The Search for the Dice Man (14 page)

‘Just doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it,’ she confirmed. ‘No matter how foolish or arbitrary it may be.’ She paused and smiled.

‘Get undressed,’ she said.

After his chastening session with Kathy that Monday morning, Larry wandered out of the orientation building a little dazed and a little proud: he had managed to lose his dignity. He had stood naked in front of Kathy and not flushed. He’d given her back the three hundred dollars and not felt a fool – or rather felt like a fool but also felt like a fool for feeling a fool. He found himself looking to see if Rick had yet returned his car, but saw no sign of it. Then, with a sudden rush of anxiety, he realized the markets were open and were racing off in every direction without him. He had to phone Jeff.

With the cellular phone in his car not an option, he’d have to use the pay phone in the orientation lobby, which annoyed him considerably since it had very little privacy. He hurried back in and soon huddled himself in a corner, with his back to the room, and called Jeff.

He was still a little distracted by the session with Kathy so it took a little while before some of the things Jeff was telling him finally sunk in.

‘What the fuck are you talking about!?’ Larry said after Jeff had presented his new recommendations and Larry had finally grasped them. ‘We can’t go short that much oil!!’

‘The price is way overvalued,’ Jeff insisted. He was also hunkered down – in his cubicle at BB&P peering out at the other brokers and traders as if each one was a foreign spy. Sweat was pouring from all the usual pores and several that hadn’t been used since adolescence. He had just received a new inside tip from X, the biggest ever, but couldn’t tell Larry. ‘The market’s way overbought. I figure
the President is bound to do something after the election that he’s been hiding before the election. That’s the political process. Almost any news that doesn’t make it look like war for certain is bound to lead to a sell-off.’

Then how come none of the other traders has figured this out,’ Larry barked into the phone, trying to shout into the corner so that his voice would be muffled for the half-dozen others milling in the room behind him. He was wondering what had gotten into Jeff this time. Until two months ago. Jeff had never had a risky idea in his life, or if he had, he’d kept it carefully to himself. ‘All our indicators are still on buy signals.’ Larry continued. ‘How can we justify suddenly selling?’

‘The market is overbought,’ said Jeff desperately.

‘So what!? It can stay overbought for weeks. Let it sell off and trigger some sell signals, then we can talk about going short.’

‘But you used to like to sell overbought markets!’ Jeff persisted.

‘That was before I’d taken several baths because the overbought markets kept going up and up and up.’ hissed Larry, shuffling back and forth in the corner as far as the phone’s short cord would permit and feeling caged.

Jeff cradled his phone closer to his cheek and crouched down even lower in his chair. He’d already gotten Larry to agree to cover shorts in the stock market and to go short a few gold contracts, but the key to it all was oil, going short oil. After they’d exchanged code words X had told him that a few days after the election the President was going to announce a new peace initiative, one that would have a credibility that would at least for a moment make people think that war would be avoided. If this happened, the price of oil, inflated by war scares, might fall 20 or 30 per cent in a day! Fortunes would be made! It was a futures trader’s wet dream! Larry simply didn’t understand that the Gods didn’t like people who thought that the future was going to remain like the past. The
Gods liked gamblers who believed only in luck and the Gods and cheating.

‘Look,’ Jeff finally said, lowering his voice. ‘I’ve got a friend in the State Department.’

Larry, who had been staring out unseeing into the room and nervously scratching his back against the phone box, now froze in that position.

‘You’ve got a friend in the Slate Department,’ he said evenly.

‘A fraternity brother,’ said Jeff, deciding that if cheating was all right, lying must be too. ‘I was at a party with him over the weekend. After he’d had a lot to drink, he let out that … well, something that next week – after the election – will make the price of oil fall.’

For Larry, who didn’t yet share Jeff’s insight into why insider trading was moral, had to think about this. Strictly speaking, acting on information about some change of government policy that had not yet been announced did not constitute insider trading. For one thing there was normally no dear or necessary market play based on some vague government policy change. State Department leaks were not part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s mandate, the SEC figuring that such leaks were so common, and spread so widely, that ‘insiders’ constituted half of the investment community. Also, thought Larry, a drunken rumour was good luck, not insider trading. Even he would trade on some unpremeditated, gratuitous, but reliable bit of drunken insider information. It was paying for information, or trading such inside information in an unauthorized way, that was clearly wrong.

‘May I ask what that something is that’s going to make the price of oil fall?’ Larry finally asked.

