Disembodied

Twenty-four dollars and thirty cents in wet coins—freshly plundered from the Bryant Park fountain—jiggled in my pockets. Pants rolled to my knees, shoes untied, I jogged west on Forty-Second Street toward the Third Rock Deli-Mart in Times Square, darting between bus lane and sidewalk to weave through the summer hordes. For the first time ever, park security had run me off from a fountain, though in truth I outran them with just a brisk walk. It was skunk management, after all: they didn’t want to catch me; they wanted to get rid of me.

My instincts were telling me to buy a scratch-off ticket. I wasn’t naïve, or blinded by the potential payoff. And I knew that my odds of winning, eight million to one, were the same odds I had of flipping twenty-three heads in a row; three years earlier, I’d graduated with a double major in math and cosmology. But here’s the thing: today I had two beauties in my pocket—Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony—and I’d never before scored both in the same month let alone same day, same fountain. As my brother Josh used to say, when you’re born homeless, hope and long odds are next-door neighbors, just not next door to you. So whenever long-shot coincidences collided, my gut screamed damn the odds, the universe is telling you to take a chance.