The Stochastic Man

38

There was a foul storm two days before Christmas, a mean reptilian blizzard, fierce brutal winds and sub-Arctic temperatures and a heavy fall of dry, hard, rough snow. It was the sort of storm that would depress a Minnesotan and make an Eskimo cry. All day long my windows shivered in their venerable frames as cascades of wind-driven snow pounded them like clusters of pebbles, and I shivered with them, thinking that we still had all the misery of January and February to come, and snow not implausible in March either. I went to bed early and woke up early into a dazzling sunny morning. Cold sunny days are common after snowstorms as clear dry air moves in, but there was something odd about the quality of the light, which was not the harsh brittle lemon hue of a winter day but rather the sweet mellow gold of spring; and, turning the radio on, I heard the announcer talking about the dramatic shift in the weather. Apparently some vagrant air mass out of the Carolinas had moved north during the night and the temperature had risen to improbable late-April warmth.

And April remained with us. Day after day the unseasonable heat caressed the winter-weary city. Of course everything was a mess at first as the great hummocks of recent snow softened and melted and ran in furious rivers along the gutters; but by the middle of the holiday week the worst of the slush was gone, and Manhattan, dry and trim, took on an unfamiliar well-scrubbed look. Lilacs and forsythias rashly began to break their buds, months too soon. A wave of giddiness swept New York: topcoats and snow robes disappeared, the streets were crowded with smiling buoyant people in light tunics and jerkins, throngs of nude and semi-nude sunbathers, pale but eager, sprawled on the sunny embankments of Central Park, every fountain in midtown had its full complement of musicians and jugglers and dancers. The carnival atmosphere intensified as the old year ticked away and the startling weather lingered, for this was 1999 and what was ebbing was not only a year but an entire millennium. (Those who insisted that the twenty-first century and the third millennium would not properly begin until January 1, 2001, were regarded as spoilsports and pedants.) The coming of April in December unhinged everyone. The unnatural mildness of the weather following so soon on the unnatural cold, the mysterious brightness of the sun hanging low on the southern horizon, the weird soft springlike texture of the air, gave a bizarre apocalyptic flavor to these days, so that anything seemed possible and it would not have been a surprise to behold strange comets in the night sky, or violent shifts in the constellations. I imagine it was something like that in Rome just before the arrival of the Goths, or in Paris on the verge of the Terror. It was a joyous but obscurely disturbing and frightening week; we relished the miraculous warmth, but we took it also as an omen, a portent, of some somber confrontation yet to come. As the final day of December approached there was an odd, perceptible heightening of tension. The giddy mood was still with us, but there was a sharp edge to it. What we felt was the desperate gaiety of tightrope walkers dancing over a fathomless abyss. There were those who said, taking a cruel pleasure in the grim prediction, that New Year’s Eve would be blighted by sudden vast snow, by tidal waves or tornadoes, despite the weather bureau’s forecast of continued balminess. But the day was bright and sweet, like the seven days preceding it. By noon, we learned, it was already the warmest December 31 since such records had been kept in New York City, and the mercury continued to climb all afternoon, so that we passed from pseudo-April into a perplexing imitation of June.

During this whole time I had kept to myself, shrouded in murky confusions and, I suppose, self-pity. I called no one — not Lombroso nor Sundara nor Mardikian nor Carvajal nor any of the other shreds and fragments of my former existence. I did go out for a few hours each day to roam the streets — who could resist that sun? — but I spoke to nobody and I discouraged people from speaking to me, and by evening I was home, alone, to read a bit, drink some brandy, listen to music without really listening, go early to bed. My isolation seemed to deprive me of all stochastic grace: I lived entirely in the past, like an animal, with no notion of what might happen next, no hunches, none of the old sense of patterns gathering and meshing.

On New Year’s Eve I felt a need to be outdoors. To barricade myself in solitude on such a night was intolerable, the eve of, among other things, my thirty-fourth birthday. I thought of phoning friends, but no, the social energies had deserted me: I would slink solitary and unknown through the byways of Manhattan, like the Caliph Haroun al-Raschid touring Baghdad. But I dressed in my nippy-dip peacock best, summer clothes of scarlet and gold with glistening underthreads, and I trimmed my beard and scraped my scalp, and I went out jauntily to see the century into its tomb.

Darkness had come by late afternoon — this was still the depth of winter, no matter what the thermometer told us — and the lights of the city glittered. Though it was only seven o’clock, the partying evidently was beginning early; I heard singing, distant laughter, the sounds of chanting, the far-off crash of breaking glass. I had a meager dinner in a small automated restaurant on Third Avenue and walked aimlessly westward and southward.

Ordinarily one didn’t stroll like this in Manhattan after dark. But tonight the streets were as busy as they were by day, pedestrians everywhere, laughing, peering into shopwindows, waving to strangers, jostling one another playfully, and I felt safe. Was this truly New York, the city of closed faces and wary eyes, the city of knives that gleamed on dark sullen streets? Yes, yes, yes, New York, but a New York transformed, a millennial New York, New York on the night of the climactic Saturnalia.

Saturnalia, yes, that was what it was, a lunatic revel, a frenzy of ecstatic spirits. Every drug in the psychedelic pharmacopoeia was being peddled on streetcorners, and sales seemed brisk. No one walked a straight line. Sirens wailed everywhere as the gaiety mounted in pitch. I took no drugs myself except the ancient one, alcohol, which I took most copiously, stopping in tavern after tavern, a beer here, a shot of awful brandy there, some tequila, some rum, a martini, even dark rich sherry. I was dizzy but not demolished: somehow I stayed upright and more or less coherent, and my mind functioned with what seemed like its customary lucidity, observing, recording.

