Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Tineke reached for the handle of the passenger door.

“You don’t know?” she said. “You really don’t know, do you?” She laughed awkwardly, her face a scrawny grimace of disbelief. “Siem is dead.” She shouted over the traffic. “He’s been dead for eight years. We buried him in early 2001. Or are you just trying to upset me?”

“No,” he said.

Then she got in.

According to his résumé, Sigerius has a pretty good understanding of coincidence. In his Berkeley days, and later in Boston, he taught practical courses in probability theory and stochastic optimization to first-year math and physics students. He was paid to impart the sensation of mathematical order amid chaos to classrooms full of emotionally stunted number nerds. These were chess players, ZX-spectrum scholars, Rubik’s wizards, not one of whom claimed a place on a university athletic team, no basketball, no baseball; they had come to Berkeley to serve quantum physics, to unleash the digital revolution. Before he bombarded the boys and that single stray girl with discrete stochasts, probability space, and Bayes’s theorem, he challenged them to relate the most spectacular piece of coincidence they’d ever experienced. Let’s have it, your most outrageous twist of fate, your spookiest fluke. As a teaser he made a probability analysis on the blackboard of the most remarkable of the students’ anecdotes.

Sigerius was reminded that he was dealing with quick-witted young adults when, once, a pale, severe-looking boy at the back of the lecture hall raised his hand and launched into a story about his grandparents’ honeymoon in the 1930s. They are on a cruise to South America and just off the coast of Chile, his grandmother drops her wedding ring overboard. Sixty years later, celebrating their diamond anniversary, the couple takes the same exact cruise, and the two of them are there when a fisherman reels in a tuna and flings it onto the deck. Gramps insists that the fish be cut open, and what do you think? (Even though it’s been a good fifteen, nearly twenty years since those classes, he still recalls, at that “what do you think” and the kid’s serious face scanning the classroom, the smell of pulverized blackboard chalk. In his memory, the orange curtains he always drew halfway right after lunch billow in front of the wide-open windows. His stuffy classroom was located on the ninth floor of Evans Hall; summers there lasted six, seven months.)

And? No ring.

When he told that joke to Aaron Bever recently, Aaron nodded, got up, took a novel out of the bookcase and showed him where Nabokov had pulled the same stunt half a century earlier.

Coincidence is at its most striking when it manifests itself as executioner — he and his students agreed on that. When the chuckling subsided, the same translucent young man told a story about an altogether different excursion. About his brother, who was planning to travel through Europe with his girlfriend, from the northernmost point in Scandinavia down to Gibraltar in three months. They flew to Kirkenes, a town at the very tip of Norway, rented a car and made their way toward Sweden along a flat two-lane road. During that tranquil, snow-white leg of the journey they encountered just a single oncoming vehicle, a lurching Danish Scania towing a heavy trailer. Just as they pass the truck — or actually, a few seconds before, or maybe the coincidence had kicked in several minutes earlier, no, it was probably a matter of long-term metal fatigue that had been eating its way through the nuts and bolts — the truck loses its trailer. The shaft comes loose. The deep-frozen shaft that juts perpendicular to the steerable front axle turns, like a jouster’s lance, in the direction of the rental car and bores through the windshield. The trailer flips over, flinging the car into the snowbank like an empty beer can. The girl is decapitated. The brother, at the wheel, escapes with a bruised wrist.

The boy was restrained and controlled. He sat straight up in his seat. Siem looked at him from the blackboard, he was wearing a button-down shirt with a large, pointy collar and while he talked his hand kept flattening out the same sheet of graph paper, densely scribbled with formulas. “Coincidence, huh?” Siem said. In the weeks that followed the boy never returned to class. Speculation around the coffee machine had it that the brother was himself.

What did Sigerius want to teach them? And what is he trying to tell himself now? That the probability of the improbable is huge? That so-called bizarre coincidences happen all the time. That a mathematician’s job is to judge the bizarre on its quantitative value, that is: to strip the coincidence down to its bare probability instead of assigning it some magical significance. He stares at the rain as it runs down the windows of the restaurant where the task force has convened. The brightly lit space is narrow and feels like a city bus in a car wash. The lobsters and crabs in the unappetizing wall of stacked-up aquariums next to the entrance are secretly hoping for a deluge that will upset the balance of power. Their claws are spotted with rust-colored freckles, sometimes one shifts as though it’s got an itch.

He tries to concentrate on his conversation with Hiro Obayashi, seated to his left at the Formica table where the eleven-man group of scholars is eating. Every Saturday evening following their afternoon session at Jiaotong University they meet at this table in this restaurant on Huaihai Zhong Lu, it’s a long-standing tradition. And usually he enjoys it, just as he enjoys these junkets to Shanghai, because that’s what they are, of course, pleasure trips. His membership in the Asian Internet Society goes back long before he became rector magnificus , and one of the conditions of his appointment was that this “valuable Asian connection” would remain intact. Of the utmost importance to the position of Tubantia University, he had argued, and so forth. Why of course, they agreed, absolutely, it goes without saying. As he wished. Complete bullshit is what it was, but even then he knew he’d be needing them, his jaunts to Shanghai. Just to get away from the campus for a bit, away from the glasshouse.

“To be honest,” he says, “I found the puzzles a bit … how shall I put it … a bit boring.”

Obayashi, Professor of Information Technology at the University of Tokyo, opens his eyes wide; his skin stretches like a mayonnaise-yellow mask over his broad skull.

“But maybe I’m not the right person to judge them.” Sigerius wipes his mouth on his napkin and, in an attempt to avoid Obayashi, looks around the room. Like every other decent restaurant in China, this one is ugly as sin. The lighting is merciless, certainly now that someone has thrown a blanket over Shanghai, the decor is haphazard: no two tables have the same shape or height; even the flickering and humming fluorescent lights, which radiate X-rays down on steaming dishes of — it must be said — fantastic food were made in different state-run factories and date from different decades. At the next table, a boisterous group of Chinese men are gorging themselves. Businessmen, undoubtedly: shirtsleeves with sweaty armpits, loosened neckties, lip-smacking, belching, bones tossed aside, loud, throaty shouts.

Obayashi nods. He lays his chopsticks on the table and stares silently into his plastic bowl of rice.

“What I mean,” Sigerius says, more tactfully, “is that other Dutch people, and therefore Europeans, might think they’re really good puzzles.”

Obayashi raises his close-cropped head, looks across the table where John Tyronne is in conversation with Ping. “But maybe you know of a publisher?” he drawls. “Siem, just put me in touch with a publisher. I’ve got high hopes.”