Coincidences

Nora Kipnis

A blizzard in New York, late night, early 2011. At West 4^th Street the downtown F slows and sighs the moment he arrives. He kisses his fingers in thanks. To him, this is natural: the next step in a long-memorized dance, the next volley in a game of tennis. The muscles remember what the brain forgets. Always thank the threshold. Keep the train gods happy. The trains don’t come unless the train gods are happy.

Everything here is familiar. Fluorescent lights in the car, tungsten whips by outside. Even the graffiti is familiar. It’s as if he’s already home. He smells perfume, faintly, although nobody is sitting near him. He had a fight with his father before he left. Now he can’t remember what it was about.

The same small paper he has next to his bedroom door is tucked in front of an advertisement for toothpaste. It’s a flyer for a psychic with an eye inside a triangle and some letters which, when put together, mean nothing in English.

With a butter knife, the second wife is cutting a pill for her father. He’s dying, generally, but momentarily he’s in the dining room, vodka glass sweating on a Theophile Steinlen coaster. There’s an ice cube in it from an ice machine in the freezer.

The house she’d been raised in had neither a dining room nor an ice machine. There were ice trays in the icebox, and they took meals around a linoleum table in the kitchen.

Now her father is telling her about the nature special, but she’s not listening.

She’s thinking about how he is going to die. Wondering how soon it will be.

She used to take care of cats, little baby kittens she found in dumpsters around the Flatlands. They often died young, and she cried for each one. Under the topsoil of her childhood backyard is a layer of feline skeletons.

The second wife’s father is telling her that the bird outside falls in love for life. Isn’t that remarkable?

The word coincidence alone makes no comment on the randomness or non-randomness of the events indicated. In other words, to state that something is a coincidence doesn’t condemn or condone what psychiatrists call magical thinking.

“O, he loved that bird. That bird loved him.” This would be the refrain at the funeral of the father of the first wife, months later, who died in perfect health of a fall off a ladder. He left seventeen grandchildren, eight guns, a marriage blessed by Pope Francis, and a pet lovebird.

In the popular imagination, coincidence and science are seen as opposing. One is mystical, one is logical. But as published in the Journal of Statistics in 1989: Much of scientific discovery depends on finding the cause of a perplexing coincidence. Changes in the world can create coincidences; likewise, changes in our own behavior such as a new pattern of reading or eating can create a pattern…

For example, a Viennese geneticist recorded coincidences for thirty years. He built a career out of the accidental spilling of ink and the subsequent false claim that toads inherit the acquired speckles of their parents. A visiting American student pointed out the mistake. It was one anyone could’ve made. But the Viennese had lived by coincidence, and, by God, he’d die by it. Not long after, he committed suicide.

She presses down on the butter knife, and all of a sudden, with a thud, the pill is split. When she lifts the knife, one half is still on the counter and the other has gone flying off to some unknown location.

Panic sets. She must find it. There’s a dog in the house, the dog might eat it. Her father is on a strict regimen. He needs every last pill to control his blood pressure.

She has also just broken her glasses.

The dog watches as she gets on her hands and knees and puts her face close to the ground, as if she herself were a dog, and sniffing. A silly old song from a silly old musical pops into her head: In the Pine-Sol scented air, somewhere that’s green.

When the young man gets out of the subway in Brooklyn, the world is whiteness and silence, except for the faraway scrape of a snowplow which can’t keep up with the heavens. The roads are covered, cars buried. Everything is one continuous snowdrift.

He thinks it’s beautiful, beautiful to walk in the middle of the road, hands in his pockets. Beautiful to be looking upward, smiling, laughing. To be singing, I remember you, you’re the one who made my dreams… come… true…

Although he hasn’t yet fallen in love, and his star has not yet fully risen, at the moment his bed is warm and waiting, and he knows himself to be the luckiest man in the world.

Vast numbers of coincidences arise from hidden causes that are never discovered. At the moment, we have no measure of the size of this body of occurrences.

Snow being solid water, avalanches happen quite coincidentally. Though physicists, meteorologists, and mountain men make efforts to predict them, the elements that cause avalanches are too numerous for us to predict them before they’ve begun, which is what makes them so miraculous.

If words sound similar, this is a clue. Heredity of words is not a closed system. There are as many ways to communicate as there are ways to move the mouth, vibrate the vocal cords, or even move the body. As in Lamarckian genetics, words pass on their acquired characteristics. They are born with meaning, and they accrue meaning as they are repeated. In this way they are unlike toads, because acquired characteristics are the very mechanisms by which words, in a sense, reproduce.

If you ever get buried in an avalanche, by the way, start to dig yourself out slowly by moving just one finger.

Coincidence: accident, cadaver, cadence, decay, casualty, cascade.

The Middle Irish word for lightning.

The related Armenian chacnum means “becoming low.”

Lowness, or gravity, as some call it, makes an essential contribution to fortunate coincidence. For example, my friend Will told me he always finds money on the ground. Later that day he found a fifty-dollar bill on the ground. I never find money on the ground, or think about finding money on the ground, but I decided that day to start. I later found a dollar on the ground, but it was in the store where I work, and I didn’t take it because it seemed fundamentally wrong to me to take money accidentally dropped by customers.

“I would have been working on the twenty-fourth floor of the World Trade Center, but I turned down the job because I wanted to take care of my kids,” said the first wife to her daughter.

Her daughter has a terrible thought: You left out the part where a few children later, you changed your mind again and left. You’d have abandoned us sooner or later. For this she has an unconscious impulse to cruelly punish herself, so she breaks a cup she is washing and cuts her knuckle with the chipped porcelain.

Careful.

Sorry.

Lately people tell her she says this word too much, to which she says, Sorry.

Later she decides that if her mother hadn’t left, her father wouldn’t have had to stay home from work that day, because he wouldn’t have had to drive his teenaged daughter to the orthodontist, because her mother would have been there to do it. Thus, motherlessness saved her from fatherlessness.

Perhaps there are some children who owe the universe a parent, one way or another. If such a debt exists, which it probably doesn’t, it’s meted out in different ways, similar to how water finds its level. In this way the second wife came to be in the house with the dining room and the ice machine and the lost half pill. Perhaps also in this way the first wife’s father happened to fall off the ladder.

One game graduates of small liberal arts colleges enjoy is the D’You Know Game. The way you play is this: You meet a graduate of another small liberal arts college, probably at a party at the house of a friend of a friend or at one of your first jobs in the big city after graduation. For lack of anything more interesting or less controversial to discuss, you decide to mention the names of every person you’ve ever heard of who went there. The initiator fires off various names, to which the inquiree says, “Yeah, I knew them,” or “No, I don’t know them.”

In the case that one or both players were good friends or bitter enemies with the person, there is a lot of exclamation, and both win. If the inquiree has never heard of anyone the inquirer knows, the inquirer wins by virtue of knowing and having been known. The inquiree can only win if and when they become the inquirer, i.e. naming people they know from the initiator’s school.

In most cases, however, both participants vaguely knew and disliked all mentioned, and there isn’t much to say about their mutual acquaintances after all, and the inquirer begins to wish they had never asked.

One way to study coincidences is to look at the world around us, make lists, and try to find pattern and structure. This behavior is common among madmen in New York City, who carry volumes filled with numbers encountered in their daily wanderings. Numbers, however, are the easiest coincidences to find. There are a finite number of possibilities. None can be added or taken away. There is a one in ten chance that any given digit will be the same as the preceding one.

Some argue that it’s not a coincidence that the plane servicing flight 911 crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, and that 911 itself is the number for emergency phone calls in the United States. This argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the word coincidence. Names, times, and dates are not accidents. We choose them ourselves. It’s possible that it was more than a coincidence. But at the very least, it was a coincidence.

When the young man met the young woman, they played the D’You Know Game, but they got bored, so they fell in love instead.

The sound of coins splashing into their respective places in a cash register is one of the many musics of her days now. People come in, buy words, leave. Each book a closed system.

Be careful on that ladder, she says. Her grandfather had fallen off a ladder and died. She goes to hold the ladder.

In the Ukraine, his grandparents were buried waist high in the dirt and disemboweled alive. Their entrails were eaten by dogs. With only twenty-two people in a room, there is a one in two chance that two will share the same birthday. She runs into twenty-two people every day, so why is it remarkable to her that her boyfriend and the man at work have the same birthday, or that their families come from the same small town in Ukraine?

He passes her dusty boxes of plastic bags and bookmarks. They argue a lot that day.

Growing inside her is the zygote of an idea that there are molecules that were once in the same body that want to be in the same body again, and that’s why we fall in love. It’s not quite soul mates, not as woo-woo as that. We drink the same water as the dinosaurs, Jesus, early humans, our grandparents, and Hitler. And the most recent common ancestor—from whom every person living today descended—lived only 1,000 years ago.

At the end of the day he gives her a coin. On one side is a lamp like Aladdin’s. It’s from the United Arab Emirates. He found it in the register. She puts it in her pocket.

