And all too finite. Sound that should have lingered died far too quickly.
And so, before he could take another step toward his and Carrie’s bedroom at the back of the apartment, before he could get his suit jacket off and his tie unknotted, before he could let the night’s strangeness fade with a sleep that would end with a waking hangover and a train ride out to Long Island, before any of those things had a chance to happen Jay looked toward the table where there should have been coins spinning and rolling (maybe not for as long as some hours before, but still
some
motion), where there should have been sound, some sound, and when he saw what was there he could move no more. What he saw was something he should not be seeing. Could not be seeing.
Must
not be seeing.
But two and a half hours later he was still seeing it. When first laying eyes upon the sight, it had shaken him. He’d steadied himself by grabbing one of the two dining room chairs. Then, a rubbery warmth still afflicting his knees, he’d lowered himself into it. And there he had sat, dawn just a few hours away now. Sat and stared at what he had to admit he
was
truly seeing.
Almost at the center of the table, laying in a misty bolt of white neon light filtering in through the thin fabric of the living room curtains, were maybe two dozen coins. Jay wasn’t sure exactly how many. He didn’t care. There were only nine that mattered, and they laid prominent in a clear patch surrounded by the rest, like palm trees sprouting in a bald spot in a conifer forest. The outer coins lay in random groups, some heads, some tails. Chance had dealt them their position of rest. But the nine coins—and Jay did examine these and saw that there were two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies—that lay in the center could not be what they were by chance. Not again. Not heads
again
!
But heads they were. Heads they had been on the table at Buffalo Kabuki’s, and heads they were here in a tiny apartment in the Village. Heads these nine coins had been all the hours that Jay Grady had stared at them, slowly sobering to a point where the probabilities involved in what he was witnessing became ever clearer.
Actually, the
im
probabilities. Sure, it was mathematically possible, but unlikely in almost immeasurable ways. Which, he had to admit (despite the daunting math involved), meant it still could happen. Once, even twice like it had. But...
One eyebrow arched severely as the thought completed itself:
But not three. No way three times.
Once—amazing luck. Twice—luck so far beyond amazing that it could make your head spin...or make you sit at a table and stare at the offending coins for hour after hour. But thrice? Thrice and Jay figured that the planets will have lined up, or that Armageddon would be just a wink away. Right. Might as well be. The odds would be about the same for the biblical end of mankind, if not better.
So go for three
. The suggestion to self came quite logically. Find out. Line up Jupiter and Mars and Venus and all the others, right in a row. A neat, celestial row. Line ‘em up. And pull the plug on humanity, too, while you’re at it. So, yeah, go for three. Go for it. Do it. Easy to do it, easy to find out. Easy to
know
.
Okay
, Jay thought.
Okay
.
But was it? something small inside of him wondered. Small but vital. Was it easy? Would it be okay?
There was one way to know. Just one.
Without further rumination, Jay reached out toward the change and with a few swats swept all but the nine coins that mattered off the table, sending them to the floor with a clatter. He listened as the noise settled. Listened and eyed what remained on the table.
Nine coins. Two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, two pennies. Eighty seven cents.
And that one way to know.
He put his hand over the coins and gathered them into his fist. Felt their coolness. Squeezed them as his hand came up a bit and hovered over the table.
Hovered. Wondering These coins that I need, what will it mean if...if...
It was time to find out.
He opened his hand and let the coins fall. All nine hit at virtually the same instant. Some spun where they had landed, some wobbled and whirled, and one of the quarters rolled at a steep angle on its edge, turning ever tighter circles until it finally lost steam and fell to one side, coming up heads.
The other coins stilled as well. Jay scanned them.
Then scanned them again.
And once more to confirm that he was seeing the impossible. And he was. All were heads. Again.
Three times...
“This is nuts,” Jay said and stood abruptly, fast enough to send the chair screeching back from his legs. “Way out fucking nuts!”
“I see you, Jay.”
The voice, soft and unfamiliar, startled him. He spun toward it and was surprised to see Carrie.
“What’s going on?” she asked groggily, clearing her throat as she stood where the hall met the kitchen, her arms drawn tight across her chest. She was wearing her nightshirt, the short one with the giant picture of a baby chick on the front, and white panties that glowed like a triangle of full-moon snow high between her pale legs.
“It’s you,” he said, letting out a calming breath.
“Who’d you expect?”
“It didn’t sound like—never mind. What are you doing up?”
“Something woke me. I heard something.”
“It was me.” Jay said with embarrassed quickness. “I...I dropped some change and then I bumped into the chair trying to pick it up.”
“Oh,” she half said, half grunted, one hand coming up to knuckle the sleep from her eyes. She looked to him, one half-open eye the best she could manage. “What time is it?”
He checked his watch. “After three.”
“Jeez, you guys did it up late tonight. You just get in?”
“It was Bunker’s birthday,” he said, sliding right by her question. To reply in the affirmative would be to lie, and he did not want to do that. Not to Carrie. And to answer truthfully he’d have to explain what he’d been doing out here for the last few hours, and from that she would want to hear more, and then he would have to share what he’d seen on the table at BK’s, and in the end it would sound ten times as crazy to her as it did to him, and he could hardly believe it still. “The big two-five.”
“Mmm,” she grunted fully now. “Was Judith there?”
Jay managed a look that scolded, if only mildly. “Jude was there.”
She nodded with disapproval. “The titty bar again?”
“Yes.”
