The Stochastic Man

by Robert Silverberg

  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 sentenc
e 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.

  So we collected our Olympic gold medals, the high dive and the trampoline dance, the 300-kilo press and the fancy figure skating, the pole vault and the 400-meter hurdles, and by imperceptible nudgings and murmurings we clued each other closer to the ultimate moment, and then we were there, and for an unending interval we were dissolved into the fount of creation, and then the unending interval ended and we fell away from each other, sweaty and sticky and exhausted.

  “Would you mind getting me a glass of water?” Sundara asked after a few minutes.

  Which was how it ended.

  Now you file for a divorce, said Carvajal six days later.

  30

  Give yourself to me, that was the deal, no questions asked, nothing guaranteed. No questions asked. But this time I had to ask. Carvajal was pushing me toward a step that I couldn’t take without some sort of explanation.

  “You promised not to ask,” he said sulkily.

  “Nevertheless. Give me a clue or the deal’s off.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I do.”

  He tried to stare me down. But those blank eyes of his, sometimes so fiercely unanswerable, didn’t intimidate me now. My hunch function said I should go ahead, press him, demand to know the structure of events into which I was entering. Carvajal resisted. He squirmed and sweated and told me that I was setting my training back by weeks or even months with this unseemly outburst of insecurity. Have faith, he urged, follow the script, do as you’re told, and all will be well.

  “No,” I said. “I love her, and even today divorce is no joke. I can’t do it on a whim.”

  “Your training—”

  “To hell with that. Why should I leave my wife, other than the simple fact that we haven’t been getting along very well lately? Breaking up with Sundara isn’t like changing my haircut, you know.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “What?”

  “All events are equal in the long run,” he said.

  I snorted. “Don’t talk garbage. Different acts have different consequences, Carvajal. Whether I wear my hair short or long can’t have much effect on surrounding events. But marriages sometimes produce children, and children are unique genetic constellations, and the children that Sundara and I might produce, if we chose to produce any, would be different from children that she or I might have with other mates, and the differences— Christ, if we break up I might marry someone else and become the great-great-grandfather of the next Napoleon, and if I stay with her I might— Well, how can you say that in the long run all events are equal?”

  “You grasp things very slowly,” said Carvajal sadly.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t speaking of consequences. Merely of events. All events are equal in their probability, Lew, by which I mean that there’s total probability of any event happening that is going to happen—”

  “Tautology!”

  “Yes. But we deal in tautologies, you and I. I tell you, I see you divorcing Sundara, just as I saw you getting that haircut, and so those events are of equal probability.”

  I closed my eyes. I sat still a long time.

  Eventually I said, “Tell me why I divorce her. Isn’t there any hope of repairing the relationship? We aren’t fighting. We don’t have serious disagreements about money. We think alike on most things. We’ve lost touch with each other, yes, but that’s all, just a drifting toward different spheres. Don’t you think we could get back together if we both made a sincere effort?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t I try it instead of—”

  “You’d have to go into Transit,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I think I could manage that if I had to. If the only alternative was losing Sundara.”

  “You couldn’t. It’s alien to you, Lew. It opposes everything you believe and everything you’re working toward.”

  “But to keep Sundara—”

  “You’ve lost her.”

  “Only in the future. She’s still my wife.”

  “What’s lost in the future is lost now.”

 
“I refuse to—”

  “You have to!” he cried. “It’s all one, Lew, it’s all one! You’ve come this far with me and you don’t see that?”

  I saw it. I knew every argument he was likely to muster, and I believed them all, and my belief wasn’t something laid on from outside, like walnut paneling, but rather something intrinsic, something that had grown and spread within me over these past months. And still I resisted. Still I looked for loopholes. I was still clutching for any straw that eddied around me in the maelstrom, even as I was being sucked under.

  I said, “Finish telling me. Why is it necessary and inevitable that I leave Sundara?”

  “Because her destiny lies with Transit and yours lies as far from Transit as you can stay. They work toward uncertainty, you toward certainty. They try to undermine, you want to build. It’s a fundamental philosophical gulf that’s going to keep on getting wider and can’t ever be bridged. So the two of you have to part.”

  “How soon?”

  “You’ll be living alone before the end of the year,” he told me. “I’ve seen you several times in your new place.”

  “No woman living with me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not good at celibacy. I haven’t had much practice.”

  “You’ll have women, Lew. But you’ll live alone.”

  “Sundara gets the condo?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the paintings, the sculptures, the—”

  “I don’t know,” Carvajal said, looking bored. “I really haven’t paid any attention to details like that. You know they don’t matter to me.”

  “I know.”

  He let me go. I walked about three miles uptown, seeing nothing around me, hearing nothing, thinking nothing. I was one with the void; I was a member of the vast emptiness. At the corner of Something Street and God-Knows-What Avenue I found a phone booth and dropped a token in the slot and dialed Haig Mardikian’s office, and vipped my way through the shield of receptionists until Mardikian himself was on the line. “I’m getting divorced,” I told him, and listened for a moment to the silent roaring of his amazement booming across the wire like the surf at Fire Island in a March storm. “I don’t care about the financial angles,” I said after a bit. “I just want a clean break. Give me the name of a lawyer you trust, Haig. Somebody who’ll do it fast without hurting her.”