The Stochastic Man

43

It was months since I had last seen him, half a year, from late November to late April, and he had evidently been through some changes. He looked smaller, almost doll-like, a miniature of his old self, all surplus pared away, the skin drawn back tightly over his cheekbones, his color a peculiar off-yellow, as though he were turning into an elderly Japanese, one of those desiccated little ancients in blue suits and bowties that can sometimes be seen sitting calmly beside the tickers in downtown brokerage houses. There was an unfamiliar Oriental calmness about Carvajal, too, an eerie Buddha-tranquillity that seemed to say he had reached a place beyond all storms, a peace that was, happily, contagious: moments after I arrived, full of panic and bewilderment, I felt the charge of tension leaving me. Graciously he seated me in his dismal living room, graciously he brought me the traditional glass of water.

He waited for me to speak.

How to begin? What to say? I decided to vault completely over our last conversation, putting it away, making no reference to my anger, to my accusations, to my repudiation of him. “I’ve been seeing, ” I blurted.

“Yes?” Quizzical, unsurprised, faintly bored.

“Disturbing things.”

“Oh?”

Carvajal studied me incuriously, waiting, waiting. How placid he was, how self-contained! Like something carved from ivory, beautiful, glossy, immobile.

“Weird scenes. Melodramatic, chaotic, contradictory, bizarre. I don’t know what’s clairvoyance and what’s schizophrenia.”

“Contradictory?” he asked.

“Sometimes. I can’t trust what I see. ”

“What sort of things?”

“Quinn, for one. He recurs almost daily. Images of Quinn as a tyrant, a dictator, some sort of monster, manipulating the entire nation, not so much a President as a generalissimo. His face is all over the future. Quinn this, Quinn that, everyone talking about him, everyone afraid of him. It can’t be real.”

“Whatever you see is real.”

“No. That’s not the real Quinn. That’s a paranoid fantasy. I know Paul Quinn.”

“Do you?” Carvajal asked, his voice reaching me from a distance of fifty thousand light-years.

“Look, I was dedicated to that man. In a real sense I loved that man. And loved what he stood for. Why do I get these visions of him as a dictator? Why have I become afraid of him? He isn’t like that. I know he isn’t.”

“Whatever you see is real,” Carvajal repeated.

“Then there’s a Quinn dictatorship coming in this country?”

Carvajal shrugged. “Perhaps. Very likely. How would I know?”

“How would I? How can I believe what I see? ”

Carvajal smiled and held up one hand, palm toward me. “Believe,” he urged in the weary, mocking tone of some old Mexican priest advising a troubled boy to have faith in the goodness of the angels and the charity of the Virgin. “Have no doubts. Believe.”

“I can’t. There are too many contradictions.” I shook my head fiercely. “It isn’t just the Quinn visions. I’ve been seeing my own death, too.”

“Yes, one must expect that.”

“Many times. In many different ways. A plane crash. A suicide. A heart attack. A drowning. And more.”

“You find it strange, eh?”

“Strange? I find it absurd. Which one is the reality?”

“They all are.”

“That’s crazy!”

“There are many levels of reality, Lew.”

“They can’t all be real. That violates everything you’ve told me about one fixed and unalterable future.”

“There’s one future that must occur,” Carvajal said. “There are many that do not. In the early stages of the seeing experience the mind is unfocused, and reality becomes contaminated with hallucination, and the spirit is bombarded with extraneous data.”

“But—”

“Perhaps there are many time lines,” Carvajal said. “One true one, and many potential ones, abortive lines, lines that have their existence only in the gray borderlands of probability. Sometimes information from those time lines crowds in on one if one’s mind is open enough, if it is vulnerable enough. I’ve experienced that.”

“You never said a word about it.”

“I didn’t want to confuse you, Lew.”

“But what do I do? What good is any of the information I’m receiving? How do I distinguish the real visions from the imaginary ones?”

“Be patient. Things will clarify.”

“How soon?”

“When you see yourself die,” he said, “have you ever seen the same scene more than once?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“I’ve had one at least twice.”

“But one more than any of the others?”

“Yes,” I said. “The first one. Myself as an old man in a hospital, with a lot of intricate medical equipment surrounding my bed. That one comes frequently.”

