The Stochastic Man

6

From September of 1997 until March of 2000, nine months ago, I was obsessed with the idea of making Paul Qui

Obsessed.That’s a strong word. It smacks of Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing, ritual handwashing, rubber undergarments. Yet I think it precisely describes my involvement with Qui

Haig Mardikian introduced me to Qui

(Probably?How can I doubt it?) On a sweltering August afternoon he phoned to say, “Sarkisian is having a big splash tonight. You’re invited. I guarantee that something good will come out of it for you.” Sarkisian is a real estate operator who, so it seems, owns both sides of the Hudson River for six or seven hundred kilometers.

“Who’ll be there?” I asked. “Aside from Ephrikian, Missakian, Hagopian, Manoogian, Garabedian, and Boghosian.”

“Berberian and Khatisian,” he said. “Also—” And Mardikian ran off a brilliant, a dazzling, list of celebrities from the world of finance, politics, industry, science, and the arts, ending with “—and Paul Qui

“Should I know him, Haig?”

“You should, but right now you probably don’t. At present he’s the assemblyman from Riverdale. A man who’ll be going places in public life.”

I didn’t particularly care to pass my Saturday night hearing some ambitious young Irish pol explain his plan for revamping the galaxy, but on the other hand I had done a few projective jobs for politicians before and there was money in it, and Mardikian probably knew what was good for me. And the guest list was irresistible. Besides, my wife was spending August as a guest of a temporarily shorthanded six-group in Oregon and I suppose I entertained some hopeful fantasy of going home that evening with a sultry dark-haired Armenian lady.

“What time?” I asked.

“Nine,” Mardikian said.

So to Sarkisian’s place: a triplex penthouse atop a ninety-story circular alabaster-and-onyx condo tower on a Lower West Side offshore platform. Blank-faced guards who might just as well have been constructs of metal and plastic checked my identity, sca

The guests! They were as promised, a spectacular swarm of contraltos and astronauts and quarterbacks and chairpersons of the board. Costumes ran to formal-flamboyant, with the expectable display of breasts and genitalia but also the first hints, from the avant-garde, of the fin-de-siиcle love of concealment that now has taken over, high throats and tight bandeaus. Half a dozen of the men and several of the women affected clerical garb and there must have been fifteen pseudo generals bedecked with enough medals to shame an African dictator. I was dressed rather simply, I thought, in a pleatless radiation-green singlet and a three-strand bubble necklace. Though the rooms were crowded, the flow of the party was far from formless, for I saw eight or ten big swarthy outgoing men in subdued clothing, key members of Haig Mardikian’s ubiquitous Armenian mafia, distributed equidistantly through the main room like cribbage pegs, like goalposts, like pylons, each occupying a preassigned fixed position and efficiently offering smokes and drinks, making introductions, directing people toward other people whose acquaintance it might be desirable for them to make. I was drawn easily into this subtle gridwork, had my hand mangled by Ara Garabedian or Jason Komurjian or perhaps George Missakian, and found myself inserted into orbit on a collision course with a su

Long before Autumn and I came to that, though, I had been smoothly nudged through a long musical-chairs rotation of conversational partners, during the course of which I

—found myself talking to a female person who was black, witty, stu

—gently deflected the playful advances of City Councilman Ronald Holbrecht, the self-styled Voice of the Gay Community and the first man outside California to win an election with Homophile Party endorsement—

—wandered into a conversation between two tall white-haired men who looked like bankers and discovered them to be bioenergetics specialists from Bellevue and Columbia-Presbyterian, swapping gossip about their current sonopuncture work, which involved ultrasonic treatment of advanced bone malignancies—

—listened to an executive from CBS Labs telling a goggle-eyed young man about their newly developed charisma-enhancement biofeedback-loop gadget—

—learned that the goggle-eyed young man was Lamont Friedman of the sinister and multifarious investment banking house of Asgard Equities—

—exchanged trifling chitchat with Nole MacIver of the Ganymede Expedition, Claude Parks of the Dope Patrol (who had brought his molecular sax, and didn’t need much encouragement to play it), three pro basketball stars and some luminous right-fielder, an organizer for the new civil-service prostitutes’ union, a municipal brothel inspector, an assortment of less trendy city officials, and the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of transient arts, Mei-ling Pulvermacher—

—had my first encounter with a Transit Creed proctor, the petite but forceful Ms. Catalina Yarber, just arrived from San Francisco, whose attempt to convert me on the spot I declined with oblique excuses—

—and met Paul Qui

Qui