The Stochastic Man Read online

  “The script admits of nothing other than acceptance. I thought you understood that point.”

  “So you made money, a lot of money but nothing like what you could have made, and it was all meaningless to you? You just let it pile up around you like falling autumn leaves?”

  “I had no need of it. My needs are simple and my tastes are plain. I accumulated it because I saw myself playing the market and growing rich. What I see myself do, I do.”

  “Following the script. No questions asked about why.”

  “Millions of dollars. What have you done with it all?”

  “I used it as I saw myself using it I gave some of it away, to charities, to universities, to politicians.”

  “According to your own preferences or to the design you saw unfolding?”

  “I have no preferences,” he said calmly.

  “And the rest of the money?”

  “I kept it. In banks. What would I have done with it? It’s never had any importance to me. As you say, meaningless. A million dollars, five million, ten million—just words.” An odd wistful note crept into his voice. “What does have meaning? What does meaning mean? We merely play out the script, Mr. Nichols. Would you like another glass of water?”

  “Please,” I said, and the millionaire filled my glass.

  My mind was whirling. I had come for answers, and I had had them, dozens of them, yet each had raised a cluster of new questions. Which he was willing to answer, evidently, for no reason other than that he had already answered them in his visions of this day. Talking to Carvajal, I found myself slipping between past and future tenses, lost in a grammatical maze of jumbled time and disordered sequences. And he was altogether placid, sitting almost motionless, his voice flat and sometimes nearly inaudible, his face without expression other than that peculiarly destroyed look. Destroyed, yes. He might have been a zombie, or perhaps a robot. Living a rigid preordained fully programmed life, never questioning die motives for any of his actions, simply going on and on, a puppet dangling from his own inevitable future, drifting in a deterministic existential passivity that I found bewildering and alien. For a moment I found myself pitying them. Then I wondered whether my compassion might not be misplaced. I felt the temptation of that existential passivity, and it was a powerful tug. How comforting it might be, I thought, to live in a world free of all uncertainty!

  He said suddenly, “I think you should go now. I’m not accustomed to long conversations and I’m afraid this has tired me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stay so long.”

  “No need to apologize. All that happened today was as I saw it would be. So all is well.”

  “I’m grateful that you were willing to talk so openly about yourself,” I said.

  “Willing?” he said, laughing. “Willing again?”

  “That word isn’t in your working vocabulary?”

  “No. And I hope to wipe it from yours.” He moved toward the door in a gesture of dismissal. “We’ll talk again soon.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I regret I couldn’t help you as much as you wished. Your question about what Paul Quinn will become—I’m sorry. The answer lies beyond my limits and I have no information to give. I can perceive only what I will perceive, do you see? Do you understand? I perceive only my own future perceptions, as though I look at the future through a periscope, and my periscope shows me nothing about next year’s election. Many of the events leading up to the election, yes. The outcome itself, no. I’m sorry.”

  He took my hand a moment I felt a current flowing between us, a distinct and almost tangible river of connection. I sensed great strain in him, not merely the strain of the conversation but something deeper, a struggle to maintain and extend that contact between us, to reach me on some profound level of being. The sensation disturbed and unsettled me. It lasted only an instant; then it snapped, and I fell back into aloneness with a perceptible impact of separation, and he smiled, gave me a courtly little nod of the head, wished me a safe journey home, showed me into the dark dank hallway.

  Only as I was getting into my car a few minutes later did all the pieces slip into place and I come to comprehend what Carvajal had been telling me as we stood by the door. Only then did I understand the nature of the ultimate limit that governed his vision, that had turned him into the passive puppet he was, that had stripped all meaning from his actions. Carvajal had seen the moment of his own death. That was why he was unable to tell me who the next President was, yes, but the effect of that knowledge ran deeper than that. It explained why he drifted through life in the peculiarly unquestioning, uncaring way. For decades Carvajal must have lived with the awareness of how and where and when he would die, the absolute and indubitable knowledge of it, and that terrible knowledge had paralyzed his will in a fashion hard for ordinary people to grasp. That was my intuitive interpretation of his condition; and I trust my intuitions. Now the time of his end was less than seventeen months away; and he was drifting aimlessly toward it, accepting, playing out the script, not caring, not caring at all.

