Stochastic Man (29 page)

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.

44

Carvajal died on April 22, 2000. I write this in early December, with the true beginning of the twenty-first century and the start of the new millennium just a few weeks away. The coming of the millennium will find me at this unprepossessing house in this unspecified town in northern New Jersey, directing the activities, still barely under way, of the Center for Stochastic Processes. We have been here since August, when Carvajal’s will cleared probate with me as sole heir to his millions.

Here at the Center, of course, we don’t dabble much in stochastic processes. The place is deceptively named; we are not stochastic here but rather post-stochastic, going on beyond the manipulation of probabilities into the certainties of second sight. But I thought it wise not to be too candid about that. What we’re doing is a species of witchcraft, more or less, and one of the great lessons of the all-but-concluded twentieth century is that if you want to practice witchcraft, you’d better do it under some other name.
Stochastic
has a pleasant pseudo-scientific resonance to it that provides the right texture for a disguise, evoking as it does an image of platoons of pale young researchers feeding data into vast computers.

There are four of us so far. There’ll be more. We build gradually here. I find new followers as I need them. I know the name of the next one already, and I know how I’ll persuade him to join us, and at the right moment he’ll come to us, just as these first three came. Six months ago they were strangers to me; today they are my brothers.

What we build here is a society, a sodality, a community, a priesthood, if you will, a band of
seers
. We are extending and refining the capabilities of our vision, elimination ambiguities, sharpening perception. Carvajal was right: everyone has the gift. It can be awakened in anyone. In you. In you. And so we’ll reach out, each of us offering a hand to another. Quietly spreading the post-stochastic gospel, quietly multiplying the numbers of those who
see
. It’ll be slow. There’ll be danger, there’ll be persecution. Hard times are coming, and not only for us. We still must pass through the ear of Quinn, an era that seems as familiar to me as any in history, though it hasn’t yet begun: the election that will anoint him is still four years in the future. But I
see
past it, to the upheavals that follow, the turmoil, the pain. Never mind that. We’ll outlast the Quinn regime, as we outlasted Assurbanipal, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. Already the clouds of vision part and we see beyond the coming darkness to the time of healing.

What we build here is a community dedicated to the abolition of uncertainty, the absolute elimination of doubt. Ultimately we will lead mankind into a universe in which nothing is random, nothing is unknown, all is predictable on every level from microcosmic to the marcocosmic, from the twitching of an electron to the journeys of the galactic nebulae. We’ll teach humanity to taste the sweet comfort of the foreordained. And in that way we’ll become as gods.

God? Yes.

Listen, did Jesus know fear when Pilate’s centurions came for him? Did he whimper about dying, did he lament the shortening of his appointed role, serenely aware that what was happening to him was part of a predetermined and necessary and inevitable Plan. And what of Isis, the young Isis, loving her brother Osiris, knowing even as a child everything that was in store, that Osiris must be torn apart, that through her he would be restored, that from their loins would spring the potent Horus? Isis lived with sorrow, yes and Isis lived with the foreknowledge of terrible loss,
and she knew these things from the beginning
, for she was a god. And she acted as she had to act. Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead. And gods do not know fear or self-pity or doubt, because they are gods and many not choose any path but the true one. Very well. We shall be as gods, all of us. I have come through the time of doubt, I have endured and survived the onslaught of confusions and terrors, I have moved into a realm beyond those things, but not into a paralysis such as afflicted Carvajal; I am in another place, and I can bring you to it. We will
see
, we will understand, we will comprehend the inevitable, we will be no pain. We will live in beauty, knowing that we are aspects of the one great Plan.