November 26th, 2015
5:49 p.m.
Patterns, my father used to say, aren’t defined by what a sequence has in common. That’s a common misconception. Any similarities up to a point are just that.
Similarity. Commonality. Coincidence.
These words exist precisely because sets can, and often do, occur in like ways without there being some higher meaning. One doesn’t find a pattern by looking for common traits. This approach often leads to false positives. One finds a pattern by looking for differences and not finding any. Not one single variance over the course of a repeating set.
Absolute predictability.
Dad would always look for patterns. He figured if he could anticipate what was coming next he could get out ahead of it and maybe, for once, get ahead in life. He kept looking for patterns—in business trends, the stock market, politics—anything, really, until the day he died. Naturally he taught me and my sister, Amelia, to recognize patterns too. He’d always caution us against mistaking a template for a pattern. Templates were dangerous. What they produced were close enough to each other to lull one into a false sense of security. They gave the impression that one knew what was coming next, but they always led to a surprise at some point.
He said he’d seen more than his fair share of good men done in by templates. Whatever that meant.
Dad said a lot of stuff that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Not all of it stuck with me, but the bit about patterns wormed its way into my brain for some reason. Everywhere I go, I’m looking for the differences in apparent patterns: on the floor tiles in public bathrooms, in the repeating grain of wooden doors, on the faux stone columns at church. One might think a propensity for finding patterns, or the lack thereof, might give one a leg up in life, but really it just provides a mildly entertaining way to pass the time when you’re pulled over, waiting for your plates to be run.
Time has never been my friend. In fact, I hesitate even to consider it an ally. Its latest passive aggressive assault had been to crawl at a snail’s pace for the entirety of my partial work day and suddenly find some gumption the moment I clocked out. From the moment I’d left the store, the pace of things seemed to increase exponentially. Before I knew it, I was rushing to make it to Mom’s house in time for Thanksgiving dinner. I tapped the steering wheel with my thumb, trying my level best to remember that it was me, not time, that opted for one more humorous YouTube diversion over a few extra minutes to account for the possibility of hitting every red light on the way across town.
I glanced at the clock. It read 5:48. Ten minutes should have been plenty of time to get where I was going, unless of course this sanctimonious asshole decided to drag his feet.
My surroundings were awash in the flickering, pale blue hue—that sickeningly intermittent reminder that I was most likely about to get a ticket. I’d exhausted the meager entertainment value of picking the pattern out of the ostensibly natural slate tiles of the bank across the street, so my mind naturally turned toward refuting what I guessed the charge would be. I wasn’t speeding, I thought. I had caught a glimpse of the speedometer just before it plummeted to zero when the tires left the pavement. I know I was eager at the light, but since when is that a crime? I couldn’t have topped twenty miles an hour out of the gate. Having learned to drive on this very stretch of highway, I was keenly aware of the speed limit and obeyed it almost instinctively.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I grumbled at the realization. The tag, I suddenly remembered. I never renewed the registration. The tragic part was that I could see with absolute clarity at that moment where the notice from the county was, or, rather, the pile of mail it sat under on my counter. Nice. No way around that one, dipshit. You brought this on yourself. Still every bone in my body instinctively told me to hold firm, to wipe my ass with the scrap of paper about to be dumped into my lap, but what good would that have done? I hardly saw my Mom as it was, which was a sad commentary on my life considering I’d never lived more than twenty minutes away from her my entire adult life. Is it worth missing half the evening with Mom just to assert myself to this jackass again?
5:54
I reached for my cell phone to text Amelia that I’d be late, only for the shimmering force that bathed the car to lash out from the steering wheel and bind my hands at ten and two.
“Hands on the steering wheel, citizen,” a commanding voice crackled through the neon haze that had a hold of the car, and subsequently of me. After a second I could feel the energy restraints dissolve, as the hairs on my arm fell from their agitated state of attention.
I tilted the rear view mirror to get a sense of where in the process we were. Now there were two of them. Is backup really necessary?! I bemoaned inwardly. I glanced out the window and down the fifteen or so feet to the ground, wondering if any of this was really necessary. The one in the lavender unitard and matching dark indigo domino mask and cloak ensemble now hovered away from the road, huddled in close to the rooftop of the pharmacy I’d been pulled up next to. In the shadows just on the edge of his luminescence and that of the street’s various neon signs and electronic billboards, I detected the shape of another, more covert operative.
The visceral frustration that would normally have resulted in hands flung in the air in any other situation, instead found its outlet through profanity. “Fuckin’ capes,” I thought aloud.