Kevin woke up from one of those dreams that linger. Not going to tell you what the dream was about, because dreams are boring for everyone except the dreamer, too deeply personal and mired in symbols that can’t be adequately communicated. But you know the kind of thing I’m talking about, like when you have a dream about making love to some kind of woman you’ve never met before, but you wake up in a damn fine mood, and all day long you’re in that mood. Or when your wife has a dream that you were having sex with some tramp, and she wakes up mad at you, and she knows it’s irrational, but she just can’t shake that anger. Best not to ask if her she’s cool staying home with the kids so you can have a few beers with the boys. Cause she’ll say yes, reluctantly, because, like I said, she knows it’s irrational to say no, and you, you’re so damn desperate for a beer and to watch Milegro pitch, just one time this summer, you’ll jump on that “Okay, fine,” and head straight for The Blue Hut. And you’re not cheating on your wife, you’re really not, you really do want to see Milegro pitch, but some asshole’s got the Stanley cup on instead, so you end up at a bar on the other side of town, on the night your wife decides to stick her nose in you Facebook account (she knows all your passwords) on the night some dumb ex of yours drunk-posts on your wall from another time zone, and you wife feels like, maybe that dream was just her intuition, cause maybe you are cheating on her, so she calls your cell, but the place you’re at is too damn noisy, and Milegro is pitching one fucking hell of a game, and of course then your wife calls The Blue Hut, but you’re not there, and so when you come home three sheets and stinking like cigarettes, she gets mad and yells, and you get mad and yell, and it’s not the final straw, but it’s one of the last of the straws, and no sex for a few weeks, and maybe a stupid decision about a lap dance, and maybe a really stupid compulsion to confess about the lap dance, and you’re screaming “why would I tell you all my fucking passwords if I was going to use fucking facebook to hook up with my fucking ex girlfriend?” and your marriage counselor, who is A Cunt, points out that in your tirades you sure do use the word “fucking” a lot, and you don’t like the kids anyway, so fuck it, divorce, and Milegro gets traded to the Yankees, because your team is basically just a farm team for the Yankees, it seems like, and all because your wife woke up from that dream and it put her in a bad mood that day.

That’s what Kevin felt like, walking towards the bus stop with the baseball bat in his hands. He’s disheveled. Kevin lives alone, and usually sleeps on the couch. He prefers sleeping on the couch, prefers having something against his back when she sleeps on his side. So he was wearing what he slept in, which is what he’d been wearing the night before, black khakis (yes, that’s a thing, go to The Gap if you don’t believe me) and a t-shirt, complete with tiny spaghetti stain from the spaghetti sauce he’d eaten with some tofu noodles, which, if you’re keeping score, only cost about a dollar twenty five and are about 20 calories a serving which is pretty fucking awesome.

It was a damn bright day. It had been raining the night before and the air felt washed. Bright and washed, a breeze in the trees on the block-long walk to the bus stop. Cars going by and enough space between them that their noise wasn’t a constant drone but a kind of slow pulse. Kevin had murder in his eyes. Don’t ask why. But when the 344 appeared at the top of the hill a quarter mile away, his pulse quickened.

Adrenaline, it turned out, was sort of the perfect antidote to his wake-rage. By the time the bus arrived, Kevin wasn’t sure what to do with the bat anymore. The bus stopped, Kevin climbed on, and pulled quarters out of his pocket until he had five of them and they went into the fare box. Hypnopompic. Kevin sat in the seat closest to the front door. The only other person on the bus was a priest.

What day was it, Saturday? Thursday. Maybe it was Monday, but maybe it was a holiday. Kevin watched Starbucks and grocery stores and some apartment buildings and an auto-body shop slide by. The day tried to be brighter but the tinting on the windows was more resilient. Kevin and the priest and the bus driver swayed and bobbed on the shocks that cost more than a decent down payment on a used Honda civic.

Nice day, the bus driver said.

Kevin blinked a few times. He never knew what to say in these situations. Yeah, it is.

Rain last night.

Yes.

More tonight.

Yeah?

