Stochastic Man (19 page)

“How will that help me to
see?”

“No questions asked,” he said. “Just give yourself to me, Lew.”

“Done.”

The lightning came. The skies opened and a crazy drenching downpour battered us with implausible fury.

26

A day and a half later. “The worst of it,” Carvajal said, “is
seeing
your own death. That’s the moment when the life goes out of you, not when you actually die, but when you have to
see
it.”

“Is that the curse you were talking about?”

“Yes. That’s the curse. That’s what killed me, Lew, long before my proper time. I was almost thirty years old, the first time I
saw
it. I’ve
seen
it many times since. I know the date, the hour, the place, the circumstances. I’ve lived through it again and again, the beginning, the middle, the end, the darkness, the silence. And once I
saw
it, life became nothing more than a meaningless puppet show for me.”

“What was the worst part?” I asked. “Knowing when, knowing how?”

“Knowing that,” he said.

“That you would die at all?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, it must be disturbing, yes, to watch yourself die, to see your own finish as if on a newsreel, but there can’t be any fundamental element of surprise in it, can there? I mean, death is inevitable and we all know it from the time we’re little children.”

“Do we?”

“Of course we do.”

“Do you think you’ll die, Lew?”

I blinked a couple of times. “Naturally.”

“Are you absolutely convinced of that?”

“I don’t get you. Axe you implying I have delusions of immortality?”

Carvajal smiled serenely. “Everybody does, Lew. When you’re a boy your pet goldfish dies, or your dog, and you say, Well, goldfish don’t live long, dogs don’t live long, and that’s how you slough off your first experience of death. It doesn’t apply to you. The boy next door falls off his bicycle and fractures his skull. Well, you say, accidents happen, but they don’t
prove
anything; some people are more careless than others, and I’m one of the careful ones. Your grandmother dies. She was old and sick for years, you say, she let herself get too heavy, she grew up in a generation when preventive medicine was still primitive, she didn’t know how to take care of her body. It won’t happen to me, you say. It won’t happen to me.”

“My parents are dead. My sister died. I had a turtle that died. Death isn’t something remote and unreal in my life. No, Carvajal, I believe in death. I accept the fact of death. I know I’m going to die.”

“You don’t. Not really.”

“How can you say that?”

“I know how people are. I know how I used to be, before I
saw
myself die, and what I became afterward. Not many have had that experience, have been changed as I’ve been changed. Perhaps no one else, ever. Listen to me, Lew. Nobody genuinely and fully believes he’s going to die, whatever he may think he thinks. You may accept it up here on top, but you don’t accept it on the cellular level, down on the level of metabolism and mitosis. Your heart hasn’t missed a beat in thirty-odd years and it knows it never will. Your body goes merrily along like a three-shift factory manufacturing corpuscles, lymph, semen, saliva, round the clock, and so far as your body knows it always will. And your brain, it perceives itself as the center of a great drama whose star is Lew Nichols, the whole universe just a giant collection of props, everything that happens happening around
you
, in relation to
you,
with
you
as the pivot and fulcrum, and if you go to somebody’s wedding the name of that scene isn’t
Dick and Judy Get Married,
no, it’s
Lew Goes to Somebody’s Wedding
, and if a politician gets elected it isn’t
Paul Quinn Becomes President,
it’s
Lew Experiences Paul Quinn Becoming President,
and if a star explodes the headline isn’t
Betelgeuse Goes Nova
but
Lew’s Universe Loses a Star,
and so on, the same for everyone, everyone the hero of the great drama of existence, Dick and Judy each in starring roles in their own heads, Paul Quinn, maybe even Betelgeuse, and each of you knows that if you were to die the whole universe would have to wink out like a switched-off light, and that isn’t possible, so therefore you aren’t going to die. You know you’re the one exception. Holding the whole business together by your continued existence. All those others, Lew, you realize
they’re
going to die; sure, they’re the bit parts, the spear carriers, the script calls for them all to vanish along the way, but not you, oh, no, not you! Isn’t that how it truly is, Lew, down in the basement of your soul, down in those mysterious levels you visit only now and then?”

I had to grin. “Maybe it is, after all. But—”

“It is. It’s the same way for everyone. It was for me. Well, people
do
die, Lew. Some die at twenty and some die at a hundred and twenty, and it’s
always
a surprise. They stand there seeing the big blackness opening up for them, and as they go into the hole they say, My God, I was wrong after all, it’s really going to happen to me, even to
me!
What a shock that is, what a terrific blow to the ego, to discover that you aren’t the unique exception you thought you were. But it’s comforting, right up until that moment arrives, to cling to the idea that maybe you’ll sneak through, maybe you’ll somehow be exempt. Everybody has that scrap of comfort to live by, Lew. Everyone except me.”

