Shownotes
In a city that stood on a hill by the sea, every child born was given a pair of dice...
When everyone is born with a pair of dice that determines their fate, how can one man escape his destiny?
Written by: Jonathan Cohen
Narrated by: Joe Cruz
A Faustian Nonsense production.
To read the full transcript, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/the-unlucky-gambler
Transcript
In a city that stood on a hill by the sea, every child born was given a pair of dice.
When the doctors had delivered the baby, red and crying, and cleaned it and cut the cord connecting it to its mother, one of the soothsayers would come in with a bowl of dice.
The bowl was a creamy quartz that gleamed and shone; some said that it dated from before the city, but nobody knew where the soothsayers had found it, and they would never say.
Inside the bowl were hundreds of dice: blue, yellow, opaque, cloudy, hazy, clear, shiny and dull. All the same size – small enough to fit into a baby’s closed fist. There were two dice of each kind, always.
The soothsayer would go over to the baby and hold its tiny hand gently, moving the thumb and middle finger together as if the baby was snapping its miniature fingers. Then, two of the dice would fly out of the bowl and into the baby’s hands. And so, the dice would have been chosen.
Nobody knew why a baby chose a certain pair of dice. There was no way to exchange them with another set in the bowl. Once a baby had chosen a pair of dice, those dice were with them for the rest of their life.
Some dice were lucky, and some were unlucky.
“Lucky” was not a word that was used in the city, however. It was considered bad form to discuss whether one was lucky or unlucky.
For the dice determined the outcome of every choice that a citizen made. If someone wanted to propose marriage, they rolled their dice to see if they were successful. If they wanted to buy a property, or barter a goat, or apprentice as a blacksmith, the dice would tell the tale. And once the dice were thrown for a particular decision, they could not be thrown again.
Those with lucky dice lived good lives, and those with unlucky dice did not. But nobody spoke of luck, because everyone had the same chance to pick a lucky set of dice. Some had to get unlucky dice, and that was that.
And so, it came to pass that on a day of a tremendous thunderstorm in the city, a baby named Anders was born.
Anders’ parents had barely made it to the hospital on time. Their car had broken down, and then their best friend wasn’t available to take them, and finally they were able to hail a taxi, but it stalled in traffic until some good souls helped push it and start it up again.
Anders’ mother lay in the bed, sweating and cursing, while his father pretended he knew what to do, and let his wife squeeze and squeeze his hand.
The soothsayer was late. Anders had already been born, and screamed and cried, red-faced, by the time the soothsayer arrived.
“Apologies,” the soothsayer said, hefting the milky bowl in front of him. “I was nearly in an accident…”
He need not have said anything. Anders’ mother was glowing, and Anders’ father looked as if he had given birth instead of her. The soothsayer approached the bed and lifted Anders’ tiny right hand. “In the name of fortune,” he said, gently moving the thumb and middle finger.
The bowl stirred, and dice clacked. After a much longer period than usual, a pair of dice flew out of the bowl and into Anders’ right hand. They were an odd smoky red color that the soothsayer had never seen before. This, however, he kept from Anders’ parents, since a donation was expected after a choosing of the dice, and any suggestion that the dice were less than lucky could result in stinginess.
“Are they good dice?” Anders’ mother whispered.
“All will be revealed in time,” replied the soothsayer. This was a standard reply.
And all was revealed, five years later, once Anders was old enough to throw his dice.
Anders was fascinated with his parents’ dice. He loved watching them fly through the air into their hands, the way they sparkled and spun, and especially the expressions on their faces when they saw the rolls.
His mother had a set of jade dice with white dots, while his father’s dice were a zigzag black-and-white pattern with red dots. Anders would crawl through the main room after the dice, trying to catch them, but they always wriggled out of his reach and into their owners’ hands. “Enough, Anders!” his father would admonish. “Wait until you can roll your own dice.”
