The Stochastic Man

13

One thing about politics, the man said, is that it makes strange bedfellows. But for politics, Sundara and I surely would never have wandered into an ad hoc four-group that spring with Catalina Yarber, the Transit Creed proctor, and Lamont Friedman, the highly ionized young financial genius. But for Catalina Yarber, Sundara might not have opted for Transit. But for Sundara’s conversion, she would very likely still be my wife. And so, and so, the threads of causation, everything leading back to the same point in time.

What happened is that as a member of Paul Quinn’s entourage I received two free tickets to the $500-a-plate Nicholas Roswell Day dinner that the New York State New Democratic Party holds every year in the middle of April. This is not only a memorial tribute to the assassinated governor but also, indeed primarily, a fund-raising affair and a showcase for the party’s current superstar. The main speaker this time, of course, was Quinn.

“It’s about time I went to one of your political dinners,” Sundara said.

“They’re pure formaldehyde.”

“Nevertheless.”

“You’ll hate it, love.”

“Are you going?” she asked.

“I have to.”

“Then I think I’ll use the other ticket. If I fall asleep, nudge me when the mayor gets up to talk. He turns me on.”

So on a mild rainy night she and I podded out to the Harbor Hilton, that great pyramid all agleam on its pliable pontoon platform half a kilometer off Manhattan’s tip, and foregathered with the cream of the eastern liberal establishment in the sparkling Summit Room, from which I had a view of — among other things — Sarkisian’s condo tower on the other side of the bay, where nearly four years earlier I had first met Paul Quinn. A good many alumni of that gaudy party would be at tonight’s dinner. Sundara and I drew seats at the same table as two of them, Friedman and Ms. Yarber.

During the preliminary session of bone-doping and cocktails Sundara drew more attention than any of the senators, governors, and mayors present, Quinn included. This was partly a matter of curiosity, since everybody in New York politics had heard about my exotic wife but few had met her, and partly because she was surely the most beautiful woman in the room. Sundara was neither surprised nor annoyed. She has been beautiful all her life, after all, and has had time to grow accustomed to the effects her looks evoke. Nor had she dressed like one who minds being stared at. She had chosen a sheer harem suit, dark and loose and flowing, that covered her body from toes to throat; beneath it she was bare and when she passed before a source of light she was devastating. She glowed like a radiant moth in the middle of the gigantic ballroom, supple and elegant somber and mysterious, highlights sparkling in her ebon hair, hints of breast and flank tantalizing the onlookers. Oh, she was having a glorious time! Quinn came over to greet us, and he and Sundara transformed a chaste kiss-and-hug into an elaborate pas de deux of sexual charisma that made some of our elder statesmen gasp and redden and loosen their collars. Even Quinn’s wife, Laraine, famous for her Gioconda smile, looked shaken a bit, though she has the most secure marriage of any politician I know. (Or was she merely amused by Quinn’s ardor? That opaque smirk!)

Sundara was still emanating pure Kama Sutra when we took our seats. Lamont Friedman, sitting halfway around the circular table from her, jerked and quivered when her eyes met his, and stared at her with ferocious intensity while muscles twitched wildly in his long narrow neck. Meanwhile, in a more restrained but no less intense way, Friedman’s companion of the evening, Ms. Yarber, was also giving Sundara the stare.

Friedman. He was about twenty-nine, weirdly thin, maybe 2.3 meters tall, with a bulging Adam’s apple and crazy exophthalmic eyes; a dense mass of kinky brown hair engulfed his head like some woolly creature from another planet that was attacking him. He had come out of Harvard with a reputation for monetary sorcery and, after going to Wall Street when he was nineteen, had become the head magus of a band of spaced-out financiers calling themselves Asgard Equities, which through a series of lightning coups — option-pumping, feigned tenders, double straddles, and a lot of other techniques I but dimly comprehend — had within five years gained control of a billion-dollar corporate empire with extensive holdings on every continent but Antarctica. (And it would not amaze me to learn that Asgard held the customs-collection franchise for McMurdo Sound.)

Ms. Yarber was a small blond person, thirty or so, lean and a trifle hard-faced, energetic, quick-eyed, thin-lipped. Her hair, boyishly short, fell in sparse bangs over her high inquisitive forehead. She wore not much face makeup, only a faint line of blue around her mouth, and her clothes were austere — a straw-colored jerkin and a straight, simple brown knee-length skirt. The effect was restrained and even ascetic, but, I had noticed as we sat down, she had neatly balanced her prevailingly asexual image with one stunning erotic touch: her skirt was entirely open from hip to hem for a span of perhaps twenty centimeters down the left side, exposing as she moved a sleek muscular leg, a smooth tawny thigh, a glimpse of buttock. At mid-thigh, fastened by an encircling chain, she wore the little abstract medallion of the Transit Creed.