To a riddle none of us will ever forget, the answer is: Bill. Bill is money.

Bill is also the name of first wife’s father, who fell off a ladder and died. Bill’s tragic fall happened when the sun made its yearly transit across the fixed binary star Algol, said to be the grisliest star in the zodiac.

People born under the fixed star Algol: his second wife, Hitler, his mother.

When the young woman told her brother this, he said, “Who knows, maybe there is some kind of schedule we don’t know about.” If there is a schedule, who is making it, and how does one go about making an appointment?

I like to talk to these note-taking madmen in New York. One told me that money isn’t bad or good, it just magnifies what is, like water. Money has no start or end. The difference of a few degrees of latitude or longitude is not much different than the difference of a few hours or the difference between you and I.

Once I heard of a rich girl who complained so much about her fancy apartment that her friend told her that she wouldn’t listen to her complaining anymore. That night the rich girl’s apartment burned down.

During the March 1970 solar eclipse, the first to be broadcast on CBS in full color, my father saw each leaf of each tree in detailed shadow. This is because, despite how small the sun appears, the light source can become smaller, and the smaller the light source, the starker the shadow.

 “When your father was courting me,” the second wife said, stroking her new stepdaughter’s hair, “and we were far away from each other, he used to say, ‘Look up at the moon. We’re under the same moon.’ Isn’t that nice?”

They were lying on her father’s bed, on the clean fresh bedclothes, looking out the window at the moon, round and bright and cold. She was the kind of woman who used the word “courting,” and he’d promised other things, things which hadn’t materialized, a brownstone in Park Slope, cats even though he was allergic. But she was all right. She was happy.

The little girl was thinking, could there be some unknown someone under that same moon to whom she could later say, “We are under the same moon?”

 The second wife was thinking, I have always wanted a linen closet full of clean, fresh linen, and here I am with one down the hall.

Water gives life to the ten thousand things but does not strive. Water goes to the lowest point and therefore always finds its level. Water flows to the places other men reject. Water accompanies lightning.

Her father is dying. When he was thirteen, growing up in Park Slope, he wanted to work at the Old American Can Factory in Park Slope. He wasn’t old enough, so he stole a taxi instead and drove it to Atlantic City. Back then Park Slope was a Bad Neighborhood, so the old man’s parents saved up to move to Flatlands, which was a Good Neighborhood but now is a Bad Neighborhood and soon will probably be a Gentrified Neighborhood, which is what Park Slope is by the great blizzard of 2011.

Much later, when the second wife is going to bed, she sees on the rug next to her side of the bed, carefully placed, the little blue half pill that she had been looking for. She cries—Aah!—and picks it up. The dog wags her tail. You are a good dog!

He crawled forward on his elbows like he’d just discovered oil.

You came a quarter.

What?

Wait, it’s not a quarter. It’s the coin, the one with the Aladdin’s lamp. He hands it to her.

That came out of me?

I don’t know. I just looked down after and there it was, between your legs.

Did you feel it inside me?

No. It was just there. Have you seen it before? Look.

She sat up. There was a wet spot where he had been. He put it on the windowsill, but the next morning, it would be gone.

They went to the bathroom and brushed their teeth and looked at each other in the mirror.

He knew two different people who’d died of the same rare bone cancer. She didn’t know anyone who had died of cancer, and she smoked cigarettes, and somehow her teeth were still very white.

Surgency. That’s what the young man feels. A surge of blood to the heart. He sees, several blocks away, a small dot that seems to be swinging back and forth, coming closer as it does.

Skiing! he realized suddenly. Skiing in the streets of New York! Who on earth would be skiing at this hour! But what a wonderful thing!

He skips in the snow. The man comes closer, and he peers—could it be? It is!—It’s his father! His father is skiing, and he’s singing too! Yoo hoo!

It’s a long while before they meet, but they do at last, and they hug. Behind him, his father says, is the rest of his family. We are going sledding in Prospect Park.

You come too.

NOTE: Certain italicized lines of this story are borrowed and modified from Johnny Mercer’s “I Remember You,” Alan Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors, various translations of the Tao Te Ching, and “Methods for Studying Coincidences,” Persi Diaconis & Frederick Mosteller, Journal of Statistics, 1989.

© 2020 Nora Kipnis

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Nora Kipnis is from New York. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, The Southeast Review, Raw Paw, Sabat, and others, and has been listed as Notable in Best American Essays. Lately her writing explores history and memory through chance, synesthesia, geography, and the digital. She is at work on her first novel.