IF YOU'VE EVER WANTED to know if you’re one in a million – just flip a coin. More specifically, flip a coin twenty times and have Heads come up consecutively; well, then, you’re of that rarified air. That’s how Eerum Upso saw it. And where he sat, comfortable but afraid, he couldn’t trust anything anymore, anything that could give it to him straight, except Math. Twenty times. It won’t be easy; being one in a million – they say – demands willpower, persistence and – let’s not forget, they say – luck. But if he could land twenty times in a row: that’s one in one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-six. That more than qualifies.
He chose a Sacagawea coin for the task. If he had to stare at a coin for months, years, he’d prefer brass. Some would say the coin was gold, but not his: dunned and dunning, its color Forty-year Doorknob. What’s more, unlike other coins’ side-profile of some hero looking left or right, Sacagawea looked backward over her shoulder, holding a baby in a papoose and a smile you’d give an idiot. The pioneer patiently waiting for him to follow. And when the sleeping baby is included – the way Eerum saw it – it was the only coin in the mint with two heads on the Heads, which gave him a semantic comfort. With Sacagawea, Heads was heads: pluralized for peace of mind.
And so he began: three, one, two, two, one, one, four, five, one, six. He tossed with his morning coffee, during Zoom meetings, on public transportation, inter alia. The ability to count flips became a background process of his mind. In time, he could take in a movie, drive to the park, shop for ice cream, vote, whatever – the coin would chime with a click of his fingernail, spin at one-hundred-twenty-five revolutions per second, float up to eye level, then down with a fwap in his palm. He’d reach the teens every so often. Eighteen once. He worried about his heart, the way it would beat faster the closer he got. He worried about the flattening of his thumb’s fingernail, the padding in his palm. But he kept at it until a still March morning, sitting on his front porch, after his eighth consecutive Heads, the coin didn’t land.
Eerum placed his coffee near the back leg of his chair, stood up and began searching. Coins roll; but a miss, like this, hadn’t happened since the early days. Into the corners, under the railings, beneath the hedges and stairs: Sacagawea had disappeared. It wasn’t until the second pass under his chair, when Eerum got down on his knees and placed his head close to the boards, he heard the familiar flickering song of his coin. You see – as he bowed – the coin had nicked the seat of his chair. And its sound – now as common as his own thoughts – rang from the same origin. With a timid touch above his eyebrows, Eerum felt the coin, spinning at one-twenty-five, a whipping burr against his fingertip. It was neither rising nor falling, just spinning in its place, at the center of his forehead.
In the bathroom mirror, he saw enough space between brow and coin to fit a finger. So from the top-down, he fit his right hand, first paper then rock. The coin continued its rotation inside his knotted hand, the force stuck at one-twenty-five, never abating to the clench of his fist. Instead, it spun against the skin which caused enough pain to scare without cutting, like a hand in a ceiling fan. He let go. He paced, called in sick, paced some more. He laid down. He thought ahead to the horror on his wife’s face when she returned from work, the freak in her home; he was determined to avoid that fate. Eerum gloved his hand in construction leather, gripped Sacagawea, and began to pull. His arm shook. And as the coin moved millimeter by millimeter, a pain grew from his core. It wasn’t a familiar feeling: no nausea, no burst appendix, no kidney shots. It was something beyond the vitals but still inside. As he pulled, the pain deepened relative to the coin’s distance from his brow. It was the pain of tearing out something you needed, something other than the measurable viscera. If he succeeded, would [redacted] come home to his corpse: looking just as he was that morning -- but dead -- inexplicably wearing one construction glove? Or worse: would he pull out whatever that pain wanted to keep in, and life would just keep going, without that thing he definitely needed? So, his thoughts returned to an explanation for all this, which didn’t exist.
She wasn’t happy. Eerum paraphrased and repeated the first five paragraphs. The night was full of suppressed tears, big questions and grim curiosity. Under his wife’s insistence, he went to a doctor, who was intrigued but ethical. (Ethical in how the healthcare ended as soon as Eerum’s coverage stopped.) After a month or so of tests, Eerum was left to his home, with a manageable debt and the diagnosis of – I dunno: shit’s crazy, man.
[redacted] made a hat, which Eerum was to wear whenever in public. From far away, it was a normal baseball cap. No one would get too close to the see the reinforced sweatband, which curved a few more inches than usual at the brim, just enough to hide that twirling mess underneath. He tried to resume with a new coin, but the interest was gone: Heads and Tails, Heads and Tails, and who the fuck cares; because the real answer – the way Eerum saw it – was stuck to his head, side over side, refusing to give any answer at all.
