Stochastic Man Read Free Page B

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:
     
    BRONX ASSEMBLYMAN QUINN
    ATTACKS SLUM-CLEARANCE DELAYS
     
    MAYOR QUINN CALLS FOR
    CITY CHARTER REFORM
     
    SENATOR QUINN SAYS
    HE’LL SEEK WHITE HOUSE
     
    QUINN LEADS NEW DEMOCRATS
    TO NATIONWIDE LANDSLIDE
     
    PRESIDENT QUINN’S FIRST TERM:
    AN APPRAISAL
     
    He went on talking, all the while smiling, maintaining eye contact, holding me impaled. He quizzed me about my profession, he pumped me for my political beliefs, he iterated his own. “They say you’ve got the best reliability index of any projector in the Northeast…. I’ll bet not even you anticipated the Gottfried assassination, though…. You don’t have to be much of a prophet to feel sorry for poor dopey DiLaurenzio, trying to run City Hall at a time like this…. This city can’t be governed, it has to be juggled…. Are you as repelled by that phony Neighborhood Authority Act as I am?... What do you think of Con Ed’s Twenty-third Street fusion project?... You ought to see the flow charts they found in Gottfried’s office safe….” Deftly he plumbed for common grounds in political philosophy, though he had to be aware I shared most of his beliefs, for if he knew so much about me he would know I was a registered New Democrat, that I had done the projections for the Twenty-first Century Manifesto and its companion, the book Toward a True Humanity , that I felt as he did about priorities and reforms and the whole inane Puritan idea of trying to legislate morality. The longer we spoke the more strongly I was drawn to him.
    I began making quiet unsettling comparisons between Quinn and some great politicians of the past—FDR, Rockefeller, Johnson, the original Kennedy. They had all had that warm beautiful doublethink knack of being able to play out the rituals of political conquest and simultaneously to indicate to their more intelligent victims that nobody’s being fooled, we all know it’s just a ritual, but don’t you think I’m good at it? Even then, even that first night in 1995, when he was just a kid assemblyman unknown outside his own borough, I saw him heading into political history alongside Roosevelt and JFK. Later I began making more grandiose comparisons, between Quinn and the likes of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, even Jesus, and if such talk makes you snicker, please remember that I am a