Zero Worship: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #6

Chapter 4 - Odds and Gods

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Back at "grandma's house," as Chad calls it, Zandra picks up where she left off the evening before. Chad and Bexley relax on the couch, splitting a stale donut from a shoebox. Zandra, damning her ankle beneath her breath, does a loop around the premises to make sure no one else is home. Given the state of the house, it's rather labor intensive.

So is trying to breathe with a chain wrapped around your neck.

As best as she can tell, no one else is present. Of course, someone could be hiding within the piles of wreckage strewn about that seem to breathe with every creak and sway of the house.

"God must be present in the most unlikeliest of events, because otherwise those events wouldn't happen. Correct?" Zandra says after rejoining Chad and Bexley. She pulls out the pack of poker cards from the pocket of her purple gown.

"Well, yeah," Chad says. He holds a crescent of donut in one hand and fidgets with a pocket torch in the other.

Zandra drags a TV tray over to the five-gallon bucket. She plants herself on the bucket and tips a stack of pizza boxes from the tray onto the floor. She pours the cards out onto the tray, squares them up, and gives them a shuffle.

"Let's see if we can conjure God right now," Zandra says.

Bexley's eyes grow a white sliver wider behind her donut.

Watch carefully.

Zandra shuffles the cards again. Her technique is sloppy, but that's not the point. After a few more rounds of shuffling, she squares the cards up and snaps her fingers over the deck.

"Done," Zandra says.

Bexley looks around. "God's here right now?"

"Oh, shit," Chad says and drops the pocket torch.

Pretty sure God knows all about your extracurricular activities, Chad. They can smell it up in heaven.

Zandra taps the top of the deck with her index finger. "Right here."

"I don't get it," Bexley says.

Zandra coughs into her sleeve. It reminds her of how little she coughed last night.

"Let me ask you this," Zandra says, shifting on the five-gallon bucket to find a comfortable angle. Such an angle doesn't exist. "How low do the odds of something happening have to be for you to assume a supernatural source? That God was responsible?"

"A billion to one," Chad says.

Bexley's more cautious. "A quadrillion to one."

A fair guess. That's as big a number as anyone can usually think of.

"How about an eight with 67 zeroes after it, to one?" Zandra says. "Those are the odds of shuffling a deck of cards at any point in time and getting the exact same order of cards as any other shuffled deck of cards at any other point in time. You just witnessed something that shouldn't be able to happen without divine intervention: the order of these cards after I shuffled them."

Unlike Zandra's other grifts, this factoid isn't massaged or embellished. The actual odds of shuffling a deck of cards and ending up with the same order of cards as another shuffled deck are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to one. There isn't an easy way to remember that sequence, let alone a name for that number, but Zandra doesn't need to recall more than what she read on a trivia flyer in the lobby of a fast-food restaurant 20 years ago. Despite the source, it's true.