The Stochastic Man Read online

  19

  A week after my visit to Carvajal he phoned to ask if I cared to have lunch with him the next day. So I met him, at his suggestion, at the Merchants and Shippers Club down in the financial district.

  The venue surprised me. Merchants and Shippers is one of those venerable Wall Street watering holes populated exclusively by high-echelon brokers and bankers on a members-only basis, and when I say exclusively I mean that even Bob Lombroso, who is a tenth-generation American and very much a power on the Street, is tacitly barred from membership by his Judaism and chooses not to make a fuss about it. As in all such places, wealth alone isn’t enough to get you in: you must be clubbable, a congenial and decorous man of the right ancestry who went to the right schools and belongs to the right firm. So far as I could see, Carvajal had nothing going for him along those lines. His richesse was nouveau and he was by nature an outsider, with none of the required prep-school background and high corporate affiliations. How had he managed to wangle a membership?

  “I inherited it,” he told me smugly as we settled into cozy, resilient well-upholstered chairs beside a window sixty floors above the turbulent street. “One of my forefathers was a founding member, in 1823. The charter provides that the eleven founding memberships descend automatically to the eldest sons of eldest sons, world without end. Some very disreputable sorts have marred the sanctity of the organization because of that clause.” He flashed a sudden and surprisingly wicked grin. “I come here about once every five years. You’ll notice I’ve worn my best suit.”

  Indeed he had—a pleated gold and green herringbone doublet that was perhaps a decade past its prime but still had far more glitter and dash than the rest of his dim and fusty wardrobe. Carvajal, in fact, seemed considerably transformed today, more animated, more vigorous, even playful, distinctly younger than the bleak and ashen man I had come to know.

  I said, “I didn’t realize you had ancestors.”

  “There were Carvajals in the New World long before the Mayflower set out for Plymouth. We were very important in Florida in the early eighteenth century. When the English annexed Florida in 1763, one branch of the family moved to New York, and I think there was a time when we owned half the waterfront and most of the Upper West Side. But we were wiped out in the Panic of 1837 and I’m the first member of the family in a century and a half who’s risen above genteel poverty. But even in the worst times we kept up our hereditary membership in the club.” He gestured at the splendid redwood- paneled walls, the gleaming chrome-trimmed windows, the discreet recessed lighting. All about us sat titans of industry and finance, making and unmaking empires between drinks. Carvajal said, “I’ll never forget the first time my father brought me here for cocktails. I was about eighteen, so that would be, say, 1957. The club hadn’t moved into this building yet—it was still over on Broad Street in a cobwebbed nineteenth-century place—and we came in, my father and I, in our twenty-dollar suits and our wool neckties, and everyone looked like a senator to me, even the waiters, but no one sneered at us, no one patronized us. I had my first martini and my first filet mignon, and it was like an excursion to Vahalla, you know, or to Versailles, to Xanadu. A visit to a strange dazzling world where everyone was rich and powerful and magnificent. And as I sat at the huge old oak table across from my father a vision came to me, I began to see, I saw myself as an old man, the man I am today, dried out, with a fringe of gray hair here and there, the elderly self that I had already come to know and recognize, and that older me was sitting in a room that was truly opulent, a room of sleek lines and brilliantly imaginative furnishings, in fact this very room where we are now, and I was sharing a table with a much younger man, a tall, strongly built, dark-haired man, who leaned forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way, listening to my every word as if he were trying to memorize it. Then the vision passed and I was with my father again, and he was asking me if I was all right, and I tried to pretend it was the martini hitting me all at once that had made my eyes glaze over and my face go slack, for I wasn’t much of a drinker even then. And I wondered if what I had seen was a kind of resonant counterimage of my father and me at the club, that is, I had seen my older self bringing my own son to the Merchants and Shippers Club of the distant future. For several years I speculated about who my wife would be and what my son would be like, and then I came to know that there would be no wife and no son. And the years went by and here we are, and there you sit opposite me, leaning forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way—”

  A shiver rippled along my backbone. “You saw me here with you, more than forty years ago?”

