The Stochastic Man

by Robert Silverberg

  The self I see is still youthful, but older than I am now. Say, forty: then this would be about the year 2006. He lies on a rumpled bed next to an attractive young woman with long black hair; they are both naked, sweaty, disheveled; obviously they have been making love. He asks, “Did you hear the President’s speech last night?”

  “Why should I waste my time listening to that murderous fascist bastard?” she replies.

  A party is going on. Shrill unfamiliar music, strange golden wine poured freely from double-spouted bottles. The air is dense with blue fumes. I hold court at one corner of the crowded room, talking urgently with a plump freckle-faced young woman and one of the young men who had been with me at that red-shingled house. But my voice is covered by the raucous music and I perceive only shreds and scraps of what I am saying; I pick up words like miscalculation and overload and demonstration and alternative distribution, but they are embedded in gibberish and it is all ultimately unintelligible. The clothing styles are odd, loose irregular garments decked with patches and strips of mismatched fabrics. In the middle of the room about twenty of the guests are dancing with weird intensity, milling in a ragged circle, slashing the air fiercely with elbows and knees. They are nude; they have coated their bodies entirely with a glossy purple dye; they are altogether hairless, both men and women totally depilated from head to foot, so that but for their jiggling genitals and bobbing breasts they might easily pass for plastic mannequins jolted into a twitching, spasmodic counterfeit of life.

  A humid summer night. A dull booming sound, another, another. Fireworks explode against the blackness of the sky over the Hudson’s Jersey shore. Skyrockets litter the heavens with Chinese fire, red, yellow, green, blue, dazzling streaks and starbursts, cycle upon cycle of flaming beauty accompanied by terrifying hisses and pops and roars and bangs, climax after climax, and then, just as one assumes the splendor now will die away into silence and darkness, there comes an amazing final pyrotechnical frenzy, culminating in a grand double set piece: an American flag spectacularly quivering above us with every star discernible, and, exploding out of the center of Old Glory’s field, the image of a man’s face, limned in startling realistic flesh tones. The face is the face of Paul Quinn.

  I am aboard a great airplane, a plan whose wings seem to stretch from China to Peru, and through the porthole beside me I see a vast gray-blue sea on whose bosom the reflected sun shines in a furious glaring brightness. I am strapped down, awaiting landing, and now I can make out our destination: an enormous hexagonal platform rising steeply from the sea, an artificial island as symmetrical in its angles as a snowflake, a concrete island encrusted with squat red-brick buildings and split down its middle by the long white arrow of an airstrip, an island that is entirely alone in this immense sea with thousands of kilometers of emptiness bordering each of its six sides.

  Manhattan. Autumn, chilly, the sky dark, the windows overhead glowing. Before me a colossal tower rising just east of the venerable Fifth Avenue library. “The tallest in the world,” someone says behind me, one tourist to another, twanging Western accent. Indeed it must be. The tower fills the sky. “It’s all government offices,” the Westerner goes on. “Can you catch it? Two hundred floors high, and all government offices. With a palace for Quinn right at the top, so they say. For whenever he comes to town. A goddamned palace, like for a king.”

  What I particularly fear as these visions crowd upon me is my first confrontation with the scene of my own death. Will I be destroyed by it, I wonder, as Carvajal was destroyed—all drive and purpose sucked from me by one glimpse of my last moments? I wait, wondering when it will come, dreading it and eager for it, wanting to absorb the terrifying knowledge and be done with it, and when it does come it’s an anticlimax, a comic letdown. What I see is a faded, weary old man in a hospital bed, gaunt and worn, perhaps seventy-five years old, maybe eighty, even ninety. He is surrounded by a bright cocoon of life-support apparatus; needled arms arch and weave about him like the tails of scorpions, filling him with enzymes, hormones, decongestants, stimulants, whatever. I’ve seen him before, briefly, that drunken night in Times Square when I crouched dazzled and astounded, tripping out on a torrent of voices and images, but now the vision continues a little further than that other time, so that I perceive this future me not merely as a sick old man, but as a dying old man on his way out, sliding away, sliding away, the whole vast wonderful lattice of medical equipment unable any longer to sustain the feeble beat of life. I can feel the pulse ebbing in him. Quietly, quietly, he is going. Into the darkness. Into the peace. He is very still. Not yet dead, else my perceptions of him would cease. But almost. Almost. And now. No more data. Peace and silence. A good death, yes.

