In the Beginning was The Asylum, and The Pip
By Ric Gerace
The Asylum, where I dwell, is an island off the coast of an unnamed Atlantic nation. It covers approximately one square mile, comprising vaguely mountainous terrain. There is, of course, a small harbor. The Asylum is not a tropical paradise. It is not even vaguely tropical. The trees are hardwoods for the most part, and the vegetation is quite similar to that found in the northern reaches of the United States, and some other reaches in England.
The Asylum is also the name of the luxury hotel near the harbor. It is actually the only building on the island, aside from a few storage buildings. The hotel is quite nice, built of granite exteriors and fireproof wood interiors. The accommodations are comfortable, the food is very good, and the communications consist of two T3 lines underwater to the mainland, two-way satellite installations, and standard phone lines, all linked to several of the best backgammon servers in the world. And of course there is a direct line to BIBA, and another to those folks who live a stratified existence in a primitive Village somewhere in the wilds of Canada.
There are no ugly fences here, no barbed wire, no razor wire, no guards with guns, none of that undignified, uncivilized nonsense. We live here far off the coast in order that our governments may protect us from the barbarians among them (many of them chess players). We have free run of the island, but for the most part we gather in the game room. Well, let’s call a spade a spade. Or is it a shovel? I forget sometimes. Oh, yes, the game room.
Since there is only one game, the room contains only backgammon boards. All kinds of backgammon boards, from cheap bar boards to the finest leather boards to be found in Europe. Everyone plays. Even the staff. Two of the doctors owe me several thousand dollars each, and the redheaded nurse, Miranda, owes me several times.
(I’m not sure why our governments feel the need to have so many medical personnel staffing a luxury hotel. Even the waitresses and bellhops are medical. Quite odd, really!)
We have some interesting personalities currently residing in The Asylum. You may recognize some of the names. Attila. Mr. Ghengis Khan (he’s very touchy about the Mister). Josephine Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte. (They don’t speak to each other any more.) Two gentlemen named Jesus Christ. For the sake of clarity, one agrees to be John the Baptist. Hitler, of course, sans moustache. George W. Bush (unpleasant sort of chap – he walks around whistling like a falling bomb – seems to enjoy it; terrible backgammon player). And the cleaning lady. Really. She is the cleaning lady. Name of Emma. Very nice lady, but she has an annoying habit of patting people on the head and saying “There, there,” when she throws wicked doubles. And of course, my self. The others call me The Knight of Backgammon, or Knighty for short. Miranda calls me God. I believe she called me that about twelve times last night.
Now things do get a little stale here playing with the same group. One of our most exciting times occurs when a new fish… er… resident comes to The Asylum. It is especially exciting when the newby comes out of quarantine and we discover that he doesn’t know the game! Oh, those are delicious times! Caviar and champagne all around! Yes, yes, yes!
It fell to me to train the latest government acquisition, a young woman, long dark hair, sky blue eyes. In appearance very much like Elizabeth Hurley. You must have heard of her? The English actress and model? I’m quite mad about her, you know, quite mad.
In any event, it is our policy not to force the game on newcomers. Sooner or later they must play. There is little else to do, besides Miranda, though she and I are each other’s exclusive hobby. However. The newcomer called herself The Kid, but allowed that we could call her The. She seemed to be enamored of a Sharon Stone movie about gunfighting and to have invented her self from that connection.
After about a week of sitting around the game room listening to dice rattle and mice click, The began to come out of her shell and show some interest. By prearrangement, each player she approached for information referred her to me, and ultimately she sat down to watch as I polished off Doctor Who with a fortunate sequence of 66, 44, 55 in the bearoff. Doctor Who grumbled off to his tardis, which looks remarkably like a broom closet, and I turned my attentions to Elizabeth. I mean, The.
“Good evening, The.”
“Yeah. Okay. Everybody shuffled me off to you about this game. So what’s the deal? You teach me this stuff?”
“Well. Do you want to learn? It’s not as simple as it looks.”
“Hey, it’s a game. How hard can it be? Push them little round things around. Pssssh!” She pushed her hand through the air.
“Where are you from, The?”
“Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. What about it?”
Her dossier said she was a California Valley Girl.
“And what is your education, dear?”
“I ain’t a deer, alright. I got a doctorate in English and another one in nuclear physics and an MBA from Harvard.”
She had a BA from a state university in the Midwest of America, graduated with a gentleman’s C average. Excuse me. Gentleperson’s C.
“Quite good, The. You’ll find this game quite to your liking. Please. Sit there across from me and we’ll begin with the basics.”
“I wanna get to the good stuff, okay.”
“You like to beat people, do you?”
“Who told you that? I never beat on nobody in my life. That’s a lie put out by those Republican clowns in the FBI.”
“Of course, dear.”
“I told you!”
“Sorry, of course. You are The, and you want to learn this game so well that you can win money from everyone here.” I indicated the room full of players. Several of them were surreptitiously eying us, and three were rolling their eyes instead of their dice. Quite an ugly picture, actually.
I cleared the checkers off the board in front of me. Quite a nice, serviceable Crisloid board. Hardly the aristocracy, but very sturdy, a necessity when Hitler throws a hissy fit. “What do you see, The?” I said, pointing at the board.
“Bunch of pointy things pointing at each other. Looks like a mouth with sharp teeth.”
Quite the discriminating eye, I mumbled to myself. “Yes, well. Those are called pips.”
“Whats?”
“Pips.”
“Yeah, well they don’t scare me, all those pointy things. Not me.”
The staff were quite gentle with her as they dragged her off screaming for an emergency valium appointment.
The next day I decided on a different approach. The table between us was empty. No board. No pips. No scary mouth. Then I brought out my brilliant educational device.
“Alright, The, this is a pip.” I placed a stuffed cloth pip on the table in front of her.
I encouraged her to touch it and play with it. She did for a few minutes, rather slowly and hesitantly, while two of the burlier sorts in white uniforms looked on from a discreet four feet away.
“That’s pretty nice for a stuffed toy,” she said. “Whazzit got to do with this game?”
“Well, I wanted you to experience the fullness of a pip. And to learn that they don’t bite.”
“Yeah. Okay. Can we get past the puff dolly stuff now?”
Since she seemed to be calm and have gotten over her earlier difficulty, I brought out the board again and opened it up.
Through hypnosis and liberal doses of various chemical supplements, she was finally able the following month to sit down and begin her apprenticeship.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“We all have our little…problems, The. Now then, do you have any problems with round objects?”
She pushed her shoulders back, smiled and said, “Not at all. See?”
“Yes. Quite. Ahem.” Elizabeth would have been proud.
I put a checker on the table. It was white and innocuous. “We call that a checker.”
“Like at the grocery store?”
“Er, no. Like in the game of checkers.” A mistake, I knew it the moment I opened my mouth.
“No. No. I want to learn backgammon.”
“Yes, sorry, we just call them that. You may call them other things. Men. Stones is popular in some parts of the world.”
“Why men? Why not women? Or persons? Huh?”
I leaned back in my chair and put on my best wicked grin. “Or how about Sam or Mary or Harriet or Harry?”
She gazed at me for a long moment. Then, “You being smart with me, Mister?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Good. Checkers it is. What’s next?”
“Now take a good look at the board.” She did, inspecting it quite carefully for a quarter of an hour.
“Nice board. I like the corky stuff.”
“Oh good, I’m so glad. Now, how many pips are there?”
“The pointy things?”
“Yes.”
She counted. “Twenty four seems close.”
“Good. How many in each quarter of the board?”
“I’d say six.”
“So would I.” I placed the checker on what would be her ace point. “Now, I want you to move it six pips. Six pointy things.”
“Which way?”
I pointed. She picked up the checker, touched it to each point, counting one two three four five six, and put it down.
She smiled at me, threw her shoulders back again. “There!”
“No,” I said, moving the checker back to the ace point. “Try again.”
She performed the same ritual. After several tries, with the burly lads in white nervously moving closer, she finally picked up the checker and plopped it down on the seven point without counting.
Everyone in the room broke out in applause. They had, of course, had one ear and one eye on our little drama. Several had been through the same process.
The leaned back in her chair, wide-eyed. “What? What?” she said, on the verge of tears.
“Your first lesson. Never, never count like that. Get to know the board so well that you can pick up a checker from anywhere and move it any number on the dice without the slightest hesitation.”
She blinked at me.
“You don’t have problems with small cubical objects do you?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Excellent. Now practice on this board tonight, and when you can move the checker in your sleep, we’ll progress to the next lesson.”
“But what’s the difference if I count or not? That’s dumb.”
“No it is not dumb, The. If you must count moves, you can never see the situation on the whole board and you will miss good moves. You won’t see the board, the whole board, the complete situation on the board.
“You’ll be going one two three and your opponent will be going hee hee hee.”
She still looked somewhat mystified. I put it into terms she could understand.
“You’ll be a bloody loser forever.”
Her eyes lit up. “Why didn’t you say so? Jeez.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched, in the far corner, George W. Bush playing Saddam Hussein. George was saying, “One two three…” Saddam looked bored.
Next time: The learns the point of the game, how to move more than one piece, and the miracle of opening moves.
————————————————————————
In Which The Learns to Move and Shake that Thing
The was nothing if not a thorough student. She didn’t reappear in the game room for another week. My intelligence sources (Guido, both of him, a very large man who is my cousin as well as a trustee guard, and who once bench pressed Michael Crane, Paul Magriel, and a CD of the Encyclopedia Britannica all at once, six times), as I say, my intelligence sources told me that The had spent all her time learning the board.
“She can whip that checker,” Guido said, his faces alight.
“But a week, G, just on that?” I feared for her insanity.
“She’s a tough little cookie.” He patted me on the head. “You watch your butt.”
I noticed he had a suitcase packed and was wearing civilian clothes. “Where are you going, G?”
“Oh, you know that fellow in Albania who owes you two pigs for that match last year?”
“He never paid. I thought he got shot.”
Guido smiled. “Not just yet. Bacon next week.” He cracked his knuckles. Several people ducked.
The showed up that evening while I was watching the final few moves of a match between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. George was contemplating a four cube from Saddam, who was looking determinedly impatient.
“Are you going to take the cube or not, Georgie?” Saddam sighed heavily. George was the only one who would play with him.
George stared at the cube for another minute. “What’s that thing for again?” he finally said.
“It’s a bomb, George. It’s going to blow up the board.”
George poked Saddam in the nose. “You don’t play fair, Saddy. I told my Daddy I’d beat you but you don’t play fair.” George was jumping up and down and throwing checkers at Saddam. The men in white moved in and grabbed him and hauled him off.
Saddam wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned to me. “That little bugger is nuts.”
“Well,” I said consolingly, “it was a good redouble. He should never have doubled you.”
“He hasn’t a clue, has he?”
I shook my head sadly. “Runs in the family, I suppose.”
The chimed in. “What’s the cube?”
Saddam intoned gravely, “The cube is Truth, Grasshopper.”
I pulled The away, politely saying goodnight to Saddam.
“If he gets started on that, he’ll go on and on and on. He likes to pretend he’s Fidel Castro sometimes.”
“Who is he anyway?”
“Well, rumor has it that he used to be an accountant. Looks like one, little guy like that. Lost all his money, his home, his wife, his kids, the dog, the cat, and the Volkswagen playing backgammon in back alley games in Chicago.”
“Hmph,” The hmphed, wrinkling her nose. “That’ll never happen to me.”
They all say that, I thought, surveying the game room full of people to whom such things never ever happened.
“Well, The,” I said as we sat down at a very nice oak bar board, “are you ready for the next lesson?”
“Whaddya think I’m doing here, for Pete’s sake? Get it on, old man.”
I may not be young and pretty anymore, but I can still think and feel and fantasize and … never mind, I digress. I must discuss this with Elizabeth later. Or Miranda. She owes me. Umm. Yes. Well. Never mind, never mind.
“Alright, The,” I said calmly. I think I heard Hitler snicker nearby. “We’ll work on setting up the board.” The board in front of us had all its checkers borne off.
“No probs,” The said brightly, and proceeded to lay out the board in a matter of seconds. Then she sat up, threw her shoulders back, and said, “See? I’m a quick learner.”
“Who taught you that?”
“That big guy, Guido. He showed me all you gotta do is set up half, then mirror the other half in the other color. Neat guy. And big, too.”
Pigs in Albania, indeed!
I took a deep calming breath and went on. “Alright, The, that’s very good. It took George three weeks to get that almost right.”
“George is a wuss.”
“We humor him. Now, then, you’ve watched lot of games. What do you think the point of the game is? In the simplest terms you can muster.” The usual answer I got was something general about winning points and being sportsmanlike. But The was not the usual student.
She stood up and in a deep muscular voice she boomed out, “To crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women.”
Hitler and Bonaparte stood up and applauded politely. Stalin’s moustache twitched. George W., now in restraints in the corner, jumped up and down, wildly shouting “Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby. Bombs away, bombs away!” Arnold Schwarznegger, in a high squeaky voice, said, “That’s my line, that’s my line.” He and George got valium right away.
The bowed to the room and sat down.
“Very good, The. You might have glossed over some minor intricacies, but we’ll get to them later.” Minor stuff like primes, holding games, races, backgames, strategy, tactics, checker play, yada yada yada.
“Alright then. Perhaps we should move on to opening moves.”
The grinned. “Yeah, baby.”
“Or dice.”
“Yeah, baby.” She stopped grinning. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that’s them things with little dots on ‘em, right? Bouncy bouncy clickety clack?”
“Yes, The.”
“What do I gotta know about them? Huh? What for?” She was squirming in her chair.
“It’s okay, The, everyone uses them.” Suddenly I realized what her difficulty was. “And the dots won’t jump off and crawl under your skin.”
“Yeah? You sure? You really sure?”
“Oh yes. All the dots have been superglued to the dice and fastened securely with little tiny nails.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Not to worry.”
She settled down. Well, pretty much anyway. After a little while her feet stopped kicking the table and we got on with it.
“Okay. We always use two dice. Just two.”
“Yes. That one and that one.” She touched each one.
“Well, yes, but it can be any two.”
“There’s so many.” Her eyes started darting all around the room. “How do you choose? How do you choose?”
“The!” I said sternly, getting her attention. I was getting seasick watching her eyes. Not quite as pretty as Elizabeth’s eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Any two.”
“Okay. Okay. Two will do.”
I heard Conan the Barbarian, a couple of tables away, giggling.
“We’ll just use these two. Watch.” I rolled out a 6 and 1. “How would you move that?”
She moved one checker seven pips, threw her shoulders back, and smiled.
“Maybe you could not do that thing with your shoulders so much. Reminds me of someone I’d like to know.”
“Okay.” She relaxed. “It’s about that Hurley dame, isn’t it?”
“Never mind. Put the checker back. Right. Now how else can you move?”
“Else? It’s seven. What is this else crap?” The beginning of a snarl showed on her lips.
“You moof a six und den a vun vit vun of der udder checkers.” Hitler said over my shoulder.
“Thank you, Adolf,” I said. “But it would be better if she figured it out herself rather than have you dictate to her.”
He got all huffy then. “Vell, Mr. Knight person, I am a dictator!” he huffed, and stomped off. Stalin laughed himself silly across the room.
The leaned forward and whispered, “You have some very strange friends.”
“Yes, and just think, soon they’ll be your friends, too.”
She thought about that for half an hour, then said “Oh. Yeah. Never mind. So I can move a six and then a one with another checker if I want.”
“Right. And you can even move them to the same point.” I made her bar point for her.
“Oh. Oh. Of course. This is very deep,” she whispered. “Do the others know about this?”
“Most of them.”
“Except George?”
“Except George.”
She spent the next hour rolling dice and moving checkers. She was actually quite good at it.
“Okay. I’m good at that now. What’s next? And when’s Guido coming back with the pigs?”
I muttered something obscene under my breath, smiled at her, and said, “Guido will have another mission right away, something about the Himalayas, I believe. Secret agent stuff and all that.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. Then she brightened. “Okay, I guess I’m stuck with you.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You’re welcome. Really. I have a doctorate from MIT in manners.”
I mumbled my thanks to the universe.
“Let’s move on, shall we, The?”
“Yeah. Cool.”
I pulled out a diagram I had made for her.
“Isn’t that cute?” she almost gushed. “Little numbers. Awww.”
“That’s how we tell where things go. See.” I picked up a white checker from the 24 and moved it to the 18. “I moved 24 18. Six pips.”
She squirmed a little. “This is higher math, right? I don’t do math so good.”
“I’m sorry. You said you had an advanced degree in physics.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. But that’s just physics. This is backgammon.”
I understood perfectly. “Don’t worry. You’ll catch on. Do you remember relativity from your physics courses?”
“Of course I do. You think I’m stupid or sumtin?”
“Not a bit.” Over in the corner Einstein’s hair perked up and he ambled over to us. “Just remember, the numbers are relative to the player. These are white’s numbers. Black’s would be just the opposite.”
“Zat brings up a pertinent point from my paper, On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.”
The gushed, “Ooooh, I read that, Doctor Einstein. Wonderful. I especially liked the part about making hash brownies.”
They beamed at each other for a moment. It could have gone on all night, the beaming.
“Albert,” I finally said, “I have business with The. You can trade recipes later.”
“Yes, of course. Charming little girl. Good night, dear,” he said to her and walked away.
“He can call you ‘Dear’ and I can’t? Hardly seems fair,” I grumped.
She sighed. “But he’s such a doll with that Don King hair.” As an afterthought, very definitely an afterthought she said, “But you’re cute too.”
Yes, well, Miranda didn’t call me God for nothing. I wondered how many times she would call me that on this night. The record was twelve. Hmmm. But I digress.
“Alright, here’s the last little bit for tonight. Some of the points have names.”
“Oh okay. I want to call that one Steve, and that one Mick, and that one – “
“No. No. No.”
The Empress Josephine leaned over from the next table and said, “You call them anything you want, honey. You don’t have to take any grief from… from… men!” She was swept away by gales of laughter and two burly orderlies.
“She’s not been right since Waterloo,” I said.
“That’s the little girls room down the hall?”
“Whatever. Pay attention. See the 18 and the 7? Those are called the bar points.”
“Bar points? What’s that mean? Can I get a drink?”
“It’s because they’re next to this long thing in the middle, which is called the bar. Don’t ask about that yet. I have a headache.”
“Poor baby.”
“This and this, the 5 and 20, they’re called the golden points. Well, the 20 is the golden point.”
“Doesn’t look like gold. Same color as the others.” She licked her finger and rubbed at the paint. “Nope. No gold there.”
“It’s because they’re valuable in play.”
“I’ll give you a dollar for one.”
Yes you will, I thought, looking ahead to the long years to come. Yes you will. Many dollars. Many many dollars. Hey, a guy’s gotta make a living. And Miranda liked expensive trinkets. And chocolate. You have no idea how hard it is to come by chocolate in The Asylum.
“And these,” I said, indicating the 12 and 13, “are the midpoints. Yours, and mine.”
“Because they’re in the middle.”
“Good. Now go to your room and memorize all that. Next time we’ll look at opening moves, and different kinds of games. Maybe.”
“When do I get to the money?”
“Sooner than you want to.” I paused. “Dear.”
She tried to give me a withering look, but I pretended she was really Elizabeth Hurley showing me that delightful sneer she’s mastered. Then she stomped out of the room.
George wandered over, looking for a game. Saddam had gone to bed.
“God wants me to play this game,” he said.
Usually I could resist, but I had my eye on a very nice chocolate backgammon set from Switzerland, for Miranda. How could I not play a nice prep school rich boy whose brain was half fried and whose mission in life was to prove how macho he was. And of course he has happily stoned on the valium he’d been given earlier.
“Okay, George, but I get to start with triple threes this time, okay?”
“Sure enough. Say, what religion are you?”
“A Backgammonite. Shall we say ten dollars a point?”
————————————————————————
In Which The Learns to Run and Bounce,
and Guido Learns He Has a Pig Problem
My match with George W. went swimmingly well. In addition to letting me open games with any double I wished, he took every cube I gave him. Perhaps it wasn’t all his fault, as he conferred several times over a small radio with someone named Karl. George claimed it was a Secret Service matter. Whatever. I think it was one of the Iraqi waiters who worked the dining room. Obviously the advice Karl provided was wrong. At the end of the session I owned three counties in Texas, including George’s ranch, and the $800,000 he made off that insider stock sale at Harken Energy. Not a bad night’s take.
Unfortunately I didn’t get the frog farm.
“I ain’t a-giving that up. I got real fond memories from when I was a boy. Why, the whole family used to sit around on a summer night and watch me stuff firecrackers in them frogs and blow ‘em up. We all had a great laugh over that.”
It’s true, too. I looked it up in his dossier. Miranda sneaked it out of the office for me after I gave her the chocolate backgammon set for her birthday. Budding sociopath, someone had written on the file .
“Takes all kinds to screw up the world,” I said to Miranda, between gasps.
She gasped. “Oh god!”
George wouldn’t play me for a while after that. Told me he wanted to play froggies with Saddam.
Fortunately The came back a couple of nights later.
“Where have you been, The? We’ve missed you,” I said, knowing full well where she’d been. Guido had come back with the two pigs from Albania and he was bumbling around The Asylum with silly smiles on his faces.
“You ain’t gonna believe it, Knightie.”
“Please don’t call me that. Sir or Mister will be fine.”
She sneered endearingly. “Yeah. Right. Anyway, that guy I talk to everyday-”
“Dr. Takesbaddoubles?”
“Chuck’s a doctor?” Perplexity was not her best emotion, though she had considerable practice with it.
“Yes. Sometimes. Please continue.” Such innocence. Such ignorance. I wondered if she had a trust fund.
“Yeah, okay, Sir Knightie. So Dr. T, he sees about my doctorate in physics from M.I.T. and asks if I’d help him out with an experiment.”
“Ah, yes. The Experiment. Let me guess. They clamped a couple of small pads on the side of your head, told you to bite on something-”
“Peppermint flavored.”
“Or wintergreen. Then they asked you to concentrate and count back from ten.”
“I got as far as nine.” She grinned and threw her shoulders back.
“They gave you a lollipop.”
Her face went blank for a minute.
“I don’t remember.”
“Surely you remember Guido?”
She smiled. Nothing shy or maidenly about it. Was he twice the man I was?
“Never mind,” I said. “Are you ready for some more backgammon?”
“You betcha, buddy.”
“You, ah, you do remember what you learned before?” George had lost an entire year in 1972-1973 after one of his experiments with the doctor. Even his military unit couldn’t find him. Not that he noticed.
“Of course. But I can’t remember the damn lollipop.”
“No one does, dear, no one does. Set up the board and we shall get on with it.”
The set up the board in quick time. I noticed that she was wearing a rather loose, low cut blouse, which clued me immediately that she meant business and was beginning to understand the game at its deepest, most fundamental level. But I was not without profound intellectual resources of my own, and resolved to look only at the board and into her eyes.
“Today,” I said, staring right into her eyes, “we’ll discuss the different types of games one can play.”
“Hey,” she said, sitting bolt upright, “I wanna discuss backgammon. You said you’d teach me backgammon, Knightie.”
“Don’t call me that! And I’m talking about themes within backgammon, so don’t get your blouse… I mean your brain in a tizzy.”
She leaned forward. “I don’t understand.” The sly look in her eyes and secretive little smile told me she understood perfectly about the blouse.
“That is the first step on the road to wisdom.” I gazed at the board.
“Okay. Whatever. Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“All weird and wisdomy.”
For a moment I flashed back to my adventures pursuing the secrets of backgammon through the Far East, the Himalayas, the dust bowls of the Middle East, the mighty Pyramids themselves, and the foulest alleys of New York City.
“I was a Tibetan wise man for seven years.”
“What’s Tibetan?”
“Never mind. It paid poorly. Can you focus now?”
“Sure.” Then she waved to someone across the room. “Hi Guido, hi!” I turned to stare at him and he slunk out of the room. Traitorous soul.
“The?”
“Ain’t he sweet? Both of him?”
“No. He owes me a pig. Pay attention.”
“Okay. Themes. Go for it, Knightie.”
I breathed a quiet “Oy,” and went on.
“Fundamentals. You understand the object of the game, correct?”
She stood up and began to intone: “Crush your enemies…”
“No, no, not that.”
She sat down, leaned forward. “Oh, you mean about getting my little guys around and off the board before you get your little guy off.” She smiled.
“Save the innuendo for Guido. But yes. And in the process there are different things that might happen, or be made to happen.”
“Okay. Like?”
“Broadly speaking, there are racing games, holding games, priming games, and attacking games.”
The bounced up and down in her chair. “I like holding and attacking. Or sometimes the other way around.” She was quite the bouncer. Two Republican politicians, family men both, they claimed, threw their necks out watching her… bounce.
“Backgammon, The, backgammon.”
She settled. “Yessir, sir.” Nonetheless, she did wave slyly to Snow White in the corner. Ms. White was looking quite out of sorts.
“Let’s talk the simplest game, the racing game. Or running game.”
“I bet you could lose a lot of weight running a mile a day carrying your backgammon board.”
“Yes you could.” Not being a religious man I could not ask the supernatural for patience nor the dark forces for plagues and pestilence, so I took a deep breath and plunged ahead.
“Assume a position like this. Stop that. On the board.” I moved the back men for both sides up to the midpoint.
“Jeez, four six fives in a row. That kind of sucks. Don’t you have to cheat to do that?”
“No. It happened to me several years ago, when Michael Crane was just starting out as a tournament director, on a small nameless island in the vicinity of Scapa Flow. Mid January it was, a horrendous gale blowing for four days. Fortunately, the inn was well stocked and the barmaids…”
“Knightie?”
“Yes, what, sorry?”
“The game.” She smiled and leaned forward. Visions of bouncing barmaids danced in my head.
“Yes. Well. Of course. The six-fives are just for illustration purposes, you understand. Do you see how the game from this point would simply be a matter of dice? Given equal skill, the player with the better dice wins.”
“So, where can I buy some really really good dice?”
“No, The. I’m talking about better rolls.”
“We had some good ones at breakfast, eh? Especially the cinnamon ones.”
I sighed. She sat up and threw her shoulders back.
“Bigger numbers,” I said. “Bigger numbers on the dice.”
“Oh, okay. Lemme look at this.”
She spent five minutes staring at the board. I could see her lips moving as she thought about the position.
“Okay, Knightie, I got it. There’s hardly any contact here so we’re just racing for home.”
“Racing game.”
“Got it.”
“So,” I said, “when there is little contact possible, or none, the game is just a race.”
“Got it.”
At that moment Snow White raced across the room towards us, mumbling, and stopped at our table.
“Knightie, I’ve lost my dwarves, I’ve lost my dwarves.” She was quite upset.
“Did you tell her to call me that?” I said to The.
She grinned. I grimaced.
“Where did you leave the dwarves, Snow?”
“Right on the computer, where they always are.”
“Ah, right, let’s go see.” I excused myself and led Snow back to her computer, which had indeed locked up and gone blank. I rebooted the machine and reloaded the Seven Dwarves backgammon program. It had been written especially to placate the more paranoid among us, and was programmed to cheat, blatantly, broadly, unabashedly.
