Leigh Ann said, “I don’t like stories about dogs dying.”
“Who does?” Ganesh agreed. “Here’s one without a dog. It’s a weird coincidence that suggests we possess a sense of the strange order hidden inside quantum chaos, but we can’t grasp how it will manifest. Dr. Jeffrey Smith, a Stanford University professor, suffered a heart attack. After recovering, he asked a psychic named Elizabeth Steen when he would die. She cited a date in April 1969. Later, she predicted a devastating seismic event in San Francisco for that same day, which led to media stories and a major earthquake scare. On the fateful date, the quake didn’t happen, and Dr. Smith didn’t pass away—but the psychic, Ms. Steen, died of a stroke.”
“All this death stuff is creeping me out,” Kenny said just as they entered a swale in the roadway and wings of water flared up on both sides of the Suburban, causing him to think of the River Styx and the land of the dead that was said to lie beyond it, which was unfortunately how his mind worked when he was stressed.
“Synchronicity isn’t just about death,” Ganesh said.
“But what does all this mean?” Kenny asked.
“And why,” Leigh Ann wondered, “do I have the feeling it has something to do with why we’re here?”
Ganesh said, “Here’s one that’ll make you feel better. On March 1, 1950, the fifteen members of the choir at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska, were scheduled for choir practice at seven thirty in the evening. None had ever been late. That evening, every one of them was late, each for a different reason—and two minutes after they should have gathered there, the church was obliterated in a gas explosion that would have killed them all.”
Kenny said, “Ah. So whatever we’re rushing toward, there’s a chance we’ll survive it.”
“Being an optimist,” Ganesh said, “I believe so. But on the quantum level, there’s no certainty. Here’s another one where the pattern is inscrutable. There was a man named Anthony Clancy of Dublin, Ireland, who was born on the seventh day of the week, seventh day of the month, in the seventh month of the year, in the seventh year of the century, 1907, the seventh child of a seventh child, with seven brothers—which is a total of seven sevens. On his twenty-seventh birthday, at a racetrack, Anthony saw a horse in the seventh race. Horse number seven was named Seventh Heaven, with a handicap of seven stone, and the odds were seven to one. Clancy bet seventy-seven pounds on Seventh Heaven—and it came in seventh.”
Leigh Ann laughed, and Kenny said, “Sounds to me like all of this means nothing at all.”
“The meaning of synchronicities is beyond our understanding,” Ganesh said. “However, I think they can be important as a predictor of major events. When you witness an especially large number of incredible coincidences, it suggests that something big is coming. And it’s best if we anticipate it with the right attitude.”
Kenny wasn’t quite aboard the Twilight Zone Express. “Attitude? What’s attitude got to do with it?”
“Just as an example, suppose that China and the US were in an escalating crisis. If there was a possibility of a nuclear exchange, and if the communal mind of humanity can affect reality, then you wouldn’t want a vast majority of people being certain that war was inevitable. You would want most people to think it was impossible. An abundance of pessimists might bend reality to Armageddon just by expecting it.”
They were all silent as cascades of thunderbolts dazzled down the sky. For all the brightness of that extended display, the vast landscape was little revealed, light chasing shadows and by shadows chased across the high and lonely plains, distant trees transformed by these fulminations, so all that was normal and of nature seemed alien and charged with menace.
In the darkness that came behind the last lightning, Ganesh said, “Considering the threat we face—every man, woman, and child on the planet—we better be optimists.”
“What threat?” Kenny asked.
Rather than answer the question, Ganesh said, “I’m given a lot of hope by the fact that you called me for help exactly when I was waiting with the Gulfstream V and a ready flight crew, waiting for some reason to go to Montana. When you two called, it was big-time synchronicity.”
Leigh Ann said, “Waiting? You told us you were about to fly out to a medical conference somewhere, and you changed your flight plan for us.”
“A harmless lie,” Ganesh said. “Yesterday Liam O’Hara told me about what happened to him and his family at Rustling Willows. That Liam, a friend of mine, should have bought the ranch from which the Other might be operating, after we at Project Olivaw spent fourteen months searching for the damn thing, and then that you, Kenny, and Wyatt should be already on the case—why, it was synchronicity squared.”