The Music of Chance by Paul Auster Page B

been playing for years, and until then we hadn’t won so much as a penny, not one plug nickel for all the hundreds of dollars we had spent. Nor did we ever expect to. The odds are always the same, after all, no matter how many times you play. Millions and millions to one, the longest of long shots. If anything, I think we bought those tickets just so we could talk about what we would do with the money if we ever happened to win. That was one of our favorite pastimes: sitting in Steinberg’s Deli with our sandwiches and spinning out stories about how we would live if our luck suddenly turned. It was a harmless little game, and it made us happy to let our thoughts run free like that. You might even call it therapeutic. You imagine another life for yourself, and it keeps your heart pounding.”
    “It’s good for the circulation,” Stone said.
    “Precisely,” Flower said. “It puts some juice in the old ticker.”
    At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and the maid wheeled in a tray of iced drinks and tea sandwiches. Flower paused in his telling as the snacks were distributed, but once the four of them had settled back into their chairs, he immediately started up again.
    “Willie and I always went partners on a single ticket,” he said. “It was more enjoyable that way, since it didn’t put us in competition with each other. Imagine if one of us had won! It would have been unthinkable for him not to share the prize money with the other, and so rather than have to go through all that, we simply split the ticket half and half. One of us would choose the firstnumber, the other would choose the second, and then we would go on taking turns until all the holes had been punched out. We came close a few times, missed the jackpot by only a digit or two. A loss was a loss, but I must say that we found those
almosts
rather exciting.”
    “They spurred us on,” Stone said. “They made us believe that anything was possible.”
    “On the day in question,” Flower continued, “seven years ago this October fourth, Willie and I punched out the holes a little more deliberately than usual. I can’t say why that was, but for some reason we actually discussed the numbers we were going to pick. I’ve dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won’t think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he’s told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation. I don’t want to bore you with this, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. It’s all very private, but every accountant I’ve ever talked to has always said the same thing. Numbers have souls, and you can’t help but get involved with them in a personal way.”
    “So there we were,” Stone said, “holding the lottery ticket in our hands, trying to decide which numbers to bet on.”
    “And I looked at Willie,” Flower said, “and I said ‘Primes.’ And Willie looked back at me and said ‘Of course.’ Because that was precisely what he was going to say to me. I got the word out of my mouth a split second faster than he did, but the same thought had also occurred to him. Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don’t change ordivide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity. And so we picked out a sequence of primes and then walked across the street and had our sandwiches.”
    “Three, seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-three, thirty-one,” Stone said.
    “I’ll never forget it,” Flower said. “It was the magic combination, the key to the gates of heaven.”
    “But it shocked us just the same,”