The Stochastic Man

28

Under the new regime I conferred with Carvajal daily, sometimes several times a day, usually by telephone, transmitting to him the latest inside political information — strategies, data projections, anything that might seem even peripherally pertinent to the business of getting Paul Quinn into the White House. The reason for filing all this stuff in Carvajal’s mind was the periscope effect: he couldn’t see anything that his consciousness would not ultimately somehow perceive, and what he couldn’t see he couldn’t pass along to me. What I was doing, then, was phoning messages to myself out of the future — messages relayed by way of Carvajal. The things I told him today were of course worthless for this purpose, since present-me already knew them; but what I would tell him a month from now might prove to be of value to me today, and, since the information had to get into the system at some point, I began the input flow here, feeding Carvajal now the data he had seen months or even years ago. Over the remaining year of Carvajal’s life he would become a unique repository of future political events. (In fact he already was that repository, but now I had to follow through by making certain he received the information that we both knew he was going to receive. There are paradoxes inherent in all this but I prefer not to examine them too closely.)

And Carvajal, day by day, flowed data back to me — mainly things having to do with the long-range shaping of Quinn’s destinies. These I passed along to Haig Mardikian, usually, though some fell into the domain of George Missakian — media relations — and some, having to do with financial matters, went to Lombroso, and a few I took directly to Quinn himself. My Carvajal-derived memos in a typical week included items like this:

Invite Commun. Devel. Commissioner Spreckels to lunch. Suggest possibil. of judgeship.

Attend wedding, son of Sen. Wilkom of Mass.

Tell Con Ed, confidential, no hope of okay for proposed Flatbush fusion plant.

Gov.’s brother — name him to Triboro Authority. Defuse nepotism issue in advance with jokes at press conf.

Call in Assembly Spkr. Feinberg for gentle arm-twisting in re NY-Mass-Conn pod-hookup bill.

Position papers: libraries, drugs, interstate population transfer.

Tour Garment District Historic Site with new Israeli consul-general. Include in party: Leibman, Berkowitz, Ms. Weisbard, Rabbi Dubin, also Msgr. O’Neill.

Sometimes I understood why my future self was recommending a given course of action to Quinn, and at other times I was altogether baffled. (Why, say, tell him to veto an innocuous City Council proposal reopening a no-parking zone south of Canal Street? How would that help him become President?) Carvajal offered no aid. He was merely passing along tips he was getting from the me of eight or nine months from now. Since he’d be dead before any of these things could manifest their ultimate implications, he had no idea what effect they might produce, and could hardly have cared less. He gave everything to me on a bland take-it-or-leave-it basis. Mine not to reason why. Follow the script, Lew, follow the script.

I followed the script.

My vicarious political ambitions were beginning to take on the character of a divine mission: using Carvajal’s gift and Quinn’s charisma, I would be able to reshape the world into a Better Place of unspecified ideal character. I felt the throbbing conduits of power in my grasp. Whereas before I had seen Quinn’s presidency as a goal worth pursuing for its own sake, now I became practically Utopian in my plans for a world guided by the ability to see. No longer did I think in terms of manipulation, of redeployment of motivations, of political machination, except in service of the higher end toward which I imagined myself working.

Day after day I streamed my memos toward Quinn and his minions. Mardikian and the mayor assumed the stuff I was handing in was the result of my own projections, the product of my polltakers, my computers, and my sweet canny cerebrum. Since my record of stochastic insight over the years had been consistently excellent, they did as I told them. Unquestioningly. Quinn occasionally laughed and said, “Boy, this one doesn’t make much sense to me,” but I told him, “It will, it will,” and he went along with it. Lombroso, though, must have realized I was getting a lot of these things from Carvajal. But he never said a word about that to me — nor, I believe, to Quinn or Mardikian.

From Carvajal I also got instructions of a more personal kind.

“It’s time to get your hair cut,” he told me early in September.

“Short, you mean?”

“Off.”

“Are you telling me to shave my scalp?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“No,” I said. “If there’s one silly fad I detest—”

“Irrelevant. As of this month you began wearing your hair like that. Do it tomorrow, Lew.”

“I wouldn’t ever have gotten a Pruss,” I objected. “It’s altogether out of keeping with my—”

“You did,” Carvajal said simply. “How can you quarrel with that?”

But what was the use of arguing? He had seen me bald; hence I must go and get a Pruss. No questions asked, the man had told me when I came aboard: just follow the script, boy.

I yielded myself up unto the barber. I came out looking like an oversized Erich von Stroheim, minus monocle and stiff collar.

“How marvelous it looks!” Sundara cried. “How gorgeous!”

She ran her hands tenderly over my stubbly scalp. It was the first time in two or three months that there had been any kind of current flowing between us. She loved the haircut, absolutely adored it. Of course: getting cropped like that was a crazy Transit sort of thing for me to do. To her it was a sign that I might yet shape up.

There were other orders.

“Spend a weekend in Caracas,” Carvajal said. “Charter a fishing boat. You’ll catch a swordfish.”

“Why?”

“Do it,” he said implacably.

“I don’t see the relevance of my going to—”

“Please, Lew. You’re being difficult.”

“Will you explain this, at least?”

“There’s no explanation. You have to go to Caracas.”

It was absurd. But I went to Caracas. I drank too many margaritas with some lawyers from New York who didn’t know I was Quinn’s right hand and put him down rather noisily, going on and on about the good old days when Gottfried kept the rabble in line. Fascinating. I hired a boat and did indeed catch a swordfish, nearly breaking both wrists in the process, and had the damned beast mounted at staggering cost. It began to occur to me that Carvajal and Sundara might be in league to drive me crazy, or maybe to drive me into the arms of the nearest Transit proctor. (Same thing?) But that was impossible. More likely Carvajal was merely giving me a crash course in following the script. Accept whatever dictate comes to you out of tomorrow: never ask questions.

I accepted the dictates.

I grew a beard. I bought nippy-dip new clothes. I picked up a sullen cow-breasted sixteen-year-old in Times Square, filled her with rum swizzles in the highest eyrie of the Hyatt Regency, rented a room there for two hours and grimly fornicated her. I spent three days up at the Columbia Medical Center as a volunteer subject for sonopuncture research, and left there with every bone buzzing. I went down to my neighborhood Numbers office and put a thousand bucks on 666, and got wiped out, because that day’s winner was 667. I complained bitterly about that to Carvajal. “I don’t mind doing craziness, but this is expensive craziness. Couldn’t you at least have given me the right number?” He smiled obliquely and said he had given me the right number. I assume I was supposed to lose. All part of my training, it seemed. Existential masochism: the Zen approach to gambling. All right. Never ask questions. A week later he had me put a thou on 333, and I hit for a not-so-small fortune. So there were a few compensations.

Follow the script, kid. Ask no questions.

I wore my funny clothes. I got my scalp scraped regularly. I endured the itching of my beard, and after a while I stopped noticing it. I sent the mayor off lunching and dinnering with a weird assortment of eventually influential politicians. God help me, I followed the script.

Early in October Carvajal said, “Now you file for a divorce.”