Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘Is that professor-speak?’ said Red Queen.

‘Yes.’

‘Singularity,’ said Red Queen thoughtfully.

‘Yes.’

‘Universe pulled inside out?’

‘Yup.’

‘Asshole.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wasn’t asking. Professor Hands, we would appreciate it if you stayed in overnight. I’ll have someone bring you a toothbrush. The universe being pulled inside out through its own asshole,’ Red Queen repeated wonderingly. ‘Nice. Well. That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it. Keeping this thing from getting anywhere near Binion’s Lucky Horseshoe Casino is the problem I propose to tackle first off.’

Red Queen got up and walked out of the room.

As Alex drove west, whistling on his way, little strangenesses proliferated in the world around him.

In one town in Nevada, the cashpoints malfunctioned. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars poured onto the pavements and were blown down the street by the wind. Children chased them. Adults chased the children. Some adults attempted to return the money to the banks. The banks blamed a lightning strike.

In Baton Rouge, a man in a tall hat removed it and a hummingbird flew out. He stopped in astonishment, not noticing the hummingbird, seeing nothing remarkable in the white sunlight on the sidewalk, overwhelmed only by a sense of déjàvu so powerful he forgot for an instant who he was.

Every narcoleptic in Mississippi went out at once. All of them were crossing roads at the time. People thought there was a plague. Cars backed up, honking, at pedestrian crossings as the pedestrians slept. And here, there and everywhere sleepers shared the same broken dream: of an old man in a shack in the mountains, a rainbow in the dark sky, a terrible wind. None of them remembered the dream.

Alex had the idea of going to bed in Memphis, but he realised not long after dark that he wasn’t going to make it. So, just around the time his eyes were getting tired and the road was starting to seem strange, he stopped at a motel outside Tupelo. He got a room, and asked the clerk where he could get food at this time of night.

He drove the car down the road to a restaurant called Steak Break. There – eyeing through the near-pitch-darkness of the dining room the portion being eaten by a courting couple at the next-door booth, he ordered just a starter – ‘chicken tenders’, which turned out to be giant, volcanically hot kidney-shaped chicken nuggets – and a baked potato, which came soggy-skinned, waxy-fleshed, wearing a tinfoil leisure suit and a pompadour of whipped buttter.

It tasted comforting. Beer came in a large, fridge-cold glass. He had two sudsy pints as he ate. The waitress said something about his accent, and he wondered briefly, flattered, if she was trying to flirt with him.

The couple left and he was the last customer there. The waitress followed the couple to the door – dark wood, four patterned-glass panels, tiny curtains on a brass rail – and flipped over the wooden ‘We’re Open!’ sign on its chain.

It was only quarter past ten. As he sat in the restaurant his phone pinged. He looked at it. Two messages. One must have arrived earlier in the car, while he was driving.

The first one was from Rob. It said: ‘One for all and all for one? (3, 3, 2, 3, 4).’

For Alex and Rob, the crossword game was a sort of distant intimacy, mixed up with showing off, mixed up with competition. They’d been doing it since a drunken evening in their second year as undergraduates. Months could pass between them, but then one of them would think of one and the other would get it.

The first one after that evening had been a scrap torn from an A4 pad in a college pigeonhole: ‘Cows hidden from Nazis? (3, 6, 5, 2, 4, 5).’ Alex had scribbled ‘The Secret Dairy of Anne Frank’ on the note there and then in the porter’s lodge and popped it back into Rob’s pigeonhole.

Latterly they’d come through as text messages. Never a proper letter or an email. Never, since the first days of it, in person. The rule – though again, it had never seemed to be actually formulated or discussed – was that until you’d guessed the last one you couldn’t send one of your own.

Rob was better at it than Alex. Alex thought about this as he chewed his potato. Something something in something something? Something something of something something? Something something to something something? The something something something something?

That set him off thinking about the sentence Rob had once asked him to make sense of: ‘Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.’ When Rob had explained it – dogs that other dogs pester (dog) in turn pester other dogs – Alex had tried it on Carey. She’d failed to be as impressed as he’d hoped. She’d said, with a sad sigh: ‘Yeah. That’s about the way it goes.’

Rob had been interested in the way the sentence was jointed. Carey, having had it cracked open for her, had simply lit on the meaning – the least important part. Rob had been interested in whether it also worked for fish: fish fish fish fish fish. Carey had said that was stupid because fish didn’t fish – and if let’s suppose they did, the ones that had been fished would hardly be in a position to do any fishing themselves.

Alex had let it go, pleased simply to be with her on a summer lawn by the river.

The second text message, the one that had just arrived, was from Carey. ‘Where are you, boy? Weird things are happening. Have a good afternoon. Miss you. Talk tomorrow? Night.’

Alex wondered what he’d say. He’d phone her. If he did, would the dial tone, or caller-ID, tell her he was in America, though? A payphone? Would that be different? He didn’t want to freak her out. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

The box with the ring in it – he hadn’t felt comfortable leaving it in the room, with its flimsy door – dug into his hip as he leaned forward to flag the waitress for the bill.

‘Could I get the check?’ he said, enjoying the American words coming out of his English mouth, resisting doing an accent.

The something of something something.

When he got back to the motel he was tired and turned straight in, setting the alarm on his mobile phone for seven thirty. In the middle of the night he half woke up. The room was cool, and through the flimsy curtains he could see the moon over the parking lot. He could hear crying from the next-door room. Then he frowned, turned over, and sank back into sleep.

‘There have been disturbances in the mass media,’ Red Queen said. ‘Running up to this. That was one of the things that caused us to keep the file open on what seemed to many of us like a lost cause. It seemed perfectly possible the machine was just imaginary: something Banacharski had made up – though, remember, we have some partial material from his communication with Holderness. And, well, some of that material either demonstrated that this machine existed, or it demonstrated the opposite. He was very paranoid. It’s possible some of what he told Holderness was disinformation, especially towards the end. But…’ Red Queen trailed off. ‘Then the thing with the airplane. The thing with the frogs…’

‘Frogs?’ Porlock said,

‘You didn’t hear about that?’

Porlock looked slightly irritated.

‘Downtown Atlanta? It was on CNN. It led Fox. Frogs fell out the sky. Thousands of them. From very high up. Several citizens were killed.’

‘I’ve been working a lot of double shifts. That’s been known to happen, though. Don’t the frogs get sucked up by tornadoes? We’ve just had not one but two hurricanes…’

‘The killed citizens: 60 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 40 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of subsidiaries or affiliates of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 10 per cent of them was a postman.’