The Stochastic Man

27

He told me, the next time we met, how his death would come to pass. He had less than a year to live, he said. It was going to happen in the spring of 2000, somewhere between the tenth of April and the twenty-fifth of May; although he claimed to know the exact date even down to the time of day, he was unwilling to be any more specific about it than that.

“Why withhold it from me?” I asked.

“Because I don’t care to be burdened with your private tensions and anticipations,” Carvajal told me bluntly. “I don’t want you showing up that day knowing it is the day, and arriving full of irrelevant emotional confusion.”

“Am I going to be there?” I asked, astounded.

“Certainly.”

“Will you tell me where it’ll happen?”

“At my apartment,” he said. “You and I will be discussing something having to do with a problem troubling you then. The doorbell will ring. I’ll answer it and a man will force his way into the house, an armed man with red hair, who—”

“Wait a minute. You once told me that no one had ever bothered you in that neighborhood and no one ever would.”

“No one who lives there, ” said Carvajal. “This man will be a stranger. He has been given my address by mistake — he has the wrong apartment — and expects to be picking up a consignment of drugs, something that sniffers use. When I tell him I don’t have any drugs, he’ll refuse to believe me; he’ll think it’s some kind of doublecross and will start to get violent, waving the gun around, threatening me.”

“And what am I doing while all this is going on?”

“Watching it.”

“Watching? Just standing there with my arms folded like a spectator?”

“Just watching,” Carvajal said. “Like a spectator.” There was a sharp edge to his tone. As if he were giving me an order: You will do nothing throughout this scene. You will remain entirely out of it, off to one side, a mere onlooker.

“I could hit him with a lamp. I could try to grab the gun.”

“You won’t.”

“All right,” I said. “What happens?”

“Somebody knocks at the door. It’s one of my neighbors, who’s heard the commotion and is worried about me. The gunman panics. Thinks it’s the police, or maybe a rival gang. He fires three times; then he breaks a window and disappears down the fire escape. The bullets strike me in the chest, the arm, and the side of my head. I linger for a minute or so. No last words. You’re not harmed at all.”

“And then?”

Carvajal laughed. “And then? And then? How would I know? I’ve told you: I see as though through a periscope. The periscope reaches only as far as that moment, and no farther. Perception ends for me there.”

How calm he was about it!

I said, “Is this the thing you saw the day you and I had lunch at the Merchants and Shippers Club?”

“Yes.”

“You sat there watching yourself get gunned down, and then casually asked to look at the menu?”

“The scene was nothing new to me.”

“How often have you seen it?” I asked.

“No idea. Twenty times, fifty, maybe a hundred. Like a recurring dream.”

“A recurring nightmare.”

“One gets used to it. It ceases to carry much emotional charge after the first dozen viewings or so.”

“It’s nothing but a movie to you? An old Cagney flick on the late-night television?”

“Something like that,” said Carvajal. “The scene itself becomes trivial, a bore, stale, predictable. It’s the implications that linger, that never lose their power over me, while the details themselves have become unimportant.”

“You just accept it. You won’t try to slam the door in the man’s face when the moment comes. You won’t let me hide behind the door and club him down. You won’t ask the police to put you under special guard that day.”

“Naturally not. What good would any of that do?”

“As an experiment—”

He pursed his lips. He looked annoyed at my stubborn return to a theme that was absurd to him. “What I see is what will happen. The time for experiments was fifty years ago, and the experiments failed. No, we won’t interfere, Lew. We’ll play our parts obediently, you and I. You know we will.”