And so to dinner. The usual banquet fare: fruit salad, consommй, protosoy filet, steam-table peas and carrots, flagons of California Burgundy, lumpy baked Alaska, everything served with maximum clatter and minimum grace by stony-faced members of downtrodden minority groups. Neither the food nor the decor had any taste, but no one minded that; we were all so doped that the menu was ambrosia and the hotel was Valhalla. As we chattered and ate, an assortment of small-time political pros circulated from table to table, slapping backs and gladding hands, and also we endured a procession of self-important political wives, mainly sixtyish, dumpy, and grotesquely garbed in the latest nippy-dip styles, wandering about digging their proximity to the mighty and famous. The noise level was 20 db up from Niagara. Geysers of ferocious laughter came splashing from this table or that as some silver-maned jurist or revered legislator told his or her favorite scabrous Republican / gay / black / Puerto / Jew / Irish / Italian / doctor / lawyer / rabbi / priest / female politician / Mafioso joke in the finest 1965 style. I felt, as I had always felt at these functions, like a visitor from Mongolia hurled without phrasebook into some unknown American tribal ritual. It might have been unendurable if tubes of high-quality bone had not kept coming around; the New Democratic Party may stint on the wine but it knows how to buy dope.

By the time the speechmaking began, about half past nine, a ritual within the ritual was unfolding: Lamont Friedman was flashing almost desperate signals of desire at Sundara, and Catalina Yarber, though she was obviously also drawn to Sundara, had in a cool unemotional nonverbal way offered herself to me.

As the master of ceremonies — Lombroso, managing brilliantly to be elegant and coarse at the same time — went into the core of his routine, alternating derisive pokes at the most distinguished members of the party present in the room with obligatory threnodies to the traditional martyrs Roosevelt, Kennedy, Kennedy, King, Roswell, and Gottfried, Sundara leaned toward me and whispered. “Have you been watching Friedman?”

“He has a bad case of horn, I’d say.”

“I thought geniuses were supposed to be more subtle.”

“Perhaps he thinks the least subtle approach is the most subtle approach,” I suggested.

“Well, I think he’s being adolescent.”

“Too bad for him, then.”

“Oh, no,” Sundara said. “I find him attractive. Weird but not repellent, you know? Almost fascinating.”

“Then the direct approach is working for him. See? He is a genius.”

Sundara laughed. “Yarber’s after you. Is she a genius, too?”

“I think it’s really you she wants, love. It’s called the indirect approach.”

“What do you want to do?”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

“I’m for it. How do you feel about Yarber?”

“Much energy there, is my guess.”

“Mine too. Four-group tonight, then?”

“Why not,” I said, just as Lombroso sent the audience into deafening merriment with an elaborately polyethnic-perverse climax to his introduction to Paul Quinn.

We gave the mayor a standing ovation, neatly choreographed by Haig Mardikian from the dais. Resuming my seat, I sent Catalina Yarber a body-language telegram that brought dots of color to her pale cheeks. She grinned. Small sharp even teeth, set close together. Message received. Done and done. Sundara and I would have an adventure with these two tonight, then. We were more monogamous than most couples, hence our two-group basic license: not for us the brawling multiheaded households, the squabbles over private property, the communal broods of kiddies. But monogamy is one thing and chastity is another, and if the former still exists, however metamorphosed by the evolutions of the era, the latter is one with the dodo and the trilobite. I welcomed the prospect of a passage at arms with the vigorous little Ms. Yarber. Yet I found myself envying Friedman, as I always envied Sundara’s partner of the night: for he would have the unique Sundara, who was to me still the most desirable woman in the world, and I must settle for someone I desired but desired less than she. A measure of love, I suppose, is what that was, love within the context of exofidelity. Lucky Friedman! One can come to a woman like Sundara for the first time only once.

