Stochastic Man Read Online Free Page B

minority that grew more minor every day. (Even Little Italy was reduced to four blocks of Mulberry Street, with Chinese swarming on every side street and the new generation of paisanos holed up securely in Patchogue and New Rochelle.) An editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggested suspending the upcoming mayoralty election and placing New York City under a military administration, with a cordon sanitaire to keep infectious New Yorkism from contaminating the rest of the country.
    “I think a UN peacekeeping force would be a better idea,” Sundara said. This was early December, the night of the season’s first blizzard. “This isn’t a city, it’s a staging ground for all the accumulated racial and ethnic hostilities of the last three thousand years.”
    “That’s not so,” I told her. “Old grudges don’t mean crap here. Hindus sleep with Paks in New York, Turks and Armenians go into partnership and open restaurants. In this city we invent new ethnic hostilities. New York is nothing if it isn’t avant-garde. You’d understand that if you’d lived here all your life the way I have.”
    “I feel as though I have.”
    “Six years doesn’t make you a native.”
    “Six years in the middle of constant guerrilla warfare feels longer than thirty years anywhere else,” she said.
    Oh-oh. Her voice was playful, but her dark eyes held a malicious sparkle. She was daring me to parry, to contradict, to challenge. I felt the air about me glowing feverishly. Suddenly we were drifting into the I-hate-New-York conversation, always productive of rifts between us, and soon we would be quarreling in earnest. A native can hate New York with love; an outsider, and my Sundara would always be an outsider here, draws tense and heavy energy out of repudiating this lunatic place she has chosen to live in, and grows bloated and murderous with unearned fury.
    Heading off trouble, I said, “Well, let’s move to Arizona.”
    “Hey, that’s my line!”
    “I’m sorry. I must have missed my cue.”
    The tension was gone. “This is an awful city, Lew.”
    “Try Tucson, then. The winters are much better. You want to smoke, love?”
    “Yes, but not that bone thing again.”
    “Plain old prehistoric dope?”
    “Please,” she said. I got the stash. The air between us was limpid and loving. We had been together four years, and, though some dissonances had appeared, we were still each other’s best friend. As I rolled the smokes she stroked the muscles of my neck, cunningly hitting the pressure points and letting the twentieth century slide out of my ligaments and vertebrae. Her parents were from Bombay but she had been born In Los Angeles, yet her supple fingers played Radha to my Krishna as though she were a padmini of the Hindu dawn, a lotus woman fully versed in the erotic shastras and the sutras of the flesh, which in truth she was, though self-taught and no graduate of the secret academies of Benares.
    The terrors and traumas of New York City seemed indecently remote as we stood by our long crystalline window, close to each other, staring into the wintry moonbright night and seeing only our own reflections, tall fairhaired man and slender dark woman, side by side, side by side, allies against the darkness.
    Actually neither of us found life in the city really burdensome. As members of the affluent minority we were insulated from much of the crazy stuff, sheltered at home in our maxsecure hilltop condo, protected by screens and filter mazes when we took the commuter pods across into Manhattan, guarded in our offices by more of the same. Whenever we yearned for an on-foot eyes-to-eyes nit-to-grit confront with urban reality we could have it, and when not there were watchful servocircuits to keep us from harm.
    We passed the smoke back and forth, languidly letting fingers caress fingers at each interchange. She seemed perfect to me just then, my wife, my love, my other self, witty and graceful, mysterious and exotic, high forehead,