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.