Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

But the city did survive, and even flourished. There was that harbor, there was the river, there was the happy geographical placement that made New York an indispensable neural nexus for the whole eastern coast, a ganglionic switchboard that couldn’t be discarded. More: the city had attained, in its bizarre sweaty density, a kind of critical mass, a level of cultural activity that made it a breeder reactor for the soul, self-enriching, self-powering, for there was so much happening even in a moribund New York that the city simply could not die, it needs must go on throbbing and spewing forth the fevers of life, endlessly rekindling and renewing itself. An irrepressible lunatic energy ticked on and on at the city’s heart and always would.

Not dying, then. But there were problems.

You could cope with the polluted air with masks and filters. You could deal with the crime the way you did with blizzards or summer heat, negatively by avoidance, positively by technological counterattack. Either you carried no valuables, moved with agility in the streets, and stayed indoors behind many locks as much as possible, or you equipped yourself with space-positive alarm systems, with anti-personnel batons, with security cones radiating from circuitry in the lining of your clothing, and went out to brave the yahoos. Coping. But the white middle class was gone, probably forever, and that caused difficulties that the electronics boys couldn’t fix. The city by 1990 was largely black and Puerto Rican, dotted with two sorts of enclaves, one kind dwindling (the pockets of aging Jews and Italians and Irish) and one steadily expanding in size and power (the dazzling islands of the affluent, the managerial and creative classes). A city populated only by rich and by poor experiences certain nasty spiritual dislocations, and it will be a while before the emerging non-white bourgeoisie is a real force for social stability. Much of New York glitters as only Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Babylon, and Persepolis glittered in the past; the rest is a jungle, a literal jungle, fetid and squalid, where force is the only law. It is not so much a dying city as an ungovernable one, seven million souls moving in seven million orbits under spectacular centrifugal pressures that threaten at any moment to make hyperbolas of us all.

Welcome to City Hall, Mayor Quinn.

Who can govern the ungovernable? Someone always is willing to try, God help him. Out of our hundred-odd mayors some have been honest and many have been crooks, and about seven all told were competent and effective administrators. Two of those were crooks, but never mind their morals, for they knew how to make the city work as well as anybody. Some were stars, some were disasters, and they all, in the aggregate, helped to nudge the city toward its ultimate entropic debacle. And now Quinn. He promised greatness, combining, so it seemed, the force and vigor of a Gottfried, the glamour of a Lindsay, the humanity and compassion of a LaGuardia.

So we put him into the New Democratic primary against the feckless, helpless DiLaurenzio. Bob Lombroso milked the banking houses for millions, George Missakian put together a string of straightforward TV spots featuring many of the celebrities who had been at that party, Ara Ephrikian bartered commissionerships for support on the clubhouse level, and I dropped in at headquarters now and then with simple-minded projective reports that said nothing more profound than

play it safe

keep on truckin’

we’ve got it made.

Everybody expected Quinn to sweep the field, and in fact he took the primary with an absolute majority in a list of seven. The Republicans found a banker named Burgess to accept their nomination. He was unknown, a political novice, and I don’t know if they were feeling suicidal or simply being realistic. A poll taken a month before the election gave Quinn 83 percent of the vote. That missing 17 percent bothered him. He wanted it all, and he vowed to take his campaign to the people. No candidate in twenty years had done the motorcade-and-handshake routine here, but he insisted on overruling a fretful assassination-minded Mardikian. “What are my chances of being gunned down if I go for a stroll in Times Square?” Quinn demanded of me.

I didn’t pick up death vibes for him and I told him so.

I also said, “But I wish you wouldn’t do it, Paul. I’m not infallible and you’re not immortal.”

“If it isn’t safe in New York for a candidate to meet the voters,” Quinn replied, “we might as well just use the place for a Z-bomb testing sight.”

“A mayor was murdered here only two years ago.”

“Everybody hated Gottfried. He was an Iron Cross fascist if anybody ever was. Why should someone feel like that about me, Lew? I’m going out.”

Quinn went forth and pressed the flesh. Maybe it helped. He won the biggest election victory in New York history, an 88 percent plurality. On the first of January, 1998, an unseasonably mild, almost Floridian day, Haig Mardikian and Bob Lombroso and the rest of us in the inner circle clustered close on the steps of City Hall to watch our man take the oath of office. Vague disquiet churned inside me. What did I fear? I couldn’t tell. A bomb, maybe. Yes, a shiny round black comic-strip bomb with a sizzling fuse whistling through the air to blow us all to mesons and quarks. No bomb was thrown. Why such a bird of ill omen Nichols? Rejoice! I remained edgy. Backs were slapped, cheeks were kissed. Paul Quinn was mayor of New York, and happy 1998 to all.

“If Quinn wins,” Sundara said one night late in the summer of ’97, “will he offer you a job in his administration?”

“Probably.”

“Will you take it?”

“Not a chance,” I told her. “Running a campaign is fun. Day-by-day municipal government is just a grubby bore. I’m going back to my regular clients as soon us the election’s over.”

Three days after the election Quinn sent for me and offered me the post of special administrative assistant and I accepted without hesitation, without one thought for my clients or my employees or my shiny office full of data-processing equipment.

Was I lying to Sundara on that summer night, then? No, the one I had been fooling was myself. My projection was faulty because my self-understanding had been imperfect. What I learned between August and November is that proximity to power becomes addictive. For more than a year I had been drawing vitality from Paul Quinn. When you spend so much time so close to so much power, you get hooked on the energy flow, you become a juice-junkie. You don’t willingly walk away from the dynamo that’s been nourishing you. When, as mayor-elect, Quinn hired me, he said he needed me, and I could buy that, but more truthfully I needed him. Quinn was poised for a huge surging leap, a brilliant cometlike passage through the dark night of American politics, and I yearned to be part of his train, to catch some of his fire and be warmed by it. It was that simple and that humiliating. I was free to pretend that by serving Quinn I was serving mankind, that I was participating in a grand exciting crusade to save the greatest of our cities, that I was helping to pull modern urban civilization back from the abyss and give it purpose and viability. It might even be true. But what drew me to Quinn was the attraction of power, power in the abstract, power for its own sake, the power to mold and shape and transform. Saving New York was incidental; riding the lines of force was what I craved.

Our whole campaign team went right into the new city administration. Quinn named Haig Mardikian his deputy mayor and Bob Lombroso his finance administrator. George Missakian became media coordinator and Ara Ephrikian was named head of the City Planning Commission. Then the five of us sat down with Quinn and handed out the rest of the jobs. Ephrikian proposed most of the names, Missakian and Lombroso and Mardikian evaluated qualifications, I made intuitive assessments, and Quinn passed final judgment. In this way we found the usual assortment of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Italians, Irish, Jews, etc., to run the Human Resources Agency, the Housing and Redevelopment Board, the Environmental Protection Administration, the Cultural Resources Administration, and the other big numbers. Then we discreetly planted many of our friends, including an inordinate number of Armenians and Sephardic Jews and other exotics, high in the lower echelons. We kept the best people from the DiLaurenzio administration — there weren’t very many — and resuscitated a few of Gottfried’s hard-nosed but enlightened commissioners. It was a heady feeling to be picking a government for New York City, to drive out the hacks and timeservers and replace them with creative, adventurous men and women who happened, only happened, also to provide the ethnic and geographic mix that the cabinet of the mayor of New York must have.