28-ch21

The Statistician always wins at Monopoly. He has never lost.

The other members of The Indifference League compete to see who will be bankrupted last, which hero among them will hold out the longest against The Statistician’s endlessly calculating brain.

The Statistician’s strategy is based entirely on mathematical formulae and probabilities. Early in the game, he will try to acquire all four of the railroads, since owned together they provide the largest payback for the smallest early investment. Later he’ll trade them away for properties he needs to complete his groups of same-coloured properties, so he can start buying houses with his accumulated “railroad fares.” He always buys exactly three houses for each property, as he has calculated that this provides the highest investment-to-rent-intake ratio.

He will try to own all three properties in the orange group (New York Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, and St. James Place) since, based on the statistical permutations of die rolls between two and twelve, they are the properties with the highest collective likelihood of being landed upon by opponents. As he collects more theoretical money, he will then attempt to procure the red and yellow properties, which are second and third most likely to be landed upon by other players. And so on, until he wins the game.

Mr. Nice Guy is always the first player to go bankrupt. He lets people land on his properties without making them pay rent. He will accept whatever property trades he’s offered, with no haggling. Sometimes he will give a property away just because one of the others needs it to complete a colour group. You can’t win the game when you play like that.

Time Bomb spends Monopoly money with wanton abandon, just like she does with real money in real life. She buys every property she lands on, including the nearly worthless Electric Company and Waterworks, in the same way that she once bought a handbag for four thousand dollars, which she’s used exactly once. Unlike in real life, though, Time Bomb does not have access to her father’s endless supply of tobacco money, so she is usually the second player to go bankrupt.

In previous games, The Statistician’s final opponent has been either SuperKen, who can be quite aggressive when negotiating property trades, or Miss Demeanor, who saves her money and waits until Mr. Nice Guy goes bankrupt so she can buy his mortgaged properties at a discount, or Hippie Avenger, who repeatedly throws advantageous dice rolls which defy mathematical probability.

They are an hour into the game now. There are a dozen empty beer bottles on the table, and three empty bottles of wine.

All of the properties have been purchased, and phase two of the Statistician’s campaign for simulated capitalistic victory has begun.

The game so far has played out even better than usual for The Statistician; he has been lucky enough to procure his desired orange and red properties simply by rolling the dice fortuitously and landing on them first, and he gets the yellow properties in an even trade with Mr. Nice Guy for his railroads (which, while valuable in the first half of the game, are less so once the houses and hotels start going up). The Statistician immediately buys three houses each for his newly acquired properties.

On Mr. Nice Guy’s next turn, he lands on Atlantic Avenue, which he just traded to The Statistician. His next roll is a two and a one, which lands him on Marvin Gardens, the final of his former yellow properties. Mr. Nice Guy is bankrupted without anyone ever taking a ride on his newly acquired railroads.

The Statistician shakes his head in disbelief. “The odds of you making two successive rolls of two dice and landing on two properties within three squares of each other, within exactly two turns of you trading them to another player, are …”

“Are not as high as you might think,” The Stunner says. “The odds are exactly thirty-six to one.”

The Statistician raises an eyebrow. “How do you figure?”

“Six times six,” The Stunner says. “It’s only the odds of casting any one number out of six, times the odds of casting any other one number out of six. The other factors are irrelevant.”

“Good logic,” The Statistician says, “but slightly flawed. On two dice, you can roll either a one and a two, or a two and a one, to get a total of three. So the probability of rolling a three on two dice is two chances in thirty-six, or eighteen to one.”

The Stunner slaps her forehead. “Uh! How did I miss that!”

“An A+ for the effort, though,” The Statistician says to his Protégée.

An A+ for the effort. Their cheeks flush red and they both stop laughing.

“You’re blushing again,” The Drifter says to The Stunner.

A roll of thunder rattles the windowpane in the living room of The Hall of Indifference.

“One divided by eighteen still equals loser,” SuperKen says to Mr. Nice Guy.

Mr. Nice Guy shrugs and says, “Oh, well. Not everyone gets to win.”

He retreats into the kitchen to put some late-night snacks in the oven, and to wash up the dishes from dinner.

“Loser!” SuperKen coughs as Mr. Nice Guy walks away.

“Why do you have to be such a jerk?” Hippie Avenger says to SuperKen.

