The Search for the Dice Man (28 page)

In the first hour of his walk through the Wall Street area heading north Larry was able to give away more than fifty of his tens and twenties, most of which were kept. Then his trek began to take him out away from the financial district and towards the Bowery. When on the less crowded First Avenue Larry offered a ten to a wiry young black man the man stopped and eyed Larry suspiciously.

‘What’s this for?’ he asked.

‘For you, my son,’ said Larry. ‘For your needs.’

‘Dis is entrapment, you know. I ain’t offered you nothing.’

‘I want nothing, my son,’ said Larry. ‘Only to give you my love.’

‘I knew it.’

‘I mean Platonic love, my son,’ explained Larry glowingly.

‘I don’t do none of that kinky shit,’ said the young black man and wheeled away.

By the time he reached the Bowery, Larry had attracted a following. As he moved along the litter-ridden, derelict-ridden street, a large group of winos, down-and-outs, and homeless followed him, each clutching a few ten-dollar bills. As Larry leaned down to give a sleeping or drunken derelict crumpled against a wall one of his bills, one of his escort would swoop down and snap it away so fast the poor victim, befuddled in some cases perhaps by alcohol, concluded the ten-dollar bill had only been a brief mirage.

But all good things must come to an end and, finally, Larry reached into his pockets and, after corning up with a few scattered bills, realized he was broke. As he dug fruitlessly into his pockets the trailing derelicts clustered closer.

‘You run out of blessings, kid?’ asked one old man.

‘All I have are the clothes on my back,’ announced Larry solemnly.

‘I’ll take the robe!’ shouted a woman.

‘The shoes!’ shouted the wiry man.

‘Me the shirt!’ cried another.

Soon Larry disappeared in the excited throng surrounding him.

When Larry returned to the offices of BB&P at 4.30 that afternoon it was a momentous occasion. Unbeknownst to him the stock market had decided that day – with only the slightest of nudges from Larry’s minor selling – to collapse,
to take one of its infamous brief freefalls that make strong men weep and weak men weepier. Not only that, but staff-of-life wheat had rallied, and cruel cattle, hog and pork belly futures gone down. The people of BB&P knew that their clients had avoided the worst consequences of the stock market fall, thanks to Larry’s brilliant morning marching orders. And his trading in the agricultural futures was nothing short of miraculous. So that when he suddenly appeared after his four-hour disappearance, the roomful of brokers and traders and clients were prepared to burst into cheers.

Unfortunately, Larry had emerged from the elevators dressed only in his underpants, socks and a torn and dirty T-shirt, and accompanied by two New York City policemen.

It was a momentous occasion. All work in BB&P came to a halt as one and all turned to stare at their returning ?hero?, who stood, in his shorts, gazing at them benevolently from between the two cops.

What happened next is a tribute to the fearless and undeviating value system of lower Manhattan. Lesser men would have seen a man who was a little crazy, dressed as if he was ready for Bellevue, in the custody of police. The workforce at BB&P saw through all this. They saw a man who had just saved (and thus made) a ton of money. After perhaps a ten-second hesitation to remember their value system, the men and women of BB&P burst into applause, then cheers. They hailed the conquering hero. The conquering hero blessed them.

FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

With Chance there are no limits on change since there is no reason or purpose or morality to limit them. When Chance rolls out her developmental Dice – whether biologically, culturally or individually – she rolls out failure after failure after failure, and then, once a day. decade or millennium, rolls out a combination that the most intelligent and purposeful of creators could never have imagined or produced.

As long as the individual takes himself or his society seriously, then there must be control and purpose, and the possibilities of change are limited. When the flow of individuals and societies are seen as elaborate games, then the changing of the rules in order to make the games more fun. more challenging, more interesting, becomes a more acceptable possibility. Of course men today usually take their games themselves with such seriousness that rule changes are almost as difficult to come by as modifying Moses’s ten commandments.

By the end of that afternoon I was intoxicated with doing good. I was mad, of course, insane by most standard definitions, because I was letting some saintly force within me that normally never got expressed run wild over my usual selves.

After I’d sent Miss Claybell out to buy me some new clothes – simple garb for a simple person: black sweat-pants and sweatshirt and sneakers made in Bulgaria – I spent the last part of the afternoon in my office, not to go over my supposedly miraculous indicators as my colleagues assumed, but to write out cheques for various charities, some on my own account, others on BB&P’s behalf. By the time I was done I’d given away close to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, half from me, half from BB&P. Although it had just been the Christmas season, a part of me wasn’t absolutely sure Mr Battle would approve.