  He nodded nonchalantly and in the same gesture swung around to summon a waiter, stabbing the air with his forefinger as imperiously as though he were J. P. Morgan. The waiter hurried to Carvajal’s side and greeted him obsequiously by name. Carvajal ordered a martini for me —because he had seen it long ago?—and dry sherry for himself.

  “They treat you courteously here,” I remarked.

  “It’s a point of honor for them to treat every member as if he’s the Czar’s cousin,” Carvajal said. “What they say about me in private is probably less flattering. My membership is going to die with me, and I imagine the club will be relieved that no more shabby little Carvajals will deface the premises.”

  The drinks arrived almost at once. Solemnly we dipped glasses at each other in a perfunctory vestigial toast.

  “To the future,” Carvajal said, “the radiant, beckoning future,” and broke into hoarse laughter.

  “You’re in lively spirits today.”

  “Yes, I feel bounder than I have in years. A second springtime for the old man, eh? Waiter! Waiter!”

  Again the waiter hustled over. To my astonishment Carvajal now ordered cigars, selecting two of the most costly from the tray the cigar girl brought. Once more the wicked grin. To me he said, “Are you supposed to save these things for after the meal? I think I want mine right away.”

  “Go ahead. Who’ll stop you?”

  He lit up, and I joined him. His ebullience was disconcerting and almost frightening. At our other two meetings Carvajal had appeared to be drawing on reservoirs of strength long since overdrawn, but today he seemed speedy, frantic, full of a wild energy obtained from some hideous source: I speculated about mysterious drugs, transfusions of bull’s blood, illicit transplants of organs ripped from unwilling young victims.

  He said suddenly, “Tell me, Lew, have you ever had moments of second sight?”

  “I think so. Nothing as vivid as what you must experience, of course. But I think many of my hunches are based on flickers of real vision—subliminal flickers that come and go so fast I don’t acknowledge them.”

  “Very likely.”

  “And dreams,” I said. “Often in dreams I have premonitions and presentiments that turn out to be correct. As though the future is floating toward me, knocking at the gates of my slumbering consciousness.”

  “The sleeping mind is much more receptive to things of that sort, yes.”

  “But what I perceive in dreams comes to me in symbolic form, a metaphor rather than a movie. Just before Gilmartin was caught I dreamed he was being hauled before a firing squad, for example. As though the right information was reaching me, but not in literal one-to-one terms.”

  “No,” Carvajal said. “The message came accurately and literally, but your mind scrambled and coded it, because you were asleep and unable to operate your receptors properly. Only the waking rational mind can process and integrate such messages reliably. But most people who are awake reject the messages altogether, and when they are asleep their minds do mischief to what comes in.”

  “You think many people get messages from the future?”

  “I think everyone does,” Carvajal said vehemently. “The future isn’t the inaccessible, intangible realm it’s thought to be. But so few admit its existence except as an abstract concept. So few let its messages reach them!” A weird intensity had come into his expression. He lowe
red his voice and said, “The future isn’t a verbal construct. It’s a place with an existence of its own. Right now, as we sit here, we are also there, there plus one, there plus two, there plus n—an infinity of theres, all of them at once, both previous to and later than our current position along our time line. Those other positions are neither more nor less ‘real’ than this one. They’re merely in a place that happens not to be the place where the seat of our perceptions is currently located.”

  “But occasionally our perceptions—”

  “Cross over,” Carvajal said. “Wander into other segments of the time line. Pick up events or moods or scraps of conversation that don’t belong to ‘now.’“

  “Do our perceptions wander,” I asked, “or is it the events themselves that are insecurely anchored in their own ‘now’?”

  He shrugged. “Does that matter? There’s no way of knowing.”

