Iterations and other stories (collection)

I glanced at the piece of tractor-feed paper that had been slipped into the mailing bag: my name and address, all right. Who would have sent me such a thing? My birthday was rolling around—the big four-oh—so maybe somebody had got me a subscription as a semi-gag gift. The poly bag stretched as I yanked at it. Having written 750,000 words about plastics in my career, you’d think I’d be able to open those things easily.

Subscription rates were printed inside the journal’s front cover. Eighty-five American dollars a year! I didn’t have many friends and none of them would shell out that much on a gift for me, even if it was meant as a joke.

I closed the book and looked at the table of contents again. Dry stuff. Say, there’s an article by that U of T guy, Zalmon Bernstein: A New Specimen of Lambeosaurus lambei from the Badlands of Alberta, Canada. I continued down the list of titles. Correlations Between Crest Size and Shape of the Pre-Orbital fenestra in Hadrosaurs. “Pre-orbital fenestra.” What a great-sounding phrase. All those lovely I a tin and Greek polysyllables. Here’s another one—

I stopped dead. Serobiculated Fontanelle Margins in Pachyrhinosanrs and Other Centrosaurinae from the Chihnahuan Desert of Mexico, by J. H. Coin.

By me.

My head swam for a moment. I was used to seeing my byline in print. It’s just that I usually remembered writing whatever it was attached to, that’s all.

It must be somebody with the same name, of course. Hell, Coin wasn’t that unusual. Besides, this guy was down in Mexico. I turned to the indicated page. There was the article, the writer’s name, and his institutional affiliation: Research Associate, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada.

It came back in a deluge of memory. The ROM had undertaken a dig in Mexico a few summers ago. A local newspaper, The Toronto Sun, had sponsored it. I remembered it as much because of my dormant interest in dinosaurs as because it seemed so out-of-character for the tabloid Sun—best known for its bikini-clad Sunshine Girls—to foot the bill for a scientific expedition.

I was disoriented for several seconds. What was going on? Why did I even have a copy of this publication? Then it hit me. Of course. All so simple, really. There must be someone at the ROM with the same initials and last name as me. He (or she, maybe) had written this article. The Journal had somehow lost his address, so they’d looked him up in the phone book to send a contributor’s copy. They’d gotten the wrong J. H. Coin, that’s all.

I decided I’d better return the guy’s Journal to him. Besides, this other Coin would probably get a kick out of the story of how his copy had ended up with me. I know I would.

I phoned the Royal Ontario Museum and spoke to a receptionist who had a pleasant Jamaican accent. “Hello,” I said. “J. H. Coin, please.”

“Can you tell me which department?” she asked.

He can’t have made a big name for himself if the receptionist didn’t know where he worked. “Paleontology.”

“Vert or invert?”

For a second I didn’t understand the question. “Oh—vertebrate.”

“I’ll put you through to the departmental assistant.” I often had to contact presidents of petrochemical firms for quotes, so I knew that how difficult it was to get hold of someone could be a sign of how important he or she was. But this shunting struck me as different. It wasn’t that J. H. Coin had to be shielded from annoying calls. Rather, it was more like he was a fossil, lost in layers of sediment.

“Vert paleo,” said a woman’s voice.

“Hello. J. H. Coin, please.”

There was a pause, as though the departmental assistant was momentarily confused. “Ah, just a second.”

At first I thought that she, too, hadn’t heard of J. H. Coin, but when the next person came on I knew that wasn’t it. The voice seemed slightly alien to me: deeper, less resonant, more nasal than my own—at least than my own sounds to me. “Hello,” he said, politely, but sounding somewhat surprised at being called at work. “Jacob Coin speaking.”

Jacob and Coin. Sure, some names go together automatically, like John and Smith, or Tom and Sawyer or, if you believe the Colombian Coffee Growers’ commercials, Juan and Valdez. But Jacob and Coin weren’t a natural pair. I was named after my mother’s father. Not some literary allusion, not some easy assonance, just a random line of circumstances.

I wanted to ask this Jacob Coin what his “H” stood for. I wanted to ask him what his mother’s maiden name was. I wanted to know his birth date, his social insurance number, whether his left leg gave him trouble when it was about to rain, whether he was allergic to cheese, if he had managed to keep his weight under control. But I didn’t have to. I already knew the answers.