  Is that all? Is he truly dead, out there fifty or sixty years from now, or has the vision merely been interrupted? I can’t be sure. If only I could see beyond that moment of quietus, just a glimpse past the curtain, to watch the routines of death, the expressionless orderlies placidly disconnecting the life-support system, the sheet pulled up over the face, the cadaver wheeled off to the morgue. But there is no way to pursue the image. The picture show ends with the last flicker of light. Yet I am certain that this is it. I am relieved and almost a bit disappointed. So little? Just to fade away at a great old age? Nothing to dread in that. I think of Carvajal, crazy-eyed from having seen himself die too often. But I’m not Carvajal. How can such knowledge harm me? I admit the inevitability of my death; the details are mere footnotes. The scene recurs, a few weeks later, and then again, and again. Always the same. The hospital, the spidery maze of life-support stuff, the sliding, the darkness, the peace. So there is nothing to fear from seeing. I’ve seen the worst, and it hasn’t harmed me.

  But then all is cast into doubt and my newfound confidence is shattered. I see myself again in that great plane, and we are swooping toward the hexagonal artificial island. A cabin attendant rushes up the aisle, distraught, alarmed, and behind her comes a bellying oily burst of black smoke. Fire on board! The plane’s wings dip wildly. There are screams. Unintelligible cries over the public-address system. Muffled, incoherent instructions. Pressure nails my body to my seat; we are plunging toward the ocean. Down, down, and we hit, an incredible cracking impact, the ship is ripped apart; still strapped in, I plummet face first into the cold dark depths. The sea swallows me and I know no more.

  The soldiers move in sinister columns through the streets. They pause outside the building where I live; they confer; then a detachment bursts into the house. I hear them on the stairs. No use trying to hide. They throw open the door, shouting my name. I greet them, hands raised. I smile and tell them I’ll go peacefully. But then—who knows why?—one of them, a very young one, in fact, only a boy, swings suddenly around, aiming his crossbowlike weapon at me. I have time only to gasp. Then the green radiance comes, and darkness afterward.

  “This is the one!” someone yells, raising a club high above my head and bringing it down with terrible force.

  Sundara and I watch nightfall engulf the Pacific. The lights of Santa Monica sparkle before us. Tentatively, timidly, I cover her hand with mine. And in that moment I feel a stabbing pain in my chest. I crumple, I topple, I kick frantically, knocking the table over, I pound my fists against the thick carpet, I struggle to hold on to life. There is the taste of blood in my mouth. I fight to live, and I lose.

  I stand on a parapet eighty stories above Broadway. With a quick, easy motion I push myself outward into the cool spring air. I float, I make graceful swimming gestures with my arms, I dive serenely toward the pavement.

  “Look out!” a woman close beside me cries. “He’s got a bomb!”

  The surf is rough today. Gray waves rise and crash, rise and crash. Yet I wade out, I force my way through the breakers, I swim with lunatic dedication toward the horizon, cleaving the bleak sea as though out to set an endurance record, swimming on and on despite the throbbing in my temples and the pounding at the base of my throat, and the sea grows more tempestuous, its su
rface heaving and swelling even out here, so far from short. The water hits me in the face and I go under, choking, and battle my way to the surface, and I am hit again, again, again...

  “This is the one!” someone yells.

  I see myself again in that great plane, and we are swooping toward the hexagonal artificial island.

  “Look out!” a woman close beside me cries.

  The soldiers move in sinister columns through the streets. They pause outside the building where I live.

  The surf is rough today. Gray waves rise and crash, rise and crash. Yet I wade out, I force my way through the breakers, I swim with lunatic dedication toward the horizon.

