Stochastic Man Read Free Page A

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