As I busily worked giving away the firm’s funds various people came in to congratulate me on the day’s trading – Brad and Jeff and even Vic Lissome. Vic even admired my black sweat-pants and shin.

‘I’d give anything to be able to dress like that,’ said Vic lugubriously and then weaved his way out of the office for some refreshment.

By the time I’d finished my acts of charity the offices were mostly empty and it was seven in the evening. As I serenely stood up to leave I became aware of someone standing in the doorway: it was Honoria.

We hadn’t had much contact since my descent into the dicelife, just the one formal and unsatisfactory evening out and two or three phone calls. As she stood silently in my
doorway, dressed in a simpler and less elegant dress than was her usual style – a stodgy grey and a bit baggy even – all my conflicts about whether to re-establish my old life or to blow it to smithereens came rushing in. We were both silent for almost twenty seconds, the only sound the hum of dormant computers and monitors being used by dedicated type-A personalities.

‘I have to see you,’ she announced. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘How did you know I was here this late?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been waiting down in the lobby since 5.30.’

Somehow the picture of Honoria waiting in a lobby for anyone reawoke the saint; I hurried over and put my arm around her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What’s the trouble?’

She stood stiffly in my arms, her eyes not meeting mine but looking past me as if studying a stock monitor.

‘You haven’t phoned me in almost two weeks,’ she said

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been leading a selfish life.’

Honoria now turned slightly in my loose embrace and for the first time looked up into my eyes.

‘I’ve been selfish too,’ she said, still in that low, unauthoritative voice that seemed so different. ‘I let your financial troubles alienate me when I should have been there for you, supporting you in your hour of need.’

‘No, it was my fault. I took my losses too seriously. I forgot that getting and spending is all chaff on the wind. I should have called you.’

Honoria began to search my eyes, apparently thrown a little off balance by my responses.

‘I … I have something … rather … strange to tell you,’ she said, and again, after her long searching of my eyes, she lowered her face. ‘It may upset you.’

‘Go ahead and tell me,’ I said, squeezing her shoulder. ‘Nothing will upset me. I’m really happy to see you again.’ In the mood I was in that day I was overjoyed to see just about everyone.

‘Oh, Larry, I’ve been such a selfish shit,’ she said, her head averted. ‘You’re the only decent person in my life and I’ve thrown you away. You can never love me again.’

‘Nori, I’ll always love you.’

Again Honoria raised her head to search my eyes, then sighed.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Even a saint gets knocked off kilter every now and then: I stared down at her in frozen benevolence.

‘I was never unpregnant,’ Honoria continued. ‘I lied to you that time last month. After I saw how upset you were I couldn’t go through with the abortion I’d planned.’

‘It’s our child?’

‘Of course,’ she said, a brief hint of the usual Honoria steel getting into her voice.

I stepped back to look down at her belly, hidden by the loose grey dress she was wearing.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘I’m going to have the child,’ she said, reverting to her modest soft voice. ‘I hope that will please you.’

‘Of course it does. It would be monstrous to do otherwise.’

After an awkward silence she dared to look up and slowly raise her left hand and hold it out for my inspection. On the fourth finger she was again wearing my engagement ring. I felt a wave of dizziness: Kim Kim Kim! What’s happening!? Save me!!

‘You’re engaged!’ I said stupidly.

‘I hope so,’ she said, lowering her hand to gaze at the ring.

‘That’s great,’ I said and, with a sick smile on my face, wheeled away to grope for support at my desk.

‘Daddy thinks we can still arrange the wedding for 28 February,’ Honoria said, looking relieved that I was acting with an understanding that passed all understanding.

I was reeling: I seemed trapped in a nightmare with some stranger self controlling the storyline in ways that
portended disaster. Still, some deep basic dice man integrity was keeping me faithful to my temporary saintly role.

‘Wonderful!’ I managed and then turned back to face her. ‘But first I have to tell you a few things … confess a few sins.’ The 94 per cent of me that wasn’t a saint began screaming at me to shut up. Honoria simply smiled at me, probably happy to be able to forgive me my little peccadilloes as I’d forgiven her hers.

‘I’m afraid I may not be a worthy husband for you,’ I continued in a low voice.

Honoria, standing only a few feet away, showed no response other than a brief narrowing of her eyes.

‘I’ve been doing some … diceliving … like my dad …’ I began. ‘And … having an affair with Kim.’ Shut up, shut up, shut up! shouted several of my normal selves, but the saint rambled on. ‘We’ve been fornicating many times a day and … enjoying it – horribly.’

