The Stochastic Man Read online

  There were definite increments of wildness from hour to hour. In the bars nudity was still uncommon by nine, but by half past there was bare sweaty flesh everywhere, jiggling breasts, waggling, buttocks, clap hands and kick, everyone join in a circle. It was half past nine before I saw anyone screwing in the streets, but outdoor fornication was widespread by ten. An undercurrent of violence had been present all evening—smashing of windows, shooting out of streetlamps—but it picked up strength rapidly after ten: there were fistfights, some genial, some murderous, and at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth there was a mob battle going on, a hundred men and women clubbing at each other in what looked like a random way, and motorists were having noisy disputes everywhere, and it seemed to me that some drivers were deliberately ramming their cars into others for the sheer destructive fun of it. Were there murders? Most certainly. Rapes? By the thousand. Mutilations and other monstrosities? I have no doubt.

  And where were the police? I saw them, now and then, some trying desperately to hold back the tide of disorder, others giving in and joining it, policemen with flushed faces and glazed eyes happily wading into fights and escalating them to savage warfare, policemen buying drugs from the corner peddlers, policemen stripped to the waist groping naked girls in bars, policemen raucously smashing windshields with their nightsticks. The general craziness was contagious. After a week of apocalyptic build-up, a week of grotesque tension, no one could hold too tightly to his sanity.

  Midnight found me in Times Square. The old custom, long since abandoned by a city in decay: thousands, hundreds of thousands, crammed shoulder to shoulder between Forty-sixth and Forty-second Streets, singing, shouting, kissing, swaying. Suddenly the hour struck. Startling searchlights speared the sky. The summits of office towers turned radiant with brilliant floodlights. The year 2000! The year 2000! And my birthday had come! Happy birthday! Happy, happy, happy me!

  I was drunk. I was out of my mind. The universal hysteria raged in me. I found my hands grasping someone’s breasts, and squeezed, and jammed my mouth against, a mouth, and felt a hot moist body pressed tight to mine. The crowd surged and we were swept apart, and I moved on the human tide, hugging, laughing, fighting to catch my breath, leaping, falling, stumbling, nearly going down beneath a thousand pairs of feet.

  “There’s a fire!” someone yelled, and indeed flames were dancing high on a building to the west along Forty-fourth Street. Such a lovely orange hue—we began to cheer and applaud. We are all Nero tonight, I thought, and was swept onward, southward. I could no longer see the flames but the smell of smoke was spreading through the area. Bells tolled. More sirens. Chaos, chaos, chaos.

  And then I felt a sensation as of a fist pounding the back of my head, and dropped to my knees in an open space, dazed, and covered my face with my hands to ward off the next blow, but there was no next blow, only a flood of visions. Visions. A baffling torrent of images roared through my mind. I saw myself old and frayed, coughing in a hospital bed with a shining spidery lattice of medical machinery all about me; I saw myself swimming in a clear mountain pool; I saw myself battered and heaved by surf on some angry tropical shore. I peered into the mysterious interior of some vast incomprehensible crystalline mechanism. I stood at the edge of a field of lava, watching molten matter bubble and pop as on the earth’s first morning. Colors assailed me. Voices whispered to me, speaking in fragments, in pulverized bits of words and tag ends of phrases. This is a trip, I told myself, a trip, a trip, a very bad trip, but even the worst trip ends eventually, and I crouched, trembling, trying not to resist, letting the nightmare sweep through me and play itself out. It may have gone on for hours; it may have lasted only a minute. In one moment of clarity I said to myself, This is seeing, this is how it begins, like a fever, like a madness. I remember telling myself that.

