to sign,” Vicky said.

  “No problem.” He crossed the large room, and she closed the door and handed him a number of papers. He skimmed them absent-mindedly.

  Each time the impulse was stronger. This time, he felt they were standing even closer than usual.

  He signed one of the papers and moved on to the next one, and pretended that what was written there really needed his thorough attention. Her fragrance filled his nostrils. He was excruciatingly aware of the distance between them, of the angle at which they stood, with his right shoulder close to her left shoulder, of her long blond hair (today, how wonderful, she decided not to tie it back), her green eyes, her lips, the way her blouse hung. . . .

  He was always a person with self-control, but how much loneliness can a person bear?

  He moved on to the next page, the last one. She was breathing a little heavily. He felt it. He wasn’t alone in this feeling.

  He could just move a bit so that their arms touched, or reach his hand out and stroke her lower back. There would be nothing vulgar about it. It would be wonderful, he knew.

  This woman.

  He was so lonely.

  He knew, simply knew, that if he made the slightest move, she would be his. He had felt this for a long time from the way she moved around him, in the way she looked at him. What he wouldn’t give for . . .

  He returned the papers to her. When she took them from his hand, their fingers almost touched.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They stood facing each other.

  Close. Too close. Too close for it to be coincidental. He looked in her eyes and saw that she was looking back at him. But he was the one who had to make the move. All he had to do was to bend forward a bit. . . .

  Four seconds passed. Four seconds of a mutual gaze were never only four seconds between a man and a woman. He turned around and began to walk back to his desk.

  “Excellent,” he said, as if nothing had happened.

  “Great, thank you.” She played along. “Bye.”

  She left the room.

  He took a deep breath and felt how the effort to do the right thing had nearly crushed him this time. He sank into the chair, turned it toward the window, and rubbed his burning eyes. Well, apparently today was one of those days.

  Guy saw the secretary, a bit flushed, leaving his client’s office.

  The knowledge that she was unable to see him was a bit embarrassing. He felt like a Peeping Tom of the worst kind. Ever since he had stopped being an imaginary friend, the sense that someone was looking at you and not seeing you had become foreign to him. He was surprised by the power of the feeling.

  Pierre had made what Guy needed to do unequivocally clear. It was almost like a commando mission. Enter, execute, exit.

  Guy was merely a small cog in the complex world of coincidences that Pierre was creating in order to cause Michael to die at the appointed time, and this had to happen that very day, within a few hours.

  “Will you be here when I return?” he asked Pierre.

  “No,” Pierre said. “I have a few urgent errands. We’ll see each other in a few hours.”

  Thus, he was alone now, just outside the office of someone who had once been the child Michael. Of all the children in the world, it had to be him.

  But sometimes you just needed to do it.

  He tried to remember exactly which character he wore when he was with Michael. The color of the suit, the shade of the eyes.

  He took a deep breath and, as he had done years ago, walked inside through the closed door.

  Michael knew why these days were coming.

  They were coming because he and Mika were now living like roommates instead of like a married couple. Even worse, they were like roommates who were staying together only because their lease had yet to expire.

  The love of his life would barely exchange a word with him. Ever since the accident, she was living like a ghost. Going to Pilates during the day, sitting and staring at the television in the evening, turning her back to him and quietly weeping at night.

  Mourning, it turned out, could be quite repetitive.

  He had met her when he was still a young entrepreneur full of ambition, when he still went to conferences for the lectures, and not only to be seen. When his ideas were the thing that motivated him and not the inertia of accomplishments.

  A common friend (because then he could still be sure they were really friends for the right reasons) introduced him to the woman with the most smiling eyes he had ever seen, and he thought it would be nice to spend a little time with her.

  Two weeks after their first date, he knew she was the woman he would spend his
life with. He had always laughed at people who made such statements. Only later did he realize that there was no other way to explain this feeling.

  They were at her home. They were trying to plan where to go out that evening and discovered that, in their heart of hearts, they both were sick and tired of the same places and people and options. They discovered that they shared a secret: both of them were fed up with what the rest of the world called “having a good time.” After they had tried all of the different coffee combinations, all of the restaurants and nightclubs and theaters, it suddenly occurred to them that what they really wanted was just to be alone together.