Anders’ parents had roughly the same amount of luck. This was one of the reasons – if not the main reason – that they were together. A marriage where one was lucky, and one was unlucky was bound to fail. Being of medium luck, Anders’ parents had similar occupations in the local government. His father would joke that had he been any less lucky, he never would have met his mother, and she would reply that had she been luckier, she still would have met him.
When Anders turned five, the soothsayer came to his school to do the Tables for him and the other children his age. This was a different soothsayer from the one who’d helped Anders choose his dice as a baby in the hospital; some whispered that the original soothsayer had been researching unusual dice and then had decided to leave the city in a hurry, but none of this could be confirmed.
The Tables were a booklet of papers for each student. When it came time for Anders’ turn, the soothsayer looked at the smoky red dice with a raised eyebrow. “This test will evaluate your dice for suitability of purpose,” the soothsayer recited. ‘Suitability of purpose’ was the current euphemism for luck.
Anders nodded, and started tossing the dice. After each roll, the soothsayer would make a mark in the booklet. Then Anders would snap his fingers, retrieve the dice, and roll again. They started in the morning, and it wore on into the afternoon. Although Anders was fascinated by dice, he thought that he would not want to see another dice roll after they were done.
Anders had a friend in school named Callo, who was the same age, and after they had rolled and rolled, they stood around awkwardly and tried not to talk about luck. Some of the boys were boasting about what they thought their scores would be, but Callo said, “I’ll be happy with whatever I get.”
“Do you really mean that?” Anders asked.
“No,” Callo said. “I want to be happy. You need good dice to be happy.”
Anders nodded.
After he had said goodbye to Callo, he thought about it all the way home. Good dice and a good job. Would he do better than his parents? Live in the better part of town? Have two children instead of one?
The soothsayer was already at his house when he arrived, and his parents were home from work. Anders knew then that he was not going to be getting a good job, and he was not going to be living in a better part of town than his parents.
“We will do everything to give you a vocation that suits your special abilities,” the soothsayer was saying. Everything the soothsayer said sounded as if it was being recited from a manual, which it probably was.
His mother looked panicked, and his father tried to look brave. When the soothsayer had gone, Anders sat on the back stoop and tossed his smoky red dice repeatedly. Two ones, over and over again.
Callo, now a tall and dark young man, had done well. He was able to take accelerated courses, enrichment programs, after-school hobbies, and school trips. When they graduated from high school, he went into the trades as an apprentice glassmaker. “We’ll stay in touch, won’t we?” he asked Anders breathlessly after their graduation ceremony, pressing his palm to Anders’, as if he wanted to convince himself of it.
“Of course,” Anders said. “Maybe some of your…fortune…will rub off on me.”
“Superstition,” Callo smiled weakly. “Maybe some of your kindness will rub off on me.”
Anders was to be a janitor. He could still live with his parents until he was twenty-one, and he tried to stay out of their way. If he spent time with them, it always seemed that dinner was burnt, the radio was full of static, and the socks would disappear from the laundry.
Anders worked at a local factory, sweeping and mopping after hours. The work was quiet and satisfying, somehow, pushing the broom and mop and sawdust from one end of a hallway to the other end. “I’m doing something useful,” he wrote on a postcard to Callo, who was on a trip to another city to learn their glassblowing secrets. “Everything is fine.”
Everything was fine, until one of the valves somehow opened when Anders cleaned it and poured thousands of gallons of water into the delicate gears of the factory. Nobody blamed Anders – how could they? But the factory was to be closed for repairs for months, so it made sense that he find another occupation.
The soothsayer reviewed the Tables and stabbed his finger at the yellowed paper from the booklet he had filled out thirteen years previously. “Of course,” he said. “I must have made a mistake.”
Anders was to be a sanitation worker. His fellow sanitation workers told him that he would get used to the smell of fresh garbage, and in fact his nose did start to disregard the smell of rotting food and discarded socks. His parents, however, would wrinkle up their noses when he came home from work at the end of a long aromatic shift, and so he decided to move out.
