Coincidence Read Online Free PDF

also my own name. Another was “No
     star without one,” in five letters, which I worked out was “Agent.”
    I had read somewhere that crossword puzzles (as I say, I have never been a crossword addict) are well-known sources of synchronicity.
     Addicts say that they frequently find something they’ve been thinking about for days cropping up in one of the clues or as
     one of the answers. That was what seemed to be happening to me. I was on my way to see my agent, and this whole chain of “false”
     or “genuine” or simply “marginal” synchronicity had started when I saw a playing card, the ace of hearts, that reminded me
     of yet another agent. And here I was finding my name, George, in a crossword puzzle that also contained the words “heartfelt”
     and “agent.”
    A man laughed loudly in another booth across the room. I turned and saw that he was sitting with his back to me and was talking
     on a mobile phone. It was obvious that he was as unaware of my presence as I had been, until then, of his.
    “Wow,” he said to whomever he was talking to and with absolutely no reference to me, “that’s quite a coincidence!”
    When I left the cafè, I realized I’d been sitting there longer than I thought; if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for my lunch.
     I took a cab, giving the address in Little Italy where I was meeting my agent. As I rode I continued turning the morning’s
     events over in my mind.
    What I had was a string of coincidences that, so far as I could see, meant nothing, yet formed a pattern. But do patterns
     have to mean something? Or, to put it another way, can order arise from disorder without there being any significance attached
     to the process? Could so intricate a little sequence of coincidences, such as I’d just experienced, be pure fluke?
    Or did such things, I asked myself, using Wordsworth’s phrase of which I’m sure Jung would have approved, point to “something
     far more deeply interfused”?
    It was a while before I registered the fact that my cab wasn’t moving and hadn’t been for some time. I was staring at the
     same stalled vehicles all around me and a stretch of wall with a faded banner reading “Liquidation Sale.” Traffic had been
     running smoothly till we reached a point just north of Penn Station, where we hit a gridlock so dense that it seemed as though
     all the vehicles in it had been welded together into a sprawling, immovable mass. There was the usual amount of honking, arm-waving,
     and insult-calling, all to no avail. I decided my best bet was to take the subway, so I paid off the cab and started to walk
     briskly toward the nearest entrance.
    At the top of the steps my mobile phone rang. I’d finally given in to progress a few months earlier and bought one. As far
     as I was concerned, it was just one more thing to lose; all the same I had to admit that, when I didn’t lose it, it was sometimes
     useful.
    “Hello,” I said, backing up a couple of steps and moving clear of the two-way torrent of people entering and exiting the subway.
    A man’s voice said, “Larry, how’s it going?”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, “you’ve got a wrong number. This isn’t Larry.”
    The man laughed and said, “Come on, Larry, stop kidding around.”
    “My name isn’t Larry,” I repeated. “You need to dial again.”
    “You sure sound like him.”
    “Listen,” I said, growing a touch exasperated by his insistence, “I don’t have time for this. I have to hang up now.”
    I did so and carried on down the steps. I had some tokens in my pocket, so I went straight through and followed the signs
     for my platform.
    Another small coincidence happened on the journey. The “heart” image cropped up again. Across from my seat in the subway was
     an advertisement for the American Heart Association. I began to wonder—more whimsically than anxiously—if fate was trying
     to tell me something. Was I about to have some kind of romantic adventure, or a