Stochastic Man (2 page)

My father liked to say, “A man doesn’t choose his life. His life chooses him.”

Maybe. I never expected to go into the prophecy trade. I never really expected to go into anything. My father feared I’d be a wastrel. Certainly it looked that way the day I collected my college diploma. (NYU ‘86.) I sailed through my three years of college not knowing at all what I wanted to do with my life, other than that it ought to be something communicative, creative, lucrative, and reasonably useful to society. I didn’t want to be a novelist, a teacher, an actor, a lawyer, a stockbroker, a general, or a priest. Industry and finance didn’t attract me, medicine was beyond my capabilities, politics seemed vulgar and blatant. I knew my skills, which are primarily verbal and conceptual, and I knew my needs, which are primarily security-oriented and privacy-oriented. I was and am bright, outgoing, alert, energetic, willing to work hard, and candidly opportunistic, though not, I hope, opportunistically candid. But I was missing a focus, a center, a defining point, when college turned me loose.

A man’s life chooses him. I had always had an odd knack for uncanny hunches; by easy stages I turned that into my livelihood. As a summer fill-in job I did some part-time polltaking; one day in the office I happened to make a few astute comments about the pattern the raw data were showing, and my boss invited me to prepare a projective sampling template for the next step of the poll. That’s a program that tells you what sort of questions you ought to ask in order to get the answers you need. The work was stimulating and my excellence at it had ego rewards. When one of my employer’s big clients asked me to quit and do free-lance consulting work, I took the chance. From there to my own full-time consulting firm was only a matter of months.

When I was in the projection business many uninformed folk thought I was a pollster. No. Pollsters worked for
me,
a whole platoon of hired gallups. They were to me as millers are to a baker: they sorted the wheat from the chaff, I produced the seven-layer cakes. My work was a giant step beyond polltaking. Using data samples collected by the usual quasi-scientific methods, I derived far-ranging predictions, I made intuitive leaps, in short I guessed, and guessed well. There was money in it, but also I felt a kind of ecstasy. When I confronted a mound of raw samples from which I had to pull a major projection, I felt like a diver plunging off a high cliff into a sparkling blue sea, seeking a glittering gold doubloon hidden in the white sand far below the waves: my heart pounded, my mind whirled, my body and my spirit underwent a quantum kick into a higher, more intense energy state. Ecstasy.

What I did was sophisticated and highly technical, but it was a species of witchcraft, too. I wallowed in harmonic means, positive skews, modal values, and parameters of dispersion. My office was a maze of display screens and graphs. I kept a battery of jumbo computers running around the clock, and what looked like a wristwatch on my wrong arm was actually a data terminal that rarely had time to cool. But the heavy math and the high-powered Hollywood technology were simply aspects of the preliminary phases of my work, the intake stage. When actual projections had to be made, IBM couldn’t help me. I had to do my trick with nothing but my unaided mind. I would stand in a dreadful solitude on the edge of that cliff, and though sonar may have told me the configuration of the ocean bottom, though GE’s finest transponders had registered the velocity of current flow and the water’s temperature and turbidity index, I was altogether on my own in the crucial moment of realization. I would scan the water with narrowed eyes, flexing my knees, swinging my arms, filling my lungs with air, waiting until I
saw
, until I truly
saw,
and when I felt that beautiful confident dizziness back of my eyebrows I would jump at last, I would launch myself headlong into the surging sea in search of that doubloon, I would shoot naked and unprotected and unerring toward my goal.

6

From September of 1997 until March of 2000, nine months ago, I was obsessed with the idea of making Paul Quinn President of the United States.

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 Quinn and his ambitions.

Haig Mardikian introduced me to Quinn in the summer of ‘95. Haig and I went to private school together—the Dalton, circa 1980-82, where we played a lot of basketball—and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He’s a slick lynx-eyed lawyer about three meters tall who wants to be, among many other things, the first United States Attorney General of Armenian ancestry and probably will be

(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 Quinn.” Meaningful emphasis on that final name.

“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, scanned me for weapons, and admitted me. The air within was a blue haze. The sour, spicy odor of powdered bone dominated everything: we were smoking doped calcium that year. Crystalline oval windows like giant portholes ringed the entire apartment. In the eastward-facing rooms the view was blocked by the two monolithic slabs of the World Trade Center, but elsewhere Sarkisian did provide a decent 270-degree panorama of New York Harbor, New Jersey, the West Side Expressway, and maybe some of Pennsylvania. Only in one of the giant wedge-shaped rooms were the portholes opaqued, and when I went into an adjoining wedge and peered at a sharp angle I found out why: that side of the tower faced the still undemolished stump of the Statue of Liberty, and Sarkisian apparently didn’t want the depressing sight to bring his guests down. (This was the summer of ‘95, remember, which was one of the more violent years of the decade, and the bombing still had everyone jittery.)

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 die
fin-de-siècle
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 sunny-faced golden- haired woman named Autumn, who wasn’t Armenian and with whom I did in fact go home many hours later.

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, stunning-looking, and half a meter taller than I am, and whom I correctly guessed to be Ilene Mulamba, the head of Network Four, a meeting which led to my getting a fancy consulting contract for design of their split-signal ethnic-zone telecasts—

—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 Maclver 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 Quinn.

Quinn, yes. Sometimes I wake quivering and perspiring from a dreamed replay of that party in which I see myself swept by an irresistible current through a sea of yammering celebrities toward the golden, smiling figure of Paul Quinn, who waits for me like Charybdis, eyes agleam, jaws agape. Quinn was thirty-four then, five years my senior, a short powerful-looking man, blond, broad shoulders, wide-set blue eyes, a warm smile, conservative clothes, a rough masculine handshake, grabbing you by the inside of your biceps as well as by your hand, making eye contact with an almost audible snap, establishing instant rapport All that was standard political technique, and I had seen it often enough before, but never with this degree of intensity and power. Quinn leaped across the person-person gap so quickly and so confidently that I began to suspect he must be wearing one of those CBS charisma-enhancement loops in his earlobe. Mardikian told him my name and right away he was into me with, “You’re one of the people I was most eager to meet here tonight,” and, “Call me Paul,” and, “Let’s go where it’s a little quieter, Lew,” and I knew I was being expertly conned and yet I was nailed despite myself.

He led me to a little salon a few rooms northwest of the main room. Pre-Columbian clay figurines, African masks, pulsar screens, splash stands—a nice mixture of old and new decorative notions. The wallpaper was
New York Times,
vintage 1980 or so. “Some party,” Quinn said, grinning. He ran quickly down the guest list, sharing with me a small-boy awe at being among such celebrities.

Then he narrowed the focus and moved in on me.

He had been well briefed. He knew all about me, where I had gone to school, what my degree was in, what sort of work I did, where my office was. He asked if I had brought my wife—”Sundara, isn’t that her name? Asian background?”

“Her family’s from India.”

“She’s said to be quite beautiful.”

“She’s in Oregon this month.”

“I hope I’ll get a chance to meet her. Perhaps next time I’m out Richmond way I’ll give you a call, yes? How do you like living on Staten Island, anyway?”

I had seen this before, too, the full Treatment, the politician’s computerized mind at work, as though a nugget of microcircuitry were going click-click-click in there whenever facts were needed, and for a moment I suspected he might be some sort of robot. But Quinn was too good to be unreal. On one level he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the outrageous excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me,
I’ve got to pile it on, Lew, that’s the way I’m supposed to play this dumb game.
Also he seemed to be picking up and reflecting the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good. My mind went into automatic project and handed me a series of
Times
headlines that went something like this: