I phoned Carvajal. “I have to talk to you,” I said.

We met along the Hudson Promenade near Tenth Street. The weather was ominous, dark and moist and warm, the sky a threatening greenish yellow, with black-edged thunderheads piled high over New Jersey and a sense of impending apocalypse pervading everything. Shafts of fierce off-color sunlight, more gray-blue than gold, burned through a filtering layer of murky clouds clustered like a crumpled blanket in mid-sky. Preposterous weather, operatic weather, a noisy overstated backdrop for our conversation.

Carvajal’s eyes had an unnatural gleam. He looked taller, younger, jazzing along the promenade on the balls of his feet. Why did he seem to gain strength between each of our meetings?

“Well?” he demanded.

“I want to be able to see. ”

“ See,then. I’m not stopping you, am I?”

“Be serious,” I begged.

“I always am. How can I help you?”

“Teach me to do it.”

“Did I ever tell you it could be taught?”

“You said everyone has the gift but very few know how to use it. All right. Show me how to use it.”

“Using it can perhaps be learned,” Carvajal said, “but it can’t be taught.”

“Please.”

“Why so eager?”

“Quinn needs me,” I told him abjectly. “I want to help him. To become President.”

“So?”

“I want to help him. I need to see. ”

“But you can project trends so well, Lew!”

“Not enough. Not enough.”

Thunder boomed over Hoboken. A cold damp wind out of the west stirred the clotted clouds. Nature’s scene-setting was becoming grotesquely, comically excessive.

Carvajal said, “Suppose I told you to give me complete control over your life. Suppose I asked you to let me make every decision for you, to shape all your actions to my orders, to put your existence entirely into my hands, and I said that if you did that, there’d be a chance that you’d learn how to see. A chance. What would your reply be?”

“I’d say that it’s a deal.”

“ Seeingmay not be as wonderful as you think it is, you know. Right now you look upon it as the magic key to everything. What if it turns out to be nothing but a burden and an obstacle? What if it’s a curse?”

“I don’t think it will be.”

“How can you know?”

“A power like that can be a tremendous positive force. I can’t see it as anything but beneficial for me. I can see its potential negative side, sure, but still — a curse? No.”

“What if it is?”

I shrugged. “I’ll take that risk. Has it been a curse for you?”

Carvajal paused and looked up at me, eyes searching mine. This was the appropriate moment for lightning to crackle across the heavens, for drum rolls of terrible thunder to sound up and down the Hudson, for tempestuous rain to slash across the promenade. None of that happened. Abruptly, the clouds directly overhead parted and sweet soft yellow sunlight enveloped the dark storm-frowns. So much for nature as a setter of scene.

“Yes,” Carvajal said quietly. “A curse. If anything, yes, a curse, a curse.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What does that matter to me?”

“Even if it’s been a curse for you, I don’t think it would for me.”

“Very courageous, Lew. Or very foolish.”

“Both. Nevertheless, I want to be able to see. ”

“Are you willing to become my disciple?”

Strange, jarring word. “What would that involve?”

“I’ve already told you. You give yourself to me on a no-questions-asked, no-results-guaranteed basis.”

“How will that help me to see? ”

“No questions asked,” he said. “Just give yourself to me, Lew.”

“Done.”

The lightning came. The skies opened and a crazy drenching downpour battered us with implausible fury.

A day and a half later. “The worst of it,” Carvajal said, “is seeing your own death. That’s the moment when the life goes out of you, not when you actually die, but when you have to see it.”

“Is that the curse you were talking about?”

“Yes. That’s the curse. That’s what killed me, Lew, long before my proper time. I was almost thirty years old, the first time I saw it. I’ve seen it many times since. I know the date, the hour, the place, the circumstances. I’ve lived through it again and again, the beginning, the middle, the end, the darkness, the silence. And once I saw it, life became nothing more than a meaningless puppet show for me.”

“What was the worst part?” I asked. “Knowing when, knowing how?”

“Knowing that,” he said.

“That you would die at all?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, it must be disturbing, yes, to watch yourself die, to see your own finish as if on a newsreel, but there can’t be any fundamental element of surprise in it, can there? I mean, death is inevitable and we all know it from the time we’re little children.”

“Do we?”

“Of course we do.”

“Do you think you’ll die, Lew?”

I blinked a couple of times. “Naturally.”

“Are you absolutely convinced of that?”

“I don’t get you. Are you implying I have delusions of immortality?”

Carvajal smiled serenely. “Everybody does, Lew. When you’re a boy your pet goldfish dies, or your dog, and you say, Well, goldfish don’t live long, dogs don’t live long, and that’s how you slough off your first experience of death. It doesn’t apply to you. The boy next door falls off his bicycle and fractures his skull. Well, you say, accidents happen, but they don’t prove anything; some people are more careless than others, and I’m one of the careful ones. Your grandmother dies. She was old and sick for years, you say, she let herself get too heavy, she grew up in a generation when preventive medicine was still primitive, she didn’t know how to take care of her body. It won’t happen to me, you say. It won’t happen to me.”

“My parents are dead. My sister died. I had a turtle that died. Death isn’t something remote and unreal in my life. No, Carvajal, I believe in death. I accept the fact of death. I know I’m going to die.”

“You don’t. Not really.”

“How can you say that?”

“I know how people are. I know how I used to be, before I saw myself die, and what I became afterward. Not many have had that experience, have been changed as I’ve been changed. Perhaps no one else, ever. Listen to me, Lew. Nobody genuinely and fully believes he’s going to die, whatever he may think he thinks. You may accept it up here on top, but you don’t accept it on the cellular level, down on the level of metabolism and mitosis. Your heart hasn’t missed a beat in thirty-odd years and it knows it never will. Your body goes merrily along like a three-shift factory manufacturing corpuscles, lymph, semen, saliva, round the clock, and so far as your body knows it always will. And your brain, it perceives itself as the center of a great drama whose star is Lew Nichols, the whole universe just a giant collection of props, everything that happens happening around you, in relation to you, with you as the pivot and fulcrum, and if you go to somebody’s wedding the name of that scene isn’t Dick and Judy Get Married, no, it’s Lew Goes to Somebody’s Wedding, and if a politician gets elected it isn’t Paul Quinn Becomes President, it’s Lew Experiences Paul Quinn Becoming President, and if a star explodes the headline isn’t Betelgeuse Goes Nova but Lew’s Universe Loses a Star, and so on, the same for everyone, everyone the hero of the great drama of existence, Dick and Judy each in starring roles in their own heads, Paul Quinn, maybe even Betelgeuse, and each of you knows that if you were to die the whole universe would have to wink out like a switched-off light, and that isn’t possible, so therefore you aren’t going to die. You know you’re the one exception. Holding the whole business together by your continued existence. All those others, Lew, you realize they’re going to die; sure, they’re the bit parts, the spear carriers, the script calls for them all to vanish along the way, but not you, oh, no, not you! Isn’t that how it truly is, Lew, down in the basement of your soul, down in those mysterious levels you visit only now and then?”