Munro was a towering man. His hair was as white as can be, the backs of his hands were gnarled and coarse, and his voice betrayed the strain that comes with a lifetime’s worth of use. His posture, however, transcended what time does so well; with his back straight and his shoulders rolled back, he carved a striking figure among the shuffling feet and clinking blades of the fencing club. He reminded me a little of David Attenborough.

His face was a myriad of wrinkles and broken capillaries, and when the club lined up to practice footwork at the beginning of the session, he didn’t move too much, but wordlessly gave instructions using a series of swoops with his épée which left the group both mentally and physically exhausted by the end. The glint in his eye when he had a blade in his hand took him back years.

One evening, during one of these exercizes, Munro suddenly died. His face apparently went blank, and he just fell back in a ninety-degree arch towards the floor. He had his épée in hand.

This happened at another club, but I had only spoken to (and trained with) him a couple of days before.

“See you next week,” was the last thing he said to me.

“Who?”

“You know. The scruffy guy. Always hung around outside our old place.”

“Ah, yeah. I didn’t know you knew him by name.”

“Yeah, I did. He always tried scrounging cigarettes off me. I gave in one time and we both took it from there.”

“Nice guy?”

“Yeah, he was alright. Didn’t bother anyone, just did his own thing most of the time”

“He hung around the corner a lot, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. Until the prostitutes came out.”

[…]

“So, uh, why’d you bring him up?”

“Huh?”

“Pablo. The homeless dude.”

“Oh, right. You know, I don’t even think he was homeless…”

“OK, well, the homeless looking dude. Why’d you bring him up?”

“Well, you know I was sick last weekend?”

“Yeah, you didn’t wanna see Francesca’s new man at their housewarming…”

“Fuck you. It had nothing to do with Francesca.”

[…]

“Seriously. I was in a bad way”

“OK, I believe you.”

“I was coughing up phlegm and all sorts of shit. I felt light-headed all the time. I was taking these super strong antibiotics which made me sleep all the time as well. And on top of all that, I watched Requiem For A Dream thinking it was something different. That completely fucked me up.”

“Jesus, that does sound bad, but I’m not getting how this is connected to…”

“Patience, man. I was getting there. God. You’d be terrible to tell long jokes to.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway. Look at this box of cigarettes.”

“What about it?”

“What’d you get?”

“Huh?”

“Trading card. Flip it over and check out the warning image.”

“Oh, right. Um, let’s see. The erectile dysfunction one. See?”

“Nice. That was a good move. If you can’t get to someone with pictures of tumours and shit, get them where it really hurts. So anyway, some time after watching Requiem For A Dream I decided to throw away my cigarettes. I saw a box on the edge of the desk and as I went to pick it up to throw away I saw the little warning picture. It was the disgusting looking infection one. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”

“Yeah I think I do. The foot, or leg, right? The warning says something about infections.”

“Yeah that one. Well, remember how right before we left Pablo he had that gnarly-looking injury on his leg?”

“Oh…”

“Yep. Dude was in a bad way. One day he was asking for cigs and walking around, the next he had that bandage on. Fuck knows what happened to him. He’d still limp over to me for a cigarette though, didn’t he? You saw him a couple of times.”

“That’s right. That leg looked gross by the end.”

“I know, right? Every day, more or less, he’d limp over to steal a cigarette, and every day the limp would get worse and the bandage would come a little looser, get a little grosser…”

“Poor guy.”

“…and then one day he was gone. We didn’t see him at all, and then we moved a couple of weeks later. And I saw that packet during that shitty week when I was ill, and saw that image and I could have sworn it was his leg.”

“Dude, I wouldn’t blame myself if I were you. You don’t know what happened to the guy. He could have gone somewhere else and gotten his leg seen to. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“I know, but it just caught me off guard, that’s all. You’re just trying to be a nice guy and give someone a little lift as he’s obviously not in a great place, then boom — he’s gone, and you might have inadvertently made things worse in a roundabout way. And yeah, you may only see part of the whole picture, but it’s a pretty big part, so you can only look at what you see and you get thinking and put two and two together and things make sense. It might not be one hundred percent right, hell, it might be completely wrong, but I wasn’t proven otherwise in the days we didn’t see him before we moved out.

[…]

“So, yeah. It just makes you think.”

Buck found himself wishing that he could stop his thoughts like turning off a PC at the plug, or putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger; a notion that somehow, in willing it, further impeded his attempt to get some sleep. As soon as his head hit the pillow, Buck’s mind went into overdrive. Memories, distorted to varying degrees, melded seamlessly into abstract notions, conjecture, film scenes and what he considered to be his own internal monologue. It was a tapestry and a spectacle too stimulating to be wasted on sleep. His thoughts at this time were unbridled and seductive. He became emotionally attached to them in a way he never could when fully awake, when other parts of his mind were busy with processing the sensations of waking life.

Sometimes Buck fancied he saw a common theme emerging, the tapestry coalescing into a kind of narrative arc. Whereas these themes were usually morbid – the consequences of a death in the family or a debilitating injury, riffing on the reality of a crashing plane that Buck happened to be on – tonight the tapestry seemed to focus on coincidences.

Like an avid descendant doing research for his family tree, Buck could sift through memories going backward in time, wondering at how the smallest (and therefore, somehow, the biggest) coincidences had led him here, tonight, to this bed. The family tree was infinite, could not be kept on a piece of paper, and was composed of events instead past lives. It was permanently in flux. Entire branches would wither away into nothingness as new appendages and moments were born and added. It constantly shifted and corrected itself, as imperfect as the human mind that conceived it.  He was in a room full of documents with a magnifying glass and a microfilm reader, ready to scrutinise a document of his choosing, to add to this family tree.

As far back as his early teens, when he wore his hair down to his shoulders like a badge of honour; a badge sufficient to detract everyone in his school year except the smallest group of like-minded misfits. His worship of Nirvana played a significant part in his life at this time, so much so that on his fourteenth birthday he went and ordered some CDs from the local record shop which were listed as influences of Kurt Cobain in a copy of Q magazine. Among albums by the Pixies and Black Flag, there was the self-titled album by a band called Os Mutantes. When he played the CD, the music he heard confounded and confused him, and even, given the low-fi quality of the music, frustrated him. It was only years later, in University, aided by certain chemical substances, that a newfound appreciation of the album and the band came to light. The music wasn’t weird but joyous in its experimentalism and racket. The singing mystified him; he came to love the foreign inflections and how they were shaped around the tracks, instead of being distracted by the lyrics themselves.

Had he been that little bit more of a casual fan of Nirvana – enough not to go out on a limb and buy albums from Kurt Cobain’s list of influences, at least – perhaps the first full conversation with Flor in a mutual friend’s house wouldn’t have carried the same spark,the same curiosity which stayed with Buck, and subsequently made him want to find out more about her.

And what about today? He put away the document for one that had barely arrived at the archive. Wasn’t it a coincidence that after a week on tenterhooks, feeling as if he were stagnating in the shadow of Flor’s sudden departure, in a vortex of grief and self-imposed exile from social media, that the moment he made his decision to finally cut himself off from the life they had slowly eked out over the years, had coincided with the car accelerating on the green lights, which clipped the rear wheel of a cycling, speeding Buck, mangling the spokes and sending him hurtling over his handlebars? The pain was now a pulsing undercurrent to these thoughts, dimmed by the beer and an aspirin he took before hobbling to bed.

Buck remembered a quote he had read somewhere on the internet which said something to the effect of life being just a series of coincidences. Even this very version of a human which was himself - features, certain personality traits - his very genes were the products of a one-in-a-number-of-millions coincidence: he had been set up to explore a labyrinth of coincidences seemingly by coincidence.

What if life, instead of being defined by experiences and memories left behind, was defined more by coincidences? He thought back much further than the roots of his relationship with Flor, to when his family was still a unit, getting ready to fly to Spain for a holiday, well over twenty years ago by now. Further down the check-in lobby he saw his aunt, uncle and cousins on his mother’s side. The sight, and even the merest notion - despite being planned by the grown-ups - that they were going to the same place his family was headed, at the same time, on the same plane, blew his mind. Years later, at seventeen, in King’s Cross Station, he caught sight of a girl he had met two years before at a tennis camp. He was passionately attracted to her, but being the shy type, he kept his presence at bay. She was a couple of years older than him, and Buck could tell that she would be in university by now. This was confirmed by a university sports hoodie and a tennis bag she had at her side. She stood in the middle of the cavernous station lobby with who he presumed were her teammates, wearing identical hoodies, heads all tilted up towards the timetable. Buck, being extremely late for a coffee with Denise, had to trot to the Tube station entrance before he could properly act on the feeling.  

Coincidences like these, and the subsequent jolts of recognition and wonder, kept him curious about the mysteries and possibilities of life. He supposed that sensations as stark as these were what life was really about. He half-remembered another quote by Borges: when writers died they became their books. When the rest of society dies, they’ll leave behind their impressions, plus the jolts of life that occur when one multitude of coincidental circumstances meets another. The stuff good books are made from.

Thoughts like these took up this ambling phase of semi-sleep, and he rode them out until they somehow overwhelmed him and he slipped into another level of obliviousness and abstraction.