  I remember vomiting, too, casting forth the evening’s mixture of liquors in quick heavy tremors, and huddling afterward near my own stinking pool, weak, shaking, unable to rise. And then came thunder, like the anger of Zeus, majestic and unanswerable. There was a great stillness after that one terrifying thunderclap. All over the city the Saturnalia was halting as New Yorkers stopped, stiffened, turned their eyes in wonder and awe to the skies. What now? Thunder on a winter night? Would the earth open and swallow us all? Would the sea rise and make an Atlantic of our playground? There came a second clap of thunder minutes after the first, but no lightning, and then, after another pause, a third, and then came rain, gentle at first, torrential in a few moments, a warm spring rain to welcome us to the year 2000. I rose uncertainly to my feet and, having remained chastely clothed all evening, stripped now, naked on Broadway at Forty-first Street, feet flat on the pavement, head upturned, letting the downpour wash the sweat and tears and weariness from me, letting it sluice my mouth to rinse me of the foul taste of vomit. It was a wondrous moment. But quickly I felt chilled. April was over; December was returning. My sex shriveled and my shoulders sagged. Shivering, I fumbled for my sodden clothes, and, sober now, drenched, miserable, timid, imagining brigands and cutpurses lurking in every alley, I began the long slow shuffle across town. The temperature seemed to plummet five degrees for every ten blocks I traversed; by the time I reached the East Side I felt I was freezing, and as I crossed Fifty-seventh Street I noticed the rain had turned to snow, and the snow was sticking, making a fine powdery dusting that covered streets and automobiles and the slumped bodies of the unconscious and the dead. It was snowing with full wintry malevolence when I reached my apartment. The time was five in the morning, January 1, A.D. 2000. I dropped my clothing on the floor and fell naked into bed, quivering, sore, and I pressed my knees to my chest and huddled there, half expecting to die before dawn. Fourteen hours passed before I awoke.

  39

  What a morning after! For me, for you, for all of New York! Not until night was beginning to fall, that first of January, was the full impact of the previous night’s wild events apparent, how many hundreds of citizens had perished in violence or in foolish misadventure or of mere exposure, how many shops had been looted, how many public monuments vandalized, how many wallets lifted, how many unwilling bodies violated. Had any city known a night like that since the sack of Byzantium? The populace had gone berserk, and no one had tried to restrain the fury, no one, not even the police. The first scattered reports had it that most of the officers of the law had joined the fun, and, as detailed investigations proceeded throughout the day, it turned out that that had in fact been the case: in the contagion of the moment the men in blue had often led rather than contained the chaos. On the late news came word that Police Commissioner Sudakis, taking personal responsibility for the debacle, had resigned. I saw him on the screen, face rigid, eyes reddened, his fury barely under control; he spoke raggedly of the shame he felt, the disgrace; he talked of the breakdown of morality, even of the decline of urban civilization; he looked like a man who had had no sleep for a week, a pitiful shattered embarrassment of a man, mumbling and coughing, and I prayed silently for the television people to have done with him and go elsewhere. Sudakis’ resignation was my own vindication, but I could take little pleasure in it. At last the scene shifted; we saw the rubble of a five-block area in Brooklyn that had been allowed to burn by absentminded firemen. Yes, yes, Sudakis has resigned. Of course. Reality is conserved; Carvajal’s infallibility is once more confirmed. Who could have anticipated such a turn of events? Not I, not Mayor Quinn, not even Sudakis; but Carvajal had.

  I waited a few days, while the city slowly returned to normal; then I phoned Lombroso at his Wall Street office. He wasn’t there, of course. I told the answering machine to program a return call at his earliest convenience. All high city officials were with the mayor at Grade Mansion virtually on a round-the-clock basis. Fires in every borough had left thousands homeless; the hospitals were stacked three tiers deep with victims of violence and accident; damage claims against the city, mainly for failure to provide proper police protection, were already in the billions and
mounting hourly. Then, too, there was the damage to the city’s public image to deal with. Since entering office Quinn had painstakingly tried to restore the reputation New York had had in the middle of the twentieth century as the nation’s most exciting, vital, stimulating city, the true capital of the planet and the center of all that was interesting, a city that was thrilling yet safe for visitors. All that had been ruined in one orgiastic night more in keeping with the nation’s familiar view of New York as a brutal, insane, ferocious, filthy zoo. So I heard nothing from Lombroso until the middle of January, when things were fairly quiet again, and by the time he called I had given up hearing from him at all.

