Someday I’m going to lose that spare tire.
As I rode up, I glanced at the white-and-orange book. It was a scholarly journal. My step-uncle, a university professor, had hundreds of such publications making neat rows of identical spines on the shelves of his musty den. This one looked interesting, though, at least to me: The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
For some reason I swung my feet up to the left instead of the right on my L-couch. The Journal’s table of contents was printed on its cover. I recognized some of the words in the tides from my old interest in dinosaurs. Ornithischian. Hadrosaurs. Cretaceous.
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.
I hung up the phone. I hated doing it only because I know how much I hate it when that happens to me—how much he must hate it, too.
I heeded John Paul’s buzz again on Friday. This time, though, I didn’t wait for him to assemble my pile of mail. Instead, I snapped up each envelope as he placed it on the counter. The first three really were for me: a check from one of my publishers, a birthday card from my insurance agent, and my cable-TV bill. But the fourth was bogus: a gray envelope addressed to J. H. Coin, Ph.D. The return address was Royal Ontario Museum Staff Association.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
The Pontiff was busy dealing out lives into the little mailboxes. “Hmm?”
“This one isn’t for me.”
“Oh, sorry.” He reached out to take it. For a moment I thought about keeping it, holding on to that piece of what might have been, but, no, I let him have it.
He looked at it, then frowned. “You’re J. H. Coin, ain’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then it is for you.” He proffered the envelope, but now that I’d let it go I couldn’t bring myself to take it back.
“No. I mean, I’m not that J. H. Coin.” The Pope said nothing. He just stood there holding the letter out towards me. I shook my head. “I don’t have a Ph.D.”
“Take that up with whoever wrote you,” he said. “I worry about apartment numbers and postal codes, not diplomas.”
“But I don’t want it. It’s not mine. I don’t work at the Museum.”
John Paul let out a heavy sigh. “Mr. Coin, it’s addressed correctly. It’s got sufficient postage. I have to deliver it to you.”
“Can’t you send it back?”
“I’ve been doing you a big favor all this time, calling you down instead of stuffing your things into that little box. Don’t make me sorry that I’ve been nice to you.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Take the letter.”
“But yesterday you brought me The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. And the day before, the University of Toronto Alumni Magazine. None of those things were meant for me.”