  “This is the one!” someone yells.

  Sundara and I watch nightfall engulf the Pacific. The lights of Santa Monica sparkle before us.

  I stand on a parapet eighty stories above Broadway. With a quick, easy motion I push myself outward into the cool spring air.

  “This is the one!” someone yells.

  And so. Death, again and again, coming to me in many forms. The scenes recurring, unvarying, contradicting and nullifying one another. Which is the true vision? What of that old man fading peacefully in his hospital bed? What am I to believe? I am dizzied with an overload of data; I stumble about in a schizophrenic fever, seeing more than I can comprehend, integrating nothing, and constantly my pulsating brain drenches me with scenes and images. I am coming apart. I huddle on the floor next to my bed, trembling, waiting for new confusions to seize me. How shall I perish next? The torturer’s rack? A plague of botulism? A knife in a dark alleyway? What does all this mean? What’s happening to me? I need help. Desperate, terrified, I rush to see Carvajal.

  43

  It was months since I had last seen him, half a year, from late November to late April, and he had evidently been through some changes. He looked smaller, almost doll-like, a miniature of his old self, all surplus pared away, the skin drawn back tightly over his cheekbones, his color a peculiar off-yellow, as though he were turning into an elderly Japanese, one of those desiccated little ancients in blue suits and bowties that can sometimes be seen sitting calmly beside the tickers in downtown brokerage houses. There was an unfamiliar Oriental calmness about Carvajal, too, an eerie Buddha-tranquillity that seemed to say he had reached a place beyond all storms, a peace that was, happily, contagious: moments after I arrived, full of panic and bewilderment, I felt the charge of tension leaving me. Graciously he seated me in his dismal living room, graciously he brought me the traditional glass of water.

  He waited for me to speak.

  How to begin? What to say? I decided to vault completely over our last conversation, putting it away, making no reference to my anger, to my accusations, to my repudiation of him. “I’ve been seeing,” I blurted.

  “Yes?” Quizzical, unsurprised, faintly bored.

  “Disturbing things.”

  “Oh?”

  Carvajal studied me incuriously, waiting, waiting. How placid he was, how self-contained! Like something carved from ivory, beautiful, glossy, immobile.

  “Weird scenes. Melodramatic, chaotic, contradictory, bizarre. I don’t know what’s clairvoyance and what’s schizophrenia.”

  “Contradictory?” he asked.

  “Sometimes. I can’t trust what I see.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Quinn for one. He recurs almost daily. Images of Quinn as a tyrant, a dictator, some sort of monster, manipulating the entire nation, not so much a President as a generalissimo. His face is all over the future. Quinn this, Quinn that, everyone talking about him, everyone afraid of him. It can’t be real.”

  “Whatever you see is real.”

  “No. That’s not the real Quinn. That’s a paranoid fantasy. I know Paul Quinn.”

  “Do you?” Carvajal asked, his voice reaching me from a distance of fifty thousand light-years.

  “Look, I was dedicated to that man. In a real sense I loved that man. And loved what he stood for. Why do I get these visions of him as a dictator? Why have I become afraid of him? He isn’t like that. I know he isn’t.”

  “Whatever you see is real,” Carvajal repeated.

  “Then there’s a Quinn dictatorship coming in this country?”

  Carvajal shrugged. “Perhaps. Very likely. How would I know?”

  “How would I? How can I believe what I see?”

  Carvajal smiled and held up one hand, palm toward me. “Believe,” he urged in the weary, mocking tone of some old Mexican priest advising a troubled boy to have faith in the goodness of the angels and the charity of the Virgin. “Have no doubts. Believe.”

  “I can’t. There are too many contradictions.” I shook my head fiercely. “It isn’t just the Quinn visions. I’ve been seeing my own death, too.”

  “Yes, one must expect that.”

  “Many times. In many different ways. A plane crash. A suicide. A heart attack. A drowning. And more.”

  “You find it strange, eh?”

