The Stochastic Man

16

This is a place where a millionaire gifted with second sight lives? A small grimy flat in a squat dilapidated ninety-year-old apartment house just off Flatbush Avenue in deepest Godforsaken Brooklyn? Going there was an experiment in foolhardiness. I knew — anybody in the municipal administration quickly gets to know — which areas of the city had been written off as out of bounds, beyond hope of redemption, outside the rule of law. This was one of them. Beneath the veil of time and decay I could see the bones of old residential respectability here; it had been a district of lower-middle-class Jews once, a neighborhood of kosher butchers and unsuccessful lawyers, and then lower-middle-class black, and then slum black, probably with Puerto enclaves, and now it was just a jungle, a corroding wasteland of crumbling little red-brick semidetached two-family houses and soot-filmed six-story apartment buildings, inhabited by drifters, sniffers, muggers, muggers of muggers, feral cat packs, short-pants gangs, elephant rats, and Martin Carvajal. "There?" I blurted when, having suggested a meeting to Carvajal, he suggested we hold it at his home. I suppose it was tactless to be so astonished at where he lived. He replied mildly that no harm would come to me. “I think I’ll arrange for a police escort anyway,” I said, and he laughed and said that was the surest way to invite trouble, and he told me again, firmly, to have no fear, that I would be in no peril if I came alone.

The inner voice whose promptings I always obey told me to have faith, so I went to Carvajal without a police escort, though not without fear.

No cab would go into that part of Brooklyn and pod service, of course, does not reach places like that. I borrowed an unmarked car from the municipal pool and drove it myself, not having the gall to risk a chauffeur’s life out there. Like most New Yorkers, I drive infrequently and poorly, and the ride had perils of its own. But in time I came, undented if not undaunted, to Carvajal’s street. Filth I had expected, yes, and rotting mounds of garbage in the street, and the rubble-strewn sites of demolished buildings looking like the gaps left by knocked-out teeth; but not the dry blackened corpses of beasts in the streets — dogs, goats, pigs? — and not the woody-stemmed weeds cracking through the pavement as if this were some ghost town, and not the reek of human dung and urine, and not the ankle-deep swirls of sand. A blast of oven heat hit me when I emerged, timidly and with misgivings, from the coolness of my car. Though this was only early June, a terrible late-August heat baked these miserable ruins. This is New York City? This might have been an outpost in the Mexican desert a century ago.

I left the car set on full alarm. Myself, I was carrying a top-strength anti-personnel baton and wearing a hip-hugging security cone warranted to knock any malefactor a dozen meters. Still I felt hideously exposed as I crossed the dreary pavement, knowing I had no defense against a casual sniper pot-shotting from above. But though a few sallow-faced inhabitants of this horrendous village eyed me sourly from the darkness behind their cracked and jagged windows, though a few lean-hipped street cowboys gave me long bleak glances, no one approached me, no one spoke to me, there were no fourth-floor fusillades. Entering the sagging building where Carvajal lived, I felt almost relaxed: maybe the neighborhood had been much maligned, maybe its dark reputation was a product of middle-class paranoia. Later I learned I would never have lasted sixty seconds outside my automobile if Carvajal hadn’t given orders insuring my safety. In this parched jungle he had immense authority; to his fierce neighbors he was a sort of warlock, a sacred totem, a holy fool, respected and feared and obeyed. His gift of vision, no doubt, used judiciously and with overwhelming impact, had made him invulnerable here — in the jungle no one trifles with a shaman — and today he had spread his mantle over me.

His apartment was on the fifth floor. There was no elevator. Each flight of stairs was a grim adventure. I heard the scurrying of giant rats, I choked and retched at foul unfamiliar odors, I imagined seven-year-old murderers lurking in every pool of shadow. Without incident I reached his door. He opened before I could find the bell. Even in this heat he wore a white shirt with buttoned collar, a gray tweed jacket, a brown necktie. He looked like a schoolmaster waiting to hear me recite my Latin conjugations and declensions. “You see?” he said. “Safe and sound. I knew. No harm.”