He'd like to say he got used to it; but that’s not exactly what happened. Instead that spinning began boring into his mind until that background process of counting was erased, replaced with the much more annoying idea of Spinning-ness. Eerum took sabbatical, time to wander from room to room. He couldn’t really do much of anything for too long without a burst of confusion toppling any thought beyond if/then. So it’s completely understandable – they say – that one day, a day when he fixed a loose tread on the backstairs, that day would be the day he forgot his hat.
The day was every day: a simple task to be completed. But as Eerum went to throw away the detritus of his work, a group of young men were filming near his trashcans. As they fiddled with an absurd mechanism in the alley, one of the members of Midwest Mousetraps got it all: a squinting man, confused in his own backyard, walking a plastic bag filled with splinters and rust toward the alley. But YOHHHHHHH!
- Sir! sir sir! Sir!
- Me? Eerum casually lifted the trashcan’s lid and tossed the bag inside.
- How’s it goin’?
- Sorry, yeah. Ehhh. Y’know. You?
- Yeahhhhh. Yeah. Soooo I’m Matt, and this is Midwest Mousetraps. What’s your name?
- E, Eerum. He stuttered. In the shock of a conversation continuing beyond what he had planned, Eerum almost forgot his name.
- Nice to meetja. Wanna hang out while we try this run again?
- Oh, that’s ok. I gotta get back inside. Good luck, guys.
The comments were loaded with thousands of FAKE FAKE FAKE or AI or variations of the two. Still, it spread. And as it jumped from platform to platform, the comments grew and splintered to include HEADCOIN EXPLAINED, MONEY ON MY MIND, and TEACH ME YOUR WAYS. The doxing was light, limited to groups of guffawing teens strolling down the sidewalk, phones recording the banality of his block, house, etc. An occasional shout, but nothing overwhelming, nothing scary, nothing violent. Still, his wife was in ruins. It was good, it was fine, things were fine she would mutter as she paced, sighed, paced some more, all the time washing her hands with imagined soap and water. Fucking statistics! – would intermittently echo through the house. At least, at least, they fucked up your name [redacted] said as she hung thicker curtains in the living room. Due to that one stutter, iterating at least fifteen times per second – they averaged – the vox populi had renamed him E.E. Rum.
Eerum or E.E. Rum, it didn’t really matter to Greg Barker, who was known as Chairman Titsonbutt to his two-hundred and eighty-five million followers. E.E. Rum had his cap on when he answered the door, which disappointed Greg. Still, Greg remained as cordial as his online persona. Greg explained the popularity of his channel and the project he had in mind: all the online explanations tested, an interview sans cap, a week or two at most. E.E. Rum was hesitant, but Greg’s offer included more than enough to crawl from under their mortgage, fixerup, extend the sabbatical. And [redacted] dreamed of tall, impenetrable fences.
The Titsonbutt scientists were of the same opinion as the ethical doctor. During the interview, E.E. Rum did his best to summarize the first four paragraphs of the story, and now – he hooked his index finger so the nail tapped the coin with a ding-ding-ding-ding – it’s been like this for almost eight months. (Someone on the Chairman Titsonbutt Team procured a Sacagawea coin.)
- So like this – Greg asked before his first toss. [fwap]
- Pretty much. E.E. Rum was all nerves: what if it happened again? Horrible. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t be alone.
- So, E, I hafta ask, you know it’s just something we say [fwap] Like people don’t really mean it. [fwap]
- I get it. But there’s a reason people say it, right? There has to be a reason [fwap] So, I wanted to prove it. I needed to know, definitively.
- Have you tried to start again? [fwap]
- Yeah, I tried. But I don’t have it in me. [fwap] It’s kinda pointless now, because I’ll always know, it’s right here. He gestured to his brow.
- So another coin
- Isn’t the real coin.[fwap]
- Whoa - seven in a row! Ok, I’m starting to get it. E, you’re onto something here. I’m hooked.
- But
- Greg stared into the lens and mugged, Chairman Titsonbutt: ah-proooved.
The video did as well as other Chairman Titsonbutt productions, hundreds of millions – they said, which led to more polite doxing. He would get a knock at the door, and a few eager youths would ask to flip their Sacagaweas on his porch. No harm in it, really. And since he refused to take off his cap, there was little to no interest in him, but rather the location, the storied porch. Visitors sat where he and Greg sat, recording themselves as they tossed and grinned, shouting -rum-runnin’ at the og spot or simply -G-4-20 (which one kind visitor explained was an initialism of sorts for goin’ for twenty). E.E. Rum would lean against a column support, out of the way, as they explored his modest porch. Their excitement bemused him. Many would show him their bookmarked videos, which he would watch as a kindness. As months passed, most videos were not from Chairman Titsonbutt nor reactions to those videos, nor inspired by, nor adjacent to. Instead, the majority of videos were clips from Ample Vigorish.
Despite being an avowed Mormon-Leninist, she had a daily viewership somewhere between the Teamsters and Tuvalu. When E.E. Rum learned of Vigorish, she had been rum-running for five months. But being Ample, she had set up a webcam to recognize and tally the Heads as she went about her daily stream. The flipcount was a constant, bottom right. (The code and readme are still available on her github.) So while she railed against cuckbrained heathens of secular techno-feudalism, a small square would read: green-two, green-three, red, green-one, red, green-one.
[redacted] sent the email, Subject: Did you see this? Body: I still think it’s fucking stupid. He sat alone on the front porch, turning the phone 90 degrees, and pushing the volume to near 100%. Ample was passionately critiquing a double-jump physics disparity in a new battle royale game when the counter hit. Digital bells distorted the stream’s audio, and for a brief moment she was confused by the racket. She’d forgotten. Her comments section flooded with 20! 20 20? 20!! 20! 20 20 etc. and she popped off – Holy Shit, Holy Shit, Holy Shit I did it Mom Mom you seeing this Mom I fuckin’ did it Fuck you fuck you fuck you 20 fuck you and fuck you rum-run complete guys rum-run fuckin complete holy shit I got twenty I’m 20 holy shit is this real it doesn’t feel real what the fuck just happened man key-raist unreal.
Her editor immediately clipped the final run, which Vigorish replayed during the remaining hours of the same stream. The show became Ample watching herself, commenting on her negligence, commenting on the comments, commenting on her unawareness as the counter hit the teens, pausing moments where she could’ve noticed but kept haranguing. When Ample reached the moment of realization, which was two hours before, she stopped the video. There it is, folks. One in a million. Definitive. Amp reflected and responded, thoughtfully, to a few chosen comments. It was a big day for the community.
After hours of broadly beaming, Amp sighed and gave a pinched pout. Obviously, this made my year – she paused to check the column of comments – and I don’t want it to seem like I’m ungrateful – bottle-of-djinn thankyouforthesubs – and this sounds, I know, this sounds fuckin ludicrous. But there’s a part of me that kinda, fuck do I even mean this, that kinda… alright fuck it I’ll say it, I wish I got the headcoin instead. Like I would trade my 20 for a headcoin. I know, I know! That sounds wack, like beyond belief wack. But maybe I mean it. Stop stop stop, I know and I reserve the right to walk back that statement at any time; I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy, maybe this is some post-Sacagawea clarity, which is also insane. Maybe I’m crazy right now. But, hold on, lest we forget – the legend that made us all start buying Sacagawea coins, a coin, may I remind you, they discontinued in 2022. Sidenote, of course, findin these fuckin things got expensive, man. But no, I’m talkin about the fuckin goat, we’re talking E.E. Rum. C-tawb don’t sue me. Amp pulled up the interview from Greg’s page and played moments, pausing to carry her impulsive ideas to loftier heights, as if the old video and her new interjections naturally combined to form an irrefutable treatise. -This fuckin dude, this guy knows what’s up. She switched to the first video.
He sat looking at his past self, a video clip of a webstream playing a video now three years old. Within these stacked windows, he saw himself: fewer grays, a better belt, but still as spun as he was now. Almost as reflex, he held a finger to the coin to feel the furious spin. And Amp paused the video within her video – Look at that look. He can’t be bothered by our bullshit. He’s in it, beyond locked in. I mean, teach me your ways to the twentieth power. Who doesn’t want that?
He really didn’t want that. Here he was: in a chair on his front porch, slumped and unsolved. He wanted to flip a coin – wait, no – he wanted to want to flip a coin. He knew; even if – one day – it miraculously fell as quickly as it stuck, whichever way it landed wouldn’t matter. The meaningless outcome made priceless, but only because it finally came. It may be infantile, disingenuous, profoundly misleading, an unrequited faith in a grand distraction, etc. Still, there’s a need for it: the simple satisfaction to ask and be answered. But that’s something they never say. So instead
— DON MALKEMES
Don Malkemes is a writer who lives in Chicago.