  17

  My head was whirling as I drove home, and it went on whirling for days. I felt stoned, drunk, intoxicated with a sense of infinite possibilities, of limitless openings. It was as though I was about to tap into some incredible source of energy toward which I had been moving, unknowingly, all my life.

  That source of energy was Carvajal’s visionary power.

  I had gone to him suspecting he was what he was, and he had confirmed it; but he had done more than that. He had poured his story out to me so readily, once we were past the game-playing and the testing, that he seemed almost to be trying to lure me into some sort of relationship based on that gift of presentiment that we so unequally shared. After all, this was a man who for decades had lived secretively, furtively, a recluse quietly piling up his millions, celibate, friendless; and he had made a point of seeking me out at Lombroso’s office, he had baited a trap for me with his three enigmatic tantalizing hints, he had snared me and drawn me to his hovel, he had freely answered my questions, he had expressed the hope that we would meet again.

  What did Carvajal want from me? What rote did he have in mind for me? Friend? Appreciative one-man audience? Partner? Disciple?

  Heir?

  All of those suggested themselves to me. I was dizzied by a wild rush of options. But there was also the possibility that I was altogether deluded, that Carvajal had no role in mind for me at all. Roles are created by playwrights; and Carvajal was an actor, not a playwright He simply picked up his cues and followed the script. And maybe to Carvajal I was merely a new character who had wandered onto the stage to engage him in conversation, who had appeared for reasons unknown to him and irrelevant to him, for reasons that mattered, if at all, only to the invisible and perhaps nonexistent author of the grand drama of the universe.

  That was an aspect of Carvajal that bothered me profoundly, in a way that drunks have always bothered me. The boozer—or doper, or sniffer, or what have you—is in the most literal sense a person who is out of his right mind. Which means you can’t take his words or his actions seriously. Let him say he loves you, let him say he hates you, let him tell you how much he admires your work or respects your integrity or shares your beliefs, and you can’t ever know how sincere he is, because the booze or dope may be putting the words in his mouth. Let him propose a deal and you don’t know how much he’ll remember when his head is straight again. So your transaction with him while he’s under the influence is essentially hollow and unreal. I’m an orderly and rational person and when I deal with someone I want to feel I’m having a real interaction with him. Not so, when I think I’m genuinely interacting and the other one is just saying whatever comes into his chemically altered head.

  With Carvajal I felt many of the uncertainties. Nothing he said was necessarily kosher. Nothing necessarily made sense. He didn’t act out of what I thought of as rational motives, such as self-interest or the general welfare; ev
erything, even his own survival, seemed irrelevant to him. Thus his actions sidestepped stochasticity and common sense itself: he was unpredictable because he didn’t follow discernible patterns, only the script, the sacred and unalterable script, and die script was revealed to him in bursts of non-logical non-sequential insight. “What I see myself do, I do.” he had said. Never asking why. Fine. He sees himself giving all his money to the poor, so he gives all his money to the poor. He sees himself crossing the George Washington Bridge on a pogo stick, so he goes jumping away. He sees himself putting H2SO4 in his guest’s water glass, so he pops the old sulphuric in without hesitating. He answers questions with the preordained answers, whether what is preordained makes sense or not. And so on. Having surrendered totally to the dictates of the revealed future, he has no need to examine motives or consequences. Worse than a drunk, in fact At least a boozer still has some shred of rational consciousness operating, however fuzzily, at the core.

