The Stochastic Man

33

I rented an apartment for myself in Manhattan, a three-room furnished job in an old, once-luxurious high rise on East Sixty-third near Second Avenue, which is an old, once-luxurious neighborhood not yet seriously into disrepair. The building’s pedigree was evidenced by an assortment of security devices dating from the 1960s or thereabouts through the early 1990s, everything from police locks and hidden peepholes up to early-model filter mazes and velocity screens. The furniture was simple and timeless in style, venerable and utilitarian, couches and chairs and bed and tables and bookcases and stuff of that sort, so anonymous as to be invisible. I felt invisible, too, after I was completely moved in and the movers and the building superintendent had gone away, leaving me standing alone in my new living room like an ambassador newly arrived from nowhere to take up residence in limbo. What was this place, and how had it happened that I was living here? Whose chairs are these? Whose fingerprints on the bare blue walls?

Sundara had let me take some of the paintings and sculptures, and I set them up here and there; they had seemed magnificently integral to the lavish textures of our Staten Island condo, but here they looked awkward and unnatural, penguins in the veldt. There were no spotlights here, no cunning arrangements of solenoids and rheostats, no carpeted pedestals: just low ceilings, dirty walls, windows without opaquers. Yet I felt no self-pity, finding myself here, only confusion, emptiness, dislocation. I spent the first day unpacking, organizing, setting up the lares and penates, working slowly and inefficiently, pausing often to think about nothing in particular. I didn’t go out, not even for groceries; instead I phoned a hundred-dollar order to Gristede’s market on the corner by way of initial stocking of the larder. Dinner was a solitary tasteless business of miscellaneous synthetic glop, absentmindedly prepared and hastily shoveled down. I slept alone, and, to my surprise, I slept very well. In the morning I phoned Carvajal and told him what had been happening.

He grunted his approval and said, “You have a view of Second Avenue from your bedroom window?”

“Yes. And Sixty-third Street from the living room. Why?”

“Light blue walls?”

“Yes.”

“A dark couch?”

“Yes. Why do you want to know all this?”

“I’m just checking,” he said. “To make certain you found the right place.”

“You mean, that I found the one you’ve been seeing? ”

“That’s right.”

“Was there any doubt?” I asked. “Have you stopped trusting the things you see? ”

“Not for a moment. But do you?”

“I trust you, I trust you. What color is my bathroom sink?”

“I don’t know,” Carvajal said. “I’ve never bothered to notice. But your refrigerator is light brown.”

“Okay, already. I’m impressed.”

“I hope so. Are you ready to take notes?”

I found a scratchpad. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Thursday, October twenty-first. Quinn will fly to Louisiana next week for a meeting with Governor Thibodaux. Afterward Quinn issues a statement declaring his support for the Plaquemines Project. When he gets back to New York he fires Housing Commissioner Ricciardi and gives the job to Charles Lewisohn. Ricciardi is named to the Racing Authority. And then—”

I took it all down, shaking my head as usual, hearing Quinn mutter, What’s Thibodaux to me? Why should I give a crap about the Plaquemines Dam? I thought dams were obsolete anyway. And Ricciardi’s been doing a reasonably good job, considering his limited intelligence; won’t it offend the Italians if I kick him upstairs like that? Et cetera, et cetera. More and more frequently these days I had been coming to Quinn with bizarre stratagems, inexplicable and implausible, for now the pipeline from Carvajal was flowing freely out of the immediate future, carrying advice for me to relay to Quinn on how best to maneuver and manipulate; Quinn went along with everything I suggested, but sometimes I was hard put to make him do the things I asked him to do. One of these days he’d turn down an idea outright and would not be budged; what would happen then to Carvajal’s unalterable future?

I was at City Hall the customary time the next day — it felt a little odd taking a cab downtown via Second Avenue instead of podding over from Staten Island — and by half past nine I had my latest batch of memos ready for the mayor. I sent them in. A little after ten my intercom bleeped and a voice said that Deputy Mayor Mardikian wanted to see me.

There was going to be trouble. I felt it intuitively as I went down the hall, and I saw it all over Mardikian’s face as I entered his office. He looked uncomfortable — edgy, off center, tense. His eyes were too bright and he was chewing at the corner of his lip. My newest memoranda were spread out in a diamond-shaped pattern on his desk. Where was the smooth, slick, lacquer-finish Mardikian? Gone. Gone. And this rattled, jangled man before me was in his place.

He said, hardly looking up at me, “Lew what the hell is this garbage about Ricciardi?”

“It’s advisable to remove him from his current job.”

“I know it’s advisable. You just advised us. Why is it advisable?”

“Long-range dynamics dictate it,” I said, trying to bluff. “I can’t give you any convincing and concrete reason, but my feeling is that it’s unwise to keep a man in that job who’s so closely identified with the Italian-American community here, especially the real estate interests within that community. Lewisohn’s a good neutral non-abrasive figure who might be safer in that slot next year as we approach the mayoralty election, and—”

“Quit it, Lew.”

“What?”