“Peace, love, dope!” SuperKen snipes at her, flashing the peace sign as if he’s giving her the finger. “One Race! The Human Race!”

“Honey!” SuperBarbie says, “Don’t be so aggressive. It’s like you’ve been possessed by Jake!”

She regrets saying this even before the words have finished tumbling out of her mouth.

SuperKen says, “Don’t ever compare me to that asshole!”

“Don’t ever call him an asshole!” Miss Demeanor says. “Jake may have been a little rough around the edges. He may have been a bit hyperactive. He may have even taken the name of the Lord in vain once or twice. But he wasn’t homophobic.”

“He wasn’t racist, either,” Hippie Avenger adds.

“And he never put down his friends to make himself feel bigger,” Miss Demeanor says.

“Yeah, he was a real saint, a real stand-up kind of guy, wasn’t he?” SuperKen says. “Except that he didn’t know enough to keep his hands off other people’s girlfriends, did he?”

SuperBarbie blushes. “Now, honey, you know you overreacted to that. There was never anything going on between me and …”

“I saw what I saw,” SuperKen says. “And that prick wasn’t so cool or so tough when I got finished with him, was he? He was nobody’s goddamn lover boy then, was he?”

He sticks his jaw out at SuperBarbie, waiting for her to admonish him for his very blatant taking-of-the-Lord’s-name-in-vain. She doesn’t say anything.

Mr. Nice Guy can hardly believe what he’s hearing. Psycho Superstar definitely had sex with Miss Demeanor, and probably also with Hippie Avenger, but he fooled around with SuperBarbie, too? Damn! What was his secret?

“Let’s just play the stupid game,” SuperKen says.

SuperKen’s Monopoly strategy is to invest aggressively in hotels for his properties, as early as possible in the game, sometimes even mortgaging one property to develop another. When The Statistician helpfully suggests that he might run into cash-flow problems later, SuperKen responds by barking, “Strike first, strike hard!”

When he is the next player to go bankrupt, SuperBarbie, The Drifter, and The Stunner vote to allow him to “merge his assets” with SuperBarbie, while Hippie Avenger, Miss Demeanor, and The Statistician vote against it. The deciding vote is given to Mr. Nice Guy upon his return from the kitchen.

“No hard feelings, eh, buddy?” SuperKen says.

So Mr. Nice Guy votes for the merger, which is short-lived anyway. Within six turns, SuperKen’s “deficit financing strategy” leaves The Perfect Pair without any joint assets left on the table.

“Oh, well,” chirps SuperBarbie, “it’s only a game, y’know. Honey, would you come upstairs for a minute and help me with something?”

After a lengthy pit stop in the washroom, SuperKen obliges. The next baby-making session is going to be quite aggressive.

Another hour passes. There are now twenty-six empty beer bottles on the table, and seven empty bottles of wine.

The Perfect Pair are still upstairs, behind closed bedroom doors. The hiss of the rainfall does not completely drown out the even-louder-than-usual sounds of their copulation.

The remaining active Monopoly players are The Statistician, The Stunner, and Miss Demeanor.

Hippie Avenger was knocked out of the game by Miss Demeanor, who did a little victory dance while Time Bomb cheered, “Go girl! Go girl! Go girl!” over and over and over again. They slapped each other’s palms in the air, over-celebrating her defeat just like those Varsity Sports Bitches in high school used to do. So Hippie Avenger is quietly hoping that The Statistician will win the game like he always does.

The Drifter, Time Bomb, and Mr. Nice Guy, all of whom were bankrupted by The Statistician, are silently rooting against him.

Miss Demeanor is about to roll the dice when The Statistician notices that her boot has been parked on his Illinois Avenue property for the past round.

“Not so fast!” he intones, “First you owe me some rent for your stay in one of my three lovely green houses … seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars, to be exact.”

“Sorry,” Miss Demeanor says. “My bad.”

“Your bad what?” The Statistician says, with that professorial tone in his voice. “Perhaps what you mean to say is, ‘Sorry, my mistake.’ I’m surprised that someone with your excellent education you would use a grammatically incorrect phrase like that.”

Miss Demeanor’s eyebrows arch upward, and her eyes widen. “And I’m surprised that someone with your impeccable upbringing would attempt to humiliate another person over something as trivial as the use of an idiomatic colloquialism.”