  A paradox, then. From Carvajal’s point of view his every action was guided by rigid deterministic criteria; but from the point of view of those around him, his behavior was as irresponsibly random as that of any lunatic. (Or of any really dedicated Transit Creed flow-and-yielder.) In his own eyes he was obeying the supreme inflexibility of the stream of events; from the outside it looked as though he was blowing in every breeze. By doing as he saw he also raised uncomfortable chicken-and-egg questions about the underlying motives for his actions. Were there any at all? Or were his visions self-generating prophecies, entirely divorced from causality, devoid altogether from reason and logic? He sees himself crossing the bridge on a pogo stick next Fourth of July; therefore, when the Fourth of July comes he does it, for no other reason than that he has seen it. What purpose in fact was served by his crossing the bridge, other than the neat closing of the visionary circuit? The pogo-stick business was self-generating and pointless. How could one carry on dealings with such k man? He was a wild card in the flow of time.

  Perhaps I was being too harsh, though. Maybe there were patterns I failed to see. It was possible that Carvajal’s interest in me was real, that he had some genuine use for me in his lonely life. To be my guide, to be a father-surrogate to me, to pour into me, in the remaining months of his time, such knowledge as he was able to impart.

  In any event I had real use for him. I was going to have him help me make Paul Quinn President

  Knowing that Carvajal couldn’t see as far as next year’s election was a drawback, but not necessarily a major one. Events as big as the presidential succession have deep roots; decisions taken now would govern the political twists and turns of the years ahead. Carvajal might already be in possession of sufficient data about die coming year to enable Quinn to construct alliances that would sweep him to the 2004 nomination. Such was my obsession that I intended to manipulate Carvajal for Quinn’s benefit. By cunning question and answer I might be able to pry vital information out of the little man.

  18

  It was a troublesome week. On the political front the news was all bad. New Democrats everywhere were falling all over themselves to pledge their support to Senator Kane, and Kane, instead of keeping his vice- presidential options open in the traditional manner of front-running politicians, felt so secure that he cheerfully told a press conference that he would like to see Socorro share the ticket with him. Quinn, who had begun to gain a national following after the oil-gellation thing, abruptly ceased to matter to party leaders west of the Hudson River. Invitations to speak stopped coming in, the requests for autographed photos dried to a trickle—trifling signs, but significant ones. Quinn knew what was going on, and he wasn’t happy about it.

  “How did it happen so fast, this Kane-Socorro tie-up?” he demanded. “One day I was the great white hope of the party, the next all the clubhouse doors were slamming in my face.” He gave us the famous intense Quinn stare, eyes clicking from one man to another, searching out the one who somehow had failed him. His presence was as overwhelming-as ever; the presence of his disappointment was almost intolerably painful.

  Mardikian had no answers for him. Neither did Lombroso. What could I say? That I had had the clues and had fumbled them? I took refuge behind a shrug and a “that’s politics” alibi. I was being paid to come up with reasonable hunches, not to function as an all-out psychic. “Wait,” I promised him. “New patterns are shaping up. Give me a month and I’ll have all of next year mapped out for you.”

  “I’ll settle for the next six weeks,” Quinn said grumpily.

  His annoyance subsided after a couple of tense days. He was too busy with local problems, of which there were suddenly a great many—the traditional hot-weather social unrest that hits New York every summer like a cloud of mosquitoes—to fret very long about a nomination he hadn’t actually wanted to win.

  It was a week of domestic problems, too. Sundara’s ever-deepening involvement with the Transit Creed was beginning to get to me. Her behavior now was as wild, as unpredictable, as motiveless as Carvajal’s; but they were coming to their crazy randomness from opposite directions, Carvajal’s behavior governed by blind obedience to an inexplicable revelation, Sundara’s by the desire to break free of all pattern and structure.

  Whim reigned. The day I went to see Carvajal, she quietly went over to the Municipal Building to apply for a prostitute’s license. It took her the better part of the afternoon, what with the medical exam, the union interview, the photography and fingerprinting, and all the rest of the bureaucratic intricacies. When I came home, my head full of Carvajal, she triumphantly flourished the little laminated card that made it legal for her to sell her body anywhere in the five boroughs.

