The Day the Nobel Prize Investigators Visited Me

I think this was around 2011 - 2013, at my Suite on Orange St. in New Haven.

Someone knocked on my door.

"Hi, you're Nathan Coppedge? We're investigating a Nobel Prize?"

"For me? I mean, really! For me?"

"Well, this is a very cursory thing. We're just checking to see if you 'might be' a valid candidate. It's either yes or no. If it's no, then you won't ever win the Nobel Prize."

"I would say, I'm a little immature. Too immature for this!" I said.

"You could be indicted for fraud" one of them said, helpfully.

"My experiments are honest, but incomplete" I said.

"Well, that's that!" someone said.

And, that was it.

For a long time I just assumed it was a joke arranged by my mother.

But my mother said it wasn't.

Nothing else came of it.

So, I had to assume it was real.

(Another option I'm considering is that my friend Laura Fawcett arranged it with the staff of the Peobody Museum. And another option is that it was a large group of neighbors in my building. But who knows).

Later the landlord asked me:

"Did you win the Nobel Prize?"

I said, "No, not yet."

"What about the people?"

"What people?"

"Those people who visited---"

"Oh, those people. I think they were just joking around."

He said: "That's a lot of people to joke around with."

There was a deadness in his voice, like I was joking around with the American people.