Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

Which I did. Sundara was now so busy with her manifold Transit activities — her process sessions, her volatility circles, her ego-decay exercises, her missionary duties, and all the rest — that close to a week passed before I was able to have a quiet word with her at home. By then I had rehearsed the whole thing in my head a thousand times, so that the lines were worn like tracks; if ever there was an instance of following the script, this would be it. But would she give me the right cues?

Almost apologetically, as though it were an intrusion on her privacy for me to request the privilege of a conversation with her, I said early one evening that I wanted to talk to her about something important, and then I told her, as I had so often heard myself telling her, that I was going to get a divorce. Saying it, I understood something of what it must be like, for Carvajal to see, because I had lived this scene so often in imagination that it already felt like an event of the past to me.

Sundara regarded me thoughtfully, saying nothing, displaying neither surprise nor annoyance nor hostility nor enthusiasm nor dismay nor despair.

Her silence baffled me.

I said, eventually, “I’ve hired Jason Komurjian as my lawyer. One of Mardikian’s partners. He’ll sit down with your lawyer, when you’ve got one, and they’ll work everything out. I want this to be a civilized parting of the ways, Sundara.”

She smiled. Mona Lisa of Bombay.

“You don’t have anything to say?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Is divorce such a trifle to you?”

“Divorce and marriage are aspects of the same illusion, my love.”

“This world seems more real to me than it does to you, I think. That’s one reason why it doesn’t appear to be a good idea for us to go on living together.”

She said, “Will there be a messy fight about dividing the things we own?”

“I told you I want this to be a civilized parting of the ways.”

“Good. So do I.”

The ease with which she was accepting all this dumb-founded me. We had been so badly out of touch with each other recently that we had never even discussed the growing failures of communication between us; but there are many marriages that go on like that for centuries, placidly drifting, no one caring to rock the boat. Now I was preparing to sink the boat, and she had no comment. Eight years of living together; suddenly I call in the lawyers; Sundara has no comment. Her imperturbability was a measure of the change Transit had worked in her, I decided.

“Do all Transit people accept great upheavals in their lives so casually?” I asked.

“Is this a great upheaval?”

“It seems like one to me.”

“To me it seems only the ratifying of a decision made a long time ago.”

“It’s been a bad time,” I admitted. “But even at the worst of it I always kept telling myself it’s just a phase, it’s a passing thing, every marriage goes through it, we’ll get back together eventually.”

As I spoke, I found myself convincing myself that all that was still true, that Sundara and I could still work out a continuing relationship like the basically reasonable human beings we were. And yet here I was asking her to hire a lawyer. I remembered Carvajal telling me, You’ve lost her, with inexorable finality in his voice. But he had been speaking of the future, not the past.

She said, “Now you think it’s hopeless, is that it? What made you change your mind?”

“Well?”

“ Did you change your mind?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t think you really want a divorce, Lew.”

“I do,” I said hoarsely.

“So you say.”

“I’m not asking you to read my mind, Sundara. Just to go along with the legal rigmarole we have to follow in order to be free to live our separate lives.”

“You don’t want a divorce, but yet you do. How strange, Lew. An attitude like that is a perfect Transit situation, you know, what we call a keying point, a situation where you hold opposing positions simultaneously and try to reconcile them. There are three possible outcomes of that. Are you interested in hearing this? One possibility is schizophrenia. One is self-deception, as when you pretend to embrace both alternatives but really don’t. And the third is the condition of illumination known in Transit as—”

“Please, Sundara.”

“I thought you were interested.”

“I guess I’m not.”

She studied me for a long moment. Then she smiled. “This divorce business is connected somehow with your gift of precognition, isn’t it? You don’t really want a divorce now, even though we aren’t getting along very well, but you nevertheless think you ought to start arranging a divorce, because you’ve had a hunch that sometime in the near future you’re going to have one, and — Isn’t that right, Lew? Come on: tell me the truth. I won’t be angry.”

“You aren’t far off the mark,” I said.

“I thought not. Well, what shall we do?”

“Work out terms of a separation,” I replied grimly. “Hire a lawyer, Sundara.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You mean you’ll contest it?”

“I never said that. I simply don’t want to deal through a lawyer. Let’s handle it ourselves, Lew. Like civilized human beings.”

“I’ll have to check with Komurjian about that. That way may be civilized, but it may not be smart.”

“Do you think I’ll cheat you?”

“I don’t think anything any more.”

She walked up to me. Her eyes glowed; her body radiated a throbbing sensuality. I was helpless before her. She could have had anything from me. Leaning forward, Sundara kissed the tip of my nose and said huskily, stagily, “If you want a divorce, darling, you can have your divorce. Whatever you want. I won’t stand in the way. I want you to be happy. I love you, you know.” She smiled wickedly. Oh, that Transit mischief! “Whatever you want,” she said.

I rented an apartment for myself in Manhattan, a three-room furnished job in an old, once-luxurious high rise on East Sixty-third near Second Avenue, which is an old, once-luxurious neighborhood not yet seriously into disrepair. The building’s pedigree was evidenced by an assortment of security devices dating from the 1960s or thereabouts through the early 1990s, everything from police locks and hidden peepholes up to early-model filter mazes and velocity screens. The furniture was simple and timeless in style, venerable and utilitarian, couches and chairs and bed and tables and bookcases and stuff of that sort, so anonymous as to be invisible. I felt invisible, too, after I was completely moved in and the movers and the building superintendent had gone away, leaving me standing alone in my new living room like an ambassador newly arrived from nowhere to take up residence in limbo. What was this place, and how had it happened that I was living here? Whose chairs are these? Whose fingerprints on the bare blue walls?

Sundara had let me take some of the paintings and sculptures, and I set them up here and there; they had seemed magnificently integral to the lavish textures of our Staten Island condo, but here they looked awkward and unnatural, penguins in the veldt. There were no spotlights here, no cunning arrangements of solenoids and rheostats, no carpeted pedestals: just low ceilings, dirty walls, windows without opaquers. Yet I felt no self-pity, finding myself here, only confusion, emptiness, dislocation. I spent the first day unpacking, organizing, setting up the lares and penates, working slowly and inefficiently, pausing often to think about nothing in particular. I didn’t go out, not even for groceries; instead I phoned a hundred-dollar order to Gristede’s market on the corner by way of initial stocking of the larder. Dinner was a solitary tasteless business of miscellaneous synthetic glop, absentmindedly prepared and hastily shoveled down. I slept alone, and, to my surprise, I slept very well. In the morning I phoned Carvajal and told him what had been happening.