May 01, 2009 by Vándorló Budapest

Sometimes the improbable just happens. Interpreting the improbable is damaging.

Sometimes the improbable just happens. I know because, to date, my life has been plagued with these randomly inexplicable impossibilities. On a good day I just put it down to worm holes and discontinuities in the space-time continuum. On bad days, it's clearly the malicious actions of whatever deity has decided to adopt my cause and clearly doesn't like me.

Maybe a true story will help. I know it's true 'cos it happened to me, but in the scheme of things I came off lightly with my sanity intact, if slightly bruised. So...

In the early 90's Hungary played host to a gob load of marauding do-gooders from around the globe, all offering their version of economic, educational and ecumenical salvation. I was one such unwelcome parasite. They put me in a town in Western Hungary, far away from where I would do any real damage and far from most other expats. It took all of 5 minutes to meet every other misfit in town and determine that I was the misfitiest of them all. Or at least I thought I was.

At the end of the Summer, towards the end of my first year, I noticed that someone across town somewhere was getting a copy of the British newspaper 'The Guardian' delivered to them. I came to a number of startling conclusions: 1. The person understood English 2. They were probably British 3. I hadn't got a clue who they were.

Already life had taught me to be wary of other expats, but a year of sensory deprivation through speaking quasi-English with only a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' for company had made me eager to meet with my own kind. So as the newspaper passed through the central delivery office I attached a note introducing myself and asking that they get in touch.

Nothing happened. So when the following week's paper arrived I wrote a new note, trying to sound more upbeat and less desperate. Zilch. Time passed. So much in fact, that I forgot about the mystery person.

But then there was one of those staged bufé/conference thingies, to which every nobody in town was invited. And it was there that I finally met Mr. Enigma (not his real name).

He looked plainly shocked when I introduced myself, but I was kind of use to that. Still it wasn't the friendliest of greetings for two people stuck on the Austro-Hungarian border will little in the line of entertainment outside of the Finno-Ugric Society and a Western theme bar. But I put it all down to him being a class 3 expat (in my yet unpublished treaties on 'Expat personality types and other dysfunctionals'). A class 3 expat is a person who has escaped their native land in the final hope that by going somewhere remote they will be treated in a way they believe is owing to them. Basically, class 3 expats believe they are unique, they want people to treat them as special. But more than anything they want all that extra, unwarranted attention that special, unique people think they deserve. My turning up at the bufé just watered down Mr. Enigma's uniqueness quotient and he was having none of it.

Anyway, I was wrong. He wasn't a class 3, Mr. Enigma was something else entirely.

The day after the bufé my department head knocked on my apartment door (5am) asking if I knew anything about what had happened to Mr. Enigma.

'Happened?' (that's me speaking by the way, the other bloke follows)

'Yes, he has disappeared and left everything behind. All the mirrors have been smashed and there are thousands of bits of newspaper rolled up and stuffed into every tiny crack or crevice in the floors, walls and ceilings.'

End of conversation. I hadn't got a clue what had happened, but clearly something had. There was his apartment looking like the Mary Celeste, only a bit more like a porcupine turned inside-out with all the bits of paper hanging out of every orifice.

And for a while the mystery of what happened to Mr. Enigma remained. The silence, the shock at meeting me, the sudden departure, the smashed mirrors and the bits of paper. What did it all mean?

Then, out of the blue, I got a call from my sister. She sounded pretty shaky and began to tell me about a new patient that had come in to the hospital. He had been enrolled, self-diagnosed as suffering from depression.

My sister had visited me in Hungary the previous year and stayed in my apartment for about 3 weeks. I had moved out of that apartment at the end of that year and it was later lived in by Mr. Enigma. So my sister knew quite a lot about Mr. Enigma's apartment on the outskirts of Western Hungary. My sister happens to be a psychiatric nurse and normally her work doesn't effect her home life, but now something had upset her.

So she began to tell me about a new patient that had arrived (something she has never done before or since). He was convinced that British Intelligence (oxymoron?) was pursuing him. You see in the past he had been to meetings and written to friends sympathetic to Irish Nationalists. He was sure he was being watched and pursued. They had even followed him to Hungary, where their agents had met with him in an attempt to extract intelligence.

As part of their surveillance efforts they had placed cameras behind the mirrors in his apartment and audio bugging equipment around the apartment.

And then I understood how this horrible riddle had gotten so out of hand. You see I have a very Irish name, all my siblings do too. We were blessed with such ridiculous names we even out class a lot of the trendy names that are current. So when I introduced myself to Mr. Enigma with my ridiculously Irish name, I can now understand the shock. I can understand the lack of response from the notes I sent with the newspapers trying to contact him. And when we had a conversation about his apartment, the bathroom, mirrors, paintings etc... I can see that none of that was particularly helpful or sympathetic to his fears.

What's worse, it probably didn't help that my sister knew everything about his apartment, the bathroom, mirrors, paintings etc... She had just started a normal conversation with him as part of the induction for day patients. The topic of Hungary came up so they chatted about that, then the coincidence that they had both stayed in the same town, knew the same streets, the apartment... He was inordinately interested to hear about her brother (me), what I looked like, name etc...

Mr. Enigma disappeared again. To date that is the last I ever heard of him and his fear of being watched and pursued.

I have greatly simplified this story. In actual fact the sheer number of coincidences that befell Mr. Enigma would have provided any reasonable person with food for their fears. For the brief time Mr. Enigma was in Western Hungary there was a inexplicable conversation of forces that fed his fear. Had I been him I would have reasonably concluded the same.

Sometimes the improbable just happens.

"The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences . . . kicking endlessly amongst the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms in a powers series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken."- p. 590. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas R. Pynchon.