Coincidence (20 page)

It only took a few minutes to learn how to use it. There were no special skills involved. You just needed three coins, then
you followed the rules at the back and looked up the passages cited.

I got out three coins and threw them six times. The base line was three tails, therefore a changing line, giving first:

This was “T’ai,” or “Peace.” The judgment read:

The small departs,

The great approaches.

Good fortune. Success.

“This hexagram,” I read, “denotes a time in nature when heaven seems to be on earth.”

Next, I looked up the alternative hexagram that was created by the changing baseline.

This was “Sheng,” or “Pushing Upward.” The judgment read:

Pushing upward has supreme success.

One must see the great man.

Fear not.

Departure toward the south

Brings good fortune.

What the devil, I asked myself, was that supposed to mean?

I looked out of the window in search of inspiration. All I saw was that it had stopped raining. I felt restless and decided
to take a walk in the park.

It was full of noise and movement—Rollerbladers, joggers, kids screaming, ghetto blasters competing to see which would inflict
most ear damage. I walked for a while without really seeing or hearing my surroundings, lost in my thoughts. I was heading
north, and after a while the crowds thinned a little and the noise grew more distant. I was dimly aware that I was taking
the same walk that George had taken on that first morning I had followed him. That had been a Saturday too. But there was
nothing dramatic or significant in my retracing my steps in that way. It was a walk I had taken many times since, one of my
favorite routes through the park.

I came to the bench, sheltered by rocks in a corner of a winding path, where George had been sitting when we had finally faced
each other. I eased myself down—as I had by now done many times—and sat hunched forward, elbows resting on knees. Just as,
when I thought about it, George had been sitting that first morning.

Not only that. Now, for the first time, I found that I was playing quite unconsciously with the three coins I’d used earlier
to cast the
I Ching
.

I looked down at myself. I was, as it happened, wearing the same clothes George had been wearing that morning. Not entirely
surprising, perhaps, as I’d inherited his wardrobe. Nonetheless it was that thought, the totality of the coincidence, that
broke my concentration. I heard one of the coins I was playing with hit the ground with a metallic clink. It landed on its
edge and, before I could catch it, started rolling down the path to my left.

A man was coming up. He stopped the coin with his foot, then bent to pick it up.

He wore a soft felt hat and sunglasses.

I was looking at myself.

George.

In my clothes.

Exactly as I’d last seen him.

“Hello, Larry,” he said. “Isn’t this a coincidence!”

I
t took me a moment, and a lot of self-control, but I congratulated myself that I held it together.

“What in all hell are you doing here?” I said, concealing as best I could the shock of seeing him.

“Like I said, Larry—coincidence. This morning you threw the same
I Ching
I did just before we met that first time, right here on this spot.”

“I did? How would you know?”

He smiled faintly and shook his head as though I’d asked precisely the question he expected. “I know everything you’ve done,
so there’s no point denying any of it.”

My mind was racing too fast to think. I instinctively spread my hands like a man with nothing to hide. Immediately, I was
embarrassed by the gesture—not because it was a lie, but because it was such a transparent lie. I had everything to hide,
and he knew it.

“You’re not making sense,” I said. “Where have you been? It’s been how long—eighteen months?”

I was attempting, I think, though not very convincingly, to paint myself as the injured party here. “What happened to you?”

He took the last few steps up the path and sat down on the bench next to me, all the time not taking his eyes off me. “Those
men who were looking for you did a very professional job.” He spoke with no trace of bitterness or rancor. “I was surrounded
by three of them and bundled into a car before I knew what was happening. I tried to tell them they were making a mistake,
but they went through my pockets and found your ID, and that was when I realized what a neat trick you’d pulled.”

“Come on, what is this? What are you talking about…?”

He brushed my protests aside with a wave of his hand. “I told you, I know everything. So we may as well be open with each
other.”

I gave a noncommittal grunt and avoided looking at him. He went on with his story.

“They drove me way out to some place in New Jersey, put a bullet through my head, and threw me in a lime pit on a big construction
site. You must have upset some very unpleasant people, Larry.”

I mumbled something about it all being a misunderstanding, but he seemed not to care either way.

“So tell me,” I said, “if they did all that to you, how come you’re sitting here now?”

“That’s what I’m about to explain. I know you won’t find it easy to accept, but you’ll get your head around it in time, trust
me.”

My mind raced with possible scenarios. He’d said that the men who were after me had killed him, but clearly they hadn’t. Perhaps
they had
thought
they’d killed him and left him for dead, but he’d recovered. Maybe he’d been lying in some hospital for months, injured,
in a coma.

“Are you on something?” I said. “Some medication?”

He ignored my question and continued to regard me with a strange kind of scrutiny.

“You hold a horrible fascination for me,” he said. “In the sense that you’re so nearly me, and yet so different.”

It was a stupid question to ask, knowing the things I’d done that he could never have done, but I asked it all the same. “Different
how?”

