The Search for the Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  ‘I gave a hundred dollars to the NAACP in eighty-seven,’ Jeff said to them, hoping to dissociate himself from Larry’s madness.

  ‘My boss ordered it,’ Larry said quietly. ‘Your wallets, please.’

  As the hyper black man continued to bounce on his toes and roll his head, happily indifferent to the trials and tribulations of his friends, the other two, in shock, slowly began groping for their wallets, managing reluctantly to pull them out.

  ‘You a cop?’ asked the smaller of the two as Larry took his wallet. ‘You must be a cop. Hey, man, we didn’t steal this money.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said the second. ‘Our ladies gave it to us – pocket money, man, you got no right.’

  Larry removed the numerous bills from the two wallets and handed them back.

  ‘What about your friend?’ he asked politely, gesturing with his automatic at the dancing junkie.

  ‘Shit, man, you lucky to find a nickle on Willy,’ the big man said. ‘Money go through him into shit so fast you don’t see it, man.’

  ‘Well, thanks, I’m really sorry about this, but take this as a warning,’ said Larry, slowly backing away, Jeff now hidden behind him and backing in tandem. ‘The streets of New York are not safe.’

  Larry gestured with his gun for the black men to be off in the other direction and then turned and led Jeff away.

  Although it took two additional appearances of Larry’s little .32 to ensure their safe escape with their illicit earnings back to the slightly safer streets of the West Side of Manhattan, they made it back.

  Jeff found that confronting his fears head on was, as he had suspected all along, even less fun than living with them slightly buried. Larry could only think of the two black men he had robbed: what was the world coming to when rich white honkies began coming to Harlem and robbing decent black men at gunpoint? The extent of God’s injustice must seem infinite.

  50

  Since the discovery that his father was probably alive and through the chaos of his diceplay Larry had continued to try to locate his father. He had set Miss Claybell to trying to discover a reality behind the initials ‘DI’ that he’d discovered in Jake’s files. She’d come up with a Venezuelan company named Distributo Innovato whose monogram was DI, but its business was distributing wholesale food to supermarkets. An Italian company ‘DI’ provided clerical garb to the Vatican. A London DI was Davis and Inges, a small brokerage house specializing in government bonds. A Tokyo DI aroused Larry’s interest but it turned out to be unlikely too: a giant company in design and consulting that did billions of dollars’ worth of business with many leading companies not only in Japan but in the US and Europe as well. It seemed to have nothing to do with Luke Rhinehart, Lukedom or dice.

  So with it looking as if his efforts at finding his father were blocked and as if the gay actor and friend who had pulled off the coup impersonations were not going to be caught, Larry found himself taking stock.

  Except for the limitation that the dicer had an obligation not to disrupt the healthy aspects of his life, he was quite happy to let himself go. He enjoyed seeing the shock on people’s faces when he did something unexpected. He loved the reputation he was getting for being eccentric; it gave him a freedom to expand his usual way of doing things. If everyone saw everyone else as an inconsistent eccentric what a wonderful zany world it would be! People could be lively and playful and absurd and stupid and brilliant and yet not have to be that way every day!

  Of course he knew that in some sense he was living on borrowed time. He was making money for his firm and himself and thus was a winner. Winners, in America, could be eccentrics, kooks, jerks, bastards – almost anything they wanted – as long as they remained winners. But if they ever began losing and became losers, then, ah, then they became simply jerks to be avoided, or bastards to be chastised, or eccentrics to be pitied. In any case, the loser, no matter what his characteristics, was soon an outsider, exiled from the winners with a swiftness that was testimony to the efficiency of the free-enterprise system.

  Kim had begun urging Larry to use the dice to develop new aspects of himself and soon had him taking karate lessons at the Big Apple, practising meditation, going to an opera, buying used clothes and actually wearing them, giving money to people, and reading novels, spiritual books and other writing that didn’t have numbers in it and offer a profit potential.