  Michael was certain their relationship would die that very evening. He wasn’t accustomed to a connection that lacked a continuous and regular exchange of witty content that passed from one side to the other against the backdrop of a social pastime. If they weren’t planning to go out or engage in some activity, what would their relationship be based on? That’s how he operated in all things pertaining to women: he won them over with wit, exciting shared interests, and all sorts of wonderful diversions—but not with frankness. As in a fight club, the first rule in a relationship was not to talk about the relationship, he thought. The main thing was to keep them far away from the worst thing—banality, to always offer excitement or surprise, and to keep away from silences, from talk about the weather, and from routine.

  He was afraid that since they had decided they had nowhere to go, and that they didn’t feel like going out at all, a corrosive silence would enter into their relationship, and the drabness of everyday life would destroy the enjoyable and exciting thing that had developed between them.

  And then, when they sat there together in her living room, surrounded by a huge collection of old books and vinyl records that he noticed for the first time, hearing the neighbor humming on the other side of the wall, unconsciously synchronizing their breathing, remaining silent, he suddenly discovered a different type of connection. It was no longer about fun. It was something else. Slower, less demanding, thick and embracing. You didn’t really know that you loved someone until you’d been properly silent with her, apparently.

  Out of this thickness, Mika got up and went to her bookshelf. Then she sat down on the sofa and signaled for him to sit next to her.

  “Come, listen to something nice,” she said and opened the dogeared book.

  They sat there all night, with her reading in her gentle, melodious voice and him listening to the silence between the words. And when the morning broke, he knew that she was the woman of his life.

  And subsequently, once or twice a week, when the level of their love surged high enough and when the level of their fatigue was low enough, they would read to each other at night.

  He read Gaiman and Safran Foer to her, she read Hugo and Camus to him; he amused her with Pratchett, she rocked him to Hemingway, he caressed her with Coben, she surprised him with Twain.

  All of them were their guests. Thrillers, dramas, the familiar, and the obscure. Even Dr. Seuss. All of them were part of the dialogue of lovers they created between themselves, far from the eyes of the world, during long nights of reading to each other.

  On the third of December, in the morning, everything changed.

  Michael regarded that day as the center point of his life, the peak point in the Gauss curve of events from which his soul was built; until that point everything ascended and rose higher, while from that point onward everything started to come apart.

  Mika had been his wife for nearly two years.

  The inspiration of his life got into the car that morning, primed for another day of work as a math teacher. She started her small car and switched on the countdown clock for the end of their love with a slight turn of the wrist.

  The only woman who was able to induce his high and choking laugh without him feeling embarrassed drove off, an Ella Fitzgerald CD playing in the background. The air conditioner was set to ventilation mode. The woman with whom he had already decided to try to bring children into the world hummed to herself, like always, because she was the humming kind, and she occasionally glanced in the mirror. When he received the telephone call that morning, he didn’t realize how deeply the rift would gape in their lives after she, the only “she” he ever had, looked at the mirror one time too many and ran over a three-year-old boy.

  He never understood exactly what happened.

  How did a three-year-old child reach the street without anyone noticing? And why? And where were his lousy and pitiable parents?

  Like a lit candle that someone extinguished with a fan, Mika was snuffed out that day.

  When she returned home, even before the slow trial and the sleepless nights and the endless weeping and the self-hatred, he was unable to crack her new armor. He couldn’t stop those screams in which she tried to explain to him that she doesn’t want doesn’t want doesn’t want anything more from life because she doesn’t deserve doesn’t deserve doesn’t deserve anything and the first therapist and the second therapist and the third therapist and the marriage counselor and the pills and the vomiting every time she got into a car and the diary full of small letters that she wrote, gripped in a frenzy, then set ablaze in desperate tears behind the house one frigid and thorny night, and the cold back and the short barbed arguments in which they tried to hit each other where it hurt and her loathing of everything she had ever done and of all the optimism that was once part of her—even before all these things, already that same evening when she returned home, he felt that a thick black cloth had been wrapped around her heart, choking it.

