Stochastic Man (20 page)

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.

Day after day I streamed my memos toward Quinn and his minions. Mardikian and the mayor assumed the stuff I was handing in was the result of my own projections, the product of my polltakers, my computers, and my sweet canny cerebrum. Since my record of stochastic insight over the years had been consistently excellent, they did as I told them. Unquestioningly. Quinn occasionally laughed and said, “Boy, this one doesn’t make much sense to me,” but I told him, “It will, it will,” and he went along with it. Lombroso, though, must have realized I was getting a lot of these things from Carvajal. But he never said a Word about that to me—nor, I believe, to Quinn or Mardikian.

From Carvajal I also got instructions of a more personal kind.

“It’s time to get your hair cut,” he told me early in September.

“Short, you mean?”

“Off.”

“Are you telling me to shave my scalp?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“No,” I said. “If there’s one silly fad I detest—”

“Irrelevant. As of this month you began wearing your hair like that. Do it tomorrow, Lew.”

“I wouldn’t ever have gotten a Pruss,” I objected. “It’s altogether out of keeping with my—”

“You did,” Carvajal said simply. “How can you quarrel with that?”

But what was the use of arguing? He had
seen
me bald; hence I must go and get a Pruss. No questions asked, the man had told me when I came aboard: just follow the script, boy.

I yielded myself up unto the barber. I came out looking like an oversized Erich von Stroheim, minus monocle and stiff collar.

“How marvelous it looks!” Sundara cried. “How gorgeous!”

She ran her hands tenderly over my stubbly scalp. It was the first time in two or three months that there had been any kind of current flowing between us. She loved the haircut, absolutely adored it. Of course: getting cropped like that was a crazy Transit sort of thing for me to do. To her it was a sign that I might yet shape up.

There were other orders.

“Spend a weekend in Caracas,” Carvajal said. “Charter a fishing boat. You’ll catch a swordfish.”

“Why?”

“Do it,” he said implacably.

“I don’t see the relevance of my going to—”

“Please, Lew. You’re being difficult.”

“Will you explain this, at least?”

“There’s no explanation. You have to go to Caracas.”

It was absurd. But I went to Caracas. I drank too many margaritas with some lawyers from New York who didn’t know I was Quinn’s right hand and put him down rather noisily, going on and on about the good old days when Gottfried kept the rabble in line. Fascinating. I hired a boat and did indeed catch a swordfish, nearly breaking both wrists in the process, and had the damned beast mounted at staggering cost. It began to occur to me that Carvajal and Sundara might be in league to drive me crazy, or maybe to drive me into the arms of the nearest Transit proctor. (Same thing?) But that was impossible. More likely Carvajal was merely giving me a crash course in following the script. Accept whatever dictate comes to you out of tomorrow: never ask questions.

I accepted the dictates.

I grew a beard. I bought nippy-dip new clothes. I picked up a sullen cow-breasted sixteen-year-old in Times Square, filled her with rum swizzles in the highest eyrie of the Hyatt Regency, rented a room there for two hours and grimly fornicated her. I spent three days up at the Columbia Medical Center as a volunteer subject for sonopuncture research, and left there with every bone buzzing. I went down to my neighborhood Numbers office and put a thousand bucks on 666, and got wiped out, because that day’s winner was 667. I complained bitterly about that to Carvajal. “I don’t mind doing craziness, but this is expensive craziness. Couldn’t you at least have given me the right number?” He smiled obliquely and said he
had
given me the right number. I assume I was
supposed
to lose. All part of my training, it seemed. Existential masochism: the Zen approach to gambling. All right. Never ask questions. A week later he had me put a thou on 333, and I hit for a not-so-small fortune. So there were a few compensations.

Follow the script, kid. Ask no questions.

I wore my funny clothes. I got my scalp scraped regularly. I endured the itching of my beard, and after a while I stopped noticing it. I sent the mayor off lunching and dinnering with a weird assortment of eventually influential politicians. God help me, I followed the script.

Early in October Carvajal said, “Now you file for a divorce.”

29

Divorce, Carvajal said, on a brisk crisp blue- skied Wednesday in October, a day of withered yellow early-falling maple leaves dancing in the sharp westerly wind, now you file for a divorce, now you arrange the termination of your marriage. Wednesday, the sixth of October, 1999, just eighty-six days left to the end of the century, unless, of course, you were the kind of purist who insisted, with logic if not emotional justice on your side, that the new century would not properly begin until the first of January, 2001. At any rate, eighty-six days left until the changing of the digit.
As the digit shifts,
Quinn had said in his most famous speech,
let us wipe clean the slate and begin afresh, remembering but not re-enacting the errors of the past.
Had marrying Sundara been one of the errors of the past? Now you file for a divorce, Carvajal told me, and he was not so much stating an imperative command as he was reporting impersonally to me on the necessary state of things to come. Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present. For Qrville and Wilbur Wright came Kitty Hawk time; for John F. Kennedy came Lee Harvey Oswald time; for Lew and Sundara Nichols now was coming divorce time, looming like an iceberg out of the months ahead, and why, why, for what end, to what purpose,
por qué, pourquoi, warum?
I still loved her.