The apartment he rented in the low-town district leaked, and it seemed to rain very often, but it was his – at least when the local cats were not finding their way in to eat his food. He burned incense every night to chase the garbage smell away and lay in bed reading stories about men and women whose dice throws saved the world. There were no stories about men and women who transcended their lot in life by becoming luckier or more fortunate – such a thing was impossible.
One day Anders picked up a pile of garbage that contained a lit cigarette, without noticing. The cigarette smoldered in the garbage truck until he arrived back at the depot and dumped his load. Then it came into contact with oily rags and burst into flame. By then, Anders was already on his way home, whistling and trying to fix his broken umbrella. By the time Anders arrived home in the rain, the garbage depot had been consumed by flames that were surprisingly difficult for the fire department to extinguish.
Could it be, the soothsayer wondered? Could there be someone so unlucky – so without fortune – that they could not be given a proper occupation?
While the factory was being pumped dry and the garbage station was being rebuilt, Anders took up several crafts. The kite he made landed in the sewer, and the candles he poured melted in an oddly lopsided way, but he was happy. He was less happy with the lack of income, and the persistent suggestion by his landlord that rent should be paid.
Callo had returned from his inter-city junket and was now becoming a celebrated glassblower. He sent a glass swan to Anders as a gift, all black curves and swirls, but one of the neighborhood cats knocked it over in search of the tuna Anders had hidden at the back of his pantry. “Can I come visit?” Callo sent via wireless message. “It’s been ages.”
Anders did his best to glue the pieces of the swan back together, but Callo did not care, sweeping Anders into a hug. Anders watched him take in the shabby apartment. Suddenly Anders saw the apartment from Callo’s eyes. Callo was dressed finely, and he walked with an air of sophistication. He had rolled well, of course.
“Let me take you to dinner,” Callo said. “I’ll make reservations.”
But when he called the restaurant and rolled his own dice (hazy purple with yellow pips), they had no spaces left. Callo looked at his dice and shook them. “You are rubbing off on me,” he said uneasily and laughed, pocketing them.
“Maybe if you stay around long enough, you’ll rub off on me,” Anders said.
“Speaking of which, have you met any girls yet?” Callo asked.
“Ah, girls,” Anders said, dismissive. There were always girls. Anders was handsome enough. But they could never connect, or he would miss a bus on the way to a date. “How about you?”
“There are a few,” Callo said, smiling. “I’m waiting for the right one to settle down. You should find one.” Then, looking around the apartment again, he fell silent.
It was not much, but it was Anders’ apartment. At least for the next week, until the landlord waited while Anders went out to buy food, then changed the locks. Anders did not have money for rent, so the police sided with the landlord.
He wondered if he might move back home. But Anders’ mother was sick; all of her dice rolls had failed her. Anders’ father was sympathetic but asked that he not come home to live with them just now. “She needs every opportunity she can get,” he said over the phone. “You do understand, don’t you?”
Anders understood. He slept in one of the parks in mid-town when he could and begged during the day. Mid-town was the best spot for beggars; low-town people could not afford to pay beggars, and high-town people could afford to pay the police to get rid of beggars.
Most days all he had to do was roll his dice while people were walking past, and when they saw what he rolled, some were moved to put money in the cap that he laid on the street in front of him. But many others looked at him with superstitious fear and hurried on without glancing back.
One day, he rolled his dice and a heavy booted foot stepped on them. This was a serious breach of protocol, but when Anders looked up, he saw a mountain of a man in leathers. “Sir,” the man said, “I would like to hire you for some jobs.”
This was so antithetical to what Anders had experienced that he could come up with no objections, so he followed the man to a local café and wolfed down lunch while the man explained himself.
The man was named Mistral, and he spoke in a booming voice. “All you have to do is stand in certain places during the day. I will tell you where and when. You stand where I tell you, and I pay you. Does that sound good?”