Miss Demeanor has just said what each of the other Not-So-Super Friends has wanted to say to The Statistician at one time or another, only better.

Time Bomb cheers for her new ally. “Yes! I hate it when he does that to me.”

You also hate a lot of other things I try to do to you, is what The Statistician wants to say. Instead, he mutters to Miss Demeanor, “Sorry. You’re right. My bad.” He doesn’t want to lose the game for the first time ever because he’s given the others a non-game-related reason to team up against him. “I’ll let you go rent-free this time, okay?”

Miss Demeanor’s eyes narrow, and she flips several pastel-coloured bits of fake currency across the board at The Statistician.

“I don’t need your charity,” she says, “because you certainly won’t be getting mine when you stay at my hotel on the Boardwalk.”

“That’s telling him, girlfriend!” Time Bomb cheers, high-fiving Miss Demeanor.

“What the hell has gotten into you?” The Statistician splutters.

“‘Gotten’ ?” Time Bomb says, “‘Gotten’ ? Is it grammatically correct to say ‘gotten’ ?”

“Seriously,” The Statistician says, “what has gotten into you today?”

Time Bomb puts her fists on her hips. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing that ain’t gettin’ into me tonight, mister, and that’s you!”

“Where is this coming from?” The Statistician demands, eyeing Miss Demeanor.

“Bankrupt me, will ya!” Time Bomb huffs.

“What?” The Statistician yelps. “But … that’s just the way the game works.”

“You have no idea how the game works,” Time Bomb says coolly.

Miss Demeanor shakes the dice and gets Time Bomb to blow on them. “For luck,” she says.

She lands on B&O Railroad, the one square between The Statistician’s bankruptcy-causing red and yellow properties.

“Lucky, indeed,” The Statistician says.

Outside The Hall of Indifference, there is a distant flash of white lightning, followed seconds later by a rumbling roll of thunder.

“I’ve got a wager for you,” Miss Demeanor says to The Statistician. “If I bankrupt you before you bankrupt me, I get to take your wife into the city to get a tattoo of Wilma Flintstone on her butt.”

“What? Why? What does this have to do with the game?”

“It has everything to do with the game,” Time Bomb says, downing the last gulp from her wineglass, pouring more for herself and Miss Demeanor.

“But what about your dermatological sensitivities?” The Statistician says.

“It’s my ass. I can do what I want with it.”

“Fine,” says The Statistician, to both his wife and Miss Demeanor. “You’re on.”

The Drifter leans forward on his elbows, staring with smoldering eyes at The Statistician, then at The Stunner, then at his brother again. “If we’re betting on the game, then I’ve got a wager for you too, big brother. If you go bankrupt before my girlfriend does, I get to ask you one question. And you have to answer it. Truthfully.”

“But sweetie,” The Stunner says, “It’s a bad bet. I can’t beat him. He knows all the odds. He knows all the variables. He knows all the permutations.”

“And so do you,” The Drifter says. “Roll the dice.”

“Wait,” Hippie Avenger says, understanding what is now at stake. “What does he get if he wins?” She turns to The Statistician. “What do you want if you win?”

The Statistician closes his eyes.

What I don’t want is for my wife to get some crass tattoo carved onto her tenth-percentile ass, but that’s what she’s going to do, whether I like it or not.

What I don’t want is for my brother or my wife to know what happened between my Protégée and me, but that’s what he’s going to ask me about.

When The Statistician opens his eyes again, Hippie Avenger is the first person he sees.

And what I do want, I know I can’t have.

There is a blinding flash of lightning and an immediate, ear-ringing crack of thunder.

The lights in the cottage dim for a moment, but they don’t go out.

The Statistician stands up and begins dividing his pastel-coloured play-money between Miss Demeanor and The Stunner.

“What are you doing?” Miss Demeanor demands.

“I can’t win,” The Statistician says, dealing the cardboard deeds to his theoretical properties between Miss Demeanor and The Stunner like playing cards.

“Go get your tattoo,” he says to Time Bomb, “if that’s what you want to do. It’s your body. And you’ve got all the real money, and you hold all the real deeds. So do whatever you want to. I can’t stop you.”