  The dice chose a few other interesting options as well. It opted for his selling his Mercedes, and buying – from the six options offered it – a used Chevy Corsica. It ordered him to sell two of the three paintings he owned of the soon-to-be-world-famous avant-garde artist, and buy a dozen new paintings that he actually liked – for one-third the price. He lost five thousand dollars in selling his two soon-to-be-world-famous masterpieces and concluded that the art market was as unreliable as the stock market. The die rejected an option that he try to sell his apartment, and another that he buy a summer place in the Hamptons.

  Larry gradually became aware that his approach to using the dice was different from his father’s. He felt that he was a scientist, while his father, for all the pretensions about ‘exploring the malleability of the human soul’, was at best an amateur, an artist rather than a true experimenter. Larry kept computerized records of his dice decisions and their results, records as careful and complete as those he had once kept of his financial ups and downs. He theorized that by introducing chance into his trading he was enabling himself to eliminate the usual human emotions that sway a trader’s decisions and lead to losing streaks. He felt that a trader on a hot streak should not let chance tamper with his patterns, but a loser could only gain by letting the dice loose on what the technical indicators were suggesting.

  So, too, if a man was winning in his personal relationships then the dice should only be used occasionally, as a kind of agent provocateur to keep the pot boiling and make sure stagnation didn’t set in. But where a man was losing – in a job or in lifeless relationships – then it made sense to bring chance in to shake things up.

  But Larry was uncertain about what he really wanted for himself and his life. On the one hand, he sometimes longed to re-establish the life that he’d had before Lukedom and his trading losses had destroyed his engagement and jeopardized his job, but on the other, he wanted to blow it all to smithereens. He loved his times with Kim, loved sailing with her, hiking New York streets, playing all sorts of dice games, even working out with her among the behemoths. He enjoyed her passionately and very probably loved her. But what did that mean?

  And on the other hand, there were her grungy Brooklyn living arrangements and her tacky job, one which showed both her total estrangement from the science of making money and her disturbing tendency towards flirtatiousness. When he complained about the nature of her work it got him nowhere.

  ‘Your job’s only one step above a call girl for some escort service!’ he had once spouted to her.

  ‘No, it’s several steps below, as you’d know if you saw my pay cheques.’

  ‘My God, have you been a call girl!?’

  ‘Nice girls don’t kiss and tell,’ said Kim.

  And little counterhits like that made her seem frighteningly experienced, even if she had a freshness that belied it.

  And Larry even wondered sometimes if her mind was rational. When he tried to discuss his futures trading Kim’s eyes began to glaze over before he’d gotten much beyond the opening quotes. Anything to do with numbers seemed to push the off button in her mind. Larry’s heart and body might prefer Kim, but the rational man said that if he knew what was good for him, he would forsake chaos, no matter how alluring, and find someone like Honoria, who came with bundles of boodle and a mind that loved thinking in decimal points.

  And so he was living a waffling life, one definitely against his principles of reason and order. He was seeing Kim three or four nights a week, making fierce love to her, but uncertain if he wanted anything more than that. But he was also giving the dice the option of his asking ot
her women out. And after his infamous market countercoup, Honoria telephoned and congratulated him. Was she open to seeing him again? My God, come to think of it she still had his ring! So when the die chose an option that he take Honoria out to lunch and ‘see what happens’ he did, but at the lunch Honoria was aloof, clearly waiting for him to make the first move, and his dice didn’t give him the go ahead.

  When he told Kim about these dates, he was relieved that she simply shook her head and said, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I am not going to let you romanticize the competition,’ she told him, ‘which is what you’d do if I tried to prevent you from seeing Honoria or any other woman. I know it can’t be easy to give up what she can offer you, but …’ and she grinned, ‘you may end up finding it’s a lot easier to give up that than what I can offer you.’

  ‘And what can you offer?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Me,’ said a challenging Kim.

  Nothing like a little overconfidence.