Snow smiled, gave me a little peck on the cheek, and as I turned to leave she said, “The Dwarves don’t cheat, you know. I have proof.”
“Very good, Snow, very good.”
Back at the table, The said, “Even I know the stupid program cheats. Why do these people insist that it doesn’t?”
“Well, The, you may have noticed that The Asylum is not a hotbed of critical thinking.”
“I don’t know about that. Some of you guys are pretty critical.”
“Oh, you mean the art critics and theater critics and suchlike. They have their own wing. They’re much too disruptive and arrogant.”
“Well, no, I meant you guys, in here. Some of your brains are in pretty critical shape.”
“And you’re here because you have a doctorate in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago?”
“From MIT. Yes, I do.” She bounced up and down. “I can tell you all about the physics of bouncing these.”
“Listen, The, just don’t do that when George is around. He won’t understand.”
“Gotcha.” She winked.
“Okay, now, back to the running game. If you want to play that game, you understand that you have to move the men accordingly.”
“Like play an opening six three all the way out to the fifteen instead of to the eighteen and ten?”
“Yes. And so on. Of course a racing game can start at any point in the course of a game. Some other strategy will fail perhaps, but you may be able switch to a running game.”
“And eventually it all becomes a race. Vroom vroom.” She gestured with her hand, running it round and round like a car on a race course. Like those really boring American auto races.
“Ain’t that kind of boring?”
“American car races. Oh, certainly.”
“Yeah, that too, but I mean backgammon.”
“Usually. It’s all dice. Minimal skill, strategy, trickery, deceit.”
“Yeah. None of the good stuff.”
Jesse Owen stopped at the table. “I heard that. It’s not true. Racing is exciting. I ran a great race in the 1936 Olympics. I did. I did. I did.”
I patted him on the head. “Very true, Jesse. I was there.”
Hitler chimed in from the next table. “He vasn’t dere, dat little Owen person. It vas a big black guy. I haf to shoot all my runners after he beat them.”
Our Jesse was a midget with a gimpy leg and big dreams. Played a hell of a backgame though. He limped off with Hitler, the pair arguing about the recent height restrictions in America, where the President declared that only Christians and people who were white and over five foot eight inches tall could be citizens. “I was with the CIA, for god’s sake,” Jesse said loudly.
“I know, little man, I know. Come, ve’ll haf some schnapps and play some Backgammon. I can tell you that Bush league stuff nefer verks in der long run.”
The gazed quietly at them walking out the door. “Isn’t that sweet? Mutt and Jeff.”
“Sweet? The little guy is the most vicious player here.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sour grapes. I heard he whomped you bad, Knightie. In The Asylum Finals last year.”
“Lucky dice, that’s all. You want to play or not?”
“Can’t, Knightie. Got a game to play with Guido. I’m holding and he’s attacking.”
She bounced out of the game room.
“Yeah,” I called after her, “you tell that two-faced mug that the Albanian is coming for his pigs. You tell him that!”
She waved ta-ta casually over her shoulder.
Oh, well, Miranda was coming back from a three-day leave on the mainland, wherever that was. In the meantime Marilyn Monroe breathed that she’d play me, but just for points.
What the hell, why not? So what if Marilyn’s a cross dresser from Iceland? She looks good. Or he looks good. Plays a mean game too. And that’s what counts around here.
————————————————————————
In Which Civil War Breaks Out, Conspiracies Hatch, Dresses are Discussed, Relationships Are Rocked, and The Begins to Lose Her Cubinity
With Mookie
Institut pour des joueurs de jacquet de Deranged
Marilyn Monroe whomped me good. Fortunately she, or he, decided that money wasn’t her object.
At the end of the match she said, “Knightie, I’m not going to take your money. I know that Miranda dame is expensive.”
“Very kind of you, Marilyn. Thank you for the match.” I got up to leave but he waved me back into my chair.
“But there is something you can do to work off your debt.” She smiled. Looked like the real thing.
“Oh, now Marilyn, I just don’t go that way.”
“Stop it. I’ll blush. No, silly, I want you to get me something, something that only you can manage.” That smile, those eyes, convinced me that I could do anything. Well, almost anything.
I tried to be discreet about heaving a sigh of relief. She patted me on the knee. “Don’t sigh like that. It’s not good for your lungs.”
“Okay, what do you need?”
“A dress.”
“Well, no problem. You can mail order anything you want, you know.”
“No, no, no. A special dress. A particular dress.”
“Oh, no, not the Monica dress! The blue job?”
Her brow furrowed. I ached to smooth it. (What on earth was I thinking?) “Monica? Who is Monica?”
