The Broken Clock is Right Thrice: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #4

Chapter 4 - Coupon Day

"I can't remember exactly when, and I certainly don't know how, but I think it was the third day after my husband went missing that the vision came. Awful. I wish I'd never seen it. I wish I wasn't the one who had to find him. Why couldn't someone else find him? Why? Why punish me with a vision like that?"

~ Zandra, 25 years ago, interview with The New York Times

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The can of Red Bull slaps the white SUV's windshield with a thunk and a chaser of someone shouting, "Fraud!" It's the second time since they left the cemetery that a pedestrian shouted at the SUV, but only the first a can of Red Bull left a starfish in the glass.

Idiot. They should've drunk the Red Bull first, and then threw it.

"Better keep your window rolled up," the man in sunglasses says. "People recognize you."

"How am I supposed to smoke then?" Zandra says and ashes into the breeze outside the passenger side window.

"The taxpayers of America kindly request you not will cracks onto the windshield," the man in sunglasses says.

"Fine," Zandra says and closes the window. The smoldering cigarette still perches between her lips. She waits until the man in sunglasses coughs to extinguish the cherry.

"That bother you, being called a fraud?" the man in sunglasses says.

Now it's Zandra's turn to cough. She hacks into the nook of her elbow. Clearing her throat, she says, "Not in the way they think it does."

I've been lucky for 25 years. Lucky when it matters. The rest I can bullshit my way through, but even then, I wonder. After a certain length of time, you stop thinking it's luck and start thinking it's something else.

That's human nature, to place yourself at the center of some great cosmic coincidence, to think you're so very blessed, so very special. "What are the odds of all of these little things all lining up so perfectly time and time again?" you ask yourself.

But you forget something. You exist in a universe of scale, where infinite possibilities coalesce around single points in time and space with nothing more than statistics to give them meaning. And even that doesn't mean anything, because it doesn't need to mean anything.

Unless you need to make money, of course. Ninety-nine percent of people don't bother looking up at the stars at night. They don't consider that if one of those points of light is a million light years away, then it took a million years for that light to reach their eyes. And what are the odds, in a universe so incredibly vast, that some creature on a rock orbiting a mundane star evolved eyes to even see that light a million years after the fact?

Every moment in time is extraordinary. The levels of perfection and coincidence that need to happen for anything to take place at all—to the birth of a child to waiting in line for an oil change to hurling a Red Bull— are beyond human comprehension.

"Luck" is relative to how much you value any of those things, or how badly the mark who hires a psychic wants answers.

"After cheating and fucking, do you know what most people who paid me at Sneak Peek wanted to know about?" Zandra says to the man in sunglasses.

"Lottery numbers?" the man says and guides the SUV past the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

"Close. Stock picks. They wanted me to choose stocks and say if the price would go up or down. Some were college kids playing slapdick with their tuition money. Others were money managers. Professionals," Zandra says.