I roll first and buy buy buy. I give my imagined opponents inferior strategies and trade properties at prices advantageous to myself. But even so I lose. The dice are against me, I couldn’t buy a roll in a bakery. Such a stupid game with so much luck involved. Such a stupid fucking game that I don’t even finish. I throw the board across the room and the paper dollars into the air. I tear up the Chance and Community Chest cards so I will never, ever have to play that stupid fucking game again.
I decide next to select a game that relies less on luck. I remove Scrabble from its dog-eared box, place the board gently on my bed and sense the excitement building again in my chest. I decide to make this a game for just two. (Not stacking the odds, you understand, merely improving them.)
I always play a tight and controlled game of Scrabble. Employing this strategy for myself only, as we near the end of the game I have surged almost a hundred points ahead. My crown awaits. And then . . . Which part of my brain despises me so? I see my hateful opponent has the letters IERGOAG. I sneer loudly when I realise these letters form an anagram of the word GEORGIA. Such a shame, I say to my opponent, that proper nouns aren’t allowed. Maybe down in Atlanta they’d give you the points for the sake of state pride. But up here in Yankee New York, well, what can I say, old friend? Rules are rules.
My imagination idly picks up the word GEORGIA and allows its letters to swim above the board. And then . . . Am I really so deserving of so much misfortune? I see a floating GEORGIA winding itself around the letter P (from my superbly played PRETZEL). Yes, I look on with horror as ARPEGGIO appears. A fifty-point bingo and a double-word score to boot.
I can barely type these words I feel such rage. I hurl away the Scrabble board where it can languish in hell with Monopoly.
And how does my luck improve next?
It does not improve, that’s exactly fucking how.
I unbox Operation and prepare to cure Cavity Sam of his diseases. I try to remove the wrench from his wrenched ankle and the pail to cure his water on the knee and the butterfly from his stomach. But every time the tweezers descend toward Sam, my fingers start trembling, very soon I twitch and . . .
Away, rapidly away, goes Operation, Chutes & Ladders, Backgammon . . .
Finally fate intervenes to save me. The batteries in my flashlight fail halfway through a woeful game of Buckaroo. Darkness has fallen outside, it transpires, so I jump off the bed and run into the living room intending to turn on the lamp. But something hits my toe and a split second later I hear the sound of breaking glass and feel a stabbing pain in the sole of my foot. I hop across the room and fumble for the lamp. When finally my fingers find the light switch, I see in the middle of the floor four empty glasses and the icy slick of a single broken glass. Blood is seeping from my foot.
I hop back to the bedroom and begin fumbling around for the game Operation. When finally I find it I return to the lamplight of the living room where I use my teeth to gnaw away the tweezers attached to the board. I grimace and then proceed to tweeze a large shard of glass from my foot. Due to my shaky hands, the procedure proves rather difficult and takes some considerable time.
And then with a great sense of relief, my foot hurting like hell, I remember my painkillers. I hop on my good foot into the kitchen where I see all my mnemonics untouched and in place. So it seems I have achieved nothing today. No water, no food, nothing at all. (Perhaps this explains the shaky hands.) I snatch up a pill but hesitate to pop it in my mouth, staring at this little blue caplet as if there is something wrong. And then I shake my head briskly, my mind cloudy, my foot stinging and throbbing. Quickly my painkillers become the first achievement of the day. And thus, soothed by my meds, I lie on the bed and close my eyes, holding my sore foot and thinking of all those losses. Thinking that, after HELL ONE, this day of defeat is a second poor omen. I have to be better than this. I must grow stronger.
XII
XII(i) They spoke of nothing but Game Soc all the way back to Pitt. When they passed through the lodge they saw Mark wandering down one side of front quad, yawning and wearing socks but no shoes. He had on a pair of headphones plugged into a Walkman that was clipped to his belt. When they approached him he pushed off the headphones and let them hang from his neck.
‘Mark, there’s no tape in your Walkman,’ said Jolyon, pointing.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mark, ‘is it that obvious?’
‘And the play button isn’t pushed down either,’ said Jack.
‘It’s worked so far though,’ said Mark.
‘What are you doing awake so early, anyway?’ said Jolyon.
‘Can’t sleep,’ said Mark. ‘I thought a walk might help. But there are some people round here I’m not so desperate to talk to.’ He unclipped the Walkman and waggled it.
‘Would a Hemingway daiquiri help more?’
Mark blinked serenely in the sunlight. ‘Indubitably,’ he said.
XII(ii) Mark was the cleverest person at Pitt, Jolyon had told Chad. Chad wasn’t sure how Jolyon had judged this. Jolyon said the cleverest people were never aware of their genius but Mark seemed barely aware of anything. Always groggy, a voracious sleeper.
Jolyon had taken Chad on a mission of mercy one evening to awaken Mark so he wouldn’t miss dinner a third night in a row. They eventually roused him, Jolyon having to resort to stealing his covers. Mark had been sleeping for sixteen hours straight.
He then yawned his way through dinner and subsequently drinks in the bar. In Jolyon’s room that night he had catnapped between hash tokes and sips of gin rickey. Mark’s lips made small murmurous movements while he napped. Perhaps, thought Chad, he was reciting equations, formulating new theories in his sleep. Mark studied physics. And like all of them in their circle, his area of study came in some ways to define Mark in the collective thoughts of his friends. Physicist, genius, mad scientist.
His hair stood in vertical coils, the effect somewhere between untamed bush and bedsprings. And he had a nose ill-suited to lethargy, it being pronouncedly aquiline. Whenever Mark’s eyes began to droop, his gaze would drift down the slope of his nose and settle for a moment on its tip. And finally, with a gentle flutter, the eyelids would shut.
XII(iii) In his room Jolyon apologised for false advertising, he blamed his poor memory. It was not the right day for Hemingway daiquiris, the ingredients for Singapore slings were already arranged on the coffee table.
Chad listened in awe as Jolyon then discussed physics with Mark. Although Jolyon was studying law at Pitt, his knowledge encompassed everyone’s choice of subject. Chad had heard him talk often to literature students about numerous obscure novels, which Jolyon always appeared to have read more of than they. He spoke knowledgeably with PPE students about politics, philosophy and economics. He chatted breezily with chemistry students about Mendeleev and the aesthetics of the periodic table. No topic seemed beyond him.
Mark spoke breathlessly about time being born in the instant of the Big Bang, other universes beyond the tails of black holes and how space was in fact composed of ten dimensions. To Chad it all felt like a high-speed thrill ride and you didn’t have to understand the mechanics of the vehicle, you just sat back and enjoyed the view, the new worlds blurring by beyond the windows.
And that’s when Chad realised Jolyon was right. Mark spent his life thinking on an entirely different plane to the rest of them and it was the immense weight of his thoughts that tired him out so quickly. Now the latest whirl of worlds was taking its toll. The creator of many universes was rubbing his eyes, apologising for yawning and stating that the time had come for his afternoon nap. ‘Thanks again for the cocktail, Jolyon,’ said Mark, raising himself wearily from the armchair.