I See Patterns
Montreal, Mid 2002

I See Patterns

Glenda was speaking to me.
“I once knew this guy who saw patterns in everything.”
“Patterns?” I asked, curious. We were commiserating over the oddities of my current boyfriend while lunching at the Rustica, and any opportunity to put them in context by discussing those of another man appealed to me at that moment.
“He claimed that all life was a pattern. That if he paid close enough attention to things he’d pick out the grand scheme.”
“And once he had the pattern?” I asked, hiding a smile.
“He said it helped him predict the future. Nothing caught him by surprise, he used to tell me, once he knew the pattern. Sometimes I’d be on the verge of doing something, and he’d pipe up – Glenda, you’re going to play with your hair – and he was right. It freaked me out. He said I showed the same pattern every time I was about to do something.”
“But that’s just cause he knew you. I mean, I’d know a lot about someone too if I’d been going out with them for a while.”
Glenda looked at me with a raised eyebrow, glanced to her right and her left, then leaned forward. “One day we sat down in a restaurant. He wrote something on the place mat, it was one of those paper ones. We ordered and then we talked for about half an hour. Someone I knew stopped by and chatted with us.”
“For how long?”
“Just for a minute of two. Later I looked at the placemat. On it he’d written what I would be ordering – appetizer, main course, and drink - and what we would be talking about for the next half hour. Each topic. And he somehow knew that my friend was coming by. He guessed all of that, can you believe it? He’d written down everything on the mat.”
“Very strange,” I murmured, grappling with my skepticism, “what did Mr. Know-it-all say when you asked him about it?”
“I don’t know,” said Glenda, “The next moment he choked on the sautéed octopus, and no one in the room knew the Heimlich.”
I looked at her, not sure if she was serious. “That’s very ironic, Glenda. Order descends into chaos. The man with the master plan overlooks one thing, the food on his plate. How amusing.”
“That’s not all. Do you know what else I found written on the back of the placemat?”
“What did you find on the back of the placemat.”

“The suicide note.”