Coincidence (21 page)
“More than you dream of.”
We walked on a while more.
“So anyway,” I said, breaking the silence we’d fallen into, “how does all this about the Big Bang and baseball explain you
and me—this twins thing?”
“We’re not twins. We’re a computer glitch—the same bit of program in two places.”
I didn’t say anything at first, just walked on in silence, keeping my eyes on the ground. “Wow,” I said eventually, feeling
that he expected some kind of response from me, “that’s pretty wild.”
“Oh, I know you don’t believe it now, but you will—when you meet Dave.”
“So where is this guy?”
“He’s waiting for us. This way.”
He turned onto a path leading out of the park and onto Central Park West. Unable to think of any immediate alternative, I
followed him.
A
s we waited for the lights to change, I saw a man watching us from the far sidewalk. He was around thirty with longish, greasy-looking
hair, thinning on top and hanging dankly to his shoulders. He wore a stained white T-shirt and baggy combat trousers. He looked
out of shape with a round, soft body and a complexion that didn’t see enough daylight. George gave him a cheerful wave. In
response he raised a white forearm, like a flipper.
George made the introductions. I didn’t catch Dave’s second name; in fact I don’t think either of them gave it. He didn’t
offer to shake hands, and neither did I.
“We need to talk,” George said, “the three of us. Why don’t we go up to the apartment?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said quickly. “Sara might be home any time, and we don’t want to involve her, do we?”
In fact she would probably be out for most of the afternoon, but there was no way I intended letting those two loony-tunes
get me alone in an enclosed space. George and Dave exchanged a glance: There was obviously some mutual understanding between
them that I was not a party to. As though by mutual consent, George turned back to me and proposed a compromise.
“We could get a cup of coffee somewhere.”
I agreed. We walked half a block west and found a table in a small place filled with a Saturday morning crowd wearing sneakers
and sweaters wrapped around their shoulders. They were chatting, reading the papers, planning their weekend. A waitress came
over and took our order. George had kept on his hat and dark glasses so that our dramatic resemblance was not so obvious.
When the waitress had gone, George turned to his friend.
“Shall I start, Dave, or will you?”
Dave’s mouth puckered into an odd little smile and he made a bobbing motion with his head. “Maybe you should start,” he said.
He had a tendency to swallow his words that sometimes made them hard to hear.
George turned to me. His eyes remained invisible behind his glasses, and he kept his voice low so it would not be overheard
at neighboring tables.
“Okay, Larry,” he began, “here’s the bottom line. I’ve told it to you already, but you didn’t take it seriously. Let’s try
again. Dave comes from another world—a world outside this one. With a few of his colleagues he created a computer program
that was capable of simulating life—including consciousness. We are that conscious life form, in their computer.”
It was, I told myself, a possibility that they had escaped together from a secure wing in Bellevue, or some other hospital
for the mentally disturbed. I probably should have called the cops and turned them in, and might have contemplated doing so
but for the can of worms I risked opening when the links between George and myself began to be probed. In the circumstances,
therefore, all I could do was play for time and go along with their game.
“If we are in a computer programmed by Dave,” I said, after deliberating over George’s words for a moment, “what’s he doing
in here with us? I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Oh, I’m just a projection right now,” Dave said, anxious to clear this little misunderstanding out of the way. “It makes
it easier for us to talk.”
On an impulse I reached across the table and grasped the soft, thick flesh of his forearm. “You don’t
feel
like a projection,” I said.
Again Dave’s round face puckered inward with that oddly self-conscious little smile of his. “Let’s just say, for the purpose
of this conversation, I’m as real as you are,” he said.
“Time and space do not exist, except insofar as consciousness creates them to store the information it receives.”
I looked at George, who had just spoken. “Is that a fact?” I said flatly.
Our coffees arrived, along with a plate of pastries that Dave had ordered.
“Look, guys,” I said, “I’m sorry, but this is crazy. I don’t know if you’re playing jokes or expecting me to take this seriously.
