The Law of Miracles

The Law of Miracles

151 The Law of Miracles or, Five Ways My Wife Could Die 0 When the tree fell on my house, I was already on my way down. Wife gone, son gone, middle age just around the corner. There had been no hurricane, no stiff in-line winds: the tree just fell over—plunk! The rafters snapped, the window imploded, and there I was lying in bed going eenie-meenie-minie-moe as to whether it would be Seconal and scotch or a razor in the bathtub. In probability theory we have an axiom called Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. The Law of Miracles is based upon a paradoxical feature of chance, viz. that given sufficiently large numbers, unlikely events will happen unexpectedly often. (Hand me that piece of chalk.) If we define a miracle (M) as something that happens once in a million events, and take as a given that we see and hear such events (e) at a rate of about one per second (boy on his bike, sun coming out, Toyota approaching), then since we experience roughly a million such events in a month of waking life, by the laws of probability we should experience a miracle about once a month. The uncanny isn’t uncanny after all. Jesus just happened to hit with Lazarus. The scotch is supposed to exacerbate the effect of the Seconal. I didn’t used to be depressed. I used to be a happy man. I had my wife. I had my son. I had my job with the New Jersey Gaming Commission. I had a house in Stone Harbor a block from the ocean that was appreciating 28 percent a year. For years my wife and I had managed to fend off the real estate developers while the cottages up and down our street were torn down and replaced with postmodern mansions. But after the tree fell over, the developers renewed their suit. They could smell the injury, see the depression leaking out of the little house. They offered me a cool million. I explained to each the Law of Miracles, the flow chart of coincidence that had brought me to where I was. The woman from Coldwell Banker upped the offer to a million, one. It began raining in my bedroom. The occasional swallow flew in, perched above my dresser, and then flew out. The tree, I explained to the paperboy, was an environmental improbability . The coastal soil was too shallow, too sandy. It should never have grown where it did. Never reached the size it did. A delegation of my neighbors dropped by—friendly, smiling millionaires asking if they could help. It’d been over a week now, they said, did I want the tree service called? They understood how difficult things were for me—would I again accept their condolences?—but the neighborhood was at risk, its appeal was seriously impaired and really, we didn’t want the lawyers to get involved, did we? On the back porch, my son’s baseball cleats lay where he’d kicked them off ten months earlier. It was not unusual for me, lying in bed, to see through the broken branches and the wilting leaves, airplanes trolling the beach with their advertising banners, parasailors arcing across the blue. These were events. One per second. Other events included Discontinuation of Service notices from South Jersey Gas, peanut butter and tequila the only food in the house, me standing on my front lawn explaining to the police in their squad car that no, no I wasn’t planning on removing the tree, and why? well, that was a good question. At work I was on probation because of some bad attendance patterns dating back to when Peggy left me. I didn’t know whether I cared or not. If I killed myself then pfft, but if I didn’t 152 THE LAW OF MIRACLES then I needed a job, didn’t I? Anyway I’d been sort of demoted and was back to testing randomly seized video slots for compliance with Commission regulations, looking for anomalous code, algorithms that defeated the random. Which is tricky because it’s an axiom of probability theory that any equation that appears to generate randomness cannot be truly random. It makes you wonder about the universe itself, whether behind the seemingly arbitrary there isn’t a massively complex equation in charge, so baroque in its calculation...