He said suddenly, “I think you should go now. I’m not accustomed to long conversations and I’m afraid this has tired me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stay so long.”

“No need to apologize. All that happened today was as I saw it would be. So all is well.”

“I’m grateful that you were willing to talk so openly about yourself,” I said.

“Willing?” he said, laughing. “ Willingagain?”

“That word isn’t in your working vocabulary?”

“No. And I hope to wipe it from yours.” He moved toward the door in a gesture of dismissal. “We’ll talk again soon.”

“I’d like that.”

“I regret I couldn’t help you as much as you wished. Your question about what Paul Quinn will become — I’m sorry. The answer lies beyond my limits and I have no information to give. I can perceive only what I will perceive, do you see? Do you understand? I perceive only my own future perceptions, as though I look at the future through a periscope, and my periscope shows me nothing about next year’s election. Many of the events leading up to the election, yes. The outcome itself, no. I’m sorry.”

He took my hand a moment. I felt a current flowing between us, a distinct and almost tangible river of connection. I sensed great strain in him, not merely the strain of the conversation but something deeper, a struggle to maintain and extend that contact between us, to reach me on some profound level of being. The sensation disturbed and unsettled me. It lasted only an instant; then it snapped, and I fell back into aloneness with a perceptible impact of separation, and he smiled, gave me a courtly little nod of the head, wished me a safe journey home, showed me into the dark dank hallway.

Only as I was getting into my car a few minutes later did all the pieces slip into place and I come to comprehend what Carvajal had been telling me as we stood by the door. Only then did I understand the nature of the ultimate limit that governed his vision, that had turned him into the passive puppet he was, that had stripped all meaning from his actions. Carvajal had seen the moment of his own death. That was why he was unable to tell me who the next President was, yes, but the effect of that knowledge ran deeper than that. It explained why he drifted through life in the peculiarly unquestioning, uncaring way. For decades Carvajal must have lived with the awareness of how and where and when he would die, the absolute and indubitable knowledge of it, and that terrible knowledge had paralyzed his will in a fashion hard for ordinary people to grasp. That was my intuitive interpretation of his condition; and I trust my intuitions. Now the time of his end was less than seventeen months away; and he was drifting aimlessly toward it, accepting, playing out the script, not caring, not caring at all.

My head was whirling as I drove home, and it went on whirling for days. I felt stoned, drunk, intoxicated with a sense of infinite possibilities, of limitless openings. It was as though I was about to tap into some incredible source of energy toward which I had been moving, unknowingly, all my life.

That source of energy was Carvajal’s visionary power.

I had gone to him suspecting he was what he was, and he had confirmed it; but he had done more than that. He had poured his story out to me so readily, once we were past the game-playing and the testing, that he seemed almost to be trying to lure me into some sort of relationship based on that gift of presentiment that we so unequally shared. After all, this was a man who for decades had lived secretively, furtively, a recluse quietly piling up his millions, celibate, friendless; and he had made a point of seeking me out at Lombroso’s office, he had baited a trap for me with his three enigmatic tantalizing hints, he had snared me and drawn me to his hovel, he had freely answered my questions, he had expressed the hope that we would meet again.

What did Carvajal want from me? What role did he have in mind for me? Friend? Appreciative one-man audience? Partner? Disciple?

Heir?

All of those suggested themselves to me. I was dizzied by a wild rush of options. But there was also the possibility that I was altogether deluded, that Carvajal had no role in mind for me at all. Roles are created by playwrights; and Carvajal was an actor, not a playwright. He simply picked up his cues and followed the script. And maybe to Carvajal I was merely a new character who had wandered onto the stage to engage him in conversation, who had appeared for reasons unknown to him and irrelevant to him, for reasons that mattered, if at all, only to the invisible and perhaps nonexistent author of the grand drama of the universe.

That was an aspect of Carvajal that bothered me profoundly, in a way that drunks have always bothered me. The boozer — or doper, or sniffer, or what have you — is in the most literal sense a person who is out of his right mind. Which means you can’t take his words or his actions seriously. Let him say he loves you, let him say he hates you, let him tell you how much he admires your work or respects your integrity or shares your beliefs, and you can’t ever know how sincere he is, because the booze or dope may be putting the words in his mouth. Let him propose a deal and you don’t know how much he’ll remember when his head is straight again. So your transaction with him while he’s under the influence is essentially hollow and unreal. I’m an orderly and rational person and when I deal with someone I want to feel I’m having a real interaction with him. Not so, when I think I’m genuinely interacting and the other one is just saying whatever comes into his chemically altered head.

With Carvajal I felt many of the uncertainties. Nothing he said was necessarily kosher. Nothing necessarily made sense. He didn’t act out of what I thought of as rational motives, such as self-interest or the general welfare; everything, even his own survival, seemed irrelevant to him. Thus his actions sidestepped stochasticity and common sense itself: he was unpredictable because he didn’t follow discernible patterns, only the script, the sacred and unalterable script, and the script was revealed to him in bursts of non-logical non-sequential insight. “What I see myself do, I do.” he had said. Never asking why. Fine. He sees himself giving all his money to the poor, so he gives all his money to the poor. He sees himself crossing the George Washington Bridge on a pogo stick, so he goes jumping away. He sees himself putting H2SO4in his guest’s water glass, so he pops the old sulphuric in without hesitating. He answers questions with the preordained answers, whether what is preordained makes sense or not. And so on. Having surrendered totally to the dictates of the revealed future, he has no need to examine motives or consequences. Worse than a drunk, in fact. At least a boozer still has some shred of rational consciousness operating, however fuzzily, at the core.

A paradox, then. From Carvajal’s point of view his every action was guided by rigid deterministic criteria; but from the point of view of those around him, his behavior was as irresponsibly random as that of any lunatic. (Or of any really dedicated Transit Creed flow-and-yielder.) In his own eyes he was obeying the supreme inflexibility of the stream of events; from the outside it looked as though he was blowing in every breeze. By doing as he saw he also raised uncomfortable chicken-and-egg questions about the underlying motives for his actions. Were there any at all? Or were his visions self-generating prophecies, entirely divorced from causality, devoid altogether from reason and logic? He sees himself crossing the bridge on a pogo stick next Fourth of July; therefore, when the Fourth of July comes he does it, for no other reason than that he has seen it. What purpose in fact was served by his crossing the bridge, other than the neat closing of the visionary circuit? The pogo-stick business was self-generating and pointless. How could one carry on dealings with such a man? He was a wild card in the flow of time.