There were definite increments of wildness from hour to hour. In the bars nudity was still uncommon by nine, but by half past there was bare sweaty flesh everywhere, jiggling breasts, waggling buttocks, clap hands and kick, everyone join in a circle. It was half past nine before I saw anyone screwing in the streets, but outdoor fornication was widespread by ten. An undercurrent of violence had been present all evening — smashing of windows, shooting out of streetlamps — but it picked up strength rapidly after ten: there were fistfights, some genial, some murderous, and at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth there was a mob battle going on, a hundred men and women clubbing at each other in what looked like a random way, and motorists were having noisy disputes everywhere, and it seemed to me that some drivers were deliberately ramming their cars into others for the sheer destructive fun of it. Were there murders? Most certainly. Rapes? By the thousand. Mutilations and other monstrosities? I have no doubt.

And where were the police? I saw them, now and then, some trying desperately to hold back the tide of disorder, others giving in and joining it, policemen with flushed faces and glazed eyes happily wading into fights and escalating them to savage warfare, policemen buying drugs from the corner peddlers, policemen stripped to the waist groping naked girls in bars, policemen raucously smashing windshields with their nightsticks. The general craziness was contagious. After a week of apocalyptic build-up, a week of grotesque tension, no one could hold too tightly to his sanity.

Midnight found me in Times Square. The old custom, long since abandoned by a city in decay: thousands, hundreds of thousands, crammed shoulder to shoulder between Forty-sixth and Forty-second Streets, singing, shouting, kissing, swaying. Suddenly the hour struck. Startling searchlights speared the sky. The summits of office towers turned radiant with brilliant floodlights. The year 2000! The year 2000! And my birthday had come! Happy birthday! Happy, happy, happy me!

I was drunk. I was out of my mind. The universal hysteria raged in me. I found my hands grasping someone’s breasts, and squeezed, and jammed my mouth against a mouth, and felt a hot moist body pressed tight to mine. The crowd surged and we were swept apart, and I moved on the human tide, hugging, laughing, fighting to catch my breath, leaping, falling, stumbling, nearly going down beneath a thousand pairs of feet.

“There’s a fire!” someone yelled, and indeed flames were dancing high on a building to the west along Forty-fourth Street. Such a lovely orange hue — we began to cheer and applaud. We are all Nero tonight, I thought, and was swept onward, southward. I could no longer see the flames but the smell of smoke was spreading through the area. Bells tolled. More sirens. Chaos, chaos, chaos.

And then I felt a sensation as of a fist pounding the back of my head, and dropped to my knees in an open space, dazed, and covered my face with my hands to ward off the next blow, but there was no next blow, only a flood of visions. Visions. A baffling torrent of images roared through my mind. I saw myself old and frayed, coughing in a hospital bed with a shining spidery lattice of medical machinery all about me; I saw myself swimming in a clear mountain pool; I saw myself battered and heaved by surf on some angry tropical shore. I peered into the mysterious interior of some vast incomprehensible crystalline mechanism. I stood at the edge of a field of lava, watching molten matter bubble and pop as on the earth’s first morning. Colors assailed me. Voices whispered to me, speaking in fragments, in pulverized bits of words and tag ends of phrases. This is a trip, I told myself, a trip, a trip, a very bad trip, but even the worst trip ends eventually, and I crouched, trembling, trying not to resist, letting the nightmare sweep through me and play itself out. It may have gone on for hours; it may have lasted only a minute. In one moment of clarity I said to myself, This is seeing, this is how it begins, like a fever, like a madness. I remember telling myself that.

I remember vomiting, too, casting forth the evening’s mixture of liquors in quick heavy tremors, and huddling afterward near my own stinking pool, weak, shaking, unable to rise. And then came thunder, like the anger of Zeus, majestic and unanswerable. There was a great stillness after that one terrifying thunderclap. All over the city the Saturnalia was halting as New Yorkers stopped, stiffened, turned their eyes in wonder and awe to the skies. What now? Thunder on a winter night? Would the earth open and swallow us all? Would the sea rise and make an Atlantic of our playground? There came a second clap of thunder minutes after the first, but no lightning, and then, after another pause, a third, and then came rain, gentle at first, torrential in a few moments, a warm spring rain to welcome us to the year 2000. I rose uncertainly to my feet and, having remained chastely clothed all evening, stripped now, naked on Broadway at Forty-first Street, feet flat on the pavement, head upturned, letting the downpour wash the sweat and tears and weariness from me, letting it sluice my mouth to rinse me of the foul taste of vomit. It was a wondrous moment. But quickly I felt chilled. April was over; December was returning. My sex shriveled and my shoulders sagged. Shivering, I fumbled for my sodden clothes, and, sober now, drenched, miserable, timid, imagining brigands and cutpurses lurking in every alley, I began the long slow shuffle across town. The temperature seemed to plummet five degrees for every ten blocks I traversed; by the time I reached the East Side I felt I was freezing, and as I crossed Fifty-seventh Street I noticed the rain had turned to snow, and the snow was sticking, making a fine powdery dusting that covered streets and automobiles and the slumped bodies of the unconscious and the dead. It was snowing with full wintry malevolence when I reached my apartment. The time was five in the morning, January 1, A.D. 2000. I dropped my clothing on the floor and fell naked into bed, quivering, sore, and I pressed my knees to my chest and huddled there, half expecting to die before dawn. Fourteen hours passed before I awoke.