Anders could not imagine how standing still might lead to either a flood or a fire, let alone any other sort of disaster. He supposed that a vehicle might swerve to avoid him and end up crushing a group of children, but that was a hypothetical and Mistral was offering him money for…something.
So, he said yes, and found himself at various spots in mid- and high-town during the day. Every evening, Mistral would give him money for the day’s work, and a scrawled list of where he expected Anders to stand the next day. Nobody approached Anders, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary. It was like the job he’d seen some men and women doing in high-town, imitating statues, except that nobody paid attention to him. Although he was not rolling his dice in public, something about the way he stood and the clothing he wore led people to walk around him at a fair distance.
“I don’t know what he has in mind,” he said to Callo via video-call, “but there’s something odd about the whole business.” Anders had rented another apartment in low-low-town. It had four walls and a roof, but barely.
Callo looked to be sitting in a large house with lavish furnishings, but he never made mention of it. “My friend, it’s money. Until you are sure there is something afoot, keep at it.”
“Come for dinner sometime, will you?” Anders asked, suddenly shy.
“I’ll even bring something,” Callo said, nodding.
There was something afoot, something odd about the whole business, but it took Anders months to find out. There was construction in the spot where he was supposed to stand that day, and so he stood some meters distant in an area he felt was close enough. Then he overheard a woman yelling, “My carpets! They’re ruined!”
He looked around surreptitiously, and he saw what she was complaining about: the carpet-seller had hung up her wares, and a wind had blown over pots of paint from a higher floor that had splashed onto them. “You blame me?” the painter asked from above. “Those pots were sealed, I swear. It’s an impossibility.”
Anders remembered that one of the many ventures that Mistral had was selling carpets. His right hand closed around the dice in his pocket – the red, smoky dice. Then he turned on his heels and walked back to his apartment in low-low-town, where Callo was to visit that night.
Callo brought meat, and rice, and figs. Anders provided the plates and stove to reheat the food. Under a dripping ceiling, they ate by candlelight in companionable silence for a while.
“He’s using me as a bad-luck charm,” Anders said at last. “Mistral, the man I told you about.”
Although ‘luck’ was a bad word, he felt close enough to Callo that he could say it in private.
“I’ve heard of such things,” Callo said, shrugging. “There is a use for everyone, I suppose.”
Anders was silent. “Do you have another idea on how to make money?” Callo prodded him gently.
Still silent, Anders wiped a raindrop from his forehead and put down his fork.
Callo waited, then put a hand over Anders’. “Old friend, do you have something to say?”
Anders shook his head. “I think you do,” Callo said kindly. They sat in a further silence while Anders frowned and frowned.
“I want my portion,” he said at last.
“Your portion?” Callo said, surprised. “Did I not give you enough meat for supper?”
But Anders was not smiling. “My due. That portion of happiness that I deserve. Even the least of the other citizens gets it.”
Callo withdrew his hand. “This is unlike you, Anders.”
Anders nodded. “I’ve said nothing. I’ve seen fires and floods and cats and rain and thunder, and I’ve said nothing.” He gestured around the shabbier apartment. “All I want is enough of a portion of happiness. Is that too much to ask?”
Callo was silent for a while, thinking. “We’re all at the mercy of a roll of our dice,” he said at last. “You may never get the roll that you want. But do you think you can be happy regardless of your fortune?"
Anders pulled away from the table and started to clear the dishes. He did not answer Callo directly. “The train comes by here in a few minutes. If I don’t pick up the plates, they’ll shatter on the floor.”
“You know I’ll always be your friend,” Callo said. “Through good or bad. That will never change.”
But it did change. Callo met a girl named Jalen, who worked as a fellow glassblower. As he texted Anders, they had become fast friends, and then something more. He was too busy to see Anders, but he thought of him often, and he wanted Jalen to meet him. But they were never quite on the same schedule, and Mistral now had Anders working some nights, so Jalen remained a story that Callo told Anders.
And Anders was alone,
