The Stochastic Man

10

“If Qui

“Probably.”

“Will you take it?”

“Not a chance,” I told her. “Ru

Three days after the election Qui

Was I lying to Sundara on that summer night, then? No, the one I had been fooling was myself. My projection was faulty because my self-understanding had been imperfect. What I learned between August and November is that proximity to power becomes addictive. For more than a year I had been drawing vitality from Paul Qui

Our whole campaign team went right into the new city administration. Qui

My own job was amorphous, evanescent: I was private adviser, hunch maker, troubleshooter, the misty presence behind the throne. I was supposed to use my intuitive faculties to keep Qui

Right into the White House.

I had felt the imminence of Qui

And then -

By early autumn of ‘97, with the mayoralty already as good as won, I found myself becoming concerned, in what I soon recognized to be an obsessive way, with Qui

Privately, secretly — for I felt abashed at such premature scheming; I didn’t want cold-eyed pros like Mardikian and Lombroso to know I was already enmeshed in misty masturbatory fantasies of our hero’s distant glowing future, though I suppose they must have been thinking similar thoughts themselves by then — I drew up endless lists of politicians worth cultivating in places like California and Florida and Texas, charted the dynamics of the national electoral blocs, concocted intricate schemas representing the power vortices of a national nominating convention, set up an infinity of simulated scenarios for the election itself. All this was, as I say, obsessive in nature, meaning that I returned again and again, eagerly, impatiently, unavoidably, in any free moment, to my projections and analyses.

Everyone has some controlling obsession, some fixation that becomes an armature for the construct that is his life: thus we make ourselves into stamp collectors, gardeners, skycyclists, marathon hikers, sniffers, fornicators. We all have the same kind of void within, and each of us fills that void in essentially the same way, no matter what kind of stuffing for the emptiness we choose. I mean we pick the cure we like best but we all have the same disease.

So I dreamed dreams of President Qui