Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

He told me what was going on at City Hall: the mayor, worried about the effects of the riot on his presidential hopes, was preparing a sheaf of drastic, almost Gottfriedesque, measures to maintain public order. The police shakeup would be accelerated, drug traffic would be restricted almost as severely as it had been before the liberalizations of the 1980s, an early-warning system would be put into effect to head off civic disturbances involving more than two dozen persons, et cetera, et cetera. It sounded wrongheaded to me, a rash, panicky response to a unique event, but my advice was no longer welcome and I kept my thoughts to myself.

“What about Sudakis?” I asked.

“He’s definitely out. Quinn refused his resignation and spent three full days trying to persuade him to stay, but Sudakis regards himself as permanently discredited here by the stuff his men did that night. He’s taken some small-town job in western Pennsylvania and he’s already gone.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, has the accuracy of my prediction about Sudakis had any effect on Quinn’s attitude toward me?”

“Yes,” Lombroso said. “Definitely.”

“Is he reconsidering?”

“He thinks you’re a sorcerer. He thinks you may have sold your soul to the devil. Literally. Literally. Underneath all the sophistication, he’s still an Irish Catholic, don’t forget. In times of stress it surfaces in him. Around City Hall you’ve become the Antichrist, Lew.”

“Has he gone so crazy that he can’t see it might be useful to have somebody around who can tip him to things like the Sudakis resignation?”

“No hope, Lew. Forget about working for Quinn. Put it absolutely out of your mind. Don’t think about him, don’t write letters to him, don’t try to call him, don’t have anything to do with him. You might look into the idea of leaving the city, in fact.”

“Jesus. Why?”

“For your own good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Bob, are you trying to tell me I’m in danger from Quinn?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said, sounding nervous.

“Whatever you are doing, I’m not having any. I won’t believe Quinn’s as afraid of me as you think, and I completely refuse to believe he might take some sort of action against me. It isn’t credible. I know the man. I was practically his alter ego for four years. I—”

“Listen, Lew,” Lombroso said, “I’ve got to get off the line. You can’t imagine how much work is stacking up here.”

“All right. Thanks for returning my call.”

“And — Lew—”

“Yes?”

“It might be a good idea for you not to call me. Not even at the Wall Street number. Except in case of some dire emergency, of course. My own position with Quinn has been a little delicate ever since we tried to work that proxy deal, and now — and now — well, you understand, don’t you? I’m sure you understand.”

I understood. I have spared Lombroso the perils of further telephone calls from me. Eleven months, nearly, have passed since the day of that conversation, and in that time I haven’t spoken to him at all, not a word to the man who was my closest friend during my years in the Quinn administration. Nor have I had any contact, direct or otherwise, with Quinn himself.

In February the visions began. There had been one harbinger on the cliff at Big Sur and another in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but now they became a routine part of my daily life. None can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, the poet said, Because there is no light behind the curtain. Oh, but the light, the light, the light, the light is there! And it lit my winter days. At first the visions came over me no more often than once every twenty-four hours, and they came unasked, like epileptic fits, usually in the late afternoon or just before midnight, signaling themselves with a glow at the back of my skull, a warmth, a tickling that would not go away. But soon I understood the techniques for invoking them, and I could summon them at will. Even then I was able to see at most once a day, with a prolonged period of recuperation required afterward. Within a few weeks, though, I became capable of entering the seeing state more readily — two or even three times a day — as if the power were a muscle that thrived with use. Eventually the interval of recuperation became minimal. Now I can turn the gift on every fifteen minutes if I feel like it. Once, experimentally, toward the early part of March, I tried it — on-off, on-off — constantly for several hours, tiring myself but not diminishing the intensity of what I saw.

If I don’t evoke the visions at least once a day they come to me anyway, breaking through of their own accord, pouring unbidden into my mind.

see a small red-shingled house on a country lane. The trees are in full leaf, dark green; it must be late summer. I stand by the front gate. My hair is still short and stubbly but growing in; this scene must lie not very far in the future, probably this very year. Two young men are with me, one dark-haired and slight, the other a burly red-haired one. I have no idea who they are, but the self I see is relaxed and easy with them, as if they are intimate companions. So they are close friends that I am yet to meet. I see myself taking a key from my pocket. “Let me show you the place,” I say. “I think it’s about what we need as the headquarters for the Center.”

Snow is falling. The automobiles in the streets are bullet-shaped, snub nosed, very small, very strange to me. Overhead a kind of helicopter soars. Three paddlelike projections dangle from it, and there are loudspeakers, apparently, at the tip of each paddle. From the three speakers in unison comes a wistful bleating sound, high-pitched and gentle, emitted for a period of perhaps two seconds spaced by five-second spans of silence. The rhythm is perfectly steady, each mild bleep arriving on schedule and cutting effortlessly through the dense swirls of descending flakes. The helicopter flies slowly up Fifth Avenue at an altitude of less than 500 meters, and as it makes its bleating way northward the snow melts below its path, clearing a zone exactly as wide as the avenue.

Sundara and I meet for cocktails at a glittering lounge hanging like the gardens of Nebuchadnezzar from the summit of some gigantic tower looming over Los Angeles. I assume it’s Los Angeles because I can make out the feathery shapes of palm trees lining the streets far beneath the window, and the architecture of the surrounding buildings is distinctly Southern Californian, and through the twilight haze there is a hint of a vast ocean not far to the west and mountains to the north. I have no idea what I’m doing in California nor how I come to be seeing Sundara then; it’s plausible that she has returned to her native city to live and I, visiting on business, have promoted a reunion. We have both changed. Her hair is streaked now with white, and her face seems leaner, less voluptuous; her eyes sparkle as before, but the gleam in them is the glint of hard-won knowledge, and not just playfulness. I am long-haired, graying, dressed with chaste ferocity in an unadorned black tunic; I look about forty-five, and I strike myself as crisp, taut, impressive, a commanding executive type, so self-possessed that I awe myself. Are there signs about my eyes of that tragic exhaustion, that burned-out devastation that had marked Carvajal after so many years of seeing? I don’t think so; but perhaps my second sight is not yet intense enough to register such subjective details. Sundara wears no wedding ring, nor are there any of the insignia of Transit visible about her. My watching self longs to ask a thousand questions. I want to know whether there has been a reconciliation, whether we see each other often, whether we are lovers, whether perhaps we are even living together again. But I have no voice, I am unable to speak through the lips of my future self, it is altogether impossible for me to direct or modify his actions; I can merely observe. He and Sundara order drinks; they clink glasses; they smile; they exchange trivial chatter about the sunset, the weather, the decor of the cocktail lounge. Then the scene slips away and I have learned nothing.