The Stochastic Man

30

Give yourself to me, that was the deal, no questions asked, nothing guaranteed. No questions asked. But this time I had to ask. Carvajal was pushing me toward a step that I couldn’t take without some sort of explanation.

“You promised not to ask,” he said sulkily.

“Nevertheless. Give me a clue or the deal’s off.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I do.”

He tried to stare me down. But those blank eyes of his, sometimes so fiercely unanswerable, didn’t intimidate me now. My hunch function said I should go ahead, press him, demand to know the structure of events into which I was entering. Carvajal resisted. He squirmed and sweated and told me that I was setting my training back by weeks or even months with this unseemly outburst of insecurity. Have faith, he urged, follow the script, do as you’re told, and all will be well.

“No,” I said. “I love her, and even today divorce is no joke. I can’t do it on a whim.”

“Your training—”

“To hell with that. Why should I leave my wife, other than the simple fact that we haven’t been getting along very well lately? Breaking up with Sundara isn’t like changing my haircut, you know.”

“Of course it is.”

“What?”

“All events are equal in the long run,” he said.

I snorted. “Don’t talk garbage. Different acts have different consequences, Carvajal. Whether I wear my hair short or long can’t have much effect on surrounding events. But marriages sometimes produce children, and children are unique genetic constellations, and the children that Sundara and I might produce, if we chose to produce any, would be different from children that she or I might have with other mates, and the differences — Christ, if we break up I might marry someone else and become the great-great-grandfather of the next Napoleon, and if I stay with her I might — Well, how can you say that in the long run all events are equal?”

“You grasp things very slowly,” said Carvajal sadly.

“What?”

“I wasn’t speaking of consequences. Merely of events. All events are equal in their probability, Lew, by which I mean that there’s total probability of any event happening that is going to happen—”

“Tautology!”

“Yes. But we deal in tautologies, you and I. I tell you, I see you divorcing Sundara, just as I saw you getting that haircut, and so those events are of equal probability.”

I closed my eyes. I sat still a long time.

Eventually I said, “Tell me why I divorce her. Isn’t there any hope of repairing the relationship? We aren’t fighting. We don’t have serious disagreements about money. We think alike on most things. We’ve lost touch with each other, yes, but that’s all, just a drifting toward different spheres. Don’t you think we could get back together if we both made a sincere effort?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t I try it instead of—”

“You’d have to go into Transit,” he said.

I shrugged. “I think I could manage that if I had to. If the only alternative was losing Sundara.”

“You couldn’t. It’s alien to you, Lew. It opposes everything you believe and everything you’re working toward.”

“But to keep Sundara—”

“You’ve lost her.”

“Only in the future. She’s still my wife.”

“What’s lost in the future is lost now.”

“I refuse to—”

“You have to!” he cried. “It’s all one, Lew, it’s all one! You’ve come this far with me and you don’t see that?”

I saw it. I knew every argument he was likely to muster, and I believed them all, and my belief wasn’t something laid on from outside, like walnut paneling, but rather something intrinsic, something that had grown and spread within me over these past months. And still I resisted. Still I looked for loopholes. I was still clutching for any straw that eddied around me in the maelstrom, even as I was being sucked under.

I said, “Finish telling me. Why is it necessary and inevitable that I leave Sundara?”

“Because her destiny lies with Transit and yours lies as far from Transit as you can stay. They work toward uncertainty, you toward certainty. They try to undermine, you want to build. It’s a fundamental philosophical gulf that’s going to keep on getting wider and can’t ever be bridged. So the two of you have to part.”

“How soon?”

“You’ll be living alone before the end of the year,” he told me. “I’ve seen you several times in your new place.”

“No woman living with me?”

“No.”

“I’m not good at celibacy. I haven’t had much practice.”

“You’ll have women, Lew. But you’ll live alone.”

“Sundara gets the condo?”

“Yes.”

“And the paintings, the sculptures, the—”

“I don’t know,” Carvajal said, looking bored. “I really haven’t paid any attention to details like that. You know they don’t matter to me.”

“I know.”

He let me go. I walked about three miles uptown, seeing nothing around me, hearing nothing, thinking nothing. I was one with the void; I was a member of the vast emptiness. At the corner of Something Street and God-Knows-What Avenue I found a phone booth and dropped a token in the slot and dialed Haig Mardikian’s office, and vipped my way through the shield of receptionists until Mardikian himself was on the line. “I’m getting divorced,” I told him, and listened for a moment to the silent roaring of his amazement booming across the wire like the surf at Fire Island in a March storm. “I don’t care about the financial angles,” I said after a bit. “I just want a clean break. Give me the name of a lawyer you trust, Haig. Somebody who’ll do it fast without hurting her.”