The Stochastic Man Read online

  25

  I phoned Carvajal. “I have to talk to you,” I said.

  We met along the Hudson Promenade near Tenth Street. The weather was ominous, dark and moist and warm, the sky a threatening greenish yellow, with black-edged thunderheads piled high over New Jersey and a sense of impending apocalypse pervading everything. Shafts of fierce off-color sunlight, more gray-blue than gold, burned through a filtering layer of murky clouds clustered like a crumpled blanket in mid-sky. Preposterous weather, operatic weather, a noisy overstated backdrop for our conversation.

  Carvajal’s eyes had an unnatural gleam. He looked taller, younger, jazzing along the promenade on the balls of his feet. Why did he seem to gain strength between each of our meetings?

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “I want to be able to see.”

  “See, then. I’m not stopping you, am I?”

  “Be serious,” I begged.

  “I always am. How can I help you?”

  “Teach me to do it.”

  “Did I ever tell you it could be taught?”

  “You said everyone has the gift but very few know how to use it. All right. Show me how to use it.”

  “Using it can perhaps be learned,” Carvajal said, “but it can’t be taught.”

  “Please.”

  “Why so eager?”

  “Quinn needs me,” I told him abjectly. “I want to help him. To become President.”

  “So?”

  “I want to help him. I need to see.”

  “But you can project trends so well, Lew!”

  “Not enough. Not enough.”

  Thunder boomed over Hoboken. A cold damp wind out of the west stirred the clotted clouds. Nature’s scene-setting was becoming grotesquely, comically excessive.

  Carvajal said, “Suppose I told you to give me complete control over your life. Suppose I asked you to let me make every decision for you, to shape all your actions to my orders, to put your existence entirely into my hands, and I said that if you did that, there’d be a chance that you’d learn how to see. A chance. What would your reply be?”

  “I’d say that it’s a deal.”

  “Seeing may not be as wonderful as you think it is, you know. Right now you look upon it as the magic key to everything. What if it turns out to be nothing but a burden and an obstacle? What if it’s a curse?”

  “I don’t think it will be.”

  “How can you know?”

  “A power like that can be a tremendous positive force. I can’t see it as anything but beneficial for me. I can see its potential negative side, sure, but still—a curse? No.”

  “What if it is?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll take that risk. Has it been a curse for you?”

  Carvajal paused and looked up at me, eyes searching mine. This was the appropriate moment for lightning to crackle across the heavens, for drum rolls of terrible thunder to sound up and down the Hudson, for tempestuous rain to slash across the promenade. None of that happened. Abruptly, the clouds directly overhead parted and sweet soft yellow sunlight enveloped the dark storm- frowns. So much for nature as a setter of scene.

  “Yes,” Carvajal said quietly. “A curse. If anything, yes, a curse, a curse.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What does that matter to me?”

  “Even if it’s been a curse for you, I don’t think it would for me.”

  “Very courageous, Lew. Or very foolish.”

  “Both. Nevertheless, I want to be able to see.”

  “Are you willing to become my disciple?”

  Strange, jarring word. “What would that involve?”

  “I’ve already told you. You give yourself to me on a no-questions-asked, no-results-guaranteed basis.”

  “How will that help me to see?”

  “No questions asked,” he said. “Just give yourself to me, Lew.”

  “Done.”

  The lightning came. The skies opened and a crazy drenching downpour battered us with implausible fury.

  26

  A day and a half later. “The worst of it,” Carvajal said, “is seeing your own death. That’s the moment when the life goes out of you, not when you actually die, but when you have to see it.”

  “Is that the curse you were talking about?”

  “Yes. That’s the curse. That’s what killed me, Lew, long before my proper time. I was almost thirty years old, the first time I saw it. I’ve seen it many times since. I know the date, the hour, the place, the circumstances. I’ve lived through it again and again, the beginning, the middle, the end, the darkness, the silence. And once I saw it, life became nothing more than a meaningless puppet show for me.”

  “What was the worst part?” I asked. “Knowing when, knowing how?”

  “Knowing that,” he said.

  “That you would die at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand. I mean, it must be disturbing, yes, to watch yourself die, to see your own finish as if on a newsreel, but there can’t be any fundamental element of surprise in it, can there? I mean, death is inevitable and we all know it from the time we’re little children.”

  “Do we?”

  “Of course we do.”

  “Do you think you’ll die, Lew?”

  I blinked a couple of times. “Naturally.”

  “Are you absolutely convinced of that?”

  “I don’t get you. Axe you implying I have delusions of immortality?”

  Carvajal smiled serenely. “Everybody does, Lew. When you’re a boy your pet goldfish dies, or your dog, and you say, Well, goldfish don’t live long, dogs don’t live long, and that’s how you slough off your first experience of death. It doesn’t apply to you. The boy next door falls off his bicycle and fractures his skull. Well, you say, accidents happen, but they don’t prove anything; some people are more careless than others, and I’m one of the careful ones. Your grandmother dies. She was old and sick for years, you say, she let herself get too heavy, she grew up in a generation when preventive medicine was still primitive, she didn’t know how to take care of her body. It won’t happen to me, you say. It won’t happen to me.”