Quinn spoke. He is no comic, and he made only a few perfunctory jokes, to which his listeners tactfully overreacted; then it was down to serious business, the future of New York City, the future of the United States, the future of humanity in the coming century. The year 2000, he told us, holds immense symbolic value: it is literally the coming of the millennium. As the digit shifts, let us wipe clean the slate and begin afresh, remembering but not re-enacting the errors of the past. We have, he said, been through the ordeal by fire in the twentieth century, enduring vast dislocations and transformations and injuries; we have several times come close to the destruction of all life on earth; we have confronted ourselves with the likelihood of universal famine and universal poverty; we have plunged ourselves foolishly and avoidably into decades of political instability; we have been the victims of our own greed, fear, hatred, and ignorance; but now, with the energy of the solar reaction itself in our control, with population growth stable, with a workable balance reached between economic expansion and protection of the environment, the time has come to build the ultimate society, a world in which reason prevails and right is triumphant, a world in which the full flowing of human potential can be realized.

And so on, a splendid vision of the era ahead. Noble rhetoric, especially from a mayor of New York, traditionally more concerned with the problems of the school system and the agitation of the civil-service unions than with the destiny of mankind. It would have been easy to dismiss the speech as mere pretty bombast; but no, impossible, it held significance beyond its theme, for what we were hearing was the first trumpet call of a would-be world leader. There he stood, looking half a meter taller than he was, face flushed, eyes bright, arms folded in that characteristic pose of force in repose, hitting us with those clarion phrases:

“—as the digit shifts, let us wipe clean the slate—”

“—we have been through the ordeal by fire—”

“—the time has come to build the ultimate society—”

The Ultimate Society.I heard the click and the whirr, and the sound was not so much the shifting of the digit as the extrusion of a new political slogan, and I didn’t need great stochastic gifts to guess that we would all hear much, much more about the Ultimate Society before Paul Quinn was done with us.

Damn, but he was compelling! I was eager to be off and into the night’s exploits, and still I sat motionless, rapt, and so did this whole audience of boozy pols and stoned celebrities, and even the waiters halted their eternal clashing of trays as Quinn’s magnificent voice rolled through the hall. Since that first night at Sarkisian’s I had watched him grow steadily stronger, more solid, as though his rise to prominence had confirmed in him his own self-appraisal and burned away whatever shred of diffidence was in him. Now, glittering in the spotlights, he seemed a vehicle for cosmic energies; there played through him and out from him an irresistible power that shook me profoundly. A new Roosevelt? A new Kennedy? I trembled. A new Charlemagne, a new Mohammed, maybe a new Genghis Khan.

He finished with a flourish and we were up and screaming, no need of Mardikian’s choreography now, and the media folk were running to claim their cassettes and the hard-eyed clubhouse boys were slapping palms and talking about the White House and women were weeping and Quinn, sweating, arms outspread, accepted our homage with quiet satisfaction, and I sensed the first rumblings of the juggernaut through these United States.

It was an hour more before Sundara and Friedman and Catalina and I got out of the hotel. To the pod, quickly home. Odd self-conscious silences; all four of us eager to get to it, but the social conventions temporarily prevail, and we pretend to coolness; and, besides, Quinn has overwhelmed us. We are so full of him, his resonant phrases, his vital presence, that we are all four of us made ciphers, numb, selfless, stunned. No one can initiate the first move. We chatter. Brandy, bone; a tour of the apartment; Sundara and I show off our paintings, our sculptures, our primitive artifacts, our view of the Brooklyn skyline; we become less ill at ease with one another, but still there is no sexual tension; that mood of erotic anticipation that had been building so excitingly three hours earlier has been wholly dissipated by the impact of Quinn’s speech. Was Hitler an orgasmic experience? Was Caesar? We sprawl on the thick white carpet. More brandy. More bone. Quinn, Quinn, Quinn: instead of sexing we talk politics. Friedman, finally, most unspontaneously, slides his hand along Sundara’s ankle and up over her calf. It is a signal. We will force the intensity. “He has to run next year,” says Catalina Yarber, ostentatiously maneuvering herself so that the slit in her skirt flops open, displaying flat belly, golden curls. “Leydecker’s got the nomination wrapped up,” Friedman opines, growing bolder, caressing Sundara’s breasts. I touch the dimmer switch, kicking in the altered-light rheostat, and the room takes on a shining psychedelic texture. About, about, in reel and rout, the witchfires dance. Yarber offers a fresh tube of bone. “From Sikkim,” she declares. “The best stuff going.” To Friedman she says, “I know Leydecker’s ahead, but Quinn can push him aside if he tries. We can’t wait four more years for him.” I draw deep on the tube and the Sikkimese dope sets up a breeder reaction in my brain. “Next year is too soon,” I tell them. “Quinn looked incredible tonight, but we don’t have enough time to hit the whole country with him between here and a year from November. Mortonson’s a cinch for reelection anyway. Let Leydecker use himself up next year and we move Quinn into position in ‘04.” I would have gone on to outline the whole feigned-vice-presidential-bid strategy but Sundara and Friedman had vanished into the shadows, and Catalina was no longer interested in politics.