  He tried all different sorts of remedies.

  He would take her on a short vacation and imagine how they would open up and talk a bit about what happened, and how she would cry and he would comfort her and they would embrace and then talk a little more and then manage to change the subject, and how they would go for a short hike in the morning and how he would say something foolish that would finally make her smile, and then a slow and beautiful process of internal healing would begin when they returned home.

  He would quarrel with her, intentionally, and imagine how he would later return home and theatrically fall upon his knees and ask forgiveness, and how she would then be able once again to grant him that wise look, and how she would cling to him and tell him how much she needed him, and he would strengthen her and lift her and cure her only with kisses, nothing more than kisses.

  He would avoid contact for entire days and imagine how she would eventually call him on the phone and ask him to talk with her, and how he would relent and both of them would cry on the phone and he would remind her of silences they both had forgotten and show her that it was possible to go back and that she was worthy of being loved the way he loved her.

  All of these imaginings were meaningless.

  They would spend three silent days in a cabin, and the small quarrels would become monsters, leading him to say a quarter of a sentence that unintentionally tore another small strip of her soul. And she never called him on the phone so he could tell her she was worthy.

  The sense of surrender that had recently overcome him was actually not something he imagined. He never thought he would reach the point of staying an extra hour at the office after finishing his work, only because he didn’t want to return home to the trench she was digging around him.

  He never believed he would put himself into such foolish workplace situations, so morally questionable, only in order to feel a bit alive, only to experience a little of the urge to self-destruct, because why should she be the only one to go crazy? And if someone, on that December third, had told him that he was going to be so lonely and so frustrated and dissatisfied and angry to the point of being one breath away from an affair with his secretary, the biggest cliché in the book, he would have fired him on the spot, for his impudence and stupidity and for drinking on the job.

  Yet here he was, and he knew that the next time it would happen.

  “Oh, shit,” he heard himself sayin
g, and pressed his red eyes with his fingers and looked out again at the city.

  “Yes, I understand what you mean,” he heard a voice say behind him and quickly turned around.

  When he saw the figure sitting, amused, on his desk, it took him a few seconds to understand who it was. And when he understood, it was clear that this was a particularly bad day.

  Once, before Michael was defined within the bounds of his business card, before he had enough pocket money to buy selfconfidence, he was a short child who didn’t really understand the dynamics of human relations among people under the age of ten.

  He would roam around by himself in the schoolyard during recess and wonder how the other children communicated with each other so naturally. He would be dumbfounded and clam up every time he had to conduct a conversation, play in a group, or speak in front of a class of small people. He wasn’t sure how others viewed him, and he was sure they would judge and examine him on every syllable.

  He was the young embodiment of those who prefer not to take action in order to avoid failing, and he considered every interpersonal activity as falling within the range of unreasonable risk.

  Only later, when standing in front of the class during a catastrophic lecture on the lives of whales, which he had prepared for homework, would he feel the huge excitement of appearing before a crowd. Something inside him broke and was rebuilt, and a week later he was participating in a soccer game in the schoolyard, scoring a goal, and revealing himself to the world. It was that simple.

  But until then he had his little soldiers, he had the neighborhood park where he observed the lives of bugs and conducted small, dirty scientific experiments on the uncomplaining natural world around him, and he had Medium John.

  Medium John was his imaginary friend.

  He wasn’t particularly tall like Michael’s uncle, so he wasn’t Big John. And he also wasn’t short like Sasha, the smallest child in the class, so he wasn’t Little John either. He was Medium John. At first, Medium John was with him mainly during the winter, when he couldn’t go out to the park. They would sit in his room and spend time together. Sometimes Michael would talk to him and tell him about school and about what he didn’t do that day, and John would say really wise things, or at least they sounded really wise. His words would both reinforce Michael’s decisions and offer the possibility of changing. Michael would lie in bed and try to understand what he meant exactly. Sometimes he would imagine John again and ask him what he meant, and John would again provide an explanation that could be interpreted in every possible way.