“With special intensity?”

I nodded.

“Trust it,” Carvajal said. “The others are phantoms. They’ll stop bothering you before long. The imaginary ones have a feverish, insubstantial feel to them. They waver and blur at the edges. If you look at them closely, your gaze pierces them and you behold the blankness beyond. Soon they vanish. It’s been thirty years, Lew, since such things have troubled me.”

“And the Quinn visions? Are they phantoms out of some other time line, too? Have I helped to set a monster loose in this country or am I just suffering from bad dreams?”

“There’s no way I can answer that for you. You’ll simply have to wait and see, and learn to refine your vision, and look again, and weigh the evidence.”

“You can’t give me any suggestions more precise than that?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t possible to—”

The doorbell rang.

“Excuse me,” Carvajal said.

He left the room. I closed my eyes and let the surf of some unknown tropical sea wash across my mind, a warm salty bath erasing all memory and all pain, making the rough places smooth. I perceived past, present, and future now as equally unreal: wisps of fog, shafts of blurred pastel light, far-off laughter, furry voices speaking in fragmentary sentences. Somewhere a play was being produced, but I was no longer on stage, nor was I in the audience. Time lay suspended. Perhaps, eventually, I began to see. I think Quinn’s blunt earnest features hovered before me, bathed in garish green and blue spotlights, and I might have seen the old man in the hospital and the armed men moving through the streets; and there were glimpses of worlds beyond worlds, of the empires still unborn, of the dance of the continents, of the sluggish creatures that crawl over the great planet-girdling shell of ice at the end of time. Then I heard voices from the hallway, a man shouting, Carvajal patiently explaining, denying. Something about drugs, a doublecross, angry accusations. What? What? I struggled up out of the fog that bound me. There was Carvajal, by the door, confronted by a short freckle-faced man with wild blue eyes and unkempt flame-red hair. The stranger was clutching a gun, an old clumsy one, a blue-black cannon of a gun, swirling it excitedly from side to side. The shipment, he kept yelling, where’s the shipment, what are you trying to pull? And Carvajal shrugged and smiled and shook his head and said over and over, mildly, This is a mistake, it’s simply an error. Carvajal looked radiant. It was as though all his life had been bent and shaped toward this moment of grace, this epiphany, this confused and comic doorway dialogue.

I stepped forward, ready to play my part. I devised lines for myself. I would say, Easy, fellow, stop waving that gun around. You’ve come to the wrong place. We’ve got no drugs here. I saw myself moving confidently toward the intruder, still talking. Why don’t you cool down, put the gun away, phone the boss and get things straightened out? Because otherwise you’ll find yourself in heavy trouble, and — Still talking, looming over the little freckle-faced gunman, calmly reaching for the gun, twisting it out of his hand, pressing him against the wall -

Wrong script. The real script called for me to do nothing. I knew that. I did nothing.

The gunman looked at me, at Carvajal, at me again. He hadn’t been expecting me to emerge from the living room and he wasn’t sure how to react. Then came a knock at the outside door. A man’s voice from the corridor asking Carvajal if everything was okay in there. The gunman’s eyes flashed in fear and bewilderment. He jerked away from Carvajal, pulling in on himself. There was a shot — almost peripherally, incidentally. Carvajal began to fall but supported himself against the wall. The gunman sprinted past me, toward the living room. Paused there, trembling, in a half crouch. He fired again. A third shot. Then swung suddenly toward the window. The sound of breaking glass. I had been standing frozen, but now at last I started to move. Too late; the intruder was out the window, down the fire escape, disappearing into the street.

I turned toward Carvajal. He had fallen and lay near the entrance to the living room, motionless, silent, eyes open, still breathing. His shirt was bloody down the front; a second patch of blood was spreading along his left arm; there was a third wound, oddly precise and small, at the side of his head, just above the cheekbone. I ran to him and held him and saw his eyes glaze, and it seemed to me he laughed right at the end, a small soft chuckle, but that may be scriptwriting of my own, a little neat stage direction. So. So. Done at last. How calm he had been, how accepting, how glad to be over with it. The scene so long rehearsed, now finally played.