Our clothes fell away. Her body was trim, athletic, boyishly smooth and muscular, breasts heavier than I had expected, hips narrower. She kept her Transit Creed emblem chained to her thigh. Her eyes gleamed but her skin was cool and dry and her nipples weren’t erect; whatever she might be feeling, it didn’t currently include strong physical desire for Lew Nichols. What I felt for her was curiosity and a certain remote willingness to fornicate; no doubt she felt no more for me. We entangled our bodies, stroked each other’s skins, made our mouths meet and our tongues tickle. It was such an impersonal thing that I was afraid I’d never get it up, but the familiar reflexes took hold, the old reliable hydraulic mechanisms began shunting blood toward my loins, and I felt the proper throb, the proper stiffening. “Come,” she said, “be born to me now.” A strange phrase. Transit stuff, I learned later. I hovered above her and her slim strong thighs gripped me and I went into her.

Our bodies moved, up and down, back and forth. We rolled into this position and that one, joylessly running through the standard repertoire. Her skills were formidable, but there was a contagious chillness about her manner of doing it that rendered me a mere screwing machine, a restless piston endlessly ramming a cylinder, so that I copulated without pleasure and almost without sensation. What could she be getting out of it? Not much, I supposed. It’s because she’s really after Sundara, I thought, and is putting up with me merely to get a chance at her. I was right but I was wrong, for, I would learn eventually, Ms. Yarber’s steely passionless technique was not so much a reflection of a lack of interest in me as it was a result of Transit teaching. Sexuality, say the good proctors, traps one in the here and now and delays transitions, and transition is all: the steady state is death. Therefore engage in coition if you must, or if there is some greater goal to be gained by it, but be not dissolved by ecstasy lest you mire yourself wrongfully in the intransitive condition.

Even so. We indulged in our icy ballet for what seemed like weeks, and then she came, or allowed herself to come, in a quiet quick quiver, and with silent relief I nudged myself across the boundary into completion, and we rolled apart, hardly breathing hard.

“I’d like more brandy,” she said after a bit.

I reached for the cognac. From far away came the groans and gasps of more orthodox pleasure: Sundara and Friedman going at it.

Catalina said, “You’re very competent.”

“Thank you,” I replied uncertainly. No one had ever said quite that to me before. I wondered how to respond and decided to make no attempt at reciprocity. Cognac for two. She sat up, crossed her legs, smoothed her hair, sipped her drink. She looked unsweaty, unruffled, unfucked, in fact. Yet, strangely, she glowed with sexual energy; she seemed genuinely pleased with what we had done and genuinely pleased, as well, with me. “I mean that,” she said. “You’re superb. You do it with power and detachment.”

“Detachment?”

“Non-attachment, I should say. We value that. In Transit, non-attachment is what we seek. All Transit processes work toward creating flux, toward constant evolutionary change, and if we allow ourselves to become attached to any aspect of the here and now, to become attached to erotic pleasure, for example, to become attached to getting rich, to become attached to any ego aspect that ties us to intransient states—”

“Catalina—”

“Yes?”

“I’m very looped. I can’t handle theology now.”

She grinned. “To become attached to non-attachment,” she said, “is one of the worst follies of all. I’ll have mercy. No more Transit talk.”

“I’m grateful.”

“Some other time, perhaps? You and Sundara both. I’d love to explain our teachings, if—”

“Of course,” I said. “Not now.”

We drank, we smoked, eventually we found ourselves fornicating again — it was my defense against her yearning to convert me — and this time she must have had her tenets less firmly to the fore of her consciousness, for our interchange was less of a copulation, more a making of love. Toward dawn Sundara and Friedman appeared, she looking sleek and glorious, he bony and drained and even a bit dazed. She kissed me across a gulf of twelve meters, a pucker of air: Hello, love, hello, I love you most of all. I went to her and she pressed tight against me and I nibbled her earlobe and said, “Have fun?” She nodded dreamily. Friedman must have his skills, too, not all of them financial. “Did he talk Transit to you?” I wanted to know. Sundara shook her head. Friedman wasn’t into Transit yet, she murmured, though Catalina had been working on him.