This time Honoria’s eyes flashed, her body becoming straight and rigid.

‘However,’ I went on, ‘since I’m the father of your child I’ll of course do whatever you want – marry you or not, even though, well, I’m obviously unworthy.’

Honoria was now the old Honoria, standing erect and proud, her head raised.

‘You’re a bastard!’ she said.

‘You’re right.’

Her eyes narrowed and I sensed her wondering whether I was trying to wiggle out of my responsibilities by declaring myself a sinner. She got hold of herself.

‘Perhaps you are,’ she said quietly. ‘But I will not deny our child having a father.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ I said. The 94 per cent of me that knew its ass from a hole in the ground buried its head in a pillow and groaned.

‘You are that father,’ she continued coldly, ‘and I expect you to assume all your responsibilities. Clearly you must
totally break with Kim. If you ever sleep with her after today you’ll never see me, the child or, I’m sure, your job again.’

‘Ahhh’

‘But that’s just common sense,’ she said with a sudden unexpected relaxation of her fierce posture and tone. ‘I’m being too negative. I must remember that I told you I wasn’t pregnant and haven’t been as warm to you as I might have been, so your little fling is both understandable and forgivable.’ She reached forward and took one of my hands and looked up at me with a small smile. ‘Just never again.’

The saint was in shock. So were all my other mes. I stood there and with superhuman effort managed to avoid

‘Of course,’ I said.

Reader, reader, reader, what had I wrought? I had anticipated that Kim was chaos and that my father’s ways were chaos, but never in my worst imaginings did I anticipate what chaos was like. The advantage of building walls around your normal mainstream self is that all the other yous are locked out and can’t usually do much more than pound on the walls and wail. But now that I’d begun knocking down those walls and letting a few of my other selves run free into existence I was finding that it’s inconvenient to be more than one person. Lukedom might be organized to let my mes exist, but not Manhattan, and certainly not Honoria.

I retreated that night alone to my East Village apartment in such a state of confusion that not only couldn’t the saint function but neither could any of my other selves. I handled a phone call from Kim by saying I wasn’t feeling well, a statement of unequivocal truth. At midnight I was still awake and still uncertain what I wanted to do with my life. Did I lust for Kim or love her? Was it moral to marry Honoria or immoral to marry her if I didn’t love her? Was it wise to marry Honoria and thus keep my job and fulfil the long-held masterplan of the rational, ordered man, or did wisdom rather lie in giving up her, my job, and my masterplan and follow my heart (or was it my loins?) to whatever life would bring with Kim?

I wondered if my father had ever faced a moment like this in his disintegration. Were my mother and our family and his job his straight and narrow path to unhappiness that he found he had to give up? If that was so, then my deserting Honoria and the unborn child would be my
abandoning a child just as he had done – only when the poor child was only five inches long instead of five feet. It infuriated me to see this link. Was my not marrying Honoria really the same as his abandoning Lil after a marriage of almost thirteen years? Was my abandoning an unborn child the same as his –

Seeing these horrible parallels tended to make me want to repudiate my father, the dice, and – by some sort of association I wasn’t sure of – Kim, and reaffirm my old life. But other forces, equally strong, pulled me towards my father and Kim.

In any case, that night I put my father’s green dice back in the box Jake had given me and stuck it back up on a high shelf of the bookcase. Whatever was to come was going to be my decision (but which me?). I would continue to lead my usual business life, but would tell both Honoria and Kim that I was on a personal spiritual retreat that would last all week and which would prevent me from seeing either of them. This would seem to be irrational nonsense but would be completely consistent with the irrationality of most of the rest of my recent life.

Honoria took my ‘retreat’ in her stride, apparently thinking it was the same saintly me that she’d confronted that evening in my office, but Kim was angry. She resented my not telling her exactly what was going on and, when I wouldn’t go into any detail, hung up on me.

So I tried to throw myself into my trading. It happened to be in the middle of January of 1991 and the United States government had given Iraq until 15 January to make a graceful exit from Kuwait, the oil well that it was hurriedly pumping dry. While politicians debated what the President might do on the 15 January deadline, Wall Street knew: he would blast the bastards back into the Stone Age. You don’t ship fifty billion dollars’ worth of men and materiel five thousand miles and then let them rust. You use them as soon as you can.

I found myself unmoved by the excitement felt by
traders both in BB&P and elsewhere. For weeks I’d been experiencing what others would call ‘burnout’, but which in my case was something worse: I was beginning not to care about making money, whether my trades made money or lost it.