“Just different.”

Then his gaze hardened. I got the impression that he did not like what he was looking at.

“Listen to me, Larry,” he said, speaking as though the social niceties were over and it was time to get down to business.
“That was all horseshit about you and me being long-lost twins. It’s more complicated than that. And also more simple in a
way.”

“That’s good—that it’s simple. So maybe you can explain it to me.”

He gave a faint, mirthless laugh. “Let me just say to begin with that the whole thing was basically my fault—in so far as
‘fault’ means anything in this context. What I’ve discovered is that if you start pursuing coincidence too closely, you risk
unraveling the fabric of your own reality—or, more accurately, your own
un
reality.”

He gave a dry little laugh at his own joke, which I was still waiting to see the point of.

“Look,” I said, “if you want to talk English it’s all right with me. As a matter of fact it’s my first language.”

He ignored the crack and continued looking at me as though wondering where to start. In the end, finding no answer to that,
he sighed deeply as though suddenly weary of everything and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
hunched, staring at the ground.

“Are you all right?” I asked, sensing he wasn’t and looking for a way to get back on top of this situation.

He gave no sign of having heard me.

“It could all end with the flick of a switch,” he said eventually in a voice suddenly flat with resignation, “though Dave
says there’s a chance of his grant being renewed for another year. Of course that’s one of
their
years. There’s no telling how long it might seem to us. Eternity, perhaps.”

“What are you talking about? What switch? Who’s Dave?”

Again he didn’t answer, but after a while he pushed himself upright, sat back, and contemplated his surroundings. “The thing
you have to understand, Larry,” he said, “is that all this, you, me—everything—is very different from what you think it is.”

“Uh-huh.” I decided for the time being I’d just go along with him, let him talk.

He looked at me again. “Do you ever think about the Big Bang?”

“Can’t say I do—at least not often. Why?”

“But you know what it means.”

“Sure—the origin of the universe. Some kind of explosion.”

“An explosion that, supposedly, came out of a ‘singularity,’ which is a point of zero volume and infinite mass—which means
something inconceivably smaller than a single atom, but containing all the material needed to create the universe. Have you
any idea what an extraordinary notion that is?”

“Well, I guess not till you put it like that, not really.”

He looked at me for a moment to ensure that I was paying proper attention before continuing.

“There’s another theory known as the Big Crunch, which says that in time the whole universe will collapse back into that same
point and, effectively, cease to exist. Now, Larry, I want you to think about that for a moment and tell me—what does it put
you in mind of?”

He waited. I shrugged. “Heck, George, I don’t know. What’s it supposed to put me in mind of?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s some sort of power source being turned on and off—right? Like a switch.”

“Oh. Well, yes, I guess you could look at it like that.”

“Because that is precisely what it is.”

“It is?”

He leaned toward me as though about to impart a deep confidence. “You and I, Larry, and everything we know, are part of a
program running on a computer that exists in another world outside our own. We’re just bits of information, all of us and
everything. A cyberuniverse.”

I just stared at him. Was he trying to be funny? Or was he expecting me to take this old science fiction chestnut serously?
If so, he was crazier than I had at first thought. And maybe dangerous.

“Uh-huh,” I said, “right.”

“Dave, by the way, is the man in charge of the computer. You’ll meet him soon.”

“Ah.”

He sat back and filled his lungs, as though relieved to have unburdened himself of all this. Then he looked at me again.

“Shall we walk a little?”

“Sure, why not,” I said, getting to my feet.

We set off at a leisurely pace. As on the previous occasion we’d walked together in the park, the hat and sunglasses that
I had originally been wearing, and he now wore, provided a sufficient disguise to stop people staring at these “identical
twins.”

A group of kids were playing a game of baseball some way off. He stopped to watch them, then turned to me. “You know something,
I can prove to you that this game we’re watching is an illusion.”

“For real?”

I don’t know if he deliberately ignored my irony or missed it.

“The speed of light, the speed of the ball, the speed at which signals travel along the human nervous system, are all measurable—right?”

“I guess.”

“So, if you add up the time it takes for the human nervous system to relay information about the ball from the eyes to the
brain, plus the time it takes the brain to react, then the time it takes the nervous system to relay a decision back to the
muscles, then compare that with the speed of the ball—you’ll find the ball is way past the batsman before he can possibly
hit it.”

I watched ball connect with bat and soar into the air.

“Then how
does
he hit it?” I asked, beginning to feel like the straight man in this partnership.

“He doesn’t, of course. We just think he does.”

“I guess that must be it,” I said cautiously, trying hard not to sound as though I was humoring him.

He looked at me, knowing that I was and apparently not caring. “The fact is,” he said, “in many ways there’s a lot
less
going on than meets the eye. How, for example, do you
know
there are six billion people on earth?”

I blinked a couple of times to show him I was considering the question seriously. “I guess we just have to take a lot on trust,”
I said finally.