“She’s working on me, too,” I said.

Friedman was slumped on the couch, glassy-eyed, staring dully at the sunrise over Brooklyn. Sundara, steeped in classical Hindu erotology, was a heavy trip for any man.

—when a woman clasps her lover as closely as a serpent twines around a tree, and pulls his head towards her waiting lips, if she then kisses him making a light hissing sound “soutt soutt” and looks at him long and tenderly — her pupils dilated with desire — this posture is known as the Clasp of the Serpent—

“Anyone for breakfast?” I asked.

Catalina smiled obliquely. Sundara merely inclined her head. Friedman looked unenthusiastic. “Later,” he said, voice barely rising above a whisper. A burned-out husk of a man.

—when a woman places one foot on the foot of her lover, and the other around his thigh, when she puts one arm around his neck and the other around his loins, and softly croons her desire, as if she wished to climb the firm stem of his body and capture a kiss — it is known as the Tree Climber—

I left them sprawled in their various parts of the living room and went off to shower. I had had no sleep but my mind was alert and active. A strange night, a busy night: I felt more alive than in weeks, and I sensed a stochastic tickle, a tremor of clairvoyance, that warned me I was moving to the threshold of some new transformation. I took the shower full force, punching for maximum vibratory enhancement, waves of ultrasound keying into my throbbing outreaching nervous system, and emerged looking for new worlds to conquer.

No one was in the living room but Friedman, still naked, still glazed of eye, still supine on the couch.

“Where’d they go?” I asked.

Languidly he waved a finger toward the master bedroom. So Catalina had scored her goal after all.

Was I expected to extend similar hospitality to Friedman now? My bisexuality quotient is low and he inspired not a shred of gaiety in me just then. But no, Sundara had dismantled his libido; he flashed no signs except exhaustion. “You’re a lucky man,” he murmured after a while. “What a marvelous woman… What … a … marvelous …” I thought he had dozed. “… woman. Is she for sale?”

"Sale?"

He sounded almost serious.

“Your Oriental slave girl is who I’m talking about.”

“My wife?”

“You bought her in the market in Baghdad. Five hundred dinars for her, Nichols.”

“No deal.”

“A thousand.”

“Not for two empires,” I said.

He laughed. “Where’d you find her?”

“California.”

“Are there any more like that out there?”

“She’s unique,” I told him. “So am I, so are you, so is Catalina. People don’t come in standard models, Friedman. Are you interested in breakfast yet?”

He yawned. “If we want to be reborn on the proper level we must learn to purify ourselves of the needs of the meat. That’s Transit. I’ll mortify my meat by renouncing breakfast as a start.” His eyes closed and he went away.

I had breakfast alone and watched morning come rushing out of the Atlantic at us. I took the morning Times out of its door slot and was pleased to see that Quinn’s speech had made the front page, below the fold but with a two-column photo. MAYOR CALLS FOR FULL HUMAN POTENTIAL. That was the headline, a bit below the Times ’ usual standard of incisiveness. The story used his Ultimate Society tag as its lead and quoted half a dozen glittering phrases in the first twenty lines. The story then jumped to page 21, and the complete text was in a box accompanying the jump. I found myself reading it, and as I read I found myself wondering why I had been so stirred, for the printed speech seemed to lack any real content; it was purely a verbal object, a collection of catchy lines, offering no program, making no concrete suggestions. And to me last night it had sounded like a blueprint for Utopia. I shivered. Quinn had provided nothing more than an armature; I myself had hung the trimmings on, all my vague fantasies of social reform and millennial transformation. Quinn’s performance had been pure charisma in action, an elemental force working us over from the dais. So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

The phone began ringing a little after eight. Mardikian wanted to distribute a thousand videotapes of the speech to New Democratic organizations all over the country; what did I think? Lombroso reported pledges of half a million to the as yet nonexistent Quinn-for-President campaign kitty in the aftermath of the speech. Missakian … Ephrikian … Sarkisian…

When I finally had a quiet moment, I came out and found Catalina Yarber, wearing her blouse and her thigh chain, prodding Lamont Friedman into wakefulness. She gave me a foxy grin. “We’ll be seeing more of each other, I know,” she said throatily.

They left. Sundara slept on. There were no more phone calls. Quinn’s speech was making waves everywhere. Eventually she emerged, naked, delicious, sleepy, but perfect in her beauty, not even puffy-eyed.

“I think I want to know more about Transit,” she said.