The Stochastic Man

I’m executive secretary of the Center, which was incorporated four months ago, in August, 2000. Carvajal’s money pays our expenses. For now we occupy a five-room house in a rural section of northern New Jersey, and I don’t care to be more specific about the location. Our aim is to find ways of reducing the Bernoulli Interval to zero: that is, to make guesses of ever-increasing accuracy on the basis of an ever-decreasing statistical sample, or, to put it another way, to move from probabilistic to absolute prediction, or, rephrasing it yet again, to replace guesswork with clairvoyance.

So we work toward post-stochastic abilities. What Carvajal taught me is that stochasticity isn’t the end of the line: it’s merely a phase, soon to pass, in our striving toward full revelation of the future, in our struggle to free ourselves from the tyra

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Carvajal is dead now; he died exactly when and as he knew he would. I am still here, and I think I know how I will die, too, but I’m not altogether sure of it, and in any case it doesn’t seem to matter to me the way it did to him. He never had the strength that was necessary to sustain his visions. He was just a burned-out little man with tired eyes and a drained smile, who had a gift that was too big for his soul, and it was the gift that killed him as much as anything. If I truly have inherited that gift, I hope I make a better job of living with it than he did.

Carvajal is dead, but I’m alive and will be for some time to come. All about me flutter the indistinct towers of the New York of twenty years hence, glittering in the pale light of mornings not yet born. I look at the dull porcelain bowl of the winter sky and see images of my own face, grown much older. So I am not about to vanish. I have a considerable future. I know that the future is a place as fixed and intransient and accessible as the past. Because I know this I’ve abandoned the wife I loved, given up the profession that was making me rich, and acquired the enmity of Paul Qui

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I was into probabilities for seven years, professionally, before I ever heard of Martin Carvajal. My business from the spring of 1992 onward was projections. I can look at the acorn and see the stack of firewood: it’s a gift I have. For a fee, I would tell you whether I think particle chips will continue to be a growth industry, whether it’s a good idea to open a tattooing parlor in Topeka, whether the fad for bare scalps is going to last long enough to make it worthwhile for you to expand your San Jose depilatory factory. And the odds are I’d be right.

My father liked to say, “A man doesn’t choose his life. His life chooses him.”

Maybe. I never expected to go into the prophecy trade. I never really expected to go into anything. My father feared I’d be a wastrel. Certainly it looked that way the day I collected my college diploma. (NYU ‘86.) I sailed through my three years of college not knowing at all what I wanted to do with my life, other than that it ought to be something communicative, creative, lucrative, and reasonably useful to society. I didn’t want to be a novelist, a teacher, an actor, a lawyer, a stockbroker, a general, or a priest. Industry and finance didn’t attract me, medicine was beyond my capabilities, politics seemed vulgar and blatant. I knew my skills, which are primarily verbal and conceptual, and I knew my needs, which are primarily security-oriented and privacy-oriented. I was and am bright, outgoing, alert, energetic, willing to work hard, and candidly opportunistic, though not, I hope, opportunistically candid. But I was missing a focus, a center, a defining point, when college turned me loose.

A man’s life chooses him. I had always had an odd knack for unca

When I was in the projection business many uninformed folk thought I was a pollster. No. Pollsters worked for me, a whole platoon of hired gallups. They were to me as millers are to a baker: they sorted the wheat from the chaff, I produced the seven-layer cakes. My work was a giant step beyond polltaking. Using data samples collected by the usual quasi-scientific methods, I derived far-ranging predictions, I made intuitive leaps, in short I guessed, and guessed well. There was money in it, but also I felt a kind of ecstasy. When I confronted a mound of raw samples from which I had to pull a major projection, I felt like a diver plunging off a high cliff into a sparkling blue sea, seeking a glittering gold doubloon hidden in the white sand far below the waves: my heart pounded, my mind whirled, my body and my spirit underwent a quantum kick into a higher, more intense energy state. Ecstasy.

What I did was sophisticated and highly technical, but it was a species of witchcraft, too. I wallowed in harmonic means, positive skews, modal values, and parameters of dispersion. My office was a maze of display screens and graphs. I kept a battery of jumbo computers ru