Destiny and Coincidence Theme Analysis

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life.

Being the sort of person who always dreams of doing something else while occupied, he could not sit down to practice without pausing to work out a chess problem in his head, could not play chess without thinking about the failures of the Chicago Cubs, could not go to the ballpark without considering some minor character in Shakespeare, and then, when he finally got home, could not sit down with his book for more than twenty minutes without feeling the urge to play his clarinet. Wherever he was, then, and wherever he went, he left behind a cluttered trail of bad chess moves, of unfinished box scores, and half-read books.

They were magic letters, and they hung there in the darkness like a message from the sky itself. MOON PALACE. I immediately thought of Uncle Victor and his band, and in that first, irrational moment, my fears lost their hold on me. I had never experienced anything so sudden and absolute. A bare and grubby room had been transformed into a site of inwardness, an intersection point of strange omens and mysterious, arbitrary events. I went on staring at the Moon Palace sign, and little by little I understood that I had come to the right place, that this small apartment was indeed where I was meant to live.

In the end, the problem was not grief. Grief was the first cause, perhaps, but it soon gave way to something else—something more tangible, more calculable in its effects, more violent in the damage it produced. A whole chain of forces had been set in motion, and at a certain point I began to wobble, to fly in greater and greater circles around myself, until at last I spun out of orbit.

Perhaps I was simply delirious with hunger, and the lights of the sign had transfixed me. I can’t be sure of any of it, but the fact was that the words Moon Palace began to haunt my mind with all the mystery and fascination of an oracle. Everything was mixed up in it at once: Uncle Victor and China, rocket ships and music, Marco Polo and the American West. I look at the sign and start to think about electricity. That would lead me to the blackout during my freshman year, which in turn would lead me to the baseball games played at Wrigley Field, which would then lead me back to Uncle Victor and the memorial candles burning on my windowsill. One thought kept giving way to another, spiraling into ever larger masses of connectedness.

I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

When it came right down to it, I was rather gratified by the Mets’ good fortune. Their history was even more abominable than the Cubs’, and to witness their sudden, wholly improbable surge from the depths seemed to prove that anything in this world was possible. There was consolation in that thought. Causality was no longer the hidden demiurge that ruled the universe: down was up, the last was the first, the end was the beginning.

Put yourself in her position. She falls in love with you, she kisses you on the lips, she drops everything to go out and find you. But what have you done for her? Not a thing. Not even the shadow of a thing. What separates Kitty from other people is that she’s willing to accept that. Just imagine it, Fogg. She saves your life, and yet you don’t owe her anything. She doesn’t expect gratitude from you. She doesn’t even expect friendship. She might wish for those things, but she’ll never ask for them. She has too much respect for other people to force them into doing things against their will. She’s open and spontaneous, but at the same time she’d rather die that have you feel she’s throwing herself at you. That’s where discretion comes into it. She’s gone far enough, and at this point she has no choice but to hold her ground and wait.

Once the dishes had been cleared away, we all opened our fortune cookies and analyzed them with mock solemnity. Oddly enough, I can remember mine as though I were still holding it in my hands. It read: “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.” As it turned out, I was to encounter this enigmatic phrase again, which in retrospect made it seem that my chance discovery of it in the Moon Palace had been fraught with a weird and premonitory truth.

Effing snorted at this, an ornery kind of laugh that seemed to dismiss the subject once and for all. Immediately after that he straightened himself up in his chair. It was remarkable how quickly this transformed his appearance. He was no longer a comatose semi-corpse lost in a twilight reverie; he had become all sinew and attention, a seething little mass of resurrected strength. As I eventually learned, this was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him. So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. He loved to trick the world with his sudden experiments and inspirations, and of all the stunts he pulled, the one he liked best was playing dead.

Afterward, I didn’t make a cross or say any prayers. Fuck God, I said to myself, fuck God, I won’t give him the satisfaction. I planted a stick in the ground and attached a piece of paper to it. Edward Byrne, I wrote, 1898-dash-1916. Buried by his friend, Julian Barber. Then I started to scream. That’s how it happened, Fogg. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to. I started to scream, and after that I just let myself be crazy.

He hadn’t known that Tom could paint, he said, repeating the remark several dozen times over the course of the afternoon. They were the beautifulest things he’d ever seen, the beautifulest things in the whole world. If he behaved himself, he said, maybe one day Tom could teach him how to do it, and Effing looked him in the eyes and said yes, maybe one day he would. Effing was sorry that anyone had seen the paintings, but at the same time he was glad to get such an enthusiastic response, realizing it was probably the only response these works would ever get.

It was in California that he invented his new name, turning himself into Thomas Effing when he signed the hotel register on the first night. He wanted the Thomas to refer to Moran, he said, and it wasn’t until he put down the pen that he realized that Tom had also been the hermit’s name, the name that had secretly belonged to him for more than a year. He took the coincidence as a good omen, as though it had strengthened his choice into something inevitable. As for his surname, he said, it would not be necessary for him to provide me with a gloss. He had already told me Effing was a pun, and unless I had misread him in some crucial way, I felt I knew where it had come from.

The accident had changed all that. Julian Barber was dead. He wasn’t an artist anymore, he wasn’t anyone. He was Thomas Effing, a crippled expatriate confined to a wheelchair, and if anyone challenged him about his identity, he would tell him to go to hell. It was that simple. He no longer cared what anyone thought, and if it meant that he was going to have to lie about himself now and then, so be it, he would lie. The whole business was a sham anyway, and it made no difference what he did.

It was an odd little episode, but such things happen in New York City more often than you would think, especially if you are open to them. What made this encounter unusual for me was not so much its lightheartedness, but the mysterious way in which it seemed to exert an influence on subsequent events. It was almost as if our meeting with Orlando had been a premonition of Effing’s fate. A new set of images had been imposed on us, and we were henceforth cast under its spell. In particular, I am thinking about rainstorms and umbrellas, but more than that, I am also thinking about change—and how everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

“Solomon Barber?” I asked.

“The same,” he said. “And you must be Mr. Fogg. I’m honored to meet you, sir.”

He had a large and resonant voice that rumbled slightly from the cigar smoke in his lungs. I shook the enormous hand he offered me and sat down beside him on the couch. For several moments neither one of us said anything further. The smile slowly vanished from Barber’s face, and his features took on a disturbed, far-off expression. He was studying me intently, but at the same time he seemed lost in thought, as though some important idea had just occurred to him. Then, inexplicably, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I once knew someone by the name of Fogg,” he said at last. “A long time ago.”

His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it, a forgotten prisoner with no recourse to appeals, no hope for a reduced sentence, no chance for a swift and merciful execution. He had reached his full adult height by the time he was fifteen, somewhere between six-two and six-three, and from then on his weight kept mounting.

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there form the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

Barber had loved my mother. From this single, incontestable fact, everything else began to move, to totter, to fall apart—the whole world began to rearrange itself before my eyes. He hadn’t come out and said it, but all of a sudden I knew. I knew who he was, all of a sudden I knew everything.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I took off my boots and felt the sand against the soles of my feet. I had come to the end of the world, and beyond it there was nothing but air and waves, an emptiness that went clear to the shores of China. This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins.

I stood on the beach for a long time, waiting for the last bits of sunlight to vanish. Behind me, the town went about its business, making familiar late-century American noises. As I looked down the curve of the coast, I saw the lights of the houses being turned on, one by one. Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. I kept my eyes on it as it rose into the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness.