It came into Alexander’s mind, as he was idly playing solitaire on his laptop, that this particular game of solitaire was connected to…something. His vague idea — not much more than what people call a “feeling” or a “sense” — didn’t include any hint of what the connection might be. But Alexander paid the thought some attention anyway.
Alexander didn’t believe in randomness. He accepted that many things are unpredictable, including the outcome of a game of solitaire. What he didn’t accept was the notion that any event, anything you noticed, wasn’t connected to other things. You couldn’t always know what those connections might be. In fact you usually couldn’t. But Alexander was sure the connections were there.
Connections, for Alexander, included thoughts as well as physical events, and had occasionally mused about thoughts being, really, physical events too. Some sort of incredibly complex pattern of tiny electrical currents in your brain; what wasn’t physical about that? And if thoughts were as physical as coin flips, then Alexander concluded that thoughts had connections too, even if the links were at least as difficult as any to recognize.
This doesn’t mean that Alexander was one of those people who claim to see meanings everywhere. Seeing a black cat means bad luck; finding a penny — face up, of course — means good luck. Alexander didn’t attach any sort of meanings to the connections he knew were there. “The universe doesn’t have intentions,” he once explained, “it just has interconnections. If you can see a connection, you might be able to predict an event, but that doesn’t have anything to do with that event being intentional or planned.” Alexander talked like that fairly frequently, even though he wasn’t a teacher or a professor.
In fact Alexander had a very different job; he drove a city bus. As a boy he’d been singled out as particularly bright, and treated to “experimental” math classes and placed in “gifted” teaching programs. Much was expected of him. Alexander learned from these experiences, but what he learned would have surprised the adults around him. Maybe even made some of them sadder and, you’d hope, wiser. What Alexander learned was that if the adults thought you were especially smart, they’d separate you from your friends. They’d treat you differently, which would slowly turn your old friends against you out of resentment. Alexander took the lessons he learned and put them into practice by the time he was in high school. He avoided advanced classes, and although his grades were excellent and his standardized test scores were at the very top of the scale, he chose a mediocre college rather than any of the top ones that were eager for him to enroll.
Once in his college, which had a limited roster of subjects to offer, Alexander chose the least challenging classes, and even those he seldom attended. He spent most of his time trying to socialize. But it seemed to Alexander that it might be too late for that; he’d forgotten — or never really learned — how to go about socializing. He was awkward and halting in conversations. He couldn’t easily share anything about himself the way many of his fellow students seemed to be able to so effortlessly. He was invited to parties, which was a new experience — he’d never been invited to a party in high school. But he found he hated parties. He couldn’t master small talk, didn’t like beer or loud music or dancing, and after a while he simply stayed away.
One thing led to another, and although Alexander ended up with a diploma, it wasn’t in any of the fields that offered careers. That was fine with Alexander; he had only a general idea, at the time, of what a career really offered for a college graduate like himself. Even a smart one, whose academic background really didn’t hint at his intelligence. He was the first in his family to graduate from college, and hadn’t received any advice or guidance about what to do with his life. His parents, who were lower middle class mostly thanks to the good economic climate, were employed, but not particularly successfully, and Alexander had finally concluded that they just didn’t know what to do with him. Throughout his youth he’d heard his mom or dad make some remark that he recognized as clearly wrong, but one of the things he’d learned was to keep quiet around his family. He wasn’t sure exactly where he’d learned this.
Alexander drifted from job to job after college. He learned how to be a pleasant, agreeable coworker, but didn’t form any close friendships. At one point he realized that work was very much like his high school experience; agreeable interactions during the working part of the day, followed by isolation. Just as in high school, he wasn’t invited to social gatherings like parties or other get togethers. He sometimes overheard comments about “going out for a drink after we get off work,” but those words were never said to him. He found this acceptable. After all, he’d been to a few parties in college and hadn’t enjoyed the experience.
Finally he arrived at the job where he stayed for more than a year or two: driving his bus. He had a route, and after a while was able to greet his regular passengers by name. The job was easy, and he could think about other things while driving. After his shift he went home, where he read. He owned a television, but rarely turned it on; there was something about television that bothered him. Besides, it was hard for Alexander to find anything on television that interested him. The PBS documentaries that he tried tended to be simplified presentations of things he’d already read about in more detail. He seldom found the comedies funny. And the dramas, if they interested him at all, turned boring before very long. So he read.
Alexander was well into adulthood when personal computers became affordable, and he finally found a use for his television set when he attached it to his Commodore 64. He taught himself programming, which he found interesting for a while, and even (as he realized much later) reinvented some of the programming concepts that eventually predominated. He mulled the idea of programming computers as a career, but never pursued it seriously after his reading convinced him that he’d be working on problems he didn’t care about using languages and techniques not of his choice. He kept his computing as simply a hobby.
His reaction to computer games was not dissimilar from his earlier take on television; few of them held his interest for very long. Either they depended on mastering feats of manual dexterity he had no talent for, or the conclusion became obvious far too early. Brief games of chance, though, he enjoyed. Most of all, even given its simplicity, solitaire.
Alexander eventually graduated to a laptop computer and an internet connection, which he used to browse online encyclopedias. Nobody else knew it, but he was an active editor of Wikipedia, under an electronic alias. He didn’t create original entries, as he lacked any specific topical knowledge. He specialized in connections. Checking links among articles and to external sites, and adding more. He used his internet connection to create his own website, where he posted essays and stories he wrote. He assumed no one ever read them, but never tried to find out whether his site had visitors. And he played short, chancy online games. Not gambling, which he’d never had any interest in, but games like solitaire.
And finally came the day when the thought came into Alexander’s mind, as he was idly playing solitaire on his laptop, that this particular game of solitaire was connected to…something. His vague idea — not much more than what people call a “feeling” or a “sense” — didn’t include any hint of what the connection might be. But Alexander paid the thought some attention anyway.
He didn’t believe in randomness. He thought the connection, if he could find it, might enable him to predict something. He’d predicted things successfully in the past, although he’d never acted on a prediction. He knew the connections were there, but didn’t trust the predictions because, really, they relied on him and his perceptions. Andrew lived a strange contradiction, at least mentally. He had great confidence in his own thought process, but at the same time, no confidence at all in himself. As for the connection to his game of solitaire, it was there, but he never found it. He looked forward to his bus route in the morning.
