Coincidence by David Ambrose Read Free Book Online

was looking for them and I imposed the connection between them. A real coincidence has
     to sneak up on you and surprise you, like the punch line of a joke, except that there’s no lead up to it, no structure. It
     doesn’t make sense, yet it makes sense of an unexpected kind.
    There didn’t seem to be much new or startling in any of the books I’d bought. The examples presented were mostly of the “just
     fancy that”
variety
:
    A man lost his engraved fountain pen in Florence, South Carolina. Three years later he and his wife were in New York City.
     As they left their hotel, she spied a pen in the street. It was her husband’s, his name clearly inscribed.
    Some of them were so unlikely I almost had to laugh out loud:
    When his station’s phone number was changed, an English police constable accidentally gave a wrong version of the new number
     to a friend. A few days later, while checking over a factory in the middle of the night, he noticed that a door was open and
     a light on in the manager’s office. He went to investigate. Nobody was in the office, but while he was there the telephone
     rang. He answered it. The caller was his friend, ringing the wrong number that the police constable had mistakenly given him—which
     turned out to be the ex-directory number of that particular office.
    One or two were a little spooky:
    In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” describing how three survivors of a shipwreck
     killed and ate the ship’s cabin boy, whose name was Richard Parker. In 1884
The Times
reported the trial of three survivors of a shipwreck on charges of murdering and eating the ship’s cabin boy—whose name was
     Richard Parker.
    This one was perhaps my favorite:
    In 1893 Henry Ziegland of Honey Grove, Texas, jilted his sweetheart, who killed herself. Her brother tried to avenge her by
     shooting Ziegland, but the bullet only grazed his face and buried itself in a tree. The brother, thinking he had killed Ziegland,
     committed suicide. In 1913 Ziegland was cutting down the tree that the bullet had hit. He had trouble getting the tree down,
     so in the end he used dynamite. The bullet was still lodged in the tree, and the explosion sent it through Ziegland’s head—twenty
     years after it had been fired with intent to kill him.
    Toward dusk I began to feel restless and decided to take a walk. I’d already made up my mind to skip dinner, but thought I
     might drop into a bar I liked over on Broadway and have a couple of drinks. As I walked, I turned over in my mind an argument
     I had been reading about between Freud and Jung. Freud regarded all talk of the paranormal—including things like synchronicity—as
     nonsense. Jung, on the other hand, always had an open mind, refusing, as he put it, “to commit the fashionable stupidity of
     regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” He grew increasingly frustrated as he listened to Freud ranting on against
     ESP, eventually feeling what he described as:
     
    “a curious sensation… as if my diaphragm was made of iron and was becoming red-hot…. At that moment there was such a loud
     report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple
     over us.”
    Freud refused to believe there was any connection between this phenomenon and Jung’s pent-up emotions. Jung insisted that
     there was, and to prove his point he predicted that in a moment it would happen again.
    “Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.”
    At that moment I felt as though I’d jumped about a foot off the sidewalk—because just as I imagined that second “detonation”
     in Jung’s bookcase, a car backfired in front of me.
    At least I think it was the car in front of me. It had stalled and the man behind the wheel appeared to be having some trouble
     getting it going. An older man with him was giving him