Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘His name was Alex Smart,’ said the manager. ‘Yup. First time we’ve used him, according to our records. The usual thing – student or something, no criminal record, answered one of our ads online. He got a short-notice flight to Atlanta. We got your parcel sent. Why? Is there a -’

Ellis hung up. Well. That explained how the kid got to Atlanta. MIC bought him a ticket.

If Ellis had been more puckish, he would have said ‘Swine’, but Ellis instead swore unimaginatively, hammered the phone cradle with two fingers and then started to dial again.

‘What I have been trying to do,’ says Banacharski later in the week. His sentences, still, are not always coming out entire. ‘To build a machine. To undo – these knots.’

They have spent a long day together. As usual, Isla has been circumspect. She has tried to make herself useful – has cleaned, even, where the opportunity to do so without looking rude has presented itself. She has retreated when it seems right – particularly when he has insisted that it is time for him to meditate. It hasn’t been a problem for her. She has taken herself off on a walk.

She has started to get used to his moods. She doesn’t think that she’s going to learn from him what she’d hoped – still less, get him to come back to civilisation. This was the thing that, though she didn’t admit it fully, she’d fantasised about: she, as Perseus, with the gorgon’s head to show off. When she was little her dad taught her how to fish. She liked the idea, always, of the skill of bringing something in that was stronger than the line by which it was caught. She has an ego, Isla.

So she doesn’t think she’s going to bring him in. But she has started to feel for him. She reproaches herself. She always felt for him – even when she’d only read about him she felt she understood him. But now, she feels like she has a responsibility. She sees his mind, like a boat straining at its moorings in a heavy tide, and she feels sorry for him. She wants to soothe it.

‘In the war. My father died. My mother lived. My little sister died. I lived. Chance. How do we live with that? How, Isla Holderness? How do we live with it? It is impossible. Nobody can. Nobody can do that.’ He seems half to be talking to himself.

Then he changes tack again. ‘There are walls in the air.’ His hand, in a chopping motion, comes down between her face and his. ‘Everything is so close to us. These walls: a membrane’s distance. We think – our physics, already, almost shows it if you know how to look. Every moment spawns infinities – new universes. A sparrow falls, a sparrow doesn’t fall – you know that?’

‘The Bible,’ Isla says.

‘Yes. The Bible. Every sparrow, a new universe. Every feather, a new universe. Every wingbeat. What happens -’

‘This is the parallel universes idea you’re talking about?’

Banacharski waves, impatiently. ‘Not parallel. No such thing as parallel. That’s what the devil, as I told you, made impossible -’

‘You’re talking metaphorically?’

‘Yes! Metaphorically. Yes, I am. Exactly that.’ He looks, riddlingly, pleased with her – but not as if she has said something he agrees with, she thinks, so much as that he knows she didn’t understand. ‘What he does to the measurements, the devil, that’s it. Everything curves. Not parallel. Like soap bubbles, these infinities. Everything touching everything else. You could just step through. If you could only see the walls. If you could hear what all those versions of you are saying, just on the other side. Think of what happens. How do you think of it? You go forward, yes?’

‘Ah. Yes?’

‘Look.’ He wiggles his hand like a fish. ‘Your choice, this or that. Your chance, this or that. You jump out of the trench and the precise angle of the bullet from a machine gun two hundred metres away -’ he dashes the tips of his fingers on his temple ‘finished. You are hiding in a house, and your baby daughter then – just then, as the guard comes by – she hiccups or she starts to cry – finished.’

Isla just looks, keeps looking at him.

‘You think this is a chance in a million. This: what kills you. What lets you live. But go back. How you got there. Every tiny chance builds on another tiny chance before it, and before that, to the beginning of the universe. Why are you there then? Why do your parents meet, and why do their parents meet, and how does that one sperm in each one meet that egg? If you look at it like that, look, it is impossible, no? Impossible. My speaking, like this, to you, how did we get here? Start back then. It is like a maze. Take any wrong turning of an infinite number and look: we are not here.’

He rocks, now, back and forwards a little on his haunches. His right hand turns and turns in his beard. Isla sits on the chair. She catches sight of herself with her hands folded over each other in her lap, primly, like a figure in a medieval painting.

‘The only way that what we have here – something as improbable as you, and me, sitting in this room together – can take place is if everything that could have happened, somewhere else, already has. You follow me? So this is what I am working with. How do you solve a maze?’

Isla feels the length of the pause. He is looking at her.

‘You follow the left-hand wall?’

Banacharski wheezes with laughter.

‘Backwards! You start at the end. Then every fork, it is not a problem – it is not a thing that can go two ways. It is just a node that is leading you back home. I mean this -’ he waves his hands again – ‘metaphorically.’

He stands up, now, and takes a step or two – agitating his hands.

‘I mean that chance is an illusion,’ he says. ‘We think one thing happens and not another. But really everything happens. No time passes and nothing is lost and nobody dies. They are living in an infinity of universes, at every moment, for all time…’

His eyes look at her, as if from far away. Isla feels creepily, sorrowfully, a sense of how broken his mind is. She knows, then, that she can’t stay. She shouldn’t have come.

‘Just here -’ He fishes, again, at his imaginary wall in the air. His lips are moving into a sad smile, and his eyes are wet. ‘So near. Imagine if you could pass through these walls. Imagine something that would make everything exist at once. Imagine if at every little point you weren’t seeing universes splitting off, but universes coming together. You will see the maze entire – it will be not a maze but a pattern, you see? Like on wallpaper. A decoration, not a prison.’

Isla’s cheeks feel stiff. She smiles at him, arranging her face somewhere between quizzical and accepting.

‘Everything that is lost is present,’ he says. ‘See? If you can just reach through, with your mind, through the wall, into the place where something never happens, or doesn’t happen yet… Everything that has gone is here. Anything can happen because everything will happen. Everything true, everything existing, everything here, now, always…’

He looks at her almost imploringly. ‘Nobody dies. Nobody goes away. Nothing is ever lost.’

The following day, Isla tells him that she has to leave. Banacharski looks momentarily stricken. Then he shrugs.

It is a bright morning, chillier than the previous one.

‘Walk with me,’ he says. They set off up the hill behind the house. At first Banacharski says nothing; then, to her surprise, he links arms with her. The slight tang of him on the air makes her not revolted, but a little sad.

‘I have enemies, Isla,’ he says. ‘You know, when you first came here, you wanted to know why I left the Sorbonne? That was one of the reasons I had to go. I had the real fear that they would kill me. No joke. They would kill me before my work was finished.’