The Stochastic Man

6

From September of 1997 until March of 2000, nine months ago, I was obsessed with the idea of making Paul Quinn President of the United States.

Obsessed.That’s a strong word. It smacks of Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing, ritual handwashing, rubber undergarments. Yet I think it precisely describes my involvement with Quinn and his ambitions.

Haig Mardikian introduced me to Quinn in the summer of ‘95. Haig and I went to private school together — the Dalton, circa 1980-82, where we played a lot of basketball — and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He’s a slick lynx-eyed lawyer about three meters tall who wants to be, among many other things, the first United States Attorney General of Armenian ancestry, and probably will be.

(Probably?How can I doubt it?) On a sweltering August afternoon he phoned to say, “Sarkisian is having a big splash tonight. You’re invited. I guarantee that something good will come out of it for you.” Sarkisian is a real estate operator who, so it seems, owns both sides of the Hudson River for six or seven hundred kilometers.

“Who’ll be there?” I asked. “Aside from Ephrikian, Missakian, Hagopian, Manoogian, Garabedian, and Boghosian.”

“Berberian and Khatisian,” he said. “Also—” And Mardikian ran off a brilliant, a dazzling, list of celebrities from the world of finance, politics, industry, science, and the arts, ending with “—and Paul Quinn.” Meaningful emphasis on that final name.

“Should I know him, Haig?”

“You should, but right now you probably don’t. At present he’s the assemblyman from Riverdale. A man who’ll be going places in public life.”

I didn’t particularly care to pass my Saturday night hearing some ambitious young Irish pol explain his plan for revamping the galaxy, but on the other hand I had done a few projective jobs for politicians before and there was money in it, and Mardikian probably knew what was good for me. And the guest list was irresistible. Besides, my wife was spending August as a guest of a temporarily shorthanded six-group in Oregon and I suppose I entertained some hopeful fantasy of going home that evening with a sultry dark-haired Armenian lady.

“What time?” I asked.

“Nine,” Mardikian said.

So to Sarkisian’s place: a triplex penthouse atop a ninety-story circular alabaster-and-onyx condo tower on a Lower West Side offshore platform. Blank-faced guards who might just as well have been constructs of metal and plastic checked my identity, scanned me for weapons, and admitted me. The air within was a blue haze. The sour, spicy odor of powdered bone dominated everything: we were smoking doped calcium that year. Crystalline oval windows like giant portholes ringed the entire apartment. In the eastward-facing rooms the view was blocked by the two monolithic slabs of the World Trade Center, but elsewhere Sarkisian did provide a decent 270-degree panorama of New York Harbor, New Jersey, the West Side Expressway, and maybe some of Pennsylvania. Only in one of the giant wedge-shaped rooms were the portholes opaqued, and when I went into an adjoining wedge and peered at a sharp angle I found out why: that side of the tower faced the still undemolished stump of the Statue of Liberty, and Sarkisian apparently didn’t want the depressing sight to bring his guests down. (This was the summer of ‘95, remember, which was one of the more violent years of the decade, and the bombing still had everyone jittery.)

The guests! They were as promised, a spectacular swarm of contraltos and astronauts and quarterbacks and chairpersons of the board. Costumes ran to formal-flamboyant, with the expectable display of breasts and genitalia but also the first hints, from the avant-garde, of the fin-de-siиcle love of concealment that now has taken over, high throats and tight bandeaus. Half a dozen of the men and several of the women affected clerical garb and there must have been fifteen pseudo generals bedecked with enough medals to shame an African dictator. I was dressed rather simply, I thought, in a pleatless radiation-green singlet and a three-strand bubble necklace. Though the rooms were crowded, the flow of the party was far from formless, for I saw eight or ten big swarthy outgoing men in subdued clothing, key members of Haig Mardikian’s ubiquitous Armenian mafia, distributed equidistantly through the main room like cribbage pegs, like goalposts, like pylons, each occupying a preassigned fixed position and efficiently offering smokes and drinks, making introductions, directing people toward other people whose acquaintance it might be desirable for them to make. I was drawn easily into this subtle gridwork, had my hand mangled by Ara Garabedian or Jason Komurjian or perhaps George Missakian, and found myself inserted into orbit on a collision course with a sunny-faced golden-haired woman named Autumn, who wasn’t Armenian and with whom I did in fact go home many hours later.