Yet the marriage had plainly been ailing all through the summer, and euthanasia was a plausible prescription now. Whatever we had had was gone, altogether fallen into ruin; she was lost in the rhythms and rituals of Transit, wholly given over to her sacred absurdities, and I was deep into dreams of visionary powers, and though we shared an apartment and a bed we shared nothing else. What powered our relationship was the thinnest of fuels, the pale petrol of nostalgia, that and such little momentum as remembered passion can supply.

I think we made love three times that final summer.
Made love!
Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all,
slept together.
Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love? The love was there, encapsulated within me and perhaps even within her, too, made long before, laid down in a cache like wine of the
premier cru
, like precious capital stored away and when our bodies grappled in the dark on those three clammy summer nights we were at that moment not making love but drawing on an existing and dwindling deposit. Living off assets.

Three times in three months. Not too many months ago we had managed a better tally than that in any given five- day span, but that was before the mysterious glassy barrier had unexpectedly descended between us. The fault was probably mine: I never reached for her now, and she, perhaps acting under some Transit commandment, was content never to reach for me. Her supple sultry body had lost none of its beauty in my eyes, nor was I festeringly jealous over some other lover, for not even the episode of the brothel license had had any effect on my desire for her, none, none at all. What she might do with others, even that, had always become as nothing the moment she was in my arms. But these days it seemed to me that sex between Sundara and me was irrelevant, inappropriate, an obsolete interchange in a demonetized currency. We had nothing to offer each other now except our bodies, and with all other levels of contact between us eroded away the body-to-body one had become worse than meaningless.

The last time we—made love, slept together, performed the act, fucked—was six days before Carvajal passed his sentence of death on the marriage. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time, though I suppose I should have, if I had been half the prophet that people were paying me to be. But how could I have detected the apocalyptic overtones, the sense of a curtain descending? There weren’t even ominous thunderheads in the sky. Thursday, the thirtieth of September, it was, a mild night on the cusp between summer and autumn. We were out with old friends that Thursday night, the Caldecott three-group, Tim and Beth and Corinne. Dinner at the Bubble, sky show afterwards. Tim and I had belonged to the same tennis club long ago and we had once won a mixed-doubles tournament, which was enough of a bond to have kept us in touch ever since; he was long-legged, easygoing, vastly wealthy, and entirely apolitical, which made his company a joy in these days of my City Hall responsibilities. No speculations about the whims of the electorate, no covert suggestions intended to be funneled back to Quinn, no hard-nosed analyses of current trends, just fun and games. We drank too much, we boned too much, we carried on a playful five-way flirtation that looked for a time to have me heading toward bed with any two of the Caldwell trio—most likely Tim and golden-haired Corinne—while Sundara settled in with the other. But as the evening unfolded I detected strong signals coming my way from Sundara. Surprise! Was she so boned she had forgotten I was only her husband? Was she indulging in a Transit unpredictability process? Or had it been so long since our last screw that I seemed a tempting novelty to her? I don’t know. I never will. But the warmth of her sudden glance set off a light-pumping resonance between us that quickly became incandescent, and we excused ourselves from the Caldecotts with delicacy and gaiety—they are such natural aristocrats of sensibility that there were no hard feelings, no intimations of rejection, and we parted gracefully, talking of-another get-together soon—and Sundara and I hurried home. Still resonating, still incandescent.

Nothing happened to snap the mood. Our clothes fell away, our bodies moved close together. Not tonight the elaborate
Kama Sutra
rituals of foreplay; she was in heat, so was I, and like animals we interpenetrated. She gave an odd little quivering sigh as I went into her, a husky sound that seemed to hit several notes at once, like a sound from one of those medieval Indian instruments that were tuned only to minor keys and produced sad twanging modal tone clusters. Perhaps she knew then that this was the final joining of our flesh. I moved against her with the assurance that I could do no wrong: if ever I followed the script it was then, no premeditation, no calculation, no separation of self from deed—myself as moving point on the face of the continuum, figure and ground merged and indistinguishable, perfectly in tune with the vibrations of the instant. I lay above her, clasping her in my arms, the classic Western position but one which we—with our shared repertoire of Oriental variations—rarely adopted. My back and hips felt strong as tempered Damascene steel, resilient as the most polymerized of plastics, and I swung inward and upward, inward and upward, inward and upward, moving with easy confident strokes, lifting her as though on jeweled ratchets to ever-higher levels of sensation and not incidentally bringing myself up there, too. For me it was a flawless screw, born of fatigue and despair and intoxication and confusion, an I-don’t-have-anything-left-to-lose kind of copulation. There was no reason why it couldn’t have gone on right through until morning. Sundara clung tight to me, matching my thrusts perfectly. Her knees were drawn almost to her breasts, and as I ran my hands down the satin of her skin I encountered, again and again, the cool metal of the Transit emblem strapped to her thigh—she never took it off,
never
—and even that didn’t shatter the perfection. But of course it wasn’t an act of love: it was a mere athletic event, two matchless discoboli moving in tandem through the prescribed and preordained rituals of their specialty, and what did love have to do with that? There was love in me for her, yes, a desperate hungry tremble-and-scratch-and-bite kind of love, but there was no longer a way to express any of that, in or out of bed.