Ah, hell, I don’t know. The bus driver chuckled. Probably.

A red light. The idle made the bus vibrate violently. Why they hell am I on this bus, Kevin thought.

Anyway, the bus driver said. Finegro’s on the mound tonight, maybe rain’s good thing.

Finegro? The light turned green, the bus lurched and obtained momentum.

Guerrero, Allegro, whatever his name is. Can’t keep ‘em straight, they get traded so fast.

Ah, Kevin thought. Baseball.

The priest got up, and did that moving-bus walk to the front. The bus pulled over, a regular old neighborhood, no church in sight. The bus stopped, and the priest got off without a word. The bus started again. Maybe he’s visiting a sick old lady, Kevin thought. Priest wouldn’t take a bus to an exorcism. That’d be a worth a taxi ride, for sure.

Yeah, the bus driver said. Me, I don’t believe in coincidence.

Kevin blinked again. Yeah?

Nope. Bunch of crap, you ask me. The boys are having a decent run, Martinez pops his shoulder, and they gotta bring in Finegro. Guerrero. He’s throwing a 2.37 down in the minors, which ain’t all that perfect but will do. And here he comes to the majors, and what is he, 6.99 over his last three starts?

Really?

Yeah. Seriously, it’s like, why bother. If a team’s going to tank, let ‘em tank. Maybe it’s a sign. Martinez pops his shoulder, there goes our run. Just not enough pizazz in this city to chase a title, you ask me, much less a pennant. Nope, there’s no such thing as coincidence.

So, everything happens for a reason.

Nah, that’s bullshit too. Like that guy. Cheers, you ever watch Cheers? Mayday Malone, Red Sox, reliever, has some kinda world record, saves and all that, alcoholic, so he decides to clean up, buy a bar, surround himself with the stuff that ruined his life. Taking the dog by the balls.

The bull by the horns.

No, fuck bulls, we’re talking dog balls here. That’s my philosophy. No coincidences. First time on this bus?

The 344? I’ve ridden it a few times.

No, not the route. This bus.

I have no idea.

Exactly. But probably yes. Me too. I’ve been doing this 12 years, the 344 and the 18 and the 42 and a few others. This bus was down on the East side, the 278 and the 236 and the 912, that express route that no one ever takes. But who knows, those guys, smarter than you and me put together, they balance a few columns, swap a few busses around, and now the 344 is this Volvo B10M, half a million bucks brand new, still 350 after 5 years. Look it up.

Wow.

So you think it’s a coincidence? First time you and me ever meet, our first time on this bus, you just waltz up and hop on, correct fare in your pocket, 6 slick quarters so that’s one extra, carrying a baseball bat like it’s an ipod or a bag of groceries? You ever see that movie? The one with the guy? He’s chasing this cowboy who found a bunch of stolen gold? Goes into a saloon, fella behind the counter just shooting the breeze, they’re the only ones in there, but something gets this guy’s back up, so he pulls out a coin, tells the fella to flip it, and the fella don’t want to, because he knows if it don’t come up heads, he’s a dead man. But the guy insists, so the fella, he flips it. Heads, and the guy’s like, keep that coin, it’s your lucky coin now.

Um, actually, yeah, that sounds familiar.

Yeah. And we’re supposed to think, that scene, shows how the guy’s a real hard ass. But you ask me, that scene was the whole point of the movie. I mean, basically, the rest of the movie was just to show us that he was serious, right there, in the saloon. He really woulda plugged that fella right between the eyes, it weren’t no game. It was serious fucking business. I mean, come on, you’re minding your damn business, and some asshole with a shotgun is rampaging? Is that scary? Some whack-job starts killing teenagers in a campground? Nah, that’s just a force if nature, no different than a tornado or a bolt of lightning. Shrug your shoulders, whadday going to do. But some guy comes up to you, sits next to you on the bus, and hands you a quarter, and you got to flip it, and if you don’t call it, you die. The dying ain’t the scary part. If you believe him, if you really know he’s really going to do it, that coin flip is what’s scary. It’s the scariest damn thing you’ll ever do. Shit. They even put another coin-flip in the end of the movie, just to remind you. Life. It ain’t a coincidence. And nothing happens for no reason. Random shit, it’s all random shit.