  He told me what was going on at City Hall: the mayor, worried about the effects of the riot on his presidential hopes, was preparing a sheaf of drastic, almost Gottfriedesque, measures to maintain public order. The police shakeup would be accelerated, drug traffic would be restricted almost as severely as it had been before the liberalizations of the 1980s, an early-warning system would be put into effect to head off civic disturbances involving more than two dozen persons, et cetera, et cetera. It sounded wrongheaded to me, a rash, panicky response to a unique event, but my advice was no longer welcome and I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “What about Sudakis?” I asked.

  “He’s definitely out. Quinn refused his resignation and spent three full days trying to persuade him to stay, but Sudakis regards himself as permanently discredited here by the stuff his men did that night. He’s taken some small-town job in western Pennsylvania and he’s already gone.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean, has the accuracy of my prediction about Sudakis had any effect on Quinn’s attitude toward me?”

  “Yes,” Lombroso said. “Definitely.”

  “Is he reconsidering?”

  “He thinks you’re a sorcerer. He thinks you may have sold your soul to the devil. Literally. Literally. Underneath all the sophistication, he’s still an Irish Catholic, don’t forget. In times of stress it surfaces in him. Around City Hall you’ve become the Antichrist, Lew.”

  “Has he gone so crazy that he can’t see it might be useful to have somebody around who can tip him to things like the Sudakis resignation?”

  “No hope, Lew. Forget about working for Quinn. Put it absolutely out of your mind. Don’t think about him, don’t write letters to him, don’t try to call him, don’t have anything to do with him. You might look into the idea of leaving the city, in fact.”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  “For your own good.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Bob, are you trying to tell me I’m in danger from Quinn?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said, sounding nervous.

  “Whatever you are doing, I’m not having any. I won’t believe Quinn’s as afraid of me as you think, and I completely refuse to believe he might take some sort of action against me. It isn’t credible. I know the man. I was practically his alter ego for four years. I—”

  “Listen, Lew,” Lombroso said, “I’ve got to get off the line. You can’t imagine how much work is stacking up here.”

  “All right. Thanks for returning my call.”

  “And—Lew—”

  “Yes?”

  “It might be a good idea for you not to call me. Not even at the Wall Street number. Except in case of some dire emergency, of course. My own position with Quinn has been a little delicate ever since we tried to work that proxy deal, and now—and now—well, you understand, don’t you? I’m sure you understand.”

  40

  I understood. I have spared Lombroso the perils of further telephone calls from me. Eleven months, nearly, have passed since the day of that conversation, and in that time I haven’t spoken to him at all, not a word to the man who was my closest friend during my years in the Quinn administration. Nor have I had any contact, direct or otherwise, with Quinn himself.

  41

  In February the visions began. There had been one harbinger on the cliff at Big Sur and another in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but now they became a routine part of my daily life. None can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, the poet said, Because there is no light behind the curtain. Oh, but the light, the light, the light, the light is there! And it lit my winter days. At first the visions came over me no more often than once every twenty-four hours, and they came unasked, like epileptic fits, usually in the late afternoon or Just before midnight, signaling themselves with a glow at the back of my skull, a warmth, a tickling that would not go away. But soon I understood the techniques for invoking them, and I could summon them at will. Even then I was able to see at most once a day, with a prolonged period of recuperation required afterward. Within a few weeks, though, I became capable of entering the seeing state more readily—two or even three times a day—as if the power were a muscle that thrived with use. Eventually the interval of recuperation became minimal. Now I can turn the gift on every fifteen minutes if I feel like it. Once, experimentally, toward the early part of March, I tried it—on-off, on-off—constantly for several hours, tiring myself but not diminishing the intensity of what I saw.