“You found
seeing
it as bad as that?”

“It demolished me. It stripped me of that one big illusion, Lew, that secret hope of immortality, that keeps us going. Of course, I had to keep going, thirty years or so more, because I could
see
that it wouldn’t happen until I was an old man. But the knowledge put a wall around my life, a boundary, an unbreakable seal. I wasn’t much more than a boy and I had already had the real summing up, the period at the end of the sentence. I couldn’t count on enjoying all of eternity, the way others think they do. I had only my thirty-odd years left to go. Knowing that about yourself constricts your life, Lew. It limits your options.”

“It isn’t easy for me to understand why it should have that effect.”

“Eventually you’ll understand.”

“Maybe it won’t be that way for me, when I come to know.”

“Ah!” Carvajal cried. “We all think we’ll be the exception!”

27

He told me, the next time we met, how his death would come to pass. He had less than a year to live, he said. It was going to happen in the spring of 2000, somewhere between the tenth of April and the twenty-fifth of May; although he claimed to know the exact date even down to the time of day, he was unwilling to be any more specific about it than that.

“Why withhold it from me?” I asked.

“Because I don’t care to be burdened with your private tensions and anticipations,” Carvajal told me bluntly. “I don’t want you showing up that day knowing it
is
the day, and arriving full of irrelevant emotional confusion.”

“Am I going to be there?” I asked, astounded.

“Certainly.”

“Will you tell me where it’ll happen?”

“At my apartment,” he said. “You and I will be discussing something having to do with a problem troubling you then. The doorbell will ring. I’ll answer it and a man will force his way into the house, an armed man with red hair, who—”

“Wait a minute. You once told me that no one had ever bothered you in that neighborhood and no one ever would.”

“No one
who lives there
,” said Carvajal. “This man will be a stranger. He has been given my address by mistake—he has the wrong apartment—and expects to be picking up a consignment of drugs, something that sniffers use. When I tell him I don’t have any drugs, he’ll refuse to believe me; he’ll think it’s some kind of doublecross and will start to get violent, waving the gun around, threatening me.”

“And what am I doing while all this is going on?”

“Watching it.”

“Watching? Just standing there with my arms folded like a spectator?”

“Just watching,” Carvajal said. “Like a spectator.” There was a sharp edge to his tone. As if he were giving me an order:
You will do nothing throughout this scene. You will remain entirely out of it, off to one side, a mere onlooker.

“I could hit him, with a lamp. I could try to grab the gun.”

“You won’t.”

“All right,” I said. “What happens?”

“Somebody knocks at the door. It’s one of my neighbors, who’s heard the commotion and is worried about me. The gunman panics. Thinks it’s the police, or maybe a rival gang. He fires three times; then he breaks a window and disappears down the fire escape. The bullets strike me in the chest, the arm, and the side of my head. I linger for a minute or so. No last words. You’re not harmed at all.”

“And then?”

Carvajal laughed. “And then? And then? How would I know? I’ve told you: I
see
as though through a periscope. The periscope reaches only as far as that moment, and no farther. Perception ends for me there.”

How calm he was about it!

I said, “Is this the thing you
saw
the day you and I had lunch at the Merchants and Shippers Club?”

“Yes.”

“You sat there watching yourself get gunned down, and then casually asked to look at the menu?”

“The scene was nothing new to me.”

“How often have you
seen
it?” I asked.

“No idea. Twenty times, fifty, maybe a hundred. Like a recurring dream.”

“A recurring nightmare.”

“One gets used to it. It ceases to carry much emotional charge after the first dozen viewings or so.”

“It’s nothing but a movie to you? An old Cagney flick on the late-night television?”

“Something like that,” said Carvajal. “The scene itself becomes trivial, a bore, stale, predictable. It’s the implications that linger, that never lose their power over me, while the details themselves have become unimportant.”

“You just accept it. You won’t try to slam the door in the man’s face when the moment comes. You won’t let me hide behind the door and club him down. You won’t ask the police to put you under special guard that day.”

“Naturally not. What good would any of that do?”

“As an experiment—”

He pursed his lips. He looked annoyed at my stubborn return to a theme that was absurd to him. “What I
see
is what will happen. The time for experiments was fifty years ago, and the experiments failed. No, we won’t interfere, Lew. We’ll play our parts obediently, you and I, You know we will.”

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.