Carvajal lived in three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. The ceilings were low, the plaster was cracking, the faded green walls looked as if they had last been painted in the days of Tricky Dick Nixon. The furniture was even older, with a Truman-era look to it, floppy and overstuffed, floral slipcovers and sturdy rhinocerous legs. The air was unconditioned and stifling; the illumination was incandescent and dim; the TV was an archaic table model; the kitchen sink had running water, not ultrasonics. When I was growing up in the mid-1970s, one of my closest friends was a boy whose father had died in Vietnam. He lived with his grandparents, and their place looked exactly like this one. Carvajal’s apartment eerily recaptured the texture of mid-century America; it was like a movie set, or a period room at the Smithsonian.

With remote, absentminded hospitality he settled me on the battered living-room sofa and apologized for having neither drink nor drug to offer me. He was not an indulger, he explained, and very little was sold in this neighborhood. “It doesn’t matter,” I said grandly. “A glass of water will be fine.”

The water was tepid and faintly rusty. That’s fine, too, I told myself. I sat unnaturally upright, spine rigid, legs tense. Carvajal, perching on the cushion of the armchair to my right, observed, “You look uncomfortable, Mr. Nichols.”

“I’ll unwind in a minute or two. The trip out here—”

“Of course.”

“But no one bothered me in the street. I have to confess I was expecting trouble, but—”

“I told you no harm would come.”

“Still—”

“But I told you,” he said mildly. “Didn’t you believe me? You should have believed me, Mr. Nichols. You know that.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, thinking, Gilmartin, gellation, Leydecker. Carvajal offered me more water. I smiled mechanically and shook my head. There was a sticky silence. After a moment I said, “This is a strange part of town for a person like you to choose.”

“Strange? Why?”

“A man of your means could live anywhere in the city.”

“I know.”

“Why here, then?”

“I’ve always lived here,” he said softly. “This is the only home I’ve ever known. These furnishings belonged to my mother, and some to her mother. I hear the echoes of familiar voices in these rooms, Mr. Nichols. I feel the living presence of the past. Is that so odd, to go on living where one has always lived?”

“But the neighborhood—”

“Has deteriorated, yes. Sixty years bring great changes. But the changes haven’t been perceptible to me in any important way. A gentle decline, year by year, then perhaps a steeper decline, but I make allowances, I make adjustments, I grow accustomed to what is new and make it part of what has always been. And everything is so familiar to me, Mr. Nichols — the names written in the wet cement when the pavement was new long ago, the great ailanthus tree in the schoolyard, the weatherbeaten gargoyles over the doorway of the building across the street. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why should I leave these things for a sleek Staten Island condo?”

“The danger, for one.”

“There’s no danger. Not for me. These people regard me as the little man who’s always been here, the symbol of stability, the one constant in a universe of entropic flow. I have a ritualistic value for them. I’m some sort of good-luck token, perhaps. At any rate no one who lives here has ever molested me. No one ever will.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Yes,” he said, with monolithic assurance, looking straight into my eyes, and I felt that chill again, that sense of standing on the rim of an abyss beyond my fathoming. There was another long silence. There was force flowing from him — a power altogether at odds with his drab appearance, his mild manner, his numb, burned-out expression — and that force immobilized me. I might have been sitting frozen for an hour. At length he said, “You wanted to ask me some questions, Mr. Nichols.”

I nodded. Taking a deep breath, I plunged in. “You knew Leydecker was going to die this spring, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t just guess he’d die. You knew.”

“Yes.” That same final, uncontestable yes.

“You knew that Gilmartin would get into trouble. You knew that oil tankers would spill ungelled oil.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You know what the stock market is going to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and you’ve made millions of dollars by using that knowledge.”

“That’s also true.”

“Therefore it’s fair to say that you see future events with extraordinary clarity, with supernatural clarity, Mr. Carvajal.”

“As do you.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I don’t see future events at all. I’ve got no vision whatsoever of things to come. I’m merely very very good at guessing, at weighing probabilities and coming up with the most likely pattern, but I don’t really see, I can’t ever be certain that I’m right, just reasonably confident. Because all I’m doing is guessing. You see. You told me almost as much when we met in Bob Lombroso’s office: I guess; you see. The future is like a movie playing inside your mind. Am I right?”

“You know you are, Mr. Nichols.”

“Yes. I know I am. There can’t be any doubt of it. I’m aware of what can be accomplished by stochastic methods, and the things you do go beyond the possibilities of guesswork. Maybe I could have predicted the likelihood of a couple of oil-tanker breakups, but not that Leydecker would drop dead or that Gilmartin would be exposed as a crook. I might have guessed that some key political figure would die this spring, but never which one. I might have guessed that some state politician would get busted, but not by name. Your predictions were exact and specific. That’s not probabilistic forecasting. That’s more like sorcery, Mr. Carvajal. By definition, the future is unknowable. But you seem to know a great deal about the future.”

