Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

If you credited the alternative universe idea, in every one of those universes there would be a you who had taken a different one of those decisions, suffered a different one of those accidents. There were versions of you who would have jumped or stumbled across every micrometre of that cliff face. And every moment spawned a new position of you in the world, a new 360-degree signpost to catastrophe, a new sheaf of alternative yous in alternative worlds around each of whom radiated another set of fresh positions, divergences, threats.

That idea had struck Alex most vividly when he was eighteen, but it had stayed with him. He became aware of it re-entering his thoughts: not threatening, but a source of wonderment. At any moment at all he was one sharp twist of the steering wheel away from the universe not existing. How on earth, with all that risk, had it survived so long?

A game he started to play with himself was to see how long he could keep cruise control on. He fixed it for the speed limit, and everyone was overtaking him. He dabbed the brake to override it, then tried to keep a steady distance behind the car in front and thumbed the button.

Over a few minutes, he found, his car was up towards the back bumper of the car in front. The trick then was to signal and move out without touching either brake or accelerator. You had to be lucky – if a big truck was passing you at the wrong time and you were boxed in, you’d have to brake… but you could cut it pretty fine.

It was absorbing. As the sun got lower and redder, and the mile markers told him Atlanta was further and further behind him, he felt settled again.

He’d never done anything like this before. He felt in and out of himself, lost and in charge. Nobody now knew where he was. Not his mum, not anybody. He was starring in a film that nobody was watching. He was unobserved.

It reminded him of his friend Rob’s joke when they’d been undergraduates together.

‘Erwin Schràdinger’s bombing down the M4 in his Porsche.’ He remembered Rob saying this, and just how he’d said it – Rob in his horrible velvet jacket and his black corduroy trousers, lolling on Alex’s green beanbag. Rob’s voice cracked and dry from weed.

‘You’ve got it wrong, Rob. It’s not Schràdinger.’

Rob, pink-eyed, thinking.

‘No. Crap. Heisenberg, right. Sorry. Heisenberg is bombing along the road…’

Now Alex laughing very hard, helium-pitched giggles. Carey, then, who they were both trying to impress, simply looked perplexed, smiling her oval smile. The joke – Heisenberg is pulled over by the police, and when asked if he knew how fast he had been going retorts: ‘No, but I can tell you exactly where I am’ – had taken Rob hours to tell, and even longer to explain afterwards.

‘It’s – you know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, right?’

‘I heard of it,’ she said. Carey was doing English and American Studies on a two-year exchange scheme. She was a year older than either of them. Her hair was brown and curly, and she was better at smoking weed and holding it together than either of her suitors. She’d done it all through high school.

As Rob had lumbered through the contrived explanation of the contrived joke, she had smiled at Alex with a studied bashfulness he thought might, just, be coquettish. Then Rob, still on the edge of hysteria, had moved onto a joke whose punchline was ‘Zorn’s Lemon’ – he remembered that, and Carey, not understanding the joke at all and finding it even funnier because of that, burst with laughter. She fell back on the scratchy old carpet and lay there with her knees up and her chest shaking with laughter. Her mouth was pink and her teeth were very white, and she snorted a little when she breathed in. Alex could have died with love, then, just looking at her.

Three days later, to Alex’s astonishment, she kissed him after the college dance. He was drinking vodka and lemonade out of a plastic cup, and the room was very dark and very, very noisy. The lights were maybe ten minutes away from coming up. In the middle of the low-ceilinged common room drunken undergraduates were staggering and stamping in a big hairy many-legged alcohol-smelling tangle. Alex was looking into the middle of it, a little glassily, when Carey appeared beside him. She had taken the plastic cup out of his hand and put it on the floor, and then she leaned in decisively and kissed him on the mouth.

That had been – nice. And afterwards they had staggered out of the room like a three-legged race and into the midnight air smelling of grass from the lawns. Without the darkness and the thumping noise, Alex had felt drunkenness wearing off and self-consciousness intruding. But then, quite briskly, she had taken him to her girl-smelling single bed in her room across the quad and had taken charge of getting the sex out of the way, as if her soft belly and miraculous breasts and unexpected tattoo had been no more to her than the facts of her own body.

Then she’d gone to sleep on her back, snoring very softly, and Alex had lain awake not minding that her neck was cutting off the circulation to his arm. Her breath smelled slightly sweet from Coca-Cola and slightly alcoholic from rum. The duvet was askew, and one of her breasts was exposed, spilling down towards her armpit, where he could see a patch of sore skin and a bit of stubble. She had a mole on the soft skin just where her neck met the hinge of her jaw.

On Sunday morning, when he woke up, Alex had shyly and, as he thought, politely made an excuse about having to be in the library, kissed her awkwardly and said something non-committal and gone.

That was how their relationship had started. When Carey arrived in the college she was sexually confident, easily flirtatious, at home in her skin. Now, having quietly worshipped Carey for months, domesticating the relationship by making a friend of her, he’d actually gone to bed with her.

But the relationship between Carey and Alex had not, as he had expected, fizzled out in embarrassment and apology. At the cost of a certain showy huffiness from Rob, who felt excluded and maybe liked Carey more than he had let on, they had gone from friendship to established coupledom almost without passing through the in-between stage of tugging and scrabbling and kissing in public.

They were at ease, and that seemed to suit them both well enough. Alex found passion, or the expectation of passion, unsettling. Why make something private so public? And the courtship thing – he knew he had to do it but the self-exposure it involved and the risk and the game-playing and the humiliation… If you liked someone and you fancied them, why did you have to go through all that?

Carey had taken that out of his hands. They knew each other. Alex knew that she liked peanut butter on the cheapest white bread she could find, that they had the same Veruca Salt album, that she got on well enough with her foster-father, argued with her foster-mother, had no sisters and was liked better by boys than she was by girls. He put this down to jealousy; she was pretty, and neither worked it nor apologised for it. It was a fact about her.

Alex didn’t know what attracted her to him, though. Men fancied Carey; women did not fancy Alex. Alex’s place, ordinarily, was as the nerdy but unthreatening best friend of girls whom he chastely worshipped but who didn’t think of him that way. Carey, on the other hand, had befriended Alex – and yet she also wanted to sleep with him. She did think of him that way. It was almost unprecedented, this state of affairs, and he intended to reward her with his loyalty. But it made him understand her less.

He wondered for a long time whether she was attracted to him by something she imagined he had that he didn’t; or whether later, that illusion having vanished, the relationship was sustained by her affection for something else about him, such as his family, with the dull and affectionate stability that hers lacked; or whether there was something lacking in her – a simple failure of nerve or imagination that led her to idle in his shallows when with her looks and confidence she could have been with anyone else she wanted.