In fact there are a lot of things I don’t know. But I do know one thing—which is that I’m not a bunch of ones and zeroes spinning
around inside a fucking computer. So give me a break—all right?”
“It’s not an ordinary computer,” Dave said, his adenoidal tones thickened further by the flaky sugar-dusted pastry in his
mouth, “it’s a quantum computer.”
“Consciousness is a quantum function,” George added, as though his job was to expand and explain Dave’s more gnomic pronouncements.
“Well,
I’m
conscious,” I said, “and I
know
I’m not a program in a computer, quantum or otherwise.”
George leaned toward me earnestly. “You
don’t
know that. You
can’t
know it. By definition.”
“Why can’t I know it?”
“Because you’re in it. Things are unknowable from the inside. You can only know them from the outside. Godel’s law—right,
Dave?”
“Pretty much,” Dave said, swallowing and taking another mouthful of pastry.
“Proof of the limitations of logic,” George rattled on. “Self-reference is the fly in the ointment of pure logic.”
“Self-reference?”
“You know—if the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself, who shaves the barber?”
“What’s this? A quiz?”
“Go on, answer.”
I humored him. “He shaves himself.”
“How can the barber shave himself if he only shaves men who don’t shave themselves?”
“So—somebody else shaves him.”
“The barber shaves
all
men who do not shave themselves. Nobody else does it.”
I thought about the problem.
“There’s no way around it,” George said after a while. “It’s like saying ‘You cannot prove that this statement is false.’
It backfires whichever way you try it.”
“Okay, very neat,” I said, “but so what?”
“So you can neither logically prove nor disprove what I am trying to explain to you. You can just believe it or not.”
“But I’m telling you,” I said, “I don’t believe it.”
George looked momentarily defeated by my intransigence and glanced at Dave for guidance. Dave swallowed and cleared his throat.
“I think you should tell him anyway,” he said.
“Okay. In this quantum computer where we are, which is our universe,” George continued, turning his attention back to me,
“the same fragments of program perform different functions in a virtually infinite number of different worlds. It is at the
points where these different worlds intersect that we experience coincidence.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The coincidence of your crossing my world and running into Nadia Shelley created a very complicated situation for both of
us, leading to our eventual meeting in the park. Even so, the computer did everything it could to straighten the situation
out, because that’s what it will always do—try to keep things singular and tidy. For example, it invented that red herring
about the two of us being long-lost twins in an effort to avoid getting into an inescapable loop. I told you already, we’re
not twins at all in the usual sense of—”
“Wait a minute,” I said, getting drawn despite myself into the mad logic of his world, “the fact that we’re twins predates
any of those coincidences that led to our meeting. How could this computer have straightened things out
before
they’d already gotten complicated?”
George held up a warning finger. “Remember, there is no time. ‘Before’ is a subjective concept.”
“Oh, yeah. Stupid of me.”
“You read my notes,” he went on, ignoring my sarcasm, “so you know that Wolfgang Pauli worked with Jung on the meaning of
synchronicity. He also won the Nobel Prize for physics for his ‘exclusion principle,’ which says that no two electrons in
an atom can be at the same time in the same—”
I interrupted again. “I thought you just said there was no time.”
“Not in an absolute sense—not as something ‘out there.’ But in here—in consciousness—we use it all the time. As I was saying,
no two electrons can be at the same time in the same state or configuration. The problem is that you and I are like those
two electrons, whom coincidence has brought face-to-face. It’s an impossible situation.”
I looked from him to the bland and pasty face of Dave, with that sickly smile hovering around the crumb-encrusted mouth into
which he popped another morsel of pastry.
“So,” I said, attempting not so much to sum up as to draw things to some sort of point, “what do you suggest we do about all
this?”
There was a silence broken only by the buzz of conversation around us and the rustle of a paper napkin as Dave wiped his fingers
clean of the buttery grease he had just been eating.
“As I understand it,” George said thoughtfully after a few moments, “there’s no way around a glitch like this. We have to
unpick it.”
“And how do we do that?”
“That’s what Dave is here to arrange.”
