Transit, of course, wasn’t Hindu — more a mixture of Buddhism and fascism, actually, a stew of Zen and Tantra and Platonism and Gestalt therapy and Poundian economics and what-all else, and neither Krishna nor Allah nor Jehovah nor any other divinity figured in its beliefs. It had come out of California, naturally, six or seven years ago, a characteristic product of the Wild ‘90s that had succeeded the Goofy ‘80s that had followed the Horrid ‘70s, and, diligently proselytized by an ever-expanding horde of dedicated proctors, it had spread rapidly through such less enlightened places as the eastern United States. Until Sundara’s conversion I had paid little attention to it; it was not so much repugnant as irrelevant to me. But as it began to absorb more and more of my wife’s energies, I started to take a closer look.

Catalina Yarber had been able to express most of the basic tenets in five minutes, the night she and I bedded. This world is unimportant, the Transit folk assert, and our passage through it is brief, a quick trifling trip. We go through, we are reborn into it, we go through again, we keep on going through until at last we are freed from the wheel of karma and pass onward to the blissful annihilation that is nirvana, when we become one with the cosmos. What holds us to the wheel is ego attachment: we become hooked on things and needs and pleasures, on self-gratification, and so long as we retain a self that requires gratification we will be born again and again into this dreary meaningless little mud-ball. If we want to move to a higher plane and ultimately to reach the Highest, we must refine our souls in the crucible of renunciation.

All that is fairly orthodox Eastern theology. The special kicker of Transit is its emphasis on volatility and mutability. Transition is all; change is essential; stasis kills; rigid consistency is the road to undesirable rebirths. Transit processes work toward constant evolution, toward perpetual quicksilver flow of the spirit, and encourage unpredictable, even eccentric, behavior. That’s the appeal: the sanctification of craziness. The universe, the proctors say, is in perpetual flux; we never can step twice into the same river; we must flow and yield; we must be supple, protean, kaleidoscopic, mercurial; we must accept the knowledge that permanence is an ugly delusion and everything, ourselves included, is in a state of giddy unending transition. But although the universe is fluid and wayward, we are not therefore condemned to blow haphazardly in its breezes. No, they tell us: because nothing is deterministic, because nothing is unbendingly foreordained, everything is within our individual control. We are the existential shapers of our destinies, and we are free to grasp the Truth and act on it. What is the Truth? That we must freely choose not to be ourselves, that we must discard our rigidly conceived self-images, for only through the unimpeded flow of the Transit processes can we abolish the ego attachments that tie us to intransient low-plane states.

These teachings were threatening to me. I am not comfortable with chaos. I believe in order and predictability. My gift of second sight, my innate stochasticity, is founded on the notion that patterns exist, that probabilities are real. I prefer to believe that while it is not certain that tea over a flame will boil or that a rock thrown in the air will fall, these events are highly likely. The Transit people, it seemed to me, were striving toward abolition of that likelihood: to produce iced tea on a stove was their aim.

Coming home was an adventure now.

One day the furniture was rearranged. Everything. All our carefully calculated effects were destroyed. Three days later I found the furniture in yet another pattern, even more clumsy. I made no comment either time and after about a week Sundara put things back the way they had been at first.

Sundara dyed her hair red. The effect was ghastly.

She kept a white cross-eyed cat for six days.

She begged me to accompany her to a Tuesday night process session, but when I agreed she canceled my appointment an hour before we were due to set out, and went alone, explaining nothing.

She was in the hands of the apostles of chaos. Love breeds patience; therefore I was patient with her. Whatever way she chose to wage her war on stasis, I was patient. This is only a phase, I told myself. Only a phase.

On the 9th day of May, 1999, between the hours of four and five in the morning, I dreamed that State Controller Gilmartin was being executed by a firing squad.

I can be so precise about the date and the time because it was a dream so vivid, so much like the eleven o’clock news unreeling on the screen of my mind, that it awakened me, and I mumbled a memo about it into my bedside recorder. I learned long ago to make notes on dreams of such intensity, because they often turn out to be premonitions. In dreams comes truth. Joseph’s Pharaoh dreamed he stood by a river out of which came seven plump cattle and seven scrawny ones — fourteen omens. Calpurnia saw the statue of her husband Caesar spouting blood the night before the ides of March. Abe Lincoln dreamed of hearing the subdued sobs of invisible mourners and beheld himself going downstairs to find a catafalque in the East Room of the White House, an honor guard of soldiers, a body in funeral vestments on the bier, a throng of weeping citizens. Who is dead in the White House? the dreaming President asks, and they tell him that the dead man is the President, slain by an assassin. Long before Carvajal entered my life I knew that the future’s moorings are weak, that floes of time break loose and drift back across the great sea to our sleeping minds. So I paid heed to my Gilmartin dream.

I saw him, plump, pale, sweating, a tall round-faced man with cold blue eyes, hauled into a bare dusty courtyard, a place of fierce sunlight and harsh sharp shadows, by a squad of scowling soldiers in black uniforms. I saw him struggling at his bonds, snuffling, twisting, beseeching, protesting his innocence. The soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, lifting their rifles, an infinitely long moment of silent aiming. Gilmartin moaning, praying, whining, at the very end finding a scrap of dignity, pulling himself erect, squaring his shoulders, facing his killers defiantly. The order to fire, the crack of guns, the body jerking and writhing hideously, slumping against the ropes …

Now what to make of this? The promise of trouble for Gilmartin, who had made financial troubles for the Quinn administration and whom I didn’t like, or merely the hope of it? An assassination brewing, perhaps? Assassinations had been a big thing in the early ‘90s, bigger even than in the bloody Kennedy years, but I thought the fad had gone out of fashion again. Who would assassinate a drab hack like Gilmartin, anyway? Maybe what I was picking up was a premonition that Gilmartin would die of natural causes. Gilmartin boasted of his good health, though. An accident, then? Or maybe just metaphorical death — a lawsuit, a political squabble, a scandal, an impeachment?

I didn’t know how to interpret my dream or what to do about it, and ultimately I decided not to do anything. And so we missed the boat on the Gilmartin scandal, which indeed was what I was perceiving — no firing squad, no assassination for the controller, but shame, resignation, jail. Quinn could have made tremendous political capital out of it if it had been city investigators who exposed Gilmartin’s manipulations, if the mayor had risen in righteous wrath to say that the city was being short-changed and an audit was needed. But I failed to see the larger pattern, and it was a state accountant, not one of our people, who eventually blew the story open — how Gilmartin had been systematically diverting millions of dollars of state funds intended for New York City into the treasuries of a few small upstate towns, and thence into his own pockets and those of a couple of rural officials. Too late I realized that I had had two chances at knocking Gilmartin down, and I had fumbled both of them. A month before my dream Carvajal had given me that mysterious note. Keep an eye on Gilmartin, he had suggested. Gilmartin, oil gellation, Leydecker. Well?