Long before Autumn and I came to that, though, I had been smoothly nudged through a long musical-chairs rotation of conversational partners, during the course of which I

—found myself talking to a female person who was black, witty, stunning-looking, and half a meter taller than I am, and whom I correctly guessed to be Ilene Mulamba, the head of Network Four, a meeting which led to my getting a fancy consulting contract for design of their split-signal ethnic-zone telecasts—

—gently deflected the playful advances of City Councilman Ronald Holbrecht, the self-styled Voice of the Gay Community and the first man outside California to win an election with Homophile Party endorsement—

—wandered into a conversation between two tall white-haired men who looked like bankers and discovered them to be bioenergetics specialists from Bellevue and Columbia-Presbyterian, swapping gossip about their current sonopuncture work, which involved ultrasonic treatment of advanced bone malignancies—

—listened to an executive from CBS Labs telling a goggle-eyed young man about their newly developed charisma-enhancement biofeedback-loop gadget—

—learned that the goggle-eyed young man was Lamont Friedman of the sinister and multifarious investment banking house of Asgard Equities—

—exchanged trifling chitchat with Nole MacIver of the Ganymede Expedition, Claude Parks of the Dope Patrol (who had brought his molecular sax, and didn’t need much encouragement to play it), three pro basketball stars and some luminous right-fielder, an organizer for the new civil-service prostitutes’ union, a municipal brothel inspector, an assortment of less trendy city officials, and the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of transient arts, Mei-ling Pulvermacher—

—had my first encounter with a Transit Creed proctor, the petite but forceful Ms. Catalina Yarber, just arrived from San Francisco, whose attempt to convert me on the spot I declined with oblique excuses—

—and met Paul Quinn.

Quinn, yes. Sometimes I wake quivering and perspiring from a dreamed replay of that party in which I see myself swept by an irresistible current through a sea of yammering celebrities toward the golden, smiling figure of Paul Quinn, who waits for me like Charybdis, eyes agleam, jaws agape. Quinn was thirty-four then, five years my senior, a short powerful-looking man, blond, broad shoulders, wide-set blue eyes, a warm smile, conservative clothes, a rough masculine handshake, grabbing you by the inside of your biceps as well as by your hand, making eye contact with an almost audible snap, establishing instant rapport. All that was standard political technique, and I had seen it often enough before, but never with this degree of intensity and power. Quinn leaped across the person-person gap so quickly and so confidently that I began to suspect he must be wearing one of those CBS charisma-enhancement loops in his earlobe. Mardikian told him my name and right away he was into me with, “You’re one of the people I was most eager to meet here tonight,” and, “Call me Paul,” and, “Let’s go where it’s a little quieter, Lew,” and I knew I was being expertly conned and yet I was nailed despite myself.

He led me to a little salon a few rooms northwest of the main room. Pre-Columbian clay figurines, African masks, pulsar screens, splash stands — a nice mixture of old and new decorative notions. The wallpaper was New York Times, vintage 1980 or so. “Some party,” Quinn said, grinning. He ran quickly down the guest list, sharing with me a small-boy awe at being among such celebrities.

Then he narrowed the focus and moved in on me.

He had been well briefed. He knew all about me, where I had gone to school, what my degree was in, what sort of work I did, where my office was. He asked if I had brought my wife — "Sundara, isn’t that her name? Asian background?”

“Her family’s from India.”

“She’s said to be quite beautiful.”

“She’s in Oregon this month.”

“I hope I’ll get a chance to meet her. Perhaps next time I’m out Richmond way I’ll give you a call, yes? How do you like living on Staten Island, anyway?”

I had seen this before, too, the full Treatment, the politician’s computerized mind at work, as though a nugget of microcircuitry were going click-click-click in there whenever facts were needed, and for a moment I suspected he might be some sort of robot. But Quinn was too good to be unreal. On one level he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the outrageous excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me, I’ve got to pile it on, Lew, that’s the way I’m supposed to play this dumb game. Also he seemed to be picking up and reflecting the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good. My mind went into automatic project and handed me a series of Times headlines that went something like this:

