25-ch18

The afternoon sun settles over the lake, and sunlight floods The Hall of Indifference. Hippie Avenger and The Statistician, drained from their scrap with The Perfect Pair, fall asleep together on the couch, in a pool of blood-warm light.

Neither The Perfect Pair’s aggressive attempts at Creation upstairs, nor the laughing and screaming of Time Bomb and Miss Demeanor out in the lake, nor the rumble of The Drifter’s Norton Commando rolling into the driveway wakes them. What rouses them from their cat like slumber is the gravelly voice of The Drifter demanding, “So what the hell has been going on here, anyway?”

He stands before the couch, still wearing his motorcycle jacket, holding his helmet against his hip like a gunslinger ready to draw. The Stunner stands behind him in a similar pose.

Oh no, thinks The Statistician. He knows. She’s told him! He sits upright and yelps, “What? What do you mean?”

“Well,” says The Drifter, sounding like Clint Eastwood in a Western movie, pointing ominously at the ceiling, “the two Co-Chairs of Teens Need Truth, who signed a friggin’ vow of chastity in high school, are now screwing the bejeezus out of each other ten times a day. And they are not keeping it to themselves. Does that not seem a bit bizarro?”

He points out to the lake, through the sliding-glass door.

“And Miss Demeanor, who normally dresses like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, is out there flouncing around in a pink bathing suit with a Miss Piggy decal on it. Bizarro. And Time Bomb is running around with her, wearing almost nothing, screaming and laughing. She usually never even smiles! I don’t remember her smiling at your wedding, for crying out loud. Not even for the pictures. Is that not bizarro? And suddenly she’s Miss Demeanor’s best buddy? The one who once called her Mizz Tight-Ass to her face? Bizarro.”

He crouches down before the couch.

“And here are you and Hippie Avenger, who I didn’t think agreed on anything, snuggled up together like the last two kittens in the litter. So what the hell is going on around here? It’s like I’ve landed on Bizarro World.”

“Bizarro World?”

The Drifter breaks into a grin. “The alternate-universe planet in Superman comics, where everything is the opposite as it is on Earth.”

“Bizarro World,” The Statistician repeats.

“You should have read more comic books when you were a kid. Life wouldn’t seem so weird.”

The Drifter stands up, slides his arm around The Stunner’s waist.

“Oh, by the way,” The Stunner says flatly to The Statistician, “I told your brother about our past relationship.”

The Statistician glares at The Stunner, as if to say, I thought we had a deal.

“No wonder you two were acting so weird around each other,” The Drifter says. “You should have just told me that she used to be a student of yours. It’s no big deal. It’s not like you’re grading her papers anymore, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, I know that would be unethical. But she’s graduated, and she’s got her degree now, so there’s no conflict anymore, right?”

“No conflict. No.”

“Actually,” The Drifter says, “I think it’s kind of cool that the two of you met before this weekend. I mean, what are the odds of that?”

“Well,” says The Stunner, “in theoretical terms, taking the entire population of the Earth into account, the odds of any two people meeting are approximately, well … let’s round it to seven billion to one. So the pure odds of any two humans meeting the same third human are about fourteen billion to one.”

“But in practical terms,” says The Statistician, looking her in the eyes for the first time since this morning, “you’ve got to take into account some geographic and demographic factors. You met at a Chinese place near the university, right?”

“Right.”

“And my brother is staying at the university residence in the same area, correct?”

“Correct.”

This exchange reminds The Stunner of the Socratic discussions she and The Statistician used to have in class, and later in his office, before that afternoon in her apartment.

“So,” The Statistician says, “you can make the assumption that …”

The Stunner completes his sentence: “… that your sample group is limited to the average population of the University of Toronto campus and its surroundings.”

She used to finish his thoughts this way during tutorial discussions. The other students were a bit jealous.

“So,” says The Statistician, “give me a number.”

“I … I don’t have any data to work with. And there must be a thousand other variables involved.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to ignore the thousand other variables and take an educated guess.”

This sort of statement is one of the reasons that The Stunner was attracted to The Statistician; academically attracted to him, that is. He gave her permission to think past the numbers.

“Well, what’s the population of Toronto?” she asks.

“The GTA is about five and half million. The city proper is about two and a half.”

“So let’s say the U of T and the Annex make up about a tenth of the actual city’s area. Let’s suppose the number of people in the defined area is about 250,000, then. So the odds of two brothers meeting the same girl at different times within roughly the same timeframe are about half a million to one.”

“Pretty slim odds,” The Statistician says, wearing that tight-lipped, difficult-to-interpret expression that attracted The Stunner to him in a non-academic way.

He had seemed so cool, so impermeable; she wanted to defrost him, to penetrate his shell. When she invited him up to her apartment, slipped him that note, touched his hand that certain way, looked him in the eyes with her Magnetic Power cranked up to Level Ten, she still figured that the odds of him actually showing up were also about a half million to one.

“But it happened anyway,” she says, inspecting the toes of her riding boots. “Didn’t it?”

“Indeed,” says The Statistician. “It happened anyway.”

The Drifter says, “You’re both wrong. The odds were much lower than that.”

“How so?” The Statistician and The Stunner say simultaneously.

“Well,” The Drifter says, “maybe the odds of anyone meeting randomly are pretty high, but this wasn’t random at all. You signed up for a specific math course that my brother specifically teaches. That made the odds of you meeting him much lower than random.”

“Indeed,” says The Statistician, nodding his head.

“And the odds of me meeting you were even better,” the Drifter says to The Stunner.

“How so?” Only she says it this time.

“Because I was looking for you,” The Drifter says. “I was looking for you. You in particular. And when you’re looking for someone in particular, you’re much more likely to find them.”

The Stunner throws her arms around The Drifter’s neck. “See? That’s the kind of logic that makes me love you so much.”

“I was looking for you,” The Drifter says again, as if he’s just solved the quadratic equation.

They turn and walk outside together.

The Statistician sighs. I was looking for her, too.

Hippie Avenger sits cross-legged on the couch, facing The Statistician. When she’s sure that the Drifter and The Stunner have wandered far from the cottage, she says, “There’s more to the story, isn’t there?”

“She offered me sexual favours in exchange for a better grade,” The Statistician says plainly. “And I accepted.”

So he’s not an android after all.

“I was her professor. And I’m married,” he says. “I let my sexual frustrations outweigh my ethical obligations.”

Hippie Avenger says, “I understand.” And she does. She understands how it feels to want something — to want someone — that you’re not supposed to have. She understands want, spelled-in-capital-letters WANT. She understands.

“It was irrational,” he says. “It was weak.”

She tries to lighten the mood. “Hey, it’s not your fault. They say that God gave man both a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to operate one or the other.”

The Statistician doesn’t laugh. “You must think I’m a horrible person,” he says.

“No. I just think you’re a person.”

She shuffles across the sofa, holds him just slightly longer than a friend comforting another friend should, just a decimal point past Platonic.

Then she resumes her cross-legged position on the couch, closer to him this time.

Upstairs, the Perfect Pair’s bedposts begin to drum on the floorboards yet again.

Through the sliding glass door, The Statistician can see his wife splashing around in the water, laughing hysterically with Miss Demeanor, who just days earlier was her least favourite member of The Indifference League.

He can see The Drifter standing on the beach with The Stunner, holding her and kissing her. Just two weeks earlier, she was his Protégée. Now she’s something else. And his younger brother has become something else, too.

“Every day that passes,” The Statistician finally offers, “the world makes less sense to me.”

“Bizarro World,” Hippie Avenger says.

“Bizarro World, indeed.”