  “My parents are dead. My sister died. I had a turtle that died. Death isn’t something remote and unreal in my life. No, Carvajal, I believe in death. I accept the fact of death. I know I’m going to die.”

  “You don’t. Not really.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “I know how people are. I know how I used to be, before I saw myself die, and what I became afterward. Not many have had that experience, have been changed as I’ve been changed. Perhaps no one else, ever. Listen to me, Lew. Nobody genuinely and fully believes he’s going to die, whatever he may think he thinks. You may accept it up here on top, but you don’t accept it on the cellular level, down on the level of metabolism and mitosis. Your heart hasn’t missed a beat in thirty-odd years and it knows it never will. Your body goes merrily along like a three-shift factory manufacturing corpuscles, lymph, semen, saliva, round the clock, and so far as your body knows it always will. And your brain, it perceives itself as the center of a great drama whose star is Lew Nichols, the whole universe just a giant collection of props, everything that happens happening around you, in relation to you, with you as the pivot and fulcrum, and if you go to somebody’s wedding the name of that scene isn’t Dick and Judy Get Married, no, it’s Lew Goes to Somebody’s Wedding, and if a politician gets elected it isn’t Paul Quinn Becomes President, it’s Lew Experiences Paul Quinn Becoming President, and if a star explodes the headline isn’t Betelgeuse Goes Nova but Lew’s Universe Loses a Star, and so on, the same for everyone, everyone the hero of the great drama of existence, Dick and Judy each in starring roles in their own heads, Paul Quinn, maybe even Betelgeuse, and each of you knows that if you were to die the whole universe would have to wink out like a switched-off light, and that isn’t possible, so therefore you aren’t going to die. You know you’re the one exception. Hol
ding the whole business together by your continued existence. All those others, Lew, you realize they’re going to die; sure, they’re the bit parts, the spear carriers, the script calls for them all to vanish along the way, but not you, oh, no, not you! Isn’t that how it truly is, Lew, down in the basement of your soul, down in those mysterious levels you visit only now and then?”

  I had to grin. “Maybe it is, after all. But—”

  “It is. It’s the same way for everyone. It was for me. Well, people do die, Lew. Some die at twenty and some die at a hundred and twenty, and it’s always a surprise. They stand there seeing the big blackness opening up for them, and as they go into the hole they say, My God, I was wrong after all, it’s really going to happen to me, even to me! What a shock that is, what a terrific blow to the ego, to discover that you aren’t the unique exception you thought you were. But it’s comforting, right up until that moment arrives, to cling to the idea that maybe you’ll sneak through, maybe you’ll somehow be exempt. Everybody has that scrap of comfort to live by, Lew. Everyone except me.”

  “You found seeing it as bad as that?”

  “It demolished me. It stripped me of that one big illusion, Lew, that secret hope of immortality, that keeps us going. Of course, I had to keep going, thirty years or so more, because I could see that it wouldn’t happen until I was an old man. But the knowledge put a wall around my life, a boundary, an unbreakable seal. I wasn’t much more than a boy and I had already had the real summing up, the period at the end of the sentence. I couldn’t count on enjoying all of eternity, the way others think they do. I had only my thirty-odd years left to go. Knowing that about yourself constricts your life, Lew. It limits your options.”

  “It isn’t easy for me to understand why it should have that effect.”

  “Eventually you’ll understand.”

  “Maybe it won’t be that way for me, when I come to know.”

  “Ah!” Carvajal cried. “We all think we’ll be the exception!”

  27

  He told me, the next time we met, how his death would come to pass. He had less than a year to live, he said. It was going to happen in the spring of 2000, somewhere between the tenth of April and the twenty-fifth of May; although he claimed to know the exact date even down to the time of day, he was unwilling to be any more specific about it than that.

  “Why withhold it from me?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t care to be burdened with your private tensions and anticipations,” Carvajal told me bluntly. “I don’t want you showing up that day knowing it is the day, and arriving full of irrelevant emotional confusion.”

  “Am I going to be there?” I asked, astounded.

  “Certainly.”

  “Will you tell me where it’ll happen?”

  “At my apartment,” he said. “You and I will be discussing something having to do with a problem troubling you then. The doorbell will ring. I’ll answer it and a man will force his way into the house, an armed man with red hair, who—”

  “Wait a minute. You once told me that no one had ever bothered you in that neighborhood and no one ever would.”

  “No one who lives there,” said Carvajal. “This man will be a stranger. He has been given my address by mistake—he has the wrong apartment—and expects to be picking up a consignment of drugs, something that sniffers use. When I tell him I don’t have any drugs, he’ll refuse to believe me; he’ll think it’s some kind of doublecross and will start to get violent, waving the gun around, threatening me.”

  “And what am I doing while all this is going on?”

  “Watching it.”

  “Watching? Just standing there with my arms folded like a spectator?”

  “Just watching,” Carvajal said. “Like a spectator.” There was a sharp edge to his tone. As if he were giving me an order: You will do nothing throughout this scene. You will remain entirely out of it, off to one side, a mere onlooker.

