Good Fortune

I saw the little black notebook while walking back from the bodega down the street. I should’ve asked for a bag; as it was, I was already juggling a half-gallon of milk, laundry detergent, and a bag of kitty litter. At least I’d been able to jam the lotto scratchers in my back pocket with my change. The notebook was sitting on top of some garbage cans, but I could tell the leather was oddly pristine. Even so, not having a free hand, I kept walking: around the corner, up the block, and into my apartment building.

After I set everything down on my countertop, curiosity got the better of me. I jogged back—why, I couldn’t quite say—and grabbed the notebook, turning my back to the street as I quickly flipped through it. It was empty. I glanced up and down the block and, with a nonchalance I almost felt, I headed back home. One man’s trash, as they say. I’d never been a dumpster diver, but I figured there’s a first time for everything.

I put the notebook on my nightstand while I tidied up. Afterward, I grabbed a pen and did what I’d always done since elementary school: wrote my name on the inside cover. I didn’t know what else to write, so I set it down, fed Nuisance, and, feeling at a loss for anything to do, called my sister while I microwaved dinner.

“Hey, Jackson. What’s up?”

“Not much—just thought I’d call and say hi.” The microwave beeped.

“Dinner for one?”

I sighed. “I didn’t move all the way out here to spend my entire life by myself—sorry, Nuisance—in a four hundred square foot apartment, but here we are. Here I am. Promise me you’ll fly out after we’re vaccinated.”

“Done. I’ve been saving some money anyway.”

“Yeah? Good. How’s Mom?”

“Eh, you know. She has her good days and her bad days. It wouldn’t be so hard if she could be social, get out of the house; you know what I mean. We rearranged the furniture again—she finally agreed to get rid of Dad’s ratty old recliner. I think it was too much, you know?”

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall for a moment. “Hey, I’m sorry I’m not there. Do you think I should—”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “We’re fine. You shouldn’t travel.”

“I know.” I sat down heavily on the couch. My wallet jammed into my back, so I pulled it out, threw it and the scratchers down. I dug into the scratcher with my fingernail. “So, uh, how’s work?”

“Blah. They cut my hours, but it’s fine. It’s not like Mom would ever let me pay rent.”

I stared down at the scratcher in disbelief. “Uh, hey, Sky, lemme call you back, okay?”

“Is everything fine?”

“Yeah, yeah, totally. I’ll call you back.” I hung up and double checked. Yep. Four little jacks. Twenty thousand dollars. Holy shit. That was a lot of money. It was almost my rent for a year. I could fly Skylar out first class. Help Mom pay off the house. Get rid of most of my student loans. I puttered around the house in a daze, then picked up the little notebook to write out a few ideas for what to do with the money:

Invest a few thousand dollars

Pay off student loans

Help Mom and Skylar out

I noodled over my little list until bedtime. Tomorrow I would go collect the money from . . . wherever one collects lottery winnings. I had no idea.

***

I was on my way to the state lottery office when Skylar called. “Jackson. You’ll never believe it. Mom just got a call from Dad’s old work. Apparently he had a life insurance policy we didn’t know about and it’s worth—get this—two hundred thousand dollars. And then! My boss called and said not only is he putting me back to full time, he lost my supervisor and is promoting me—and I’ll be making double what I am now!”

“Sky, that’s great! Congratulations! Lord knows you’ve earned it.”

“I know! Mom was more excited about my promotion, but the insurance money is going to be a huge weight off her shoulders too.”

“Yeah. It’s kinda weird, though . . . like, I’m on my way to collect twenty grand I won off a scratcher. I mean, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that, but what a coincidence.”

Skylar laughed. “Well, we were way overdue for some good luck for a change. Go get your money. I’ll call you later.”

Well, I thought as I hung up, I guess I’ll have to come up with a new list of things to do with my newfound wealth. And later that day, $20,000 richer, I did exactly that: I jotted down in the notebook three of my best friends’ names and then brainstormed a short list of way-too-expensive restaurants to go to after it was safe.

I started to suspect something was going on when Cody tweeted about being picked in a city housing lottery for a brand-new rent-controlled apartment—he called it “the only way she could afford to stay here,” and, honestly, in Brooklyn, it was. I texted Abby, who told me her pop-sci book project had been picked up by a big publisher. I checked in with Candace too; she hadn’t won anything, and seemed confused by the question, but I broke out in a cold sweat when she told me that she’d almost been t-boned by a garbage truck as it skidded to a stop seconds before hitting her door.