  Of course Kim was a woman, so one time when he showed up unexpectedly at one of the clubs after a woman he’d had a date with had stood him up he found Kim in a supply room in tears. She claimed she was crying because she felt like crying, but Larry, in one of his rare moments of insight, guessed that she couldn’t understand how he could still be ambivalent towards her. Neither could Larry.

  But the dice began to clarify matters. They chose a one-in-thirty-six shot that he write Kim a love sonnet and, though she spent ten minutes suggesting various subtle ways the poem might be improved, Larry could tell she was pleased. She became kittenishly feminine and incredibly sexy and he would have raped her on the spot if the spot hadn’t been the dirty-towel room at her midtown health spa.

  And then the die chose a one-in-six shot and ordered him to buy Kim a five-thousand-dollar gold necklace and take her to one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, a place famous equally for its snobbish clientele and outrageous prices. This was the first time he had given Kim any gift or even taken her to a high-priced restaurant.

  Larry was somewhat depressed that the dice seemed to have a tendency to choose expensive options. If they hadn’t also been making the very money he was being forced to spend he might have lodged a formal complaint. Seated opposite Kim at a small, exquisite table, where everything around them glittered expensively, he tried not to think how much it was going to cost. A bottle of champagne – one that even Mr Battle might have bragged about – rested glowingly in a bucket of ice. A vase of roses stood on one side of their table.

  Kim, dressed in what for her was expensive luxury, but was in fact only a simple but elegant cocktail dress she’d bought at T.J. Maxx, was fingering the necklace that lay in modest splendour on her lovely bosom. Her face was flushed with pleasure.

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I could be a sucker for something like this. But it’s so beautiful. It even looks real.’

  ‘It better be real,’ said Larry a little irritably.

  ‘I’ve never known you to show such extravagance,’ she added.

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘Maybe this is a side of you the dice ought to develop more strongly,’ she went on, looking at him playfully. ‘Maybe I’ll find I like the hundred-dollar wines better than draught beer and gold necklaces better than my usual costume jewellery.’

  ‘Shame on you,’ said Larry. ‘Where are your values!?’

  ‘And this restaurant,’ she said. ‘The one time I mentioned it you shuddered.’

  ‘Not as much as I’m shuddering now,’ said Larry, who had picked up the menu and was looking at the prices. It was poster size, its extensive area apparently needed to contain all the zeros.

  ‘What shall we order?’ asked Kim, picking up her menu.

  ‘God knows,’ Larry said. ‘Let’s hope they have bread and water.’

  Afterwards Kim invited him back to her apartment in Brooklyn and they made marvellous love. While Larry lay back in post-coital bliss, Kim gaily went and brought in a tray with a pot of tea and a pint of some sweet liqueur, and they got into a discussion of Larry’s diceplay. He felt his dicing would lead either to his finding his father or to his father’s coming to him, but he was determined to avoid the error his father had made in creating wild options that let the dice ruin his marriage and his family.

  ‘And who or what is this family that you’re so determined to protect?’ asked Kim, puzzled. She was sitting up against the headboard of the bed, wearing only a white T-shirt that managed to highlight what it covered and not cover much else. She was holding a saucer and cup of tea.

  Larry thought about it and then moved so that he could look at her more directly.

  ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘You’re now my family.’

  Those nice words were good for some spilled tea and a long kiss. When they had wiped up the dampness, Kim, teary-eyed, said that those were the nicest words anyone had ever said to her. ‘It means I love you,’ said Larry.

  ‘Don’t undercut your good line,’ said Kim, wiping her eyes and smiling with her more normal mischievousness. ‘Dozens of men tell me they love me, but none has ever before said I’m family. That’s almost a proposal.’

  That gave even dewy-eyed Larry a slight start.

  ‘Almost a proposal,’ he said quickly. ‘But notice that I avoided the real thing.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Kim. ‘I haven’t manoeuvred you into it yet.’