I never thought about it like that.

I bet you didn’t. So look, you, me, this bus, and that curve down by Theron, the only curve on this route, you think it’s just a coincidence? That this is the one day I take that damn curve too fast, spill us over the edge, bust through the guardrail and down we go, tumbling, your head bashed in with every turn and your brain leaking out your ears and the last thing you see is a flashes of the bay? Maybe. Tell you what. Give me your story. If I like your story, I won’t need to grab the dog by the balls today. You can keep that last quarter in your pocket and call it your lucky quarter. So what’s your story.

Kevin hesitates. Um. Well. I was born, more or less against my will. Dad left when I was little, and I tried to hate him for it, growing up. But the more I got to know mom, the more I saw why he left. And that’s awful. But I set up myself in a kind of balance, sort of a stasis, between not liking my mom, but glad for her taking care fo me, and not liking my dad, but understanding why he left, and one dayt in highschool, in a whim, I applied for a job, and got it. And I was still working there when I graduated. And when I was 22 or something, on a whim I put in an application for a studio apartment, and got it. And I’ve been living there ever since. Asked a co-worker out on a whim once, and she said yes. She pregnant, and I didn’t think much of it, then she miscarried, but she said it was no big deal, and then she went to grad school. Bought a used car on a whim. It stopped running as year ago, not sure what to do with it, not sure if I care. Sometimes I watch TV. Sometimes I read books I buy in the grocery store. I took up jogging for a year, I got into kite flying, taught myself French for a few months. Sometimes I wonder if one of these whims is going to land me in jail, or with a million dollar lotto ticket, or a tattoo, or fake tits, or if my dad’s going to show up and hand me some kind of Kingdom and tell me “it’s not much kid, but it’s yours. Go tax the shit out of the peasants or whatever, I don’t care.”

The bus slowed for a red light, but it turned green before the bus came to a stop. Kevin and bus driver lurched slightly with the reacceleration.

When I was a kid, I got it in my head that there were invisible arrows flying through the air, all the time, constantly, the air was thick with them. But there were gaps, and the gaps just happened to coincide with where our bodies would happen to be. And you could randomly sweep your arm through the air, and it was just a coincidence that the arrows would have a gap where your arm went. It wasn’t cause, it wasn’t effect, it wasn’t fate, it was just coincidence. And I told someone about this, once, at work, on a break, and this guy, he really liked the idea. He said to me, “yeah, and God shoots the arrows, and he allows for all kinds of crazy shit, but if you fuck up and move the wrong way at the wrong time, you get all fucked up with arrows, and, yeah, maybe you even block the arrows that were supposed to hit some other dumb motherfucker, which is why sometimes good people suffer and bad people get away with shit, it’s like The Butterfly Effect and the Morality of Infinite Grace all wrapped up into one.” And then he looks me right in the eye, and he says “Kevin, you’re a fucking genius.” Then he shook his head and went back to work and the next day he’s not there and I find out he got fired for some bullshit random reason, so I never got to tell him, no, it wasn’t god, and it wasn’t fate, and it wasn’t punishment, it was all just coincidence, everything is just coincidence, if something moving at infinite speed occupies every point in the universe at the same time, then we’re all the same goddamn thing and what we think is simultaneity is just the coincidence of repetition under perceived deceleration.

The bus driver nodded a few times, and then pulled the bus over. Not a bus stop, but close to a church, the kind the priest probably should have got off at. He opened the doors. Okay, kid. Good story. This is your stop. If you want. Your choice… I’m not sure yet if I’m going to take that turn or not, tumble this bus into the bay. But I’m going to let you avoid the chance right now.

Kevin shrugged, stood up, got off the bus. The doors closed and the bus drove away.

The next day, on a whim, Kevin bought a newspaper. Front page: Bus Plummets Into Bay. A picture of the bus, pulled out of the water, showed it battered and warped and broken. Kevin glanced over to where his baseball bat lay on the floor.