  “Strange? I find it absurd. Which one is the reality?”

  “They all are.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “There are many levels of reality, Lew.”

  “They can’t all be real. That violates everything you’ve told me about one fixed and unalterable future.”

  “There’s one future that must occur,” Carvajal said. “There are many that do not In the early stages of the seeing experience the mind is unfocused, and reality becomes contaminated with hallucination, and the spirit is bombarded with extraneous data.”

  “But—”

  “Perhaps there are many time lines,” Carvajal said. “One true one, and many potential ones, abortive lines, lines that have their existence only in the gray borderlands of probability. Sometimes information from those time lines crowds in on one if one’s mind is open enough, if it is vulnerable enough. I’ve experienced that.”

  “You never said a word about it.”

  “I didn’t want to confuse you, Lew.”

  “But what do I do? What good is any of the information I’m receiving? How do I distinguish the real visions from the imaginary ones?”

  “Be patient. Things will clarify.”

  “How soon?”

  “When you see yourself die,” he said, “have you ever seen the same scene more than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’ve had one at least twice.”

  “But one more than any of the others?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The first one. Myself as an old man in a hospital, with a lot of intricate medical equipment surrounding my bed. That one comes frequently.”

  “With special intensity?”

  I nodded.

  “Trust it,” Carvajal said. “The others are phantoms. They’ll stop bothering you before long. The imaginary ones have a feverish, insubstantial feel to; them. They waver and blur at the edges. If you look at them closely, your gaze pierces them and you behold the blankness beyond. Soon they vanish. It’s been thirty years, Lew, since such things have troubled me.”

  “And the Quinn visions? Are they phantoms out of some other time line, too? Have I helped to set a monster loose in this country or am I just suffering from bad dreams?”

  “There’s no way I can answer that for you. You’ll simply have to wait and see, and learn to refine your vision, and look again, and weigh the evidence.”

  “You can’t give me any suggestions more precise than that?”

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t possible to—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Excuse me,” Carvajal said.

  He left the room. I closed my eyes and let the surf of some unknown tropical sea wash across my mind, a warm salty bath erasing all memory and all pain, making the rough places smooth. I perceived past, present, and future now as equally unreal: wisps of fog, shafts of blurred pastel light, far-off laughter, furry voices speaking in fragmentary sentences. Somewhere a play was being produced, bu
t I was no longer on stage, nor was I in the audience. Time lay suspended. Perhaps, eventually, I began to see. I think Quinn’s blunt earnest features hovered before me, bathed in garish green and blue spotlights, and I might have seen the old man in the hospital and the armed men moving through the streets; and there were glimpses of worlds beyond worlds, of the empires still unborn, of the dance of the continents, of the sluggish creatures that crawl over the great planet- girdling shell of ice at the end of time. Then I heard voices from the hallway, a man shouting, Carvajal patiently explaining, denying. Something about drugs, a doublecross, angry accusations. What? What? I struggled up out of the fog that bound me. There was Carvajal, by the door, confronted by a short freckle-faced man with wild blue eyes and unkempt flame-red hair. The stranger was clutching a gun, an old clumsy one, a blue- black cannon of a gun, swirling it excitedly from side to side. The shipment, he kept yelling, where’s the shipment, what are you trying to pull? And Carvajal shrugged and smiled and shook his head and said over and over, mildly, This is a mistake, it’s simply an error. Carvajal looked radiant. It was as though all his life had been bent and shaped toward this moment of grace, this epiphany, this confused and comic doorway dialogue.

  I stepped forward, ready to play my part. I devised lines for myself. I would say, Easy, fellow, stop waving that gun around. You’ve come to the wrong place. We’ve got no drugs here. I saw myself moving confidently toward the intruder, still talking. Why don’t you cool down, put the gun away, phone the boss and get things straightened out? Because otherwise you’ll find yourself in heavy trouble, and—Still talking, looming over the little freckle-faced gunman, calmly reaching for the gun, twisting it out of his hand, pressing him against the wall—