The Broken Clock is Right Thrice: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #4

Chapter 4 - Coupon Day

"I take it you made some money from stocks yourself, too."

"No. I did make one person fabulously wealthy, though. I called the S&P 500 correctly every week for 52 weeks. They say it's impossible, but I did it," Zandra says.

"I'd like to see the numbers on that one," the man says.

"You could turn on the news. He's a sitting U.S. senator now," Zandra says. "No one said you need to be smart to be in politics, but you do need money."

It's a big claim. Unlike some of Zandra's other statements, it's true.

"How did you do it?" the man says.

"If I'm a fraud, then I got lucky 52 times in a row. And if I'm not lucky, then I'm not a fraud," Zandra says.

And that depends on how you want to count the wins. The headline is getting it right 52 weeks in a row. The full story is that I started a subscription stock picking service a while back. Twenty-thousand people signed up to get stock picks once a week from a world-renowned psychic.

The first week, 10,000 people received my "the S&P 500 will go up" prediction and 10,000 people got my "it'll go down" prediction. I kept the 10,000 that was correct, and the other half I gave a coupon to for some other bullshit I had to sell at the time.

The second week, I repeated the same process as the first week, this time splitting the correct 10,000 in half with the predictions. The same with the third week, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, until finally I winnowed it down to a single person on the 14th week. That one person, who later went on to run for the U.S. Senate, became so ecstatic with every passing week that he took out several mortgages to juice his positions. By the 14th week, when he went all in on some options plays, he'd become a millionaire several times over.

What about the rest of the weeks up to 52? I advised him to let his money sit until the 52nd week, and then cash out. I cashed out, too, but much earlier on. It cost $500 to sign up for my little experiment. Multiply that by 20,000, and I could light my cigarettes with a roll of hundred-dollar bills. Which I did.

What does this mean? It means that if every event, even the ones that boggle the imagination, is equally a coincidence due to scale and statistics, what about the events that don't use the mechanisms of scale and statistics? Like, oh, say, plucking a vision out of the ether of the location of your murdered husband's body? Or is what we call supernatural pulling from a place of higher order beyond human perception that still delivers coincidences humans can perceive? Real Chaos Theory shit.

More importantly, why should anyone care about these things? Why do I care about these things?

The same reason anyone cares about anything, I guess. Because the world is fucked, and it's OK to give yourself reasons to not be.

The white SUV stops in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn off the highway that runs through Stevens Point. The coral-colored hotel, flanked by rows of bushes, stands proud in its genericism.

Not exactly the secret safe house they show in the movies.

"Was it coupon day at the CIA? A Holiday Inn? Really?" Zandra says as she hobbles out of the SUV.

"I told you. I'm not CIA. As steward of taxpayer dollars, your government determined Holiday Inn to be the most economical option for the services rendered and within the appropriated budget," the man in sunglasses says.

"Can you not talk like that?" Zandra says.

"Like what?"

"Like the side effects disclaimer at the end of a commercial for broke dick pills," Zandra says, taking care to scan the parking lot of the hotel for familiar faces.