Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

I heard nothing from or about him all fall. The Legislature was in session and Quinn was at his desk in Albany, which is like being on Mars so far as anybody in New York City cares. In the city the usual weird circus was going full blast, only more so than usual now that the potent Freudian force that was Mayor Gottfried, the Urban Allfather, dark of brow and long of nose, guardian of the weak and castrator of the unruly, had been removed from the scene. The 125th Street Militia, a new black self-determination force that had been boasting for months that it was buying tanks from Syria, not only unveiled three armored monsters at a noisy press conference but proceeded to send them across Columbus Avenue on a search-and-destroy mission into Hispano Manhattan, leaving four blocks in flames and dozens dead. In October, while the blacks were celebrating Marcus Garvey Day, the Puerto Ricans retaliated with a commando raid on Harlem, personally led by two of their three Israeli colonels. (The barrio boys had hired the Israelis to train their troops in ‘94, following the ratification of the anti-black “mutual defense” alliance put together by the Puerto Ricans and what was left of the city’s Jewish population.) The commandos, in a lightning strike up Lenox Avenue, not only blew up the tank garage and all three tanks, but took out five liquor stores and the main numbers computer center, while a diversionary force slipped westward to firebomb the Apollo Theater.

A few weeks later at the site of the West Twenty-third Street Fusion Plant there was a shootout between the profusion group, Keep Our Cities Bright, and the anti-fusionists, Concerned Citizens Against Uncontrollable Technology. Four Con Edison security men were lynched and there were thirty-two fatalities among the demonstrators, twenty-one KOCB and eleven CCAUT, including a lot of politically involved young mothers on both sides and even a few babes in arms; this caused much horror and outcry (even in New York you can stir strong emotions by gunning babies during a demonstration), and Mayor DiLaurenzio found it expedient to appoint a study group to re-examine the whole question of building fusion plants within city limits. Since this amounted to a victory for CCAUT, a KOCB strike-force blockaded City Hall and began planting protest mines in the shrubbery, but they were driven off by a police tac squad strafing ‘copter at a cost of nine more lives. The Times put the story on page 27.

Mayor DiLaurenzio, speaking from his Auxiliary City Hall somewhere in the East Bronx — he had set up seven offices in outlying boroughs, all in Italian neighborhoods, the exact locations being carefully guarded secrets — issued new lawnorder pleas. However, nobody in the city paid much attention to the mayor, partly because he was such a nebbish and partly as an overcompensating reaction to the removal of the brooding, sinister, overwhelming presence of Gottfried the Gauleiter. DiLaurenzio had staffed his administration, from police commissioner down to dogcatcher and clean-air administrator, with Italian cronies, which I suppose was reasonable enough, since the Italians were the only ones in town who showed any respect for him, and that merely because they were all his cousins or nephews. But that meant that the mayor’s sole political support was drawn from an ethnic minority that grew more minor every day. (Even Little Italy was reduced to four blocks of Mulberry Street, with Chinese swarming on every side street and the new generation of paisanos holed up securely in Patchogue and New Rochelle.) An editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggested suspending the upcoming mayoralty election and placing New York City under a military administration, with a cordon sanitaire to keep infectious New Yorkism from contaminating the rest of the country.

“I think a UN peacekeeping force would be a better idea,” Sundara said. This was early December, the night of the season’s first blizzard. “This isn’t a city, it’s a staging ground for all the accumulated racial and ethnic hostilities of the last three thousand years.”

“That’s not so,” I told her. “Old grudges don’t mean crap here. Hindus sleep with Paks in New York, Turks and Armenians go into partnership and open restaurants. In this city we invent new ethnic hostilities. New York is nothing if it isn’t avant-garde. You’d understand that if you’d lived here all your life the way I have.”

“I feel as though I have.”

“Six years doesn’t make you a native.”

“Six years in the middle of constant guerrilla warfare feels longer than thirty years anywhere else,” she said.

Oh-oh. Her voice was playful, but her dark eyes held a malicious sparkle. She was daring me to parry, to contradict, to challenge. I felt the air about me glowing feverishly. Suddenly we were drifting into the I-hate-New-York conversation, always productive of rifts between us, and soon we would be quarreling in earnest. A native can hate New York with love; an outsider, and my Sundara would always be an outsider here, draws tense and heavy energy out of repudiating this lunatic place she has chosen to live in, and grows bloated and murderous with unearned fury.

Heading off trouble, I said, “Well, let’s move to Arizona.”

“Hey, that’s my line!”

“I’m sorry. I must have missed my cue.”

The tension was gone. “This is an awful city, Lew.”

“Try Tucson, then. The winters are much better. You want to smoke, love?”

“Yes, but not that bone thing again.”

“Plain old prehistoric dope?”

“Please,” she said. I got the stash. The air between us was limpid and loving. We had been together four years, and, though some dissonances had appeared, we were still each other’s best friend. As I rolled the smokes she stroked the muscles of my neck, cunningly hitting the pressure points and letting the twentieth century slide out of my ligaments and vertebrae. Her parents were from Bombay but she had been born in Los Angeles, yet her supple fingers played Radha to my Krishna as though she were a padmini of the Hindu dawn, a lotus woman fully versed in the erotic shastras and the sutras of the flesh, which in truth she was, though self-taught and no graduate of the secret academies of Benares.

The terrors and traumas of New York City seemed indecently remote as we stood by our long crystalline window, close to each other, staring into the wintry moonbright night and seeing only our own reflections, tall fairhaired man and slender dark woman, side by side, side by side, allies against the darkness.

Actually neither of us found life in the city really burdensome. As members of the affluent minority we were insulated from much of the crazy stuff, sheltered at home in our maxsecure hilltop condo, protected by screens and filter mazes when we took the commuter pods across into Manhattan, guarded in our offices by more of the same. Whenever we yearned for an on-foot eyes-to-eyes nit-to-grit confront with urban reality we could have it, and when not there were watchful servocircuits to keep us from harm.

We passed the smoke back and forth, languidly letting fingers caress fingers at each interchange. She seemed perfect to me just then, my wife, my love, my other self, witty and graceful, mysterious and exotic, high forehead, blue-black hair, full-moon face — but a moon eclipsed, a moon empurpled by shadow; the perfect lotus woman of the sutras, skin fine and tender, eyes brilliant and beautiful as a fawn’s, well defined and red at the corners, breasts hard and full and uplifted, neck elegant, nose straight and gracious. Yoni like an open lotus bud, voice as low and melodious as the kokila bird’s, my prize, my love, my companion, my alien bride. Within twelve hours I would set myself on the path toward losing her, which perhaps is why I studied her with such intensity this snowy evening, and yet I knew nothing of what would happen, nothing, I knew nothing. Only I must have known.