‘A peace initiative,’ Jeff mumbled.

Well, yes, that would do it.

‘I see.’

‘If my friend’s right,’ said Jeff, ‘the profits will be enormous.’

‘I would say so,’ said Larry. ‘Did your hunch about the T-Bonds come from this same guy?’ he suddenly asked.

Jeff’s body began running in all directions at once, which meant his teeth gritted, eyes bulged, face twitched, hands quivered and sweat glands, all two million of them, put in overtime.

‘No, no,’ he answered. ‘This guy is State Department. He doesn’t know beans about economics or bonds. He put all his money in condominiums.’

This last statement was a masterstroke, the sort of seemingly trivial detail that makes the liar’s story ring absolutely true. On Wall Street in the early 1990s anyone who had put all their money into condominiums was clearly a complete ass – as opposed to the partial asses that everyone else was – except me and thee.

‘OK,’ said Larry. ‘We go short two hundred December oil contracts – gradually, today and Wednesday, assuming the President will wait a decent day or two before telling the public what he wouldn’t tell them during the election campaign. Put the stop … about fifty cents above the market. Let’s see if we can make more off drunks than we can from ten years of experience and education.’

Jeff dared to smile.

‘That’s exactly it.’ he said. ‘I think we can.’

After talking to Jeff I felt oddly dislocated. Wandering away from the orientation building I looked around and found myself surrounded by huge mountains of pine trees with open meadows spread below, instead of huge mountains of concrete with layers of macadam below. As I walked along I felt myself moving back into the world of Lukedom where people were different and unpredictable and unique compared to the button-down world of Wall Street and Blair, Battle and Pike, where they were all crazy in the same ways. And the trades and figures Jeff and I had bandied about, which seemed to have such body and meaning in New York, seemed flimsy and artificial here in the mountains. Everything about Lukedom made money seem sort of silly while everything in Wall Street made it seem like the only serious reality in the world. I knew Wall Street was right, and worried that if I stayed too long in Lukedom I might lose that compulsive calculating nature that had made me the hotshot I was.

And things didn’t get better when I went back to the orientation centre after the break. I found that I was expected to let a die choose which of three ‘chores’ I’d do during the lunch hour: cook, serve table or mop up. The die chose the mop and, after I’d eaten a mediocre lunch, I had to clean up both the kitchen and dining area of the small orientation centre restaurant. So for the first time in my life I discovered the joys of mopping a kitchen floor.

In the afternoon I had to continue to endure my ‘training’, some with Kathy but most with the big English trainer Michael Way. and I hated it. While Kathy had
made me feel like an inhibited prude. Way soon had me feeling like a philosophical pygmy.

Even the other people in the classes or on the street or in the restaurants began to depress me. No one seemed to care who I was. No one seemed to care I was a brilliant graduate of Wharton Business School earning close to two hundred thousand dollars a year, that the expensive clothes I wore were really mine and not some duds I’d borrowed from Lukedom’s huge collection of clothing and costumes. It was depressing to be telling someone at the bar at the Do Die Inn how I’d made an incredible coup on the Japanese yen that had made BB&P millions, and then realize that the two men listening to me assumed it was all simply a bullshit role the dice had told me to play. And when a woman told me a really moving story about losing her only child to leukaemia I’d wanted to comfort her until she took out a die, flipped it across the bar and, in an entirely different tone of voice, told me I had a cute butt.

I realized I was feeling a consistent low level of anxiety. I’d often enough had anxiety caused by worrying about other people disapproving of who I was or what I did, but this was the first time I’d experienced a low level dread of not being sure
who
I was. Of course I knew who I was, but somehow the fact that no one else acknowledged or cared about who I thought I was was profoundly unsettling.

I felt such waves of loneliness I phoned Jeff two more times than I really had to, pretending I was worried about all the oil contracts. I also tried to phone Honoria at her office, wanting to apologize and redeclare my undying devotion to our union, but was told she was in a meeting.

Was it a real meeting? Was she talking to me? Were we no longer engaged? Had she really discovered that the magnificent two-carat diamond I’d given her had a minor flaw?

I became so depressed I even longed to meet my father again, just to have someone who would recognize me as Larry Rhinehart. Never had I realized how important it
was to have people who were always around reminding you of who you are. Maybe Honoria was right: the place was designed to drive people crazy.