  “My God,” I said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “You just stood there in line like any twenty-dollar hooker out of Vegas?”

  “Should I have used political influence to get my card?”

  “What if some reporter had seen you down there, though?”

  “So?”

  “The wife of Lew Nichols, special administrative assistant to Mayor Quinn, joining the whores’ union?”

  “Do you think I’m the only married woman in that union?”

  “I don’t mean that I’m thinking in terms of potential scandal, Sundara.”

  “Prostitution is a legal activity, and regulated prostitution is generally recognized as having social benefits which—”

  “It’s legal in New York City,” I said. “Not in Kankakee. Not in Tallahassee. Not in Sioux City. One of these days Quinn’s going to be looking for votes in those places and others like them, maybe, and some wise guy will dig up the information that one of Quinn’s closest advisers is married to a woman who sells her body in a public brothel, and—”

  “Am I supposed to govern my life by Quinn’s need to conform to the morality of small-town voters?” she asked, dark eyes blazing, color glowing under the darkness of her cheeks.

  “Do you want to be a whore, Sundara?”

  “Prostitute is the term that the union leadership prefers to use.”

  “Prostitute isn’t any prettier than whore. Aren’t you satisfied with the arrangements we’ve been making? Why do you want to sell yourself?”

  “What I want to be,” she said icily, “is a free human being, released from all constricting ego attachments.”

  “And you’ll get there through prostitution?”

  “Prostitutes learn to dismantle their egos. Prostitutes exist only to serve the needs of others. A week or two in a city brothel will teach me how to subordinate the demands of my ego to the needs of those who come to me.”

  “You could become a nurse. You could become a masseuse. You could—”

  “I chose what I chose.”

  “And that’s what you’re going to do? Spend the next week or two in a city brothel?”

  “Probably.”

  “Did Catalina Yarber suggest this?”

  “I thought of it myself,” said Sundara solemnly. Her eyes flashed fire. We were a
t the edge of the worst quarrel of our life together, a straight I-forbid-this/don’t-you- give-me-orders clash. I trembled. I pictured Sundara, sleek and elegant, Sundara whom all men and many women desired, punching the timeclock in one of those grim sterile municipal cubicles, Sundara standing at a sink swabbing her loins with antiseptic lotions, Sundara on her narrow cot with her knees pulled up to her breasts, servicing some stubble-faced sweat-stinking clod while an endless line waited, tickets in hand, at her door. No. I couldn’t swallow it. Four-group, six-group, ten-group, whatever kind of communal sex she liked, yes, but not n-group, not infinity-group, not offering her precious tender body to every hideous misfit in New York City who had the price of admission. For an instant I really was tempted to rise up in old-fashioned husbandly wrath and tell her to drop all this foolishness, or else. But of course that was impossible. So I said nothing, while chasms opened between us. We were on separate islands in a stormy sea, borne away from each other by mighty surging currents, and I was unable even to shout across the widening strait, unable even to reach toward her with futile hands. Where had it gone, the oneness that had been ours for a few years? Why was the strait growing wider?

  “Go to your whorehouse, then,” I muttered, and left the apartment in a blind wild unstochastic frenzy of anger and fear.

  Instead of registering at a brothel, though, Sundara podded to JFK airport and boarded a rocket bound for India. She bathed in the Ganges at one of the Benares ghats, spent an hour unsuccessfully searching for her family’s ancestral neighborhood in Bombay, had a curry dinner at Green’s Hotel, and caught the next rocket home. Her pilgrimage covered forty hours in toto and cost her exactly forty dollars an hour, a symmetry that failed to lighten my mood. I had the good sense not to make an issue of it. In any case I was helpless; Sundara was a free being and growing more free every day, and it was her privilege to consume her own money on anything she chose, even crazy overnight excursions to India. I was careful not to ask her, in the days following her return, whether she planned actually to use her new prostitute’s license. Perhaps she already had. I preferred not to know.