The Stochastic Man

Position papers: libraries, drugs, interstate population transfer.

Tour Garment District Historic Site with new Israeli consul-general. Include in party: Leibman, Berkowitz, Ms. Weisbard, Rabbi Dubin, also Msgr. O’Neill.

Sometimes I understood why my future self was recommending a given course of action to Qui

I followed the script.

My vicarious political ambitions were begi

Day after day I streamed my memos toward Qui

From Carvajal I also got instructions of a more personal kind.

“It’s time to get your hair cut,” he told me early in September.

“Short, you mean?”

“Off.”

“Are you telling me to shave my scalp?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“No,” I said. “If there’s one silly fad I detest—”

“Irrelevant. As of this month you began wearing your hair like that. Do it tomorrow, Lew.”

“I wouldn’t ever have gotten a Pruss,” I objected. “It’s altogether out of keeping with my—”

“You did,” Carvajal said simply. “How can you quarrel with that?”

But what was the use of arguing? He had seen me bald; hence I must go and get a Pruss. No questions asked, the man had told me when I came aboard: just follow the script, boy.

I yielded myself up unto the barber. I came out looking like an oversized Erich von Stroheim, minus monocle and stiff collar.

“How marvelous it looks!” Sundara cried. “How gorgeous!”

She ran her hands tenderly over my stubbly scalp. It was the first time in two or three months that there had been any kind of current flowing between us. She loved the haircut, absolutely adored it. Of course: getting cropped like that was a crazy Transit sort of thing for me to do. To her it was a sign that I might yet shape up.

There were other orders.

“Spend a weekend in Caracas,” Carvajal said. “Charter a fishing boat. You’ll catch a swordfish.”

“Why?”

“Do it,” he said implacably.

“I don’t see the relevance of my going to—”

“Please, Lew. You’re being difficult.”

“Will you explain this, at least?”

“There’s no explanation. You have to go to Caracas.”

It was absurd. But I went to Caracas. I drank too many margaritas with some lawyers from New York who didn’t know I was Qui

I accepted the dictates.

I grew a beard. I bought nippy-dip new clothes. I picked up a sullen cow-breasted sixteen-year-old in Times Square, filled her with rum swizzles in the highest eyrie of the Hyatt Regency, rented a room there for two hours and grimly fornicated her. I spent three days up at the Columbia Medical Center as a volunteer subject for sonopuncture research, and left there with every bone buzzing. I went down to my neighborhood Numbers office and put a thousand bucks on 666, and got wiped out, because that day’s wi

Follow the script, kid. Ask no questions.

I wore my fu

Early in October Carvajal said, “Now you file for a divorce.”

29

Divorce, Carvajal said, on a brisk crisp blue-skied Wednesday in October, a day of withered yellow early-falling maple leaves dancing in the sharp westerly wind, now you file for a divorce, now you arrange the termination of your marriage. Wednesday, the sixth of October, 1999, just eighty-six days left to the end of the century, unless, of course, you were the kind of purist who insisted, with logic if not emotional justice on your side, that the new century would not properly begin until the first of January, 2001. At any rate, eighty-six days left until the changing of the digit. As the digit shifts, Qui