“Well, all right!” Miss Demeanor cheers, raising her hands for another high-five from Time Bomb. “Let’s get you branded, baby!”

Time Bomb slaps palms with Miss Demeanor, but with less enthusiasm than before.

“Well, let’s go,” Miss Demeanor says, “before you chicken out.”

“Tonight?”

“Hell yeah, tonight! I know this twenty-four hour parlour, best needle artist in the city. She did almost all of mine!” Miss Demeanor turns to The Statistician. “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll have her home by sunrise.”

As they rush out into the rain, Time Bomb turns to The Statistician and says, “See you later,” almost like she’s asking a question.

“Yeah. See you later.”

The Statistician sits down again at the table, folds his hands where his stack of phony deeds and cash had been, and faces his younger brother.

Rain blasts against the steel roof over their heads, rumbling like a volcano about to erupt.

“Okay, then,” The Statistician says, locking his eyes onto the Drifter’s. He doesn’t blink. Nothing moves but his mouth. “Ask.”

The Drifter hesitates. He knows The Statistician better than anyone. He knows that if he doesn’t phrase this in exactly the right way, his brother will calculate a way to evade the question.

“You two are still being weird around each other,” The Drifter says, “and, well, I just can’t help wondering … did your … relationship … go beyond the limits … the accepted boundaries … of a normal student-teacher relationship?”

“Yes,” The Statistician says. “Yes. It did.”

The Stunner’s eyes are wide and dark.

“I was attracted to her. I made a proposition. I offered to give her an A+ grade in exchange for … well, you know.”

The Drifter’s fists clench.

“She said no,” The Statistician says, looking his brother in the eyes, not even blinking. “She turned me down. And even though I graded her twice as hard as the other students, she earned the A+ anyway.”

“Well, at least I know you’re telling the truth,” The Drifter says, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. “You never look anyone in the eyes when you’re lying.”

“She wasn’t looking for a man like me,” The Statistician says. “She was looking for a man like you.”

The Drifter has wanted to beat his older brother at something, at anything, since they were little kids. Now he feels like he might cry.

The Stunner is crying. Her tears splash on the plastic tablecloth.

The Drifter puts his arms around The Stunner. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I needed to hear it from him.”

“I hope you can forgive me some day,” The Statistician says.

The Stunner cries even harder.

Rain hisses against the ground outside.

“Tonight is kind of like the night we met,” The Drifter says to The Stunner. “Want to go out and relive the ride?”

“Fraser,” The Stunner says to The Drifter, “Can we just ride all night? And not come back here?”

“Sure, Cassie,” he tells her. “We’ll ride all night. Let’s go.”

Hippie Avenger and Mr. Nice Guy sit at the table with The Statistician, unsure of what to do or say next. Mr. Nice Guy is desperate to break the storm-punctuated tension. He is equally desperate to engineer a moment alone with Hippie Avenger. It’s the final night of the long weekend. It’s now or never.

He leans over and whispers to her, “Why don’t you and I drive into town, grab a drink somewhere. I’m sure he could use some time alone right now.”

“I’m okay,” The Statistician says.

“I think I’ll just turn in for the night,” Hippie Avenger says. She leans over and kisses The Statistician on the cheek. “Good night, mister,” she says.

As Hippie Avenger climbs the stairs, Mr. Nice Guy stretches, forces a yawn, and says, “Well, I’m pretty beat, too.”

Maybe I should go get my goodnight kiss, he thinks. By the time Mr. Nice Guy is upstairs, though, the door to Hippie Avenger’s room is closed.

Alone at the table, The Statistician gathers the money and the deeds, and puts them in their respective slots inside the game box. Then he plucks the pieces from the Monopoly board: the top hat, which he had never worn until tonight. The Stunner’s wheelbarrow, which was never really his in the first place. Miss Demeanor’s boot, which certainly kicked some ass this evening. He tosses the little metallic tokens into the box with The Perfect Pair’s battleship and cannon, The Drifter’s race car, Time Bomb’s horse and rider, Mr. Nice Guy’s thimble, and Hippie Avenger’s shaggy dog.

He folds the game board, places the lid of the box overtop, and sits alone at the table. Behind his bruised back, rain pecks gently at the windowpane.

The Statistician had always won at Monopoly. He had never lost.