  You don’t care how it works? Your whole life has been shaped by this and you simply don’t—”

  “I told you,” Carvajal said, “that I have many theories. So many, indeed, that they tend to cancel one another out. Lew, Lew, do you think I don’t care? I’ve spent all my life toying to understand my gift, my power, and I can answer any of your questions with a dozen answers, each as plausible as the next. The two-times-lines theory, for example. Have I told you about that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.” Coolly he produced a pen and drew two firm lines parellel to each other across the tablecloth. He labeled the ends of one line X and Y, the other X' and Y'. “This line that runs from X to Y is the course of history as we know it. It begins with the creation of the universe at X and ends with thermodynamic equilibrium at Y, all right? And these are some significant dates along its path.” With fussy little strokes he sketched in crossbars, beginning at the side of the table closer to himself and proceeding toward me. “This is the era of Neanderthal man. This is the time of Jesus. This is 1939, the start of World War Two. Also the start of Martin Carvajal, by the way. When were you born? Around 1970?”

  “1966.”

  “1966. All right. This is you, 1966. And this is the present year, 1999. Let’s say you’re going to live to be ninety. This is the year of your death, then, 2056. So much for line X-Y. Now this other line, X'-Y'—that’s also the course of history in this universe, the very same course of history denoted by the other line. Only it runs the other way.”

  “What?”

  “Why not? Suppose there are many universes, each independent of all the others, each containing its unique set of suns and planets on which events occur unique to that universe. An infinity of universes, Lew. Is there any logical reason why time has to flow in the same direction in all of them?”

  “Entropy,” I mumbled. “The laws of thermodynamics. Time’s arrow. Cause and effect.”

  “I won’t quarrel with any of those ideas. So far as I know they’re all valid within a closed system,” said Carvajal. “But one closed system has no entropic responsibilities relative to another closed system, does it? Time can tick from A to Z in one universe and from Z to A in another, but only an observer outside both universes is going to know that, so long as within each universe the daily flow runs from cause to effect and not the other way. Will you admit the logic of that?”

  I shut my eyes a moment. “All right. We have an infinity of universes all separate from one another, and the direction of time-flow in any of them may seem topsyturvy relative to all the others. So?”

  “In an infinity of anything, all possible cases exist, yes?”

  “Yes. By definition.”

  “Then you’ll also agree,” Carvajal said, “that out of that infinity of unconnected universes there may be one that’s identical to ours in all particulars, except only the direction of its flow of time relative to the flow of time here.”

  “I’m not sure I grasp—”

  “Look,” he said impatiently, pointing to the line that ran across the tablecloth from X' to Y'. “Here’s another universe, side by side with our own. Everything that happens in it is something that also happens in ours, down to the most minute detail. But in this one the creation is at Y’ instead of X and the heat death of the universe is at X' instead of Y. Down here”—he sketched a crossbar across the second line near my end of the table— “is the era of Neanderthal man. Here’s the Crucifixion. Here’s 1939, 1966, 1999, 2056. The same events, the same key dates, but running back to front. That is, they look back to front if you happen to live in this universe and can manage to get a peek into the other one. Over there, naturally, everything seems to be running in the right direction.” Carvajal extended the 1939 and 1999 crossbars on the X-Y line until they intersected the X- Y' line, and did the same for the 1999 and 1939 crossbars on the second line. Then he bracketed both sets of crossbars by connecting their ends, to form a pattern like this:

  A waiter passing by glanced at what Carvajal was doing to the tablecloth and, coughing slightly, moved on, saying nothing, keeping his face rigid. Carvajal didn’t seem to notice. He continued, “Let’s suppose, now, that a person is bora in the X to Y universe who is able, God knows why, to see occasionally into the X'-Y' universe. Me. Here I am, going from 1939 to 1999 in X-Y, peeking across now and then into X'-Y' and observing the events of their years 1939 to 1999, which are the same as ours except that they’re flowing by in the reverse order, so at the time of my birth here everything in my entire X-Y lifetime has already happened in X'-Y’. When my consciousness connects with the consciousness of my other self over there, I catch him reminiscing about his past, which coincidentally is my future.”