“About the immediate future, yes. Yes, I do, Mr. Nichols.”

“Only the immediate future?”

He laughed. “Do you think my mind penetrates all of space and time?”

“At this point I have no idea what your mind penetrates. I wish I knew. I wish I had some notion of how it works and what its limits are.”

“It works as you described it,” Carvajal replied. “When I want to, I see. A vision of things to come plays within me like a film.” His voice was utterly matter-of-fact. He sounded almost bored. “Is that the only thing you came here to find out?”

“Don’t you know? Surely you’ve seen the film of this conversation already.”

“Of course I have.”

“But you’ve forgotten some of the details?”

“I rarely forget anything,” Carvajal said, sighing.

“Then you must know what else I’m going to ask.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Even so, you won’t answer it unless I ask it.”

“Yes.”

“Suppose I don’t,” I said. “Suppose I just leave right now, without doing what I’m supposed to have done.”

“That won’t be possible,” said Carvajal evenly. “I remember the course this conversation must take, and you don’t leave before asking your next question. There’s only one way for things to happen. You have no choice but to say and do the things I saw you say and do.”

“Are you a god, decreeing the events of my life?”

He smiled wanly and shook his head. “Very much mortal, Mr. Nichols. Decreeing nothing. I tell you, though, the future’s immutable. What you think of as the future. We’re both actors in a script that can’t be rewritten. Come, now. Let’s play out our script. Ask me—”

“No. I’m going to break the pattern and walk out of here.”

“—about Paul Quinn’s future,” he said.

I was already at the door. But when he spoke Quinn’s name I halted, slack-jawed, stunned, and I turned. That was, of course, the question I had been going to ask, the question I had come here to ask, the question I had determined not to ask when I began to play my little game with immutable destiny. How poorly I had played! How sweetly Carvajal had maneuvered me! Because I was helpless, defeated, immobilized. You may think I was still free to walk out, but no, but no, not once he had invoked Quinn’s name, not now that he had tantalized me with the promise of desired knowledge, not now that Carvajal had demonstrated once more, crushingly, conclusively, the precision of his oracular gift.

“You say it,” I muttered. “You ask the question.”

He sighed. “If you wish.”

“I insist.”

“You mean to ask if Paul Quinn is going to become President.”

“That’s it,” I said hollowly.

“The answer is that I think he will.”

“You think? That’s the best you can tell me. You think he will?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know everything!”

“No,” Carvajal said. “Not everything. There are limits, and your question lies beyond them. The only answer I can give you is a mere guess, based on the same sort of factors anyone interested in politics would consider. Considering those factors, I think Quinn is likely to become President.”

“But you don’t know for sure. You can’t see him becoming President.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s beyond your range? Not in the immediate future?”

“Beyond my range, yes.”

“Therefore you’re telling me that Quinn won’t be elected in 2000, but you think he’s a good bet for 2004, although you aren’t capable of seeing as far as 2004.”

“Did you ever believe Quinn would be elected in 2000?” Carvajal asked.

“Never. Mortonson’s unbeatable. That is, unless Mortonson happens to drop dead the way Leydecker did, in which case it’s anybody’s election, and Quinn—” I paused. “What do you see in store for Mortonson? Is he going to live as long as the election of 2000?”

“I don’t know,” said Carvajal quietly.

“You don’t know that either? The election’s seventeen months away. Your range of clairvoyance is less than seventeen months, is that it?”

“At present, yes.”

“Has it ever been greater than that?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Much greater. I’ve seen thirty or forty years ahead, at times. But not now.”

I felt Carvajal was playing with me again. Exasperated, I said, “Is there any chance your long-range vision will return? And give you, say, a vision of the 2004 election? Or even of the election of 2000?”

“Not really?”

Sweat was pouring down my body. “Help me. It’s extremely important for me to know whether Quinn’s going to make it into the White House.”

“Why?”