Well, she was the one who had told him it was okay to go the first time Rude Jude had squired the boys that way, and Jay
had
asked her before agreeing to go. Asked her if it would bother her, and of course she had told him that it was all right with her, and he had then assured her that it was the drinks, and the drinks only, and that the women were just...decorations on the place. And, well, if she’d been any kind of feminist, she suspected that that characterization would have offended more than soothed, but in the end she told him that he had just one thing to remember about the ‘decorations’—that he could look, but that he had better not even
think
of touching. So, she really couldn’t rag on him for going this night, or for staying late, which ‘the boys’ always seemed to do, though not
this
late before, but she could needle her mad just a bit. Needle jealously.
“Did you have fun?” she asked, needling just that little bit in the suggestive way she asked.
I had something, Jay thought. Too much to drink, a lecture on misguided charity. And what to call the other thing? A mystical experience? In the end he just nodded, not wanting to lie about that, nor even to skirt the issue this time.
And to his reply Carrie herself smiled, something devilishly more than a happy face, and lifted her nightshirt to her neck, exposing her smallish breasts. Perfect little mounds that would not get her a job at BK’s, but were enough to raise a leering grin on her man’s face. “See anything as nice as these?”
He stared, surprised not at all that after all their years together he still did stare, then shook his head. “No. No I didn’t.”
She lowered the nightshirt, leaving just the yellow bird’s beaky grin pointing at Jay. On her face the smile was gone, leaving just a look of invitation, one that said, ‘Hurry, you’. “Well, they’ll be waiting for you in bed.”
And with that she turned and headed for their room. His eyes dropped naturally to her rear, the cutest pair of cheeks he had ever known, the most alluring natural wiggle that still made his knees weak. That still made him want to know her in ways biblical and profane.
Except for now.
He turned back to the table once the bedroom door clicked shut, this wanting stronger than the wanting of her. This wanting to know. To understand.
Three times, he thought, looking upon the coins. It would have to stop there, wouldn’t it? The envelope had been pushed, stretched, and broken. Right?
As before, there was but one way to know.
He did not want Carrie to be roused again, so he went to the living room and retrieved the paper from the day before. The day before the day before, he had to remind himself. It was Saturday already, and what was what he opened upon the table after taking the coins in hand was Thursday’s paper. Or the stock pages from Thursday’s Journal, to be precise. He spread them out just like he would if scanning the long columns of financial data, but now it was not to read, but to cushion. To quiet.
His fist closed around the coins. He shook them like dice before a very, very critical roll, then let them fall again.
And they came up heads.
Four times.
His head shook slowly from side to side and he whispered, “No way.”
Again, he took them in hand and dropped them on the papered tabletop. They fell, settled with no unnatural display of motion, and came up heads once more.
Five times.
Jupiter was where Jupiter should be. And Mars. And Venus. God’s six day project was not torn asunder. The heavens hadn’t opened to spill destruction upon the world. Nothing cataclysmic had happened.
But...
But something was happening. Was developing. Slowly, like an image on film being gradually cut by the light shone upon it. Jay sensed this. Felt this.
Knew
this.
“I see you, Jay.”
He spun fast this time, because that was
NOT
Carrie’s voice. Of that he was certain now. Of that he was double damn certain when he was looking behind and saw Carrie not there. Saw nothing there. But...
Oh, wonderful. Now he was hearing things.
I see you Jay
And half way around again he spun, looking back toward past the coins, toward the dim and empty living room. Looking because he had heard that. Had heard it said. Or...
I see you Jay
...had he?
It was there, yes, the words. But, and he looked back and front once more, had he
heard
them? Or had it been something—more than sound, more than sight, more than feeling—in his head? Something that was more of a...knowing.
I see you Jay
He remained still this time. Still as a stone. Hardly breathing. Not a muscle twitching. Nothing moving.
Nothing but the coins.
On the table before him they had begun to tremor. To twitch and shudder like kernels of popcorn did just before exploding. Like the Mexican jumping beans his uncle had given him when he was six. But mostly like the old electric football game he had gotten for Christmas before times got hard. The kind where the field was green sheet metal and something beneath it made it shake when a switch was flipped, which would send defense one way and offense the other in a haphazard advance toward their goal lines. The coins were moving like those old plastic players now, only their slow motion rush was not haphazard at all. They were moving, all right, in one vibrating mass in the direction of Jay.
And when the first one had almost reached the table edge they all stopped.
Jay’s breath hitched in and out as he stared at the coins, and after a moment they shook again in place, not moving this time. As if they wanted attention. As if they wanted...
...to be picked up again?
And they stilled. Waiting.
This was not the booze. No way was this the booze. This was something way more than the booze. Something...elemental. Something primal.
The coins jittered briefly again, then quieted.
“All right,” Jay said quietly, and took them in hand again, and dropped them on the paper again, and they came up heads again. For the sixth time they came up heads, and why that mattered or what it meant he had no—
I SEE you Jay
And the coins tittered almost gleefully for just a second.
Jay gazed at the coins, and he thought of the ‘thing’ he was knowing in his head. The words that...
I SEE YOU Jay
...that...
And, yes, the coins quaked where they lay.
I SEE YOU JAY
...were not words at all.
I. SEE. YOU. JAY.
Jay’s eyes swelled in steps like slowly inflating balloons—wide, wider, HUGE.
I. SEE. YOU. JAY.
The coins tremored again, lightly, almost humming.
Jay’s gaze brightened with wonder. Before them, knowing surfaced in a black void of ignorance. A knowing that came not with the sudden flourish of summer rockets bursting in the sky with dazzling colors and sharp cracks of mini-thunder, but with a mystical grace, as if it had been there all along, barely veiled and the veil had been drawn casually aside to reveal and oh so obvious certainty. A certainty that nine rounds of metal had led him to.
I. SEE. YOU. JAY.
He understood none of it, and craved to understand all of it, but for the moment he could only revel in it. This thing. This knowing.
Not words at all
, he thought, a slim, cautious smile creeping onto his face as the coins shuddered one final time.
Not words at all.