The Stochastic Man

“Jesus!” I cried. “You think that breaking up with Sundara has destroyed my sanity?”

“I think it’s taken a lot out of you,” Mardikian said, speaking more gently. “You yourself used the phrase about not having much reserve of energy. Frankly, Lew, we think you’re under a strain, we think you’re fatigued, weary, groggy, that you’ve overtaxed yourself seriously, that you can use a rest. And we—”

“Who’s we? ”

“Qui

“What has Lombroso been saying about me?”

“Mainly that he’s been trying to get you to take a vacation since last August.”

“What else?”

Mardikian looked puzzled. “What do you mean, what else? What do you think he’d say? Christ, Lew, you’re sounding awfully paranoid all of a sudden. Bob’s your friend, remember? He’s on your side. We’re all on your side. He told you to go up to so-and-so’s hunting lodge, but you wouldn’t. He’s worried about you. We all are. Now we’d like to put it a little more strongly. We feel you need a rest, Lew, and we want you to take one. City Hall won’t fall apart if you aren’t around for a few weeks.”

“Okay. I’ll go on vacation. I could use one, sure. But one favor, first.”

“Go on.”

“The Thibodaux thing and the Ricciardi thing. I want you to put them through and have Qui

“If you’ll give me some plausible justification.”

“I can’t, Haig.” Suddenly I was sweating all over. “Nothing that would sound convincing. But it’s important that the mayor go along with those recommendations.”

“Why?”

“It is. Very important.”

“To you or to Qui

It was a shrewd shot, and it hit me hard. To me, I thought, to me, to Carvajal, to the whole pattern of faith and belief I’ve been constructing. Had the moment of truth come at last? Had I handed Qui

“Important to everybody,” I said. “Please. As a favor. I haven’t given him any bad advice up to now, have I?”

“He’s hostile to this. He needs to know something of the projective structure behind these suggestions.”

Almost panicky, I said, “Don’t push me too hard, Haig. I’m right at the brink. But I’m not crazy. Exhausted, maybe, yes, but not crazy, and the stuff I handed in this morning makes sense, it will make sense, it’ll be perfectly apparent in three months, five, six, whenever. Look at me. Look me right in the eye. I’ll take that vacation. I appreciate the fact that you’re all worried about me. But I want this one favor from you, Haig. Will you go in there and tell Qui

Then Mardikian said, astonishingly, smiling warmly, “All right, Lew. It’s nutty, but I’ll do it. Just this once. You get yourself off to Hawaii or somewhere and sit on the beach for a couple of weeks. And I’ll go in there and talk Qui

34

I took a vacation. Not the beaches of Hawaii — too crowded, too hectic, too far away — and not the hunting lodge in Canada, for the snows of late autumn would already be descending there; I went off to golden California, Carlos Socorro’s California, to magnificent Big Sur, where another friend of Lombroso’s conveniently managed to own an isolated redwood cottage on an acre of clifftop overlooking the ocean. For ten restless days I lived in rustic solitude, with the densely wooded slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains, dark and mysterious and ferny, to my back, and the broad breast of the Pacific before me, five hundred feet below. It was, they had assured me, the finest time of the year in Big Sur, the idyllic season that separates the summer’s fogs from the winter’s rains, and indeed it was so, with warm sunlit days and cool starry nights and an astonishing purple and gold sunset every evening. I hiked in the silent redwood groves, I swam in chilly, swift mountain streams, I scrambled down rocks thick with cascading glossy-leaved succulents to the beach and the turbulent surf. I watched cormorants and gulls at their di

But peace eluded me. I thought too much about Sundara, wondering in a blank, baffled way how I had come to lose her; I fretted about dreary political matters that any sane man would have banished from his mind in such stu

Yet slowly I allowed myself to feel refreshed. Slowly the magic of the lush coastline, miraculously preserved throughout a century in which almost everything else had been spoiled, worked itself on my stale and tangled soul.

Possibly I saw for the first time while I was in Big Sur.

I’m not sure. Months of proximity to Carvajal hadn’t yet produced any definite results. The future sent me no messages that I could read. I knew now the tricks Carvajal used to induce the state, I knew the symptoms of an oncoming vision, I felt certain that before much longer I’d be seeing, but I had had no certain visionary experience, and the harder I tried to attain one, of course, the more distant my goal appeared. But there was one odd moment late in my stay in Big Sur. I had been to the beach, and now, toward the end of the afternoon, I was climbing swiftly up the steep trail to the cottage, getting tired fast, breathing hard, enjoying the heady dizziness that was coming over me as I deliberately pushed heart and lungs to their limits. Reaching a sharp switchback, I paused for a moment, turning to look back and down, and the glare of the dipping sun reverberating off the surface of the sea hit me and dazzled me, so that I swayed and shivered and had to clutch at a bush to keep from falling. And in that moment it seemed to me — it seemed, it was only an illusory sensation, a brief subliminal flicker — that I was staring through the golden fire of the sunlight into a time not yet arrived, that I beheld a vast rectangular green ba

Did I see? Had the veil of time parted for me? Was Qui