The Stochastic Man

26

A day and a half later. “The worst of it,” Carvajal said, “is seeing your own death. That’s the moment when the life goes out of you, not when you actually die, but when you have to see it.”

“Is that the curse you were talking about?”

“Yes. That’s the curse. That’s what killed me, Lew, long before my proper time. I was almost thirty years old, the first time I saw it. I’ve seen it many times since. I know the date, the hour, the place, the circumstances. I’ve lived through it again and again, the beginning, the middle, the end, the darkness, the silence. And once I saw it, life became nothing more than a meaningless puppet show for me.”

“What was the worst part?” I asked. “Knowing when, knowing how?”

“Knowing that,” he said.

“That you would die at all?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, it must be disturbing, yes, to watch yourself die, to see your own finish as if on a newsreel, but there can’t be any fundamental element of surprise in it, can there? I mean, death is inevitable and we all know it from the time we’re little children.”

“Do we?”

“Of course we do.”

“Do you think you’ll die, Lew?”

I blinked a couple of times. “Naturally.”

“Are you absolutely convinced of that?”

“I don’t get you. Are you implying I have delusions of immortality?”

Carvajal smiled serenely. “Everybody does, Lew. When you’re a boy your pet goldfish dies, or your dog, and you say, Well, goldfish don’t live long, dogs don’t live long, and that’s how you slough off your first experience of death. It doesn’t apply to you. The boy next door falls off his bicycle and fractures his skull. Well, you say, accidents happen, but they don’t prove anything; some people are more careless than others, and I’m one of the careful ones. Your grandmother dies. She was old and sick for years, you say, she let herself get too heavy, she grew up in a generation when preventive medicine was still primitive, she didn’t know how to take care of her body. It won’t happen to me, you say. It won’t happen to me.”

“My parents are dead. My sister died. I had a turtle that died. Death isn’t something remote and unreal in my life. No, Carvajal, I believe in death. I accept the fact of death. I know I’m going to die.”

“You don’t. Not really.”

“How can you say that?”

“I know how people are. I know how I used to be, before I saw myself die, and what I became afterward. Not many have had that experience, have been changed as I’ve been changed. Perhaps no one else, ever. Listen to me, Lew. Nobody genuinely and fully believes he’s going to die, whatever he may think he thinks. You may accept it up here on top, but you don’t accept it on the cellular level, down on the level of metabolism and mitosis. Your heart hasn’t missed a beat in thirty-odd years and it knows it never will. Your body goes merrily along like a three-shift factory manufacturing corpuscles, lymph, semen, saliva, round the clock, and so far as your body knows it always will. And your brain, it perceives itself as the center of a great drama whose star is Lew Nichols, the whole universe just a giant collection of props, everything that happens happening around you, in relation to you, with you as the pivot and fulcrum, and if you go to somebody’s wedding the name of that scene isn’t Dick and Judy Get Married, no, it’s Lew Goes to Somebody’s Wedding, and if a politician gets elected it isn’t Paul Quinn Becomes President, it’s Lew Experiences Paul Quinn Becoming President, and if a star explodes the headline isn’t Betelgeuse Goes Nova but Lew’s Universe Loses a Star, and so on, the same for everyone, everyone the hero of the great drama of existence, Dick and Judy each in starring roles in their own heads, Paul Quinn, maybe even Betelgeuse, and each of you knows that if you were to die the whole universe would have to wink out like a switched-off light, and that isn’t possible, so therefore you aren’t going to die. You know you’re the one exception. Holding the whole business together by your continued existence. All those others, Lew, you realize they’re going to die; sure, they’re the bit parts, the spear carriers, the script calls for them all to vanish along the way, but not you, oh, no, not you! Isn’t that how it truly is, Lew, down in the basement of your soul, down in those mysterious levels you visit only now and then?”

I had to grin. “Maybe it is, after all. But—”

“It is. It’s the same way for everyone. It was for me. Well, people do die, Lew. Some die at twenty and some die at a hundred and twenty, and it’s always a surprise. They stand there seeing the big blackness opening up for them, and as they go into the hole they say, My God, I was wrong after all, it’s really going to happen to me, even to me! What a shock that is, what a terrific blow to the ego, to discover that you aren’t the unique exception you thought you were. But it’s comforting, right up until that moment arrives, to cling to the idea that maybe you’ll sneak through, maybe you’ll somehow be exempt. Everybody has that scrap of comfort to live by, Lew. Everyone except me.”

“You found seeing it as bad as that?”

“It demolished me. It stripped me of that one big illusion, Lew, that secret hope of immortality, that keeps us going. Of course, I had to keep going, thirty years or so more, because I could see that it wouldn’t happen until I was an old man. But the knowledge put a wall around my life, a boundary, an unbreakable seal. I wasn’t much more than a boy and I had already had the real summing up, the period at the end of the sentence. I couldn’t count on enjoying all of eternity, the way others think they do. I had only my thirty-odd years left to go. Knowing that about yourself constricts your life, Lew. It limits your options.”

“It isn’t easy for me to understand why it should have that effect.”

“Eventually you’ll understand.”

“Maybe it won’t be that way for me, when I come to know.”

“Ah!” Carvajal cried. “We all think we’ll be the exception!”