  “I could hit him, with a lamp. I could try to grab the gun.”

  “You won’t.”

  “All right,” I said. “What happens?”

  “Somebody knocks at the door. It’s one of my neighbors, who’s heard the commotion and is worried about me. The gunman panics. Thinks it’s the police, or maybe a rival gang. He fires three times; then he breaks a window and disappears down the fire escape. The bullets strike me in the chest, the arm, and the side of my head. I linger for a minute or so. No last words. You’re not harmed at all.”

  “And then?”

  Carvajal laughed. “And then? And then? How would I know? I’ve told you: I see as though through a periscope. The periscope reaches only as far as that moment, and no farther. Perception ends for me there.”

  How calm he was about it!

  I said, “Is this the thing you saw the day you and I had lunch at the Merchants and Shippers Club?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sat there watching yourself get gunned down, and then casually asked to look at the menu?”

  “The scene was nothing new to me.”

  “How often have you seen it?” I asked.

  “No idea. Twenty times, fifty, maybe a hundred. Like a recurring dream.”

  “A recurring nightmare.”

  “One gets used to it. It ceases to carry much emotional charge after the first dozen viewings or so.”

  “It’s nothing but a movie to you? An old Cagney flick on the late-night television?”

  “Something like that,” said Carvajal. “The scene itself becomes trivial, a bore, stale, predictable. It’s the implications that linger, that never lose their power over me, while the details themselves have become unimportant.”

  “You just accept it. You won’t try to slam the door in the man’s face when the moment comes. You won’t let me hide behind the door and club him down. You won’t ask the police to put you under special guard that day.”

  “Naturally not. What good would any of that do?”

  “As an experiment—”

  He pursed his lips. He looked annoyed at my stubborn return to a theme that was absurd to him. “What I see is what will happen. The time for experiments was fifty years ago, and the experiments failed. No, we won’t interfere, Lew. We’ll play our parts obediently, you and I, You know we will.”

  28

  Under the new regime I conferred with Carvajal daily, sometimes several times a day, usually by telephone, transmitting to him the latest inside political information—strategies, data projections, anything that might seem even peripherally pertinent to the business of getting Paul Quinn into the White House. The reason for filing all this stuff in Carvajal’s mind was the periscope effect: he couldn’t see anything that his consciousness would not ultimately somehow perceive, and what he couldn’t see he couldn’t pass along to me. What I was doing, then, was phoning messages to myself out of the future—messages relayed by way of Carvajal. The things I told him today were of course worthless for this purpose, since present-me already knew them; but what I would tell him a month from now might prove to be of value to me today, and, since the information had to get into the system at some point, I began the input flow here, feeding Carvajal now the data he had seen months or even years ago. Over the remaining year of Carvajal’s life he would become a unique repository of future political events. (In fact he already was that repository, but now I had to follow through by making certain he received the information that we both knew he was going to receive. There are paradoxes inherent in all this but I prefer not to examine them too closely.)

  And Carvajal, day by day, flowed data back to me—mainly things having to do with the long-range shaping of Quinn’s destinies. These I passed along to Haig Mardikian, usually, though some fell into the domain of George Missakian—media relations—and some, having to do with financial matters, went to Lombroso, and a few I took directly to Quinn himself. My Carvajal-derived memos in a typical week included items like this:

  Invite Commun. Devel. Commissioner Spreckels to lunch. Sug
gest possibil. of judgeship.

  Attend wedding, son of Sen. Wilkom of Mass.

  Tell Con Ed, confidential, no hope of okay for proposed Flatbush fusion plant.

  Gov’s brother—name him to Triboro Authority. Defuse nepotism issue in advance with jokes at press conf.

  Call in Assembly Spkr. Feinberg for gentle arm-twisting in re NY-Mass-Conn pod-hookup bill.

  Position papers: libraries, drugs, interstate population transfer.

  Tour Garment District Historic Site with new Israeli consul-general. Include in party: Leibman, Berkowitz, Ms. Weisbard, Rabbi Dubin, also Msgr. O’Neill.

  Sometimes I understood why my future self was recommending a given course of action to Quinn, and at other times I was altogether baffled. (Why, say, tell him to veto an innocuous City Council proposal reopening a no-parking zone south of Canal Street? How would that help him become President?) Carvajal offered no aid. He was merely passing along tips he was getting from the me of eight or nine months from now. Since he’d be dead before any of these things could manifest their ultimate implications, he had no idea what effect they might produce, and could hardly have cared less. He gave everything to me on a bland take-it-or-leave-it basis. Mine not to reason why. Follow the script, Lew, follow the script.

  I followed the script.

  My vicarious political ambitions were beginning to take on the character of a divine mission: using Carvajal’s gift and Quinn’s charisma, I would be able to reshape the world into a Better Place of unspecified ideal character. I felt the throbbing conduits of power in my grasp. Whereas before I had seen Quinn’s presidency as a goal worth pursuing for its own sake, now I became practically Utopian in my plans for a world guided by the ability to see. No longer did I think in terms of manipulation, of redeployment of motivations, of political machination, except in service of the higher end toward which I imagined myself working.