Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

And where were the police? I saw them, now and then, some trying desperately to hold back the tide of disorder, others giving in and joining it, policemen with flushed faces and glazed eyes happily wading into fights and escalating them to savage warfare, policemen buying drugs from the corner peddlers, policemen stripped to the waist groping naked girls in bars, policemen raucously smashing windshields with their nightsticks. The general craziness was contagious. After a week of apocalyptic build-up, a week of grotesque tension, no one could hold too tightly to his sanity.

Midnight found me in Times Square. The old custom, long since abandoned by a city in decay: thousands, hundreds of thousands, crammed shoulder to shoulder between Forty-sixth and Forty-second Streets, singing, shouting, kissing, swaying. Suddenly the hour struck. Startling searchlights speared the sky. The summits of office towers turned radiant with brilliant floodlights. The year 2000! The year 2000! And my birthday had come! Happy birthday! Happy, happy, happy me!

I was drunk. I was out of my mind. The universal hysteria raged in me. I found my hands grasping someone’s breasts, and squeezed, and jammed my mouth against a mouth, and felt a hot moist body pressed tight to mine. The crowd surged and we were swept apart, and I moved on the human tide, hugging, laughing, fighting to catch my breath, leaping, falling, stumbling, nearly going down beneath a thousand pairs of feet.

“There’s a fire!” someone yelled, and indeed flames were dancing high on a building to the west along Forty-fourth Street. Such a lovely orange hue — we began to cheer and applaud. We are all Nero tonight, I thought, and was swept onward, southward. I could no longer see the flames but the smell of smoke was spreading through the area. Bells tolled. More sirens. Chaos, chaos, chaos.

And then I felt a sensation as of a fist pounding the back of my head, and dropped to my knees in an open space, dazed, and covered my face with my hands to ward off the next blow, but there was no next blow, only a flood of visions. Visions. A baffling torrent of images roared through my mind. I saw myself old and frayed, coughing in a hospital bed with a shining spidery lattice of medical machinery all about me; I saw myself swimming in a clear mountain pool; I saw myself battered and heaved by surf on some angry tropical shore. I peered into the mysterious interior of some vast incomprehensible crystalline mechanism. I stood at the edge of a field of lava, watching molten matter bubble and pop as on the earth’s first morning. Colors assailed me. Voices whispered to me, speaking in fragments, in pulverized bits of words and tag ends of phrases. This is a trip, I told myself, a trip, a trip, a very bad trip, but even the worst trip ends eventually, and I crouched, trembling, trying not to resist, letting the nightmare sweep through me and play itself out. It may have gone on for hours; it may have lasted only a minute. In one moment of clarity I said to myself, This is seeing, this is how it begins, like a fever, like a madness. I remember telling myself that.

I remember vomiting, too, casting forth the evening’s mixture of liquors in quick heavy tremors, and huddling afterward near my own stinking pool, weak, shaking, unable to rise. And then came thunder, like the anger of Zeus, majestic and unanswerable. There was a great stillness after that one terrifying thunderclap. All over the city the Saturnalia was halting as New Yorkers stopped, stiffened, turned their eyes in wonder and awe to the skies. What now? Thunder on a winter night? Would the earth open and swallow us all? Would the sea rise and make an Atlantic of our playground? There came a second clap of thunder minutes after the first, but no lightning, and then, after another pause, a third, and then came rain, gentle at first, torrential in a few moments, a warm spring rain to welcome us to the year 2000. I rose uncertainly to my feet and, having remained chastely clothed all evening, stripped now, naked on Broadway at Forty-first Street, feet flat on the pavement, head upturned, letting the downpour wash the sweat and tears and weariness from me, letting it sluice my mouth to rinse me of the foul taste of vomit. It was a wondrous moment. But quickly I felt chilled. April was over; December was returning. My sex shriveled and my shoulders sagged. Shivering, I fumbled for my sodden clothes, and, sober now, drenched, miserable, timid, imagining brigands and cutpurses lurking in every alley, I began the long slow shuffle across town. The temperature seemed to plummet five degrees for every ten blocks I traversed; by the time I reached the East Side I felt I was freezing, and as I crossed Fifty-seventh Street I noticed the rain had turned to snow, and the snow was sticking, making a fine powdery dusting that covered streets and automobiles and the slumped bodies of the unconscious and the dead. It was snowing with full wintry malevolence when I reached my apartment. The time was five in the morning, January 1, A.D. 2000. I dropped my clothing on the floor and fell naked into bed, quivering, sore, and I pressed my knees to my chest and huddled there, half expecting to die before dawn. Fourteen hours passed before I awoke.

What a morning after! For me, for you, for all of New York! Not until night was beginning to fall, that first of January, was the full impact of the previous night’s wild events apparent, how many hundreds of citizens had perished in violence or in foolish misadventure or of mere exposure, how many shops had been looted, how many public monuments vandalized, how many wallets lifted, how many unwilling bodies violated. Had any city known a night like that since the sack of Byzantium? The populace had gone berserk, and no one had tried to restrain the fury, no one, not even the police. The first scattered reports had it that most of the officers of the law had joined the fun, and, as detailed investigations proceeded throughout the day, it turned out that that had in fact been the case: in the contagion of the moment the men in blue had often led rather than contained the chaos. On the late news came word that Police Commissioner Sudakis, taking personal responsibility for the debacle, had resigned. I saw him on the screen, face rigid, eyes reddened, his fury barely under control; he spoke raggedly of the shame he felt, the disgrace; he talked of the breakdown of morality, even of the decline of urban civilization; he looked like a man who had had no sleep for a week, a pitiful shattered embarrassment of a man, mumbling and coughing, and I prayed silently for the television people to have done with him and go elsewhere. Sudakis’ resignation was my own vindication, but I could take little pleasure in it. At last the scene shifted; we saw the rubble of a five-block area in Brooklyn that had been allowed to burn by absentminded firemen. Yes, yes, Sudakis has resigned. Of course. Reality is conserved; Carvajal’s infallibility is once more confirmed. Who could have anticipated such a turn of events? Not I, not Mayor Quinn, not even Sudakis; but Carvajal had.

I waited a few days, while the city slowly returned to normal; then I phoned Lombroso at his Wall Street office. He wasn’t there, of course. I told the answering machine to program a return call at his earliest convenience. All high city officials were with the mayor at Gracie Mansion virtually on a round-the-clock basis. Fires in every borough had left thousands homeless; the hospitals were stacked three tiers deep with victims of violence and accident; damage claims against the city, mainly for failure to provide proper police protection, were already in the billions and mounting hourly. Then, too, there was the damage to the city’s public image to deal with. Since entering office Quinn had painstakingly tried to restore the reputation New York had had in the middle of the twentieth century as the nation’s most exciting, vital, stimulating city, the true capital of the planet and the center of all that was interesting, a city that was thrilling yet safe for visitors. All that had been ruined in one orgiastic night more in keeping with the nation’s familiar view of New York as a brutal, insane, ferocious, filthy zoo. So I heard nothing from Lombroso until the middle of January, when things were fairly quiet again, and by the time he called I had given up hearing from him at all.