The Stochastic Man

“So am I,” I said, sighing.

“I won’t be calling you. If you need to get in touch with me, do it by way of my Wall Street office.”

“Okay. I don’t want to get you in trouble, Bob.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Okay.”

“If I could do anything for you—”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.”

38

There was a foul storm two days before Christmas, a mean reptilian blizzard, fierce brutal winds and sub-Arctic temperatures and a heavy fall of dry, hard, rough snow. It was the sort of storm that would depress a Mi

And April remained with us. Day after day the unseasonable heat caressed the winter-weary city. Of course everything was a mess at first as the great hummocks of recent snow softened and melted and ran in furious rivers along the gutters; but by the middle of the holiday week the worst of the slush was gone, and Manhattan, dry and trim, took on an unfamiliar well-scrubbed look. Lilacs and forsythias rashly began to break their buds, months too soon. A wave of giddiness swept New York: topcoats and snow robes disappeared, the streets were crowded with smiling buoyant people in light tunics and jerkins, throngs of nude and semi-nude sunbathers, pale but eager, sprawled on the su

During this whole time I had kept to myself, shrouded in murky confusions and, I suppose, self-pity. I called no one — not Lombroso nor Sundara nor Mardikian nor Carvajal nor any of the other shreds and fragments of my former existence. I did go out for a few hours each day to roam the streets — who could resist that sun? — but I spoke to nobody and I discouraged people from speaking to me, and by evening I was home, alone, to read a bit, drink some brandy, listen to music without really listening, go early to bed. My isolation seemed to deprive me of all stochastic grace: I lived entirely in the past, like an animal, with no notion of what might happen next, no hunches, none of the old sense of patterns gathering and meshing.

On New Year’s Eve I felt a need to be outdoors. To barricade myself in solitude on such a night was intolerable, the eve of, among other things, my thirty-fourth birthday. I thought of phoning friends, but no, the social energies had deserted me: I would slink solitary and unknown through the byways of Manhattan, like the Caliph Haroun al-Raschid touring Baghdad. But I dressed in my nippy-dip peacock best, summer clothes of scarlet and gold with glistening underthreads, and I trimmed my beard and scraped my scalp, and I went out jauntily to see the century into its tomb.

Darkness had come by late afternoon — this was still the depth of winter, no matter what the thermometer told us — and the lights of the city glittered. Though it was only seven o’clock, the partying evidently was begi

Ordinarily one didn’t stroll like this in Manhattan after dark. But tonight the streets were as busy as they were by day, pedestrians everywhere, laughing, peering into shopwindows, waving to strangers, jostling one another playfully, and I felt safe. Was this truly New York, the city of closed faces and wary eyes, the city of knives that gleamed on dark sullen streets? Yes, yes, yes, New York, but a New York transformed, a mille

Saturnalia, yes, that was what it was, a lunatic revel, a frenzy of ecstatic spirits. Every drug in the psychedelic pharmacopoeia was being peddled on streetcorners, and sales seemed brisk. No one walked a straight line. Sirens wailed everywhere as the gaiety mounted in pitch. I took no drugs myself except the ancient one, alcohol, which I took most copiously, stopping in tavern after tavern, a beer here, a shot of awful brandy there, some tequila, some rum, a martini, even dark rich sherry. I was dizzy but not demolished: somehow I stayed upright and more or less coherent, and my mind functioned with what seemed like its customary lucidity, observing, recording.

There were definite increments of wildness from hour to hour. In the bars nudity was still uncommon by nine, but by half past there was bare sweaty flesh everywhere, jiggling breasts, waggling buttocks, clap hands and kick, everyone join in a circle. It was half past nine before I saw anyone screwing in the streets, but outdoor fornication was widespread by ten. An undercurrent of violence had been present all evening — smashing of windows, shooting out of streetlamps — but it picked up strength rapidly after ten: there were fistfights, some genial, some murderous, and at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth there was a mob battle going on, a hundred men and women clubbing at each other in what looked like a random way, and motorists were having noisy disputes everywhere, and it seemed to me that some drivers were deliberately ramming their cars into others for the sheer destructive fun of it. Were there murders? Most certainly. Rapes? By the thousand. Mutilations and other monstrosities? I have no doubt.