Alright, then. Every single person whose name I’d written in my little black book had had something amazing happen to them. It seemed completely absurd, but I wasn’t above believing in something good in a year like this one. With a feeling like I was letting myself believe in Santa Claus again, I wrote my own name in the book.

Nothing happened. So much for Santa.

I gave it two days just to be sure.

It took me well into day two to realize that my name was the first one I’d written in the notebook, right before I had won the scratcher—so maybe luck only happens once? I wrote Skylar’s name again to be sure, and then picked another close friend. Nothing happened to my sister, but when Madison finally returned my calls, she said her mom had been deathly ill and had suddenly made a total turnaround. She was leaving the hospital that day. I hadn’t even known. Okay, now I was well and truly freaked out. I threw the notebook into my desk drawer and locked it—to protect the notebook, or get away from it, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was I had to get out.

Abby agreed to meet me for a walk in Morningside Park. I explained to her what I thought was going on, then explained it again when she looked at me like I’d finally lost it in lockdown.

“Look, I know it sounds nuts. You’re a quantum physicist. Your whole life is studying impossible shit. Humor me.”

“Okay, fine. So you said you wrote my name in there and then I got my book deal. That means you could write my name again and something else good would happen?” she asked.

“No, I think it only works the once. I tried.”

“Okay, then I won’t kill you and steal it,” she joked, I think. “Hm. So all these things that happened to people—they were things that could’ve happened anyway, right?”

“I think so. The effects seem to get . . . bigger . . . the more I write. No one, like, got superpowers or anything, but . . . I mean, I won twenty grand; Madison’s mom recovered completely from septic shock.”

“Right. So they’re things that were statistically likely, or at least possible. So maybe that’s what it’s doing. Influencing random chance.”

“If that’s the case, I wonder how big the effects can get.”

“I guess you won’t know until you finish the notebook.”

When I got home, I had an idea. First, yes, I wrote—in the smallest printing I could muster—the names of everyone I knew and actually liked. I knew that doing so wasn’t entirely fair: people shouldn’t just have good things happen to them based solely on their proximity to me; there were plenty of deserving people I’d never met. So I started skimming local news sites looking for people who had had something bad enough happen to them to make it into the papers and wrote every name I could find in the notebook. I didn’t follow up with them individually; how could I? But over the next few days enough news sites ran follow-up articles for me to learn that I didn’t need to know the person for the notebook to work. Meanwhile, my friends began posting on social media or texting and calling about their wild experiences: lotteries won, life-changing phone calls, freak accidents avoided. I didn’t bother to tell them. Who would believe me? Besides, the anonymity was kind of fun.

What wasn’t fun, what kept me scouring the papers and tossing and turning late into the night, was the fact that, at the root of it all, I was just guessing. I couldn’t see the future; I couldn’t know everyone; I couldn’t find the biggest problems and solve them before they happened. I could only react.

It was crippling.

I did it anyway. I plowed through my workdays and as soon as I could turned to my daily task of trolling for terrible news—“doomscrolling,” everyone called it, but in my case, I had a purpose. I could do something about it. And, as Abby had suggested, the effects of the notebook did seem to get bigger and bigger, until my twenty thousand was nothing compared to what was happening out there to people I’d never know. It felt good, of course, but some part of me was disappointed that I couldn’t rewrite my name, or Skylar’s, or my mom’s.

But then I began thinking. About whatever strange power this little notebook had, and the limits of the possible. Abby had said that the book seemed to affect things that were statistically likely, but things were getting more outlandish, more unlikely, with each name I added. How improbable could it get once I got to the end?

She laughed when I asked my question. “You know you’re not a god, right?” was her reply.

I felt myself flush. “I didn’t say that! I’m just wondering—”

“No, no, it’s a smart question—in fact, it’s tied up in the big questions about the nature of reality itself. I guess this is only partly an answer, but . . . well, you know time is totally relative, right? Like, time slows down the faster you go, or if you’re closer to something with a lot of mass. In fact, there’s no real reason time runs forward and never backward. Like, think about it—things can happen in any direction in space, right? It’s not like you can only move up and not down, or left and not right. No one really understands at all why time is the one dimension that seems to only move in one direction, toward greater entropy, toward decay.”

“So there’s no real reason that time can’t run backward, then?”

“Well, it’s not that simple—”

“Listen, that’s good enough for me.” I hung up before she could clarify further, before she could diminish my resolve. Here at the end of it all, I stared down at the last line on the last page.

Maybe it was selfish. I didn’t care. I did it. I wrote his name.

I closed the book for the last time, and my phone began to ring.