by John Gallaher

 

In our movie dream these two strangers will occasionally see each other
from a bus window or across a crowd, and know, fleetingly, that was
the person, would have been the person. Thank you, Christopher Reeve
and Jane Seymour, 1980. Thank you, loneliness and science fiction.
Electrodes on your scalp might help, counting to ten might also help,
like how we’re continually surprised when we come across someone
with the same birthday as us. It’s called “the birthday problem” which asks
how many people would you need to get into the same room in order
to statistically assure that at least two share the exact birth month and day.
Given that there are 365 days in a non-leap year, you might reasonably
assume you’d need a lot of people there to find two that match, 200,
perhaps, and even then you’d think you’d be lucky to find two people
with the same birthday. Statistically, however, you need only 23 people
for a greater than 50% (hence “statistically probable”) chance of finding two
with the same birthday. For virtually a 100% chance, you need only 70,
or else, as when we see the obituary of someone with the same name
as us, viewing’s at six, and don’t you kind of want to go? With the attendant
idea of time passing at different speeds, that it might loop around in the
Huckleberry Finn fantasy of walking in on your funeral, or the Billy
Pilgrim fantasy where you live your life in random order, your funeral
is just another day you think of now and then. Happiness also overtakes
me in this way sometimes, thinking of us as a jumble of ideas, as a way
of finding meaning, to join the mental and material worlds, signing up
for an invisible realm that binds together our lives, like making a family
tree, watching the dates flip backward. It’s long been scientifically
disproven, of course, and it’s flawed from the start; but, like many other
non-scientific beliefs, from a psychological angle, it makes some sense,
as there’s a difference between statistical significance and human
significance. It’s all just now, we say, or, really, at some point we say that,
other times it’s that face flashing from a passing bus. Your eyes meet.
It’s 1980. For a few minutes we thought it kind of funny, the kids
and I did, imagining it’s 1980 while driving to Kansas City listening
to the radio, “Call Me,” and then “Another Brick in the Wall,”
but then John Lennon comes on with “(Just Like) Starting Over”
and it’s a thin wire, as I’m saying he was dead by the time this song
got to number one, the rearview mirror fell off the windshield
onto the gearshift. “No looking back now,” we say. And so now we
watch the mirror as we drive. It starts to shake a bit before it’s going
to fall, as it wiggles off the clasp that holds it to the windshield.