“Why, because I—” I stopped, astonished to realize I had no real answer beyond mere curiosity. I was committed to working for Quinn’s election; presumably that commitment wasn’t conditional on knowing I was working for a winner. Yet in the moments when I thought Carvajal was able to tell me. I had been desperate to know. Clumsily I said, “Because I’m, well, very much involved in his career, and I’d feel better knowing the direction it’s likely to take, especially if I knew all our effort on his behalf wasn’t going to go to waste. I — ah—” I halted, feeling inane.

Carvajal said, “I’ve given you the best answer I can. My guess is that your man will become President.”

“Next year or in 2004?”

“Unless something happens to Mortonson, it looks to me as though Quinn has no chance until 2004.”

“But you don’t know whether something’s going to happen to Mortonson?” I persisted.

“I’ve told you: I don’t have any way of knowing that. Please believe that I can’t see as far as the next election. And, as you yourself pointed out a few minutes ago, probabilistic techniques are worthless in predicting the date of death of any one person. Probabilities are all I’m going on in this. My guess isn’t even as good as yours. In stochastic matters, Mr. Nichols, you’re the expert, not I.”

“What you’re saying is that your support of Quinn isn’t based on absolute knowledge, only a hunch.”

“What support of Quinn?”

His question, so innocent in tone, took me aback. “You thought he’d make a good mayor. You want him to become President,” I said.

“I did? I do?”

“You gave huge sums to his campaign treasury when he was running for mayor. What is that if it isn’t support? In March you showed up at the office of one of his chief strategists and offered to do everything you could to help Quinn attain higher office. That isn’t support?”

“It’s of no concern to me at all whether Paul Quinn ever wins another election,” Carvajal said.

“Really?”

“His career means nothing to me. It never has.”

“Then why are you willing to contribute so heavily to his election kitty? Why are you willing to offer handy tips about the future to his campaign managers? Why are you willing—”

"Willing?"

“Willing, yes. Did I use the wrong word?”

“Will has nothing to do with it, Mr. Nichols.”

“The more I talk with you, the less I understand.”

“Will implies choice, freedom, volition. There are no such concepts in my life. I give to Quinn because I know I must, not because I prefer him to other politicians. I came to Lombroso’s office in March because I saw myself, months ago, going there, and knew that I had to go that day, no matter what I’d rather be doing. I live in this crumbling neighborhood because I’ve never been granted a view of myself living anywhere else, and so I know this is where I belong. I tell you what I’ve been telling you today because this conversation is already as familiar to me as a movie I’ve seen fifty times, and so I know I must tell you things I’ve never told to another human being. I never ask why. My life is without surprises, Mr. Nichols, and it is without decisions, and it is without volition. I do what I know I must do, and I know I must do it because I’ve seen myself doing it.”

His placid words terrified me more than any of the real or imagined horrors of the dark staircase outside. Never before had I looked into a universe from which free will, chance, the unexpected, the random, had all been banished. I saw Carvajal as a man dragged helpless but uncomplaining through the present by his inflexible vision of the immutable future. It frightened me, but after a moment the dizzying terror was gone, never to return; for after the first appalling perception of Carvajal as tragic victim came another, more exalting, of Carvajal as one whose gift was the ultimate refinement of my own, one who has moved beyond the vagaries of chance into a realm of utter predictability. I was drawn irresistibly to him by that insight. I felt our souls interpenetrate and knew I would never be free of him again. It was as though that cold force emanating from him, that chilly radiance born of his strangeness that had made him so repellent to me, had now reversed its sign and pulled me toward him.

I said, “You always act out the scenes you see? ”

“Always.”

“You never try to change the script?”

“Never.”

“Because you’re afraid of what might happen if you do?”

He shook his head. “How could I possibly be afraid of anything? What we fear is the unknown, isn’t it? No: I obediently read the lines of the script because I know there’s no alternative. What looks to you like the future is to me more like the past, something already experienced, something it would be futile to attempt to alter. I give money to Quinn, you see, because I have already done so and have perceived that giving. How could I see myself having given, if I fail in fact to give when the moment of my vision intersects the moment of my ‘present’?”

“Do you ever worry about forgetting the script and doing the wrong thing when the moment comes?”

Carvajal chuckled. “If you could ever for an instant see as I see, you’d know how empty that question is. There’s no way to do ‘the wrong thing.’ There’s only ‘the right thing,’ that which happens, that which is real. I perceive what will happen; eventually it takes place; I am an actor in a drama that allows for no improvisations, as are you, as are we all.”