  51

  Reality, with its infallible nose for a human being who begins to get too cocky, took a good sniff at me and went to work. One evening, when Kim had to work until eleven, the dice picked at random that I read a book by Ram Dass extolling the spiritual value of service, of giving, of sainthood. Before I knew what I was doing, I found that from various do-good options I’d given the die, it had chosen that for one whole day I try to be a complete saint.

  I felt a burst of excitement, but then began to fear that although sainthood was fine and dandy in books, in life it might not work out too well, especially on Wall Street. When Kim came home I quickly made love to her before the start of my saintly day at midnight necessitated celibacy. I wasn’t sure what a saint’s attitude towards lovemaking would be, but doubted it would be as favourable as mine.

  Kim, of course, was enthusiastic about my becoming a saint and urged me to take it all the way, to let myself go, to pray, give and serve every second of the following day.

  I spent a restless night, but began the next morning with a sincere prayer to the Lord God Almighty, a Being with whom I’d been in only remote and sporadic communication most of my life. I prayed that I be able to discover and express the saint in myself, and obey God’s will in all that I did.

  The prayer had an unexpected elevating effect. I felt love not only for Kim but even for the cats, whose habit of tearing my socks to ribbons had begun to annoy me. And even for Judy, Kim’s room-mate, whose fierce feminism I didn’t normally find endearing, a feminism so strong it made Kim seem a conservative homebody in comparison. I gave Judy a hug that morning that the poor woman had no way of interpreting; I think she concluded that Kim and I had had a fight and I was coming on to her. She righteously pushed me away.

  The mood still hadn’t worn off when I reached the office. I found I was smiling benevolently at one and all. When I saw that some of the men looked so uptight that if the Dow opened a point lower that morning they might disintegrate I had all I could do to resist hugging them.

  When I saw Jeff leaning over a monitor at a trader’s desk and staring with the intensity of a man watching a surgeon operate on his wife’s heart, saw him watching and yet knew that most of the markets hadn’t even opened yet, I felt a rush of love and pity that could not be held in check.

  When Jeff looked up and saw me, his face grimaced into what I’m sure Jeff thought was a welcoming smile but was more like the nervous tic of a man having a noose placed over his head. I went up to embrace him, throwing open my arms with a glowing smile.

  Jeff, w
hose day-to-day expression normally varied only from worry to terror, revealed something I’d never seen before: confusion. Was I undergoing a seizure? An attack of indigestion? The effects of too many tranquillizers? Jeff was too astounded to move in time to avoid the bear hug that I now captured him in, but he was together enough to stand rigidly within it, so that I had the feeling I was embracing a thick concrete slab.

  ‘Relax, Jeff, relax,’ I said, as I released my prisoner and took a step back to look warmly into his eyes. ‘Why don’t you take the day off and go to the ocean.’

  I was firing him: I’m sure that was the only explanation Jeff could find for this mad embrace and even madder suggestion. A day off!? A trader take a day off!? Traders did not take days off. Traders knew that they were like the legendary Wally Pipp who took a day off from the Yankees once in the 1920s, was replaced on the field by Lou Gherig, and never played again. Traders had been known to survive gunshot wounds by muggers but still stagger in to make sure nothing happened in the markets while they weren’t there.

  ‘Bean oil is up again.’ replied Jeff, looking as if he hoped I’d simply taken too many tranquillizers. Jeff had done that once and thought that having the March bonds go a full point against him was funny! After that he’d never taken another tranquillizer, and was proud to tell everyone he’d never found anything funny since.

  ‘Of course bean oil is up,’ I said benevolently, wondering why Jeff cared. ‘And if it weren’t, it would be down.’

  Definitely too many tranquillizers, Jeff concluded and began to ease away.

  ‘The important thing,’ I went on, ‘is to do our simple best in order to make more money to give to the poor.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jeff, glancing at the man whose monitor he’d been staring at. The man was too sleepy to notice what was going on. He was a stockbroker, not a futures trader, and thus could afford to be sleepy and afford not to know what was going on.