I continued to go through the motions, monitoring and adjusting my indicators, once or twice even flipping a coin to decide, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t bothering to keep my own records on a daily or even a weekly basis. The fact was, although neither I nor my colleagues were aware of it at the time, my trading had barely been breaking even except for the day my saintliness had scored its great coup. However, my reputation had grown so big since the President’s Aids day that everyone assumed I was doing well even when I wasn’t: they noted and talked about my winning trades and ignored the losers.

Jeff, I learned, had entered a new stage too, a stage of tranquillity. The words ‘Jeff’ and ‘tranquillity’ had been, of course, absolute opposites for as long as Jeff had been a human being, but after he’d discovered dicetrading, he confided in me, all his worries and fears and nightmares disappeared. He had gotten in touch with the voice of God. Being in touch with the voice of God permitted him to know precisely what the Gods wanted, and whatever the Gods wanted must be, as far as he could see, exactly what he should want.

This religious insight had come early in his dicetrading. He’d huddled in his cubicle hiding his list of options and his dice from the other traders and let chance choose what trades he was to make. He had first prayed that he do nothing to challenge the Gods’ exclusive right to know the future. His initial trading had been mixed: some trades had made money and some had lost. But it was a sharp, normally painful loss in gold futures that had given Jeff his insight, salvation and peace of mind. After a die told him to go long and the market had then begun to sell off he had
naturally begun biting his lips, his nails and his tongue, bouncing on both feet and wringing his hands. Then he saw it.

The Gods controlled the fall of the die; They wanted him to go long even though They knew the market was going to sell off; it was Their Will that he lose on this particular trade! There was nothing he could do about it; it was Their Will!

Jeff said he felt a sudden release from two decades of tension: the Gods controlled everything and therefore Jeff could relax; nothing he could do could change Their Plans; he was putty in Their Hands. But by bowing to Their Will he was one of Their Favourites. He might lose on gold today, might lose again for a week, a month, a year! but in the long run the Gods would honour his subservience and take care of him. At that moment he became one with the flow of the universe and a happy man. The dice were the Instruments of the Gods, the ultimate surrender of man’s presumption, and thus the vehicle of Jeff’s salvation.

From that moment on he became as absurdly serene as he had been absurdly nervous. He moved around the offices of BB&P like a man who had not only taken several tranquillizers, smoked some powerful pot and was slightly brain-damaged, but also like one who has inside information denied to all other men, inside information that will permit him always to win while others falter. That was exactly how Jeff fell.

The other traders, not knowing what I knew, watched him with awe. This was my right-hand man, and they could see now why the two of us were so successful. Somehow Jeff had an infallible inside source. When one trader challenged Jeff, Jeff just nodded serenely and said: ‘And
my
Inside Source is never wrong.’

The other traders could only look on in envy and awe.

Just as most traders anticipated, the war started promptly
on the sixteenth, and the markets gyrated wildly. While others raced around the trading room in a state of near hysteria I indifferently made some adjustments and placed my orders. With Jeff gliding through the office like a serene angel (or as a lobotomized freak, as one trader claimed) and I showing not much more concern, our reputations as infallible insiders grew. But I found it all rather boring.

Not so for Mr Battle. Mr Battle loved war, especially when his side had all the best weapons, men and materiel, and, as an added bonus, even had right on its side. And even more especially when it looked as if the enemy, Iraq, was pulling a rope-a-dope strategy of letting themselves get clobbered until the US ran out of ammunition, an event that Mr Battle calculated wouldn’t occur until the twenty-third century. Never had a war been so lopsided. Never had Mr Battle dared to hope that the trillions spent on the military over several decades would actually get to be used. Guns were being fired! Bombs were being dropped! Missiles! And without more than a handful of Caucasians dying! It was a warrior’s wet dream.

It also helped that after the first day the stock market was soaring and all his clients and brokers were making money. Wars are always more enjoyable when you’re making money.

And the Japanese bankers were finally coming round. They had been quite impressed by my remarkable December comeback. Although for some reason they still couldn’t figure out my knack, they were coming to New York to complete the negotiations that would lead to their making a major capital investment in BB&P and hire BB&P to manage a major futures fund they would develop.

Mr Battle decided to throw a party. He would throw the biggest party of his life to celebrate the war and the invasion of the Japanese and his having in his future
son-in-law the most acute trader since Jerry ‘Fix It’ Smoot. He would invite the Japanese bankers and everyone who was anyone on Wall Street.