Dave, who was draining his coffee, put down his cup and wiped a hand across his mouth. “Listen,” he said, “I really think
we should go up to the apartment to discuss this.”
I started to say something to the effect that if those weirdos thought they were ever getting into that apartment…
And I froze. Without my sensing even the faintest movement or impression of transition, I found everything changed. In place
of sitting at the coffee shop table as we had been, we were all three now standing in the apartment. In the main room, to
be exact. In a triangle about six feet from one another.
“Hey! How… ? What… ? Jesus… ! Fuck… !”
I listened to myself blustering incoherently as my mind spun out of control. What had happened was impossible. It was a dream,
and yet it wasn’t. This was no dream. This was concrete, real, and immediate. I could feel the floor beneath my feet and see
the Manhattan skyline beyond the window.
The next thing I felt was George’s arms around me holding me up. “It’s all right… okay… steady… I know it’s a shock,” he was
saying. I realized that my legs had buckled beneath me and I must have blacked out for a moment.
“How the fuck did you do that?” I said, my voice hoarse and shaking. “You put something in my coffee or what?”
George hoisted me a fraction more and made sure I was going to stay on my feet before letting go of me. “Just try to stay
calm, Larry. Just stay calm.”
“Stay calm? How d’you expect me to stay fucking calm when…”
I was shouting now, waving my arms, gasping for breath.
“What the fuck is going on here? What the fuck is this?”
“Jesus, Larry,” George said, sounding exasperated with me, “you’re really holding out here, aren’t you? You’re in denial—you
know that?”
I confess I panicked. And when I panic I lash out. I lunged at George, intending to grab him by the jacket. Except my hand
closed on thin air. He was still standing there in front of me, solid-looking as ever, three-dimensional, alive. But my hands
just went through him.
Dave next, whose fleshy arm I’d laid my hand on in the cafe. Same thing. Straight through him like smoke.
“What in the name of all… ? For Christ’s sakes… !”
“Larry, take it easy,” George said.
“Take what easy? What is this? What the fuck is this?”
I punched a wall—and nearly broke my hand. The pain brought me back to reality. Of a kind. Pain was real. You don’t dream
pain, not like that. If you did you’d wake up screaming.
“It’s not broken. It’s okay, you’ve not broken anything.”
George had taken hold of my hand and was examining it. I realized I could
feel
his touch. He was solid again. I started to say something, but Dave anticipated me.
“Don’t expect things to behave by the normal rules, Larry,’ he said. “Right now there are no rules—at least none you’re familiar
with.”
“I don’t believe this is happening.”
“Larry, either this is happening,” George said, his voice calm and reasonable in contrast to my own, “or you’re crazy enough
to be imagining it. Tough choice, I know. But that’s how it is.”
“
I’m
not crazy.
You
guys are crazy. I’m getting out of here.”
“There’s nowhere to go, Larry,” Dave said, unconcerned by the dash I made for the door. Something in the tone of his voice
made me stop and look back at him. “And by the way,” he added, “you needn’t worry about Sara showing up. If you look out the
window you’ll see why.”
I followed his gaze out over the park. It was like looking at a photograph or one of those models of some proposed building
development. Nothing moved. People, traffic, even birds in the air and planes on the horizon were frozen in place.
“We have all the time in the world,” Dave said, with the hint of a self-congratulatory smirk on his face. I stared at him,
then turned back to the still life that was Manhattan, too numbed by what had already happened to be susceptible to further
shock.
“How’s your hand?” he said. “It’s stopped hurting, I hope.”
I had forgotten about my hand. Now that I thought about it again, I realized that I no longer felt any pain. I nodded vaguely
in reply.
“All right,” he said, “now that you’re in a more receptive state of mind, let George tell you everything from the beginning…”
T
here is nothing so conducive to an open mind as having someone put a gun to your head and pull the trigger—and I don’t just
mean that as a joke in bad taste. I mean that if your brains get blown out but you find yourself still fully conscious and
watching the scene as a detached observer, though obviously unseen by everybody else, then whatever happens next is unlikely
to take your breath away too sharply.