In mid-afternoon, after I’d been at last released from more intense one-on-one training which was giving me an inferiority complex, I was given a chance to choose six ‘occupations for the day’ from a list of over twenty. The list varied from bank manager to farmhand to housewife to babysitter to hardware store clerk and so on. Only one leapt out at me: administrative clerk; maybe I’d have a chance to browse through some other file cabinets. So I listed it as one of the six and then added five more: bank manager (why not start at the top?); babysitter (I’d have free time to follow the markets on CNBC-FNN); hardware store clerk (maybe True Value would have a special on effective skeleton keys); telephone operator (maybe I’d overhear a phone call that would give me a lead); psychotherapist (I knew I’d enjoy playing god to some poor wimp the way Dr Bickers did to me); and sheriff’s deputy (maybe I could find out how I could stop Rick from always taking off with my car).

I then cast a die. A ‘three’ babysitter.

The babysitting was a disaster. I’d assumed I would sit around reading the
Wall Street Journal
and catching up on the Monday markets on CNBC-FNN on television while the three children played with blocks on the living-room floor. It didn’t work out that way.

I was given a hint of the trouble to come when the babysitter for the morning shift, a middle-aged woman named Dolores, looked rather frazzled as she passed over responsibility for the three young children, varying in age from two to seven. She practically ran from the house as soon as I took over.

Things got off to a bad start immediately. First of all the house had neither cable television (and thus a financial network) nor a telephone (and thus access to Jeff back in
New York). Secondly, the children claimed they hadn’t been fed since mid-morning snack and were circling the icebox and cupboards like a wolfpack closing in on a kill. Thirdly, I made the mistake of asking them what they wanted for lunch.

‘Pizza’ had seemed a reasonable request until I discovered that there was no frozen pizza, no leftover pizza, no nearby pizza parlour, and that I was expected to
make
a pizza. I quickly corrected the children on that expectation but was immediately labelled a liar by the oldest: ‘You promised us we could have whatever we wanted!’

I tried to get the three kids to become hypnotized by the television set, but discovered that only one of the three channels had cartoons, and the cartoons were so bizarre that minutes after the kids had snuck away to try raiding the refrigerator again, I stood in front of the set hypnotized. In the middle of a manic cat chasing an overconfident mouse would appear Snow White singing away with the seven dwarfs, followed by Dumbo diving into a pool of water and then a video
Playboy
centrefold smiling shyly out at the kids in the slimmest of bikinis, followed by Batman getting tough with Penguin, and then a beautiful two-minute scene of water gurgling down a mountain stream in autumn, the sunlight splashing such spectacular light and shadow and colour it was hypnotizing. I was only snapped out of my trance by the appearance of the three-year-old soaking-wet with blood that soon, thank God, turned out to be tomato juice.

I traipsed into the kitchen and tried throwing together three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but found that none of the children would eat them because I’d used ‘crunchy’ peanut butter and not smooth. To show them who was boss, I announced that they could make their own lunches and marched from the kitchen back to catch some more of the cartoons.

A half-hour later, after I’d discovered that the other channels were equally bizarre and equally fascinating, I
was feeling pretty good, especially since there had been a beautiful silence from the kitchen. Then I smelled the smoke.

By the time the kids’ mother returned from acting principal for over one hundred and fifty children she found her house looked as if another one hundred and fifty had run wild in it. I assured her there were only three, and hers, and that I was sorry I hadn’t cleaned up as much as I’d wanted to. As the poor woman stared around at the devastation, she wondered apathetically just exactly what I thought I
had
cleaned up – perhaps I’d rearranged some area of neatness that looked out of place.

It was five o’clock when the mother rescued me from a fate worse than death, but I discovered my trials were not done. I was ordered to report for duty to the lobby of the Hazard Inn.

I was met there by a thin wiry man named Ray, who in a soft gentle voice, announced that he was another diceguide. My first response to the Hazard Inn with its lobby crowded with people spaced out in their individual movie scenarios was one of both annoyance and a sense of righteousness: this was what I expected all of Lukedom to be like. This was the son of kookiedom that was my father’s madness at its worst.

I grimly followed gentle Ray down the central hall, off which were the strangely titled rooms, most of which had their doors open. In the Yoga Room was nothing more threatening than a group of seven people on a huge mat all arching their backs and sticking their tongues out in what I assumed was some traditional yoga
asana.
One of the seven appeared to be a leader. I didn’t see what yoga had to do with Lukedom, but Ray answered that it was a way of gaining new knowledge about one’s body and of making the body flexible.

