The Coincidence Machine

I didn't know what it was at first.  It was shrouded in bubble wrap, which had rendered it spherical, but once the wrappings were removed it was a small rectangular casket with a leather shoulder strap.  There were various knobs and dials and a brass handled lever.  There was a yellowed roll of paper in amongst the wrapping, and on it was written these words: 'Henry, don't play with this, it's most precarious.  Uncle Stanislous.'
    Naturally this only piqued my curiosity.  I put the leather strap over my head and across my chest, the casket sat snugly at my stomach, the enticing array of buttons in easy reach of my eager fingers.
    I was ginger at first, choosing carefully which dial to twist, and doing so only gradually, but, as nothing seemed to happen I became more reckless, more ready to turn things as far as they would go, until at last in utter frustration I threw my hands to my sides and exclaimed; "How does this contraption work?!"
    At this point I stumbled backwards over an old dusty sheet, pulling the covering off of one of my father's bookshelves, revealing an assortment of aged tomes.  One in particular caught my eye, less dusty than the others, it was a small book, no more than 100 pages at most and didn't bare any inscription on the spine.  I stood up and slipped it from the shelf.
    It turned out to be a notebook, written by this Uncle Stanislous, and explaining the workings of the box at my belly.  It was, what he called, a coincidence machine.  I skimmed listlessly through the pages, the book falling on the final page of scribbled inkings, words stressed with harsh under-lining, emphasizing their importance: 'Perhaps it is best to leave things to chance.'
    This did not interest me, I flipped back to the beginning, to the operation of the machine.  It transpired that the various dials controlled levels of coincidence, from a little bit of happenstance through kismet and ultimately to destiny.  You could carefully adjust each dial to endeavour to incur the occurence of all manner of fates, from financial to romantic, though the book was rather unsure of the correct ratios to encourage each.  The lever was, quite simply, the on and off switch.
    To be sure I moved the lever back into the off position.  Just in case.
    I figured the best place to test the coincidence machine would be somewhere out in the open, somewhere public and prone to randomness.

I received a few suspicious looks as I strolled around the supermarket with this odd brown box hanging from my neck, carefully twiddling its knobs, but waiting until just the right moment to finally turn it on.  Finally I reached a good cross-roads, a small roundabout of baked goods where the breads and cakes were kept.  I stood back, surveyed the scene, and pushed the lever forward.
    There was a lady examining egg boxes, opening each one and checking the contents carefully, inspecting each half dozen, looking for the perfect purchase.  Nearby a father and his toddler were inspecting birthday cakes, trying to find the right one, the boy was unhappy with the selection of novelty caterpillars, football shapes and boy bands.
    "Well, what do you want on your cake, son?"
    "A picture of me fighting a hundred robot sharks!"
    His father chuckled, "I think that's rather wishful thinking..."
    "There it is!" his boy beamed, pointing at a cake down in the corner.
    "What?" his father stepped forward, assuming that his son had spotted another satisfactory confection and forgotten all about his surreal suggestion.  But there, sure enough, was a rectangle of sponge, smothered in icing and bearing a rather life-like image of the boy dressed as a space warrior blasting at a seemingly endless army of mechanised great whites with his double-barrelled laser rifle.  His father, with a look of some confusion and trepdiation in his eyes, snatched up the cake and hurried off.
    I quickly pulled the lever back.  I took out my camera, snapped a picture of the dials, and wrote - in a notebook I had purchased earlier - 'Tuesday 11am: Cake coincidence.'

