‘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.
53
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 t
oo, 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.
54
The decisive day of my life occurred at the Battle country estate overlooking the Hudson on the day that William Fanshawe Battle III held his First Annual War Party. Actually he called it, on the advice from his PR department, a ‘Celebration of the Triumph of the Human Spirit.’
He’d invited Mr Sato, the President of the Nagasaki Sumo Bank, his wife, and two senior vice presidents, good old Akito and Mr Namamuri, to spend the whole weekend at the estate, the better to impress them with the quality of his friends and business associates. Mr Battle seemed to feel that one of his chief selling points to them was my increasingly inexplicable knack, and he hoped my scientific approach to trading would be the seal to the deal he wanted to make.
At a private tèlt-à-tête a little before noon he impressed upon me how important this party was to the success of BB&P and urged me to be at my most charming and technical. I nodded.
The party was scheduled to begin officially at two o’clock and last until God knew when. It was an eclectic party, to say the least. Guests could play poker, baccarat, or watch the war on CNN on any of the four conveniently located television sets. They could eat at any of five buffet tables or drink from any of three bars, all colourfully prepared by Celeste’s Heavenly Hosts. They could dance to a band that had promised no heavy metal, or swim in the heated indoor pool. They could even talk.
Kim had not been invited to the party, for reasons that seemed obvious to all concerned. The night before, she and I had had a phone tiff about my going to the party without her. I told her I was still on my ‘spiritual retreat’ and going solely as part of my job and not to be with Honoria. After a long silence on the line Kim had then spoken with quiet anger: ‘When are you going to start creating your own life again?’ she said softly. ‘I’m getting a little tired of your shilly-shallying!’
‘I know and I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But whatever move I make next will irrevocably affect the rest of my life. I’d sort of like to know what I’m doing when I’m doing it.’
‘Human beings never know what they’re doing when they’re doing it,’ she countered. ‘The smart ones just go ahead and do it anyway.’
And she hung up. Since Honoria had hung up on me three times that week for roughly the same reason – my sitting on the fence – I was used to it and no longer wondered if the phone company had cut us off.
Having been ordered by Mr Battle to arrive early, I wandered through the rooms feeling very detached from the proceedings. I was feeling more out of place than ever, a stranger accidentally plopped down in a life I’d never intended.
When I met Honoria in a hallway we greeted each other cautiously, both wondering the same thing: whether I was going to marry her and live happily ever after with the Battle millions or be a fool and do something else.
When I wandered into the kitchen I was surprised to see Kim busily laying out food on one of the half-dozen serving cans. She was dressed in the blue and white uniform of Celeste’s Heavenly Hosts. I approached her almost as warily as I had Honoria.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘What’s it look like?’ she answered. ‘I am earning my living.’
‘I mean –’
‘Me and the die figured out that if you can’t get in the front door, there’s always the back one,’ she said. ‘So I convinced Celeste she could use someone like me who knew the inside of this place.’
‘But why?’
; ‘I didn’t think you should be unsupervised at a party like this,’ she said with one of her mischievous smiles.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You won’t even notice me.’ And with that she went back to spreading out what looked to be egg rolls.
‘Mr Rhinehart, sir?’ said the suddenly appearing Hawkins. ‘A Mrs Ecstein has arrived and would like to see you.’
I turned reluctantly away from Kim and trailed after Hawkins, wondering what the unpredictable Arlene was up to this time. I knew she’d been invited to the party – after all, she was one of BB&P’s better new clients – but wondered why she was asking for me.
Arlene greeted me just outside the main kitchen in one of her younger versions, with dark hair and wearing a conservative business suit. She was also carrying a ridiculously large and apparently full plastic shopping bag.
When I came up to her she handed me a copy of the New York Post.
‘Have you seen this?’ she asked pleasantly, as if sharing some amusing society item.
I never read the Post and, this being Saturday, hadn’t actually seen any newspaper. The Post page-one headline was its usual succinct self: ‘FEDS FLUSH FLAKES‘. And then a smaller headline: ‘FBI and DEA officials raid dice communes’
I began reading. Page three indicated that officers from several federal and state agencies varying from drug enforcement to the IRS had raided three illegal communes – Lukedom in Virginia, Chanceton in Colorado, and Dice in California. They’d arrested over one hundred people, including Jake Ecstein. One article painted a sewery picture of life at the communes: slavery, brainwashing, cult religion, random sex, religious sacrilege, gross overcharging at restaurants, tax evasion, and rampant car theft. There was supposedly fanatical cult worship of the masterfiend Luke, who allegedly just escaped from the raid on Lukedom only minutes before it began.
The two Post articles were more restrained than the World Star article of four months earlier, but not by much. The only new contribution I noted in my quick browsing was to suggest that my father had a secret cadre of thousands of underground followers who had infiltrated important sections of American life. FBI official Putt claimed that the bureau was gathering evidence that indicated secret dice men in various banks were seeding bank computers with random elements that had led to many cases of masses of money being erroneously shifted from one account to another, with thousands of people spending or vanishing with the unexpected windfall before the errors were caught. He also claimed that dicepeople in the US and various state governments had intervened in the decision process to bring about all sons of bizarre decisions that ‘normal, rational’ government would never have made – although how the bizarre decisions of normal rational governments could be distinguished from dice decisions Putt didn’t make clear.