BRONX ASSEMBLYMAN QUINN ATTACKS SLUM-CLEARANCE DELAYS

MAYOR QUINN CALLS FOR CITY CHARTER REFORM

SENATOR QUINN SAYS HE’LL SEEK WHITE HOUSE

QUINN LEADS NEW DEMOCRATS TO NATIONWIDE LANDSLIDE

PRESIDENT QUINN’S FIRST TERM: AN APPRAISAL

He went on talking, all the while smiling, maintaining eye contact, holding me impaled. He quizzed me about my profession, he pumped me for my political beliefs, he iterated his own. “They say you’ve got the best reliability index of any projector in the Northeast… I’ll bet not even you anticipated the Gottfried assassination, though… You don’t have to be much of a prophet to feel sorry for poor dopey DiLaurenzio, trying to run City Hall at a time like this… This city can’t be governed, it has to be juggled… Are you as repelled by that phony Neighborhood Authority Act as I am? … What do you think of Con Ed’s Twenty-third Street fusion project? … You ought to see the flow charts they found in Gottfried’s office safe…” Deftly he plumbed for common grounds in political philosophy, though he had to be aware I shared most of his beliefs, for if he knew so much about me he would know I was a registered New Democrat, that I had done the projections for the Twenty-first Century Manifesto and its companion, the book Toward a True Humanity, that I felt as he did about priorities and reforms and the whole inane Puritan idea of trying to legislate morality. The longer we spoke the more strongly I was drawn to him.

I began making quiet unsettling comparisons between Quinn and some great politicians of the past — FDR, Rockefeller, Johnson, the original Kennedy. They had all had that warm beautiful doublethink knack of being able to play out the rituals of political conquest and simultaneously to indicate to their more intelligent victims that nobody’s being fooled, we all know it’s just a ritual, but don’t you think I’m good at it? Even then, even that first night in 1995, when he was just a kid assemblyman unknown outside his own borough, I saw him heading into political history alongside Roosevelt and JFK. Later I began making more grandiose comparisons, between Quinn and the likes of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, even Jesus, and if such talk makes you snicker, please remember that I am a master of the stochastic arts and my vision is clearer than yours.

Quinn said nothing to me then about running for higher office. As we returned to the party he simply remarked, “It’s too early for me to be setting up a staff. But when I do, I’ll want you. Haig will be in touch.”

“What did you think of him?” Mardikian asked me five minutes later.

“He’ll be mayor of New York City in 1998.”

“And then?”

“You want to know more, man, you get in touch with my office and make an appointment. Fifty an hour and I’ll give you the whole crystal-balling.”

He jabbed my arm lightly and strode away laughing.

Ten minutes after that I was sharing a pipe with the golden-haired lady named Autumn. Autumn Hawkes, she was, the much-hailed new Met soprano. Quickly we negotiated an agreement, eyes only, the silent language of the body, concerning the rest of the night. She told me she had come to the party with Victor Schott — gaunt gigantic youngish Prussian type in somber medal-studded military outfit — who was due to conduct her in Lulu that winter, but Schott had apparently arranged a deal to go home with Councilman Holbrecht, leaving Autumn to shift for herself. Autumn shifted. I was undeceived about her real preference, though, for I saw her looking hungrily at Paul Quinn far across the room, and her eyes glowed. Quinn was here on business: no woman could bag him. (No man either!) “I wonder if he sings,” Autumn said wistfully.

“You’d like to try some duets with him?”

“Isolde to his Tristan. Turandot to his Calaf. Aпda to his Radames.”

“Salome to his Jokanaan?” I suggested.

“Don’t tease.”

“You admire his political ideas?”

“I could, if I knew what they were.”

I said, “He’s liberal and sane.”

“Then I admire his political ideas. I also think he’s overpoweringly masculine and superbly beautiful.”

“Politicians on the make are said to be inadequate lovers.”

She shrugged. “Hearsay evidence never impresses me. I can look at a man — one glance will do — and know instantly whether he’s adequate.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Save the compliments. Sometimes I’m wrong, of course,” she said, poisonously sweet. “Not always, but sometimes.”

“Sometimes I am, too.”

“About women?”

“About anything. I have second sight, you know. The future is an open book to me.”

“You sound serious,” she said.

“I am. It’s the way I earn my living. Projections.”

“What do you see in my future?” she asked, half coy, half in earnest.

“Immediate or long range?”

“Either.”

“Immediate,” I said, “a night of wild revelry and a peaceful morning stroll in a light drizzle. Long range, triumph upon triumph, fame, a villa in Majorca, two divorces, happiness late in life.”

“Are you a Gypsy fortuneteller, then?”

I shook my head. “Merely a stochastic technician, milady.”

She glanced toward Quinn. “What do you see ahead for him?”

“Him? He’s going to be President. At the very least.”