  If I don’t evoke the visions at least once a day they come to me anyway, breaking through of their own accord, pouring unbidden into my mind.

  42

  I see a small red-shingled house on a country lane. The trees are in full leaf, dark green; it must be late summer. I stand by the front gate. My hair is still short and stubbly but growing in; this scene must lie not very far in the future, probably this very year. Two young men are with me, one dark-haired and slight, the other a burly red-haired one. I have no idea who they are, but the self I see is relaxed and easy with them, as if they are intimate companions. So they are close friends that I am yet to meet. I see myself taking a key from my pocket. “Let me show you the place,” I say. “I think it’s about what we need as the headquarters for the Center.”

  Snow is falling. The automobiles in the streets are bullet-shaped, snub nosed, very small, very strange to me. Overhead a kind of helicopter soars. Three paddlelike projections dangle from it, and there are loudspeakers, apparently, at the tip of each paddle. From the three speakers in unison comes a wistful bleating sound, high-pitched and gentle, emitted for a period of perhaps two seconds spaced by five-second spans of silence. The rhythm is perfectly steady, each mild bleep arriving on schedule and cutting effortlessly through the dense swirls of descending flakes. The helicopter flies slowly up Fifth Avenue at an altitude of less than 500 meters, and as it makes its bleating way northward the snow melts below its path, clearing a zone exactly as wide as the avenue.

  Sundara and I meet for cocktails at a glittering lounge hanging like the gardens of Nebuchadnezzar from the summit of some gigantic tower looming over Los Angeles. I assume it’s Los Angeles because I can make out the feathery shapes of palm trees lining the streets far beneath the window, and the architecture of the surrounding buildings is distinctly Southern Californian, and through the twilight haze there is a hint of a vast ocean not far to the west and mountains to the north. I have no idea what I’m doing in California nor how I come to be seeing Sundara there; it’s plausible that she has returned to her native city to live and I, visiting on business, have promoted a reunion. We have both changed. Her hair is streaked now with white, and her face seems leaner, less voluptuous; her eyes sparkle as before, but the gleam in them is the glint of hard-won knowledge, and not just playfulness. I am long-haked, graying, dressed with chaste ferocity in an unadorned black tunic; I look about forty-five, and I strike myself as crisp, taut, impressive, a commanding executive type, so self-possessed that I awe myself. Are there signs about my eyes of that tragic exhaustion, that burned-out devastation that had marked Carvajal after so many years of seeing? I don’t think so; but perhaps my second sight is not yet intense enough to register such subjective details. Sundara wears no wedding ring, nor are there any of the insignia of Transit visible about her. My watching self longs to ask a thousand quest
ions. I want to know whether there has been a reconciliation, whether we see each other often, whether we are lovers, whether perhaps we are even living together again. But I have no voice, I am unable to speak through the lips of my future self, it is altogether impossible for me to direct or modify his actions; I can merely observe. He and Sundara order drinks; they clink glasses; they smile; they exchange trivial chatter about the sunset, the weather, the decor of the cocktail lounge. Then the scene slips away and I have learned nothing.

  Soldiers move through the canyons of New York, five abreast, looking warily to all sides. I watch them from an upper-story window. They wear bizarre uniforms, green with red piping, gaudy yellow and red berets, ruffles at their shoulders. They are armed with weapons that look a little like crossbows—sturdy metal tubes about a meter in length, widening to a fan at the outer end and bristling with lateral whiskers of bright wire coil —which they carry with the wide ends balanced across their left forearms. The self who watches them is a man of at least sixty, white-haired, gaunt, with deep vertical lines scored in his cheeks; he is recognizably myself, and yet he is almost wholly strange to me. In the street a figure erupts from a building and rushes wildly toward the soldiers, shouting slogans, waving his arms. One very young soldier jerks his right arm up and a cone of green light emerges quietly from his weapon; the onrushing figure halts, Incandescent, and disappears. Disappears.