“Knock it off. You aren’t telling me a thing. You’re just giving me a lot of noise. Quinn thinks Ricciardi’s been doing decent work and he’s upset about your memo, and when I ask you for supportive data you just shrug and say it’s a hunch. Now also—”

“My hunches have always—”

“Wait,” Mardikian said. “This Louisiana thing. Christ! Thibodaux is the antithesis of everything Quinn has been trying to stand for. Why in hell should the mayor haul his ass all the way down to Baton Rouge to embrace an antediluvian bigot and espouse a useless and controversial and ecologically risky dam-building project? Quinn’s got everything to lose and nothing visible to gain from that, unless you think it’ll help him get the redneck vote in 2004 and you think the redneck vote is going to be vital to his chances, which God help us all if it is. Well?”

“I can’t explain it, Haig.”

“You can’t explain it? You can’t explain it? You give the mayor a highly explicit instruction like this, or like the Ricciardi thing, something that obviously has to have been the product of a whole lot of complicated thinking, and you don’t know why? If you don’t know why, how are we supposed to? Where’s the rational basis for our actions? You want the mayor to be wandering around like a sleepwalker, like some sort of zombie, just doing as you say and not knowing why? Come on, kid! A hunch is a hunch, but we’ve hired you to make rational comprehensible projections, not to be a soothsayer.”

Quietly I said, after a long wobbly pause, “Haig, I’ve been going through a lot of bad stuff lately, and I don’t have much reserve of energy. I don’t want to have a heavy hassle with you now. I’m just asking you to take it on faith that there’s logic in the things I propose.”

“I can’t.”

“Please?”

“Look, I realize that having your marriage fall apart has really ripped you up, Lew, but that’s exactly why I have to challenge what you’ve handed in today. For months now you’ve been giving us these weird trips to do, and sometimes you justify them convincingly and sometimes you don’t, sometimes you give us the most shamelessly cockeyed reasons for some course of action, and without exception Quinn has ultimately gone along with all your advice, frequently against his own better judgment. And I have to admit that so far everything has worked out surprisingly well. But now, but now—” He looked up, and his eyes drilled into mine. “Frankly, Lew, we’re starting to have some doubts about your stability. We don’t know if we ought to trust your suggestions as blindly as we have in the past.”

“Jesus!” I cried. “You think that breaking up with Sundara has destroyed my sanity?”

“I think it’s taken a lot out of you,” Mardikian said, speaking more gently. “You yourself used the phrase about not having much reserve of energy. Frankly, Lew, we think you’re under a strain, we think you’re fatigued, weary, groggy, that you’ve overtaxed yourself seriously, that you can use a rest. And we—”

“Who’s we? ”

“Quinn. Lombroso. Me.”

“What has Lombroso been saying about me?”

“Mainly that he’s been trying to get you to take a vacation since last August.”

“What else?”

Mardikian looked puzzled. “What do you mean, what else? What do you think he’d say? Christ, Lew, you’re sounding awfully paranoid all of a sudden. Bob’s your friend, remember? He’s on your side. We’re all on your side. He told you to go up to so-and-so’s hunting lodge, but you wouldn’t. He’s worried about you. We all are. Now we’d like to put it a little more strongly. We feel you need a rest, Lew, and we want you to take one. City Hall won’t fall apart if you aren’t around for a few weeks.”

“Okay. I’ll go on vacation. I could use one, sure. But one favor, first.”

“Go on.”

“The Thibodaux thing and the Ricciardi thing. I want you to put them through and have Quinn do them.”

“If you’ll give me some plausible justification.”

“I can’t, Haig.” Suddenly I was sweating all over. “Nothing that would sound convincing. But it’s important that the mayor go along with those recommendations.”

“Why?”

“It is. Very important.”

“To you or to Quinn?”

It was a shrewd shot, and it hit me hard. To me, I thought, to me, to Carvajal, to the whole pattern of faith and belief I’ve been constructing. Had the moment of truth come at last? Had I handed Quinn instructions that he would refuse to follow? And what then? The paradoxes sprouting from such a negative decision dizzied me. I felt sick.

“Important to everybody,” I said. “Please. As a favor. I haven’t given him any bad advice up to now, have I?”

“He’s hostile to this. He needs to know something of the projective structure behind these suggestions.”

Almost panicky, I said, “Don’t push me too hard, Haig. I’m right at the brink. But I’m not crazy. Exhausted, maybe, yes, but not crazy, and the stuff I handed in this morning makes sense, it will make sense, it’ll be perfectly apparent in three months, five, six, whenever. Look at me. Look me right in the eye. I’ll take that vacation. I appreciate the fact that you’re all worried about me. But I want this one favor from you, Haig. Will you go in there and tell Quinn to follow those memos? For my sake. For the sake of all the years we’ve known each other. I tell you, those memos are kosher.” I halted. I was babbling, I knew, and the more I said, the less likely it was that Haig would risk taking me seriously. Did he already see me as a dangerously unstable lunatic? Were the men in the white coats waiting in the corridor? What chance was there, actually, that anybody would pay heed to this morning’s memos? I felt pillars tumbling, the sky falling.

Then Mardikian said, astonishingly, smiling warmly, “All right, Lew. It’s nutty, but I’ll do it. Just this once. You get yourself off to Hawaii or somewhere and sit on the beach for a couple of weeks. And I’ll go in there and talk Quinn into firing Ricciardi and visiting Louisiana and all the rest. I think it’s crazy advice, but I’ll gamble on your track record.” He left his desk and came around to me, towering above me, and, abruptly, clumsily, he pulled me to him and gave me a hug. “You worry me, kid,” he muttered.