“And you’ve never even once attempted to rewrite the script? In some small detail? Not even once?”

“Oh, yes, more than once, Mr. Nichols, and not only small details. When I was younger, much younger, before I understood. I would have a vision of some calamity, say a child running in front of a truck or a house on fire, and I would decide to play God, to prevent the calamity from occurring.”

“And?”

“No way. However I planned things, when the moment came the event invariably happened as I had seen it happen. Always. Circumstances prevented me from preventing anything. Many times I experimented with changing the predestined course of events, and I never succeeded, and eventually I stopped trying. Since then I’ve simply played my part, reciting my lines as I know they must be recited.”

“And you accept this fully?” I asked. I paced the room, restless, agitated, overheated. “To you the book of time is written and sealed and unalterable? Kismet and no arguments?”

“Kismet and no arguments,” he said.

“Isn’t that a pretty forlorn philosophy?”

He seemed faintly amused. “It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality. Look, do you ‘accept’ the present?”

“What?”

“As things happen to you, do you recognize them as valid events? Or do you see them as conditional and mutable, do you have the feeling that you could change them in the moment they’re happening?”

“Of course not. How could anybody change—”

“Precisely. One can try to redirect the course of one’s future, one can even edit and reconstruct one’s memories of the past, but nothing can be done about the moment itself as it flows into being and assumes existence.”

“So?”

“To others the future looks alterable because it’s inaccessible. One has the illusion of being able to create one’s own future, to carve it out of the matrix of time yet unborn. But what I perceive when I see, ” he said, “is the ‘future’ only in terms of my temporary position in the time flow. In truth it’s also the ‘present,’ the unalterable immediate present, of myself at a different position in the time flow. Or perhaps at the same position in a different time flow. Oh, I have many clever theories, Mr. Nichols. But they all come to the same conclusion: that what I witness isn’t a hypothetical and conditional future, subject to modification through rearrangement of antecedent factors, but rather a real and unalterable event, as fixed as the present or the past. I can no more change it than you can change a motion picture as you sit watching it in a theater. I came to understand this a long time ago. And to accept. And to accept.”

“How long have you had the power to see? ”

Shrugging, Carvajal said, “All my life, I suppose. When I was a child I couldn’t comprehend it; it was like a fever that came over me, a vivid dream, a delirium. I didn’t know I was experiencing — shall we say, flashforwards? But then I found myself living through episodes I had previously ‘dreamed.’ That dйjа vu sensation, Mr. Nichols, that I’m sure you’ve experienced now and then — it was my daily companion. There were times when I felt like a puppet jerking about on strings while someone spoke my lines out of the sky. Gradually I discovered that no one else experienced the dйjа vu feeling as often or as intensely as I. I think I must have been twenty before I fully understood what I was, and close to thirty before I really came to terms with it. Of course I never revealed myself to anyone else, not until today, in fact.”

“Because there was no one you trusted?”

“Because it wasn’t in the script,” he said with maddening smugness.

“You never married?”

“No.”

“How could I want to? How could I want what I had obviously not wanted? I never saw a wife for myself.”

“And therefore you must never have been meant to have one.”

“Never have been meant?” His eyes flashed strangely. “I don’t like that phrase, Mr. Nichols. It implies that there’s some conscious design in the universe, an author for the great script. I don’t think there is. There’s no need to introduce such a complication. The script writes itself, moment by moment, and the script showed that I lived alone. One doesn’t need to say I was meant to be single. Sufficient to say that I saw myself to be single, and so I would be single, and so I was single, and so I am single.”

“The language lacks the proper tenses for a case like yours,” I said.

“But you follow my meaning?”

“I think so. Would it be right to say that ‘future’ and ‘present’ are merely different names for the same events seen from different points of view?”

“Not a bad approximation,” said Carvajal. “I prefer to think of all events as simultaneous, and what is in motion is our perception of them, that moving point of consciousness, not the events themselves.”

“And sometimes it’s given to someone to perceive events from several viewpoints at the same time, is that it?”

“I have many theories,” he said vaguely. “Perhaps one of them is correct. What matters is the vision itself, not the explanation. And I have the vision.”

“You could have used it to make millions,” I said, gesturing at the shabby apartment.

“I did.”

“No, I mean a really gigantic fortune. Rockefeller plus Getty plus Croesus, a financial empire on a scale the world’s never seen. Power. Ultimate luxury. Pleasure. Women. Control of whole continents.”