I went to the park, it was a nice day but quiet, perhaps it was too late for all the joggers and too early for all the lunchers.  I sat on a bench and adjusted each dial ever so slightly, wanting to see what effects a small change would have before I tried anything too wild.  I looked around and pushed the lever.
    “Michael?” came an excited female voice, I turned, as it had called my name.
    Stood in the path, dressed in jogging clothes, removing the headphones of her mp3 player from her ears, was Elizabeth.  She had been a huge crush of mine throughout University, we were on the same course together, and she looked even more beautiful now than she had done so then.  She brushed a slip of her long dark hair back from her eyes where it had fallen from the neat pony-tail it was otherwise cinched into, and walked towards me.  I stood and received a big hug and a rather unexpected kiss on the cheek.
    “Hey!” I beamed, “It’s been a long time.”
    “It’s been five years exactly,” she nodded, doing the rather simple math in her head.  It was indeed almost exactly five years since the end of term of the last year of University.  “How have you been?”
    “Good, yeah, great, I’ve moved to London, how about you?”
    “Yeah, London as well, been here for a few months.”
    “Whereabouts are you?”
    “Stoke Newington.”
    “Oh, me too, I have a flat on Church Street.”
    “Me too!  Spooky.” She exclaimed.
    “I know,” I agreed, but I knew that this was not what she thought it was.
    “What number?”
    Tentatively I said; “Thirty eight.”
    “No!  I’m at thirty-seven, what a –“
    I cut her short, almost loath to hear the word, and feeling like the cruel invisible orchestrator of some twisted symphony.  “Are you still seeing…?”
    I only wished to imply his name, she’d been with Johnny for the final two years of Uni, they’d begun their relationship on the very day I had finally psyched myself up enough to try and ask Elizabeth out.  When I got to Scholars – our regular pub – there was Elizabeth and Johnny, fingers entwined, slumped happily on the sofa chairs at the back.  They didn’t see me, but I saw them and immediately turned around, went home and drank an entire bottle of Glen’s vodka.
    “Johnny?  No, we broke up about a month after Uni, in fact I haven’t seen him in – OH MY GOD!” she broke into another massive smile, but she was looking just over my shoulder.
    I turned, there was Johnny, he was riding a bicycle towards us, but came almost immediately to a halt when he saw Elizabeth’s grinning face and out-stretched arms.
    “This is SO wild!” she howled with glee.
    “Elizabeth?” Johnny smiled wistfully, “I don’t believe it.” He turned and looked me up and down, scrunching his eyes into a squint of remembrance, “And… Martin, good to see you too, buddy.”
    “Michael,” I corrected, shaking his hand.
    “No, it’s Johnny.” He corrected, squeezing a little more tightly as he did so.
    “So, how have you been?” his correction directed at Elizabeth, I was no longer part of his attention, I could have stripped naked, painted myself blue and farted the complete works of Shostakovich and he wouldn’t have noticed.
    “Great, yeah, me and Michael –“ (She emphasized my name for Johnny’s benefit, but I doubt it mattered.) “-were just catching up, we’re neighbours, can you believe that?”
    “That’s great,” Johnny said with a spectacular lack of conviction.
    “How about you? I thought you’d moved to Chicago?”
    Suddenly Johnny seemed to take on a different shade of confusion, he looked around like a concerned squirrel and surveyed the scene, the cold London skyline, the weary trees, the dew dusted grass.
    “I have,” he whimpered.
    “What brings you back?”
    “I’m back?”
    “Yes,” suddenly Elizabeth lost her radiance, “We’re in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington.”
    “What?! I… What? You’re messing with me, right?”
    “No, I, well, look, that’s the Castle, that’s the pond, er, how can I prove this?” Elizabeth got out her mobile phone, illuminated the screen and showed him the little location indicator beneath the clock that read ‘London’.
    “This is impossible… I was on my way to a business meeting… the most important…” his eyes darted from left to right, baubles of sweat were visibly sprouting out of his brow, his hands were shaking on the handlebars, his voice was beginning to quiver.
    I timidly glanced down at the coincidence machine and, very slowly so as not to arouse suspicion, edged the lever back to the off position.
    But, unlike fairy tales when the spell is broken, things did not revert back to normal, and Johnny stood there unable to articulate his bafflement. He was overcome with shock, Elizabeth, being the wonderful person she is, wrapped an arm around him and said she’d make him a cup of tea at hers and then they could figure out what had happened and how to get him home. I made some terribly flimsy excuses and, with waves of guilt crashing over me, took a prolonged and circuitous route back to the flat so as not to bump into my new neighbour.

When I was home I took a photograph of the settings and wrote; ‘Tuesday 1pm: Old friends.’
Now I was beginning to realise the terrible power of the coincidence machine. Whilst it had clearly brightened that child’s birthday, relieved – and, I think, worried – that beleaguered father, almost allowed me to make up for a missed romantic opportunity, it had, on the other hand perhaps destroyed a man’s career, cost him a flight home and, worst of all, potentially reunited a couple I was more than grateful to have seen the end of.
    I began to suspect that there was no real way to control the coincidence machine once it was operational, that you couldn’t will a coincidence into action, and, at first, the coincidence machine had a secret agenda of its own that, ultimately, fed off of the thoughts and feelings of those drawn into its sphere and brought about whatever little acts of fate they perhaps wished for or dreaded, unintentionally or otherwise.  Turning the coincidence machine on was a leap of faith, a plunge into the unknown, it was dangerous and could not be trusted.
    I felt that the power of this device was too much for anyone to be responsible for, that the consequences of operating it were too random and hazardous for further experimentation, no amount of analysis of those various dials would ever be enough to understand the machinations of fate, and that potentially tragedy could befall me before I completed my task.
    Worse, I worried that the coincidence machine had not only been effecting me, but it had impacted others, that, suddenly, spontaneously, around the world there had been a mass outbreak of coincidences resulting in all manner of awful and awkward situations. Though another, more romantic, voice in my head had posited that perhaps it could have possibly resulted in the discovery of important clues in unsolvable cases, of parents being reunited with long lost children, of lovers seperated by trivial notions who both longed to speak but had never had the courage miraculously found themselves face to face and immediately fell into one another’s embrace.
    What was it? I wondered. If there are two sides to coincidence, the magical and tragical, then does one outweigh the other? For all the strained conversations that a bad coincidence could elicit, perhaps the good that this device was capable of tipped the balance.
     I had convinced myself, it was worth the risk, I turned the coincidence machine back on, besides, what’s the worst that could happen, it’s not the end of the world.