  “Very neat.”

  “Yes. The ordinary person confined to a single universe can roam his memory at will, wandering around freely in his own past. But I have access to the memory of someone who’s living in the opposite direction, which allows me to ‘remember’ the future as well as the past. That is, if the two-time-lines theory is correct.”

  “And is it?”

  “How would I know?” Carvajal asked. “It’s only a plausible operational hypothesis to explain what happens when I see. But how could I confirm it?”

  I said, after a time, “The things you see—do they come to you in reverse chronological order? The future unrolling in a continuous scroll, that sort of thing?”

  “No. Never. No more than your memories form a single continuous scroll. I get fitful glimpses, fragments of scenes, sometimes extended passages that have an apparent duration of ten or fifteen minutes or more, but always a random jumble, never any linear sequence, never anything at all consecutive. I learned to find the larger pattern myself, to remember sequences and hook them together in a likely order. It was like learning to read Babylonian poetry by deciphering cuneiform inscriptions on broken, scrambled bricks. Gradually I worked out clues to guide me in my reconstructions of the future: this is how my face will look when I’m forty, when I’m fifty, when I’m sixty, these are clothes I wore from 1965 to 1973, this is the period when I had a mustache, when my hair was dark, oh, a whole host of little references and associations and footnotes, which eventually became so familiar to me that I could see any scene, even the most brief, and place it within a matter of weeks or even days. Not easy at first, but second nature by this time.”

  “Are you seeing right now?”

  “No,” he said. “It takes effort to induce the state. It’s rather like & trance.” A wintry look swept his face. “At its most powerful it’s a kind of double vision, one world overlying the other, so that I can’t be entirely sure which world I’m inhabiting and which is die world I see. Even after all these years I haven’t fully adjusted to that disorientation, that confusion.” He may have shuddered then. “Usually it’s not so intense. For which I’m grateful.”

  “Could you show me what it’s like?”

  “Here? Now?”

  “If you would.”

  He studied me a long moment. He moistened his lips, compressed them, frowned, considered. Then abrup
tly his expression changed, his eyes becoming glazed and fixed as though he were watching a motion picture from the last row of a huge theater, or perhaps as if he were entering deep meditation. His pupils dilated and the aperture, once widened, remained constant regardless of the fluctuations of light as people walked past our table. His face showed evidence of great strain. His breathing was slow, hoarse, and regular. He sat perfectly still; he seemed altogether absent. A minute, maybe, elapsed; for me it was unen- durably long. Then his fixity shattered like a falling icicle. He relaxed, shoulders slumping forward; color came to his cheeks in a quick pumping burst; his eyes watered and grew dull; he reached with a shaky hand for his water glass and gulped its contents. He said nothing. I dared not speak.

  At length Carvajal said, “How long was I gone?”

  “Only a few moments. It seemed a much longer time than it actually was.”

  “It was half an hour for me. At least.”

  “What did you see?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t seen before. The same scenes recur, you know, five, ten, two dozen times. As they do in memory. But memory alters things. The scenes I see never change.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “It was nothing,” he said offhandedly. “Something that’s going to happen next spring. You were there. That’s not surprising, is it? We’re going to spend a lot of time together, you and I, in the months to come.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “Watching.”

  “Watching what?”

  “Watching me,” Carvajal said. He smiled, and it was a skeletal smile, a terrible bleak smile, a smile like all the smiles he had smiled that first day in Lombroso’s office. All the unexpected buoyancy of twenty minutes ago had gone out of him. I wished I hadn’t asked for the demonstration; I felt as though I’d talked a dying man into dancing a jig. But after a brief interval of embarrassing silence he appeared to recover. He took a swaggering pull at his cigar, he finished his sherry, he sat straight again. “That’s better,” he said. “It can be exhausting sometimes. Suppose we ask for the menu now, eh?”