I nodded. “I think so, too. You won’t drop any hints to Quinn, then, about what he ought to say or not to say at that bank dedication?”

“Of course not.”

He began to usher me toward the door. I was shaky and sweating and, I imagine, wild-eyed.

I couldn’t shut up, either. “And you won’t tell people I’m cracking up, Bob? Because I’m not. I may be on the verge of a tremendous breakthrough in consciousness, but I’m not going crazy. I really am not going crazy,” I said, so vehemently that it sounded unconvincing even to me.

“I do think you could use a short vacation. But no, I won’t spread any rumors of your impending commitment to the funny farm.”

“Thanks, Bob.”

“Thank you for coming to me”

“There was no one else.”

“It’ll work out,” he said soothingly. “Don’t worry about Quinn. I’ll start checking to see if he really is getting in trouble with Mrs. Goldstein and Mr. Rosenblum. You might try some polltaking through your own department.” He clasped my hand. “Get some rest, Lew. Get yourself some rest.”

And so I engineered the fulfilling of the prophecy, though it had been in my power to thwart it. Or had it been? I had declined to put Carvajal’s ice-etched unbending determinism to the test. I had accomplished what they used to call a cop-out when I was a boy. Quinn would speak at the dedication. Quinn would make his dumb jokes about Israel. Mrs. Goldstein would mutter; Mr. Rosenblum would curse. The mayor would acquire needless enemies; the Times would have a juicy story; we would set about the process of repairing the political damage; Carvajal would once more be vindicated. It would have been so easy to interfere, you say. Why not test the system? Call Carvajal’s bluff. Verify his assertion that the future, once glimpsed, is graven as if on tablets of stone. Well, I hadn’t done it. I had had my chance, and I had been afraid to take it, as though in some secret way I knew the stars in their courses would come crashing into confusion if I meddled with the course of events. So I had surrendered to the alleged inevitability of it all with hardly a struggle. But had I really given in so easily? Had I ever been truly free to act? Was my surrender not also, perhaps, part of the unchangeable eternal script?

Everyone has the gift,Carvajal said to me. Very few know how to use it. And he had talked of a time when I would be able to see things myself. Not if, but when.

Was he planning to awaken the gift in me?

The idea terrified and thrilled me. To look into the future, to be free of the buffeting of the random and the unexpected, to move beyond the vaporous imprecisions of the stochastic method into absolute certainty — oh, yes, yes, yes, how wondrous, but how frightening! To swing open that dark door, to peer down the track of time at the wonders and mysteries lying in wait -

A miner was leaving his home for his work,

When he heard his little child scream.

He went to the side of the little girl’s bed,

She said, Daddy, I’ve had such a dream.

Frightening because I knew I might see something I didn’t want to see, and it might drain and shatter me as Carvajal apparently had been drained and shattered by knowledge of his death. Wondrous because to see meant escape from the chaos of the unknown, it meant attainment at last of that fully structured, fully determined life toward which I had yearned since abandoning my adolescent nihilism for the philosophy of causality.

Please, Daddy, don’t go to the mines today.

For dreams have so often come true.

My daddy, my daddy, please don’t go away.

For I never could live without you.

But if Carvajal did indeed know some way of bringing the vision to life in me, I vowed I would handle it differently, not letting it make a shriveled recluse out of me, not bowing passively to the decrees of some invisible playwright, not accepting puppethood as Carvajal had done. No, I would use the gift in an active way, I would employ it to shape and direct the flow of history, I would take advantage of my special knowledge to guide and direct and alter, insofar as I was able, the pattern of human events.

Oh, I dreamed that the mines were all flaming with fire. And the men all fought for their lives. Just then the scene changed and the mouth of the mine was covered with sweethearts and wives.

According to Carvajal such shaping and directing was impossible. Impossible for him, perhaps; but would I be bound by his limitations? Even if the future is fixed and unchangeable, knowledge of it could still be put to use to cushion blows, to redirect energies, to create new patterns out of the wreckage of the old. I would try. Teach me to see, Carvajal, and let me try!

Oh, Daddy, don’t work in the mines today.

For dreams have so often come true.

My daddy, my daddy, please don’t go away.

For I never could live without you.

Sundara vanished at the end of June, leaving no message, and was gone for five days. I didn’t notify the police. When she returned, saying nothing by way of explanation, I didn’t ask where she had been. Bombay again, Tierra del Fuego, Capetown, Bangkok, they were all the same to me. I was becoming a good Transit husband. Perhaps she had spent all five days spread-eagled on the altar at some local Transit house, if they have altars, or perhaps she’d been putting in time at a Bronx bordello. Didn’t know, didn’t want to care. We were badly out of touch with each other now, skating side by side over thin ice and never once glancing toward each other, never once exchanging a word, just gliding on silently toward an unknown and perilous destination. Transit processes occupied her energies night and day, day and night. What do you get out of it? I wanted to ask her. What does it mean to you? But I didn’t. One sticky July evening she came home late from doing God knows what in the city, wearing a sheer turquoise sari that clung to her moist skin with a lasciviousness that would get her a ten-year sentence for public lewdity in puritan New Delhi, and came up to me and rested her arms on my shoulders and sighed and leaned close to me, so that I felt the warmth of her body and it made me tremble, and her eyes met mine, and there was in her dark shining eyes a look of pain and loss and regret, a terrible look of aching grief. And as though I were able to read her thoughts, I could clearly hear her telling me, “Say the word, Lew, only say the word, and I’ll quit them, and everything will be as it used to be for us.” I know that was what her eyes were telling me. But I didn’t say the word. Why did I remain silent? Because I suspected Sundara was merely playing out another meaningless Transit exercise on me, playing a game of Did-you-think-I-meant-it? Or because somewhere within me I really didn’t want her to swerve from the course she had chosen?