“It wasn’t in the script,” Carvajal said.

“And you accepted the script.”

“The script admits of nothing other than acceptance. I thought you understood that point.”

“So you made money, a lot of money but nothing like what you could have made, and it was all meaningless to you? You just let it pile up around you like falling autumn leaves?”

“I had no need of it. My needs are simple and my tastes are plain. I accumulated it because I saw myself playing the market and growing rich. What I see myself do, I do.”

“Following the script. No questions asked about why.”

“Millions of dollars. What have you done with it all?”

“I used it as I saw myself using it. I gave some of it away, to charities, to universities, to politicians.”

“According to your own preferences or to the design you saw unfolding?”

“I have no preferences,” he said calmly.

“And the rest of the money?”

“I kept it. In banks. What would I have done with it? It’s never had any importance to me. As you say, meaningless. A million dollars, five million, ten million — just words.” An odd wistful note crept into his voice. “What does have meaning? What does meaning mean? We merely play out the script, Mr. Nichols. Would you like another glass of water?”

“Please,” I said, and the millionaire filled my glass.

My mind was whirling. I had come for answers, and I had had them, dozens of them, yet each had raised a cluster of new questions. Which he was willing to answer, evidently, for no reason other than that he had already answered them in his visions of this day. Talking to Carvajal, I found myself slipping between past and future tenses, lost in a grammatical maze of jumbled time and disordered sequences. And he was altogether placid, sitting almost motionless, his voice flat and sometimes nearly inaudible, his face without expression other than that peculiarly destroyed look. Destroyed, yes. He might have been a zombie, or perhaps a robot. Living a rigid preordained fully programmed life, never questioning the motives for any of his actions, simply going on and on, a puppet dangling from his own inevitable future, drifting in a deterministic existential passivity that I found bewildering and alien. For a moment I found myself pitying them. Then I wondered whether my compassion might not be misplaced. I felt the temptation of that existential passivity, and it was a powerful tug. How comforting it might be, I thought, to live in a world free of all uncertainty!

He said suddenly, “I think you should go now. I’m not accustomed to long conversations and I’m afraid this has tired me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stay so long.”

“No need to apologize. All that happened today was as I saw it would be. So all is well.”

“I’m grateful that you were willing to talk so openly about yourself,” I said.

“Willing?” he said, laughing. “ Willingagain?”

“That word isn’t in your working vocabulary?”

“No. And I hope to wipe it from yours.” He moved toward the door in a gesture of dismissal. “We’ll talk again soon.”

“I’d like that.”

“I regret I couldn’t help you as much as you wished. Your question about what Paul Quinn will become — I’m sorry. The answer lies beyond my limits and I have no information to give. I can perceive only what I will perceive, do you see? Do you understand? I perceive only my own future perceptions, as though I look at the future through a periscope, and my periscope shows me nothing about next year’s election. Many of the events leading up to the election, yes. The outcome itself, no. I’m sorry.”

He took my hand a moment. I felt a current flowing between us, a distinct and almost tangible river of connection. I sensed great strain in him, not merely the strain of the conversation but something deeper, a struggle to maintain and extend that contact between us, to reach me on some profound level of being. The sensation disturbed and unsettled me. It lasted only an instant; then it snapped, and I fell back into aloneness with a perceptible impact of separation, and he smiled, gave me a courtly little nod of the head, wished me a safe journey home, showed me into the dark dank hallway.

Only as I was getting into my car a few minutes later did all the pieces slip into place and I come to comprehend what Carvajal had been telling me as we stood by the door. Only then did I understand the nature of the ultimate limit that governed his vision, that had turned him into the passive puppet he was, that had stripped all meaning from his actions. Carvajal had seen the moment of his own death. That was why he was unable to tell me who the next President was, yes, but the effect of that knowledge ran deeper than that. It explained why he drifted through life in the peculiarly unquestioning, uncaring way. For decades Carvajal must have lived with the awareness of how and where and when he would die, the absolute and indubitable knowledge of it, and that terrible knowledge had paralyzed his will in a fashion hard for ordinary people to grasp. That was my intuitive interpretation of his condition; and I trust my intuitions. Now the time of his end was less than seventeen months away; and he was drifting aimlessly toward it, accepting, playing out the script, not caring, not caring at all.