I peeked into the Art Room, where nothing more subversive was happening than a dozen people, ranging in age from sixty to five or six, messing around with paints and clays and that sort of thing. It looked like every art class I’d ever seen, although Ray said something about the teacher getting the students to let chance enter their work. I sneered. That’s all modern art needed: more chaos.

The Death Room was not what I expected. When we stopped outside the closed door Ray explained that the groaning we were hearing from inside was the sounds of mourning by those within. He asked me to go inside and spend as much time as I wanted, but at least ten minutes, mourning for someone I had lost from my life. I hesitated, hating to be drawn into any of these games, even those that didn’t involve dice, but decided at least to enter the room.

Inside, it was dimly lit by stands of candles on either side of a raised closed casket against the far wall. There were six mourners, five seated in various positions on the deeply padded floor, the sixth standing. Two were crying softly, one moaning, and the other three were silent, with bowed heads.

Ray had come in too and went forward to the casket, crossed himself, and stood with bowed head in front of it. The casket was a simple pine one, but looked well made, with nicely designed handles on the sides and a clear varnish making it glow in the candlelight.

I eased myself over to one side of the room and, feeling exhausted from my babysitting, sat down on the thick floor covering.

One of the previously silent mourners, a young woman, now went public with a long wail, almost a scream, and then broke into noisy sobs. I was annoyed. After a minute, Ray turned from the casket and walked slowly back into the middle of the room and also sat down. When I noticed the candlelight reflecting off the tears in Ray’s eyes I felt first another burst of annoyance and then an inexplicable rush of grief.

I hadn’t even thought of anyone to mourn!! Yet I had to stifle a sob! I quickly lowered my head to get a hold of myself. But the sounds of people crying and groaning in grief around me were too powerful – I could feel their emotion vibrate through me and pull me down into a pool of deep sadness. Even as tears welled into my eyes, I was mumbling, ‘What the fuck!? What the fuck!?’ fighting against the rising flood of grief.

But for whom?! For what?

It didn’t seem to matter As the tears and grief and sadness flowed through me, I thought of my mother on the morning of her car accident, vibrant, happy, busy and unknowing, and I groaned. And then the memory of my sister Evie, still alive, but so different from me, now living her circumscribed life in Trenton, telling me that afternoon with the rain falling gently around us that she didn’t need any money, even as the beat-up car she was sitting in stalled and wouldn’t start. I grieved for her and for the distance between us. When I suddenly thought of Luke, my grief ebbed as suddenly as it had flowed, replaced by anger. I would not be tricked by that man’s madness into mourning him. But then the sobs and sniffles and cries from those around me overwhelmed the image of my father, again forcing me to remember my mother and weep once more.

In the next hour Ray took me into several other rooms, but none had the impact of the Death Room. I observed but didn’t participate in the Emotional Roulette Room, was curious about but didn’t enter the Prostitute-Client Room, and watched for ten minutes the people in the Childhood Room, off which was a playground where the childhood could be continued outdoors. There was something appealing about the adults playing with the blocks and the Lego and Nintendo and dolls. But when Ray suggested I get in there with the other adults and the few real children – who looked as if they were having a ball – and
regress, I felt too wasted from the Death Room and declined.

Ray did get me involved in the Money Room, which was perhaps the most bizarre of all the rooms I’d seen. It consisted of an otherwise bare room lit by two harsh fluorescent lights and containing only a tiny wood stove, with a small live fire, and money: real dollar bills, and fives scattered over the entire floor of the room like windblown trash. There was only one other man in the room when we entered and he, like me, just stood and looked around in some incomprehension.

Ray handed me a die.

‘In here,’ he explained, ‘there are really only two options: you let the die decide whether you are going to keep or destroy each duster of money you pick up.’

I bent over and picked up a five and examined It. Damned if it didn’t seem genuine.

‘What for?’ I asked. For me the amounts of money were so small as to be trivial.

‘For the hell of it,’ Ray replied with gentle smile.

‘Hrhuh!’ I said, and with the five in hand went over to the wood stove. Then I turned back to Ray. The other man in the room was watching me.

‘What prevents someone from coming in here and simply taking all the money he needs?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Ray. ‘Although in this room all decisions must be made with the dice.’

‘So if I say “odd” I take all these bills home with me and “even” I don’t, I can do it?’ I asked.