“Oh. Never mind. What dress do you want?”
She leaned forward and breathlessly whispered, “The birthday dress. The dress the real Marilyn wore when she sang Happy Birthday to John F. Kennedy.”
“Oh. Oh!! That dress!!” I remembered it. A skintight sheath, neck to ankles, looked like it was painted on.
“Yes. The one that was sewn on.”
“I remember it well. Madison Square Garden. May 1962. That was a great night.”
His eyes went wide and she inhaled in surprise. “You were there?”
“Oh yes. I was on the trail of a major backgammon smuggling ring. They had connections high into the government.”
“Really?!”
“Yes. Marilyn was working with me. I think they were the ones responsible for her death.”
“Backgammoners? Involved in chicanery?” she breathlessed.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“Oh my, yes.”
“However,” I said, “the dress.”
“Oh dear, can you get it for me?”
I knew the garment had been auctioned for an unconscionable price, over a million dollars, in 1999 at Christies, but beyond that I had no idea and I told Marilyn so.
“But with all your contacts, your CIA background, your KGB connections, you must know someone.”
She was really quite wistful and lovely. She had finally found a way to eliminate the problem she had been having with her five o’clock shadow. Quite the replicant he was.
“I’ll see what I can do. I know a KGB shopkeeper in the Himalayas who might know someone.”
“Oh thank you, Knightie, thank you.”
“It will take a while.”
She just smiled. “Good things are worth waiting for, Knightie.” She slinkily breathed her way across the room to play a few goodnight games with Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter.
A couple of days later Miranda returned. A good thing well worth waiting for. She sneaked into my room that night and we found other things worth waiting for, but not too long.
After, she said, “Are you working on The Asylum Grand Tournament yet?”
“I’m trying,” I said, exasperation creeping into my voice.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
“I love it when you call me babe.”
“How about when I call you God?”
“Oh yeah…”
Later, we continued.
“It’s George,” I said.
“The pinhead?”
“No, the crazy one.”
“Oh. Bush.”
“Yes. All this blathering he’s doing about war has everyone upset. No one can make any sense of it. He keeps talking about invading the South Wing if they don’t stop playing chess over there. Says chess is a threat to the whole world. He rants and raves day and night since you’ve been gone.”
“Does he still blow up frogs with firecrackers?”
“No. He’s graduated to blowing up women and children.”
Saddam had wandered into George’s room by mistake and discovered magazine cutouts of women and children pasted onto the walls and crude drawings of explosions on top of the photos. “Who’s the real nutcase?” was his only comment.
Miranda said, “What can we do? His daddy pays a lot of money to keep him here. We can’t just treat him like a normal person.”
I sat up in the bed and scrunched back against the headboard. All my brain cells were madly firing. Miranda put her head in my lap.
Later, when I got my breath back, I had a solution.
Miranda breathed in my ear.
“Stop that a minute. No, no, just for a minute. Listen, I’ve got an idea.”
“Can I pout first?”
“No. Pout later. Let’s give George a box of backgammon chequers, tell him they’re chess bombs and will destroy any chess set or chess player they land near.”
“What good will that do?”
“Then,” I grinned, “we send him into the South Wing by himself.”
“Oh, Knightie, he’ll never go for that. He runs like a scared bunny when he hears a loud noise.”
“Ah,” I said. I had a plan. “I have a plan.”
“What?”
“Appeal to his macho cowboy persona. Challenge his manhood.”
“Hmmm. The nurses tell me there isn’t much there.”
“Not that.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean his psycho manhood.”
“Yes, love. And let him know that if he doesn’t take up the challenge we’ll let the world know that he deserted from the military back in 1972.”
“Carrot and stick.”
“Yes. Most definitely.”
“But Knightie, what’s to be gained from all this?”
Imagine, I told her, George marching into the South Wing flinging chequers at all the chess players, shouting his jingoistic anti-chess insanity. Imagine the chess players getting really riled. Imagine the row that results. Imagine George getting pummeled thoroughly. Imagine that shutting him up. Imagine him in a nice quiet padded room for about a year. Imagine peace in The Asylum, the way it used to be before George got here.
Miranda sighed. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
“We can only hope.”
The next evening I was puzzling over a particularly difficult cube problem when The came in and plopped down in the chair across from me. She wore pre-torn bluejeans and a baggy sweater. No bouncing tonight. She crossed her arms and frowned.
“Good evening, The.”
“No it’s not. And leave me alone.”
Women! “No problem, dear.”
She grimaced, then sat silently for several minutes.
“Guido broke up with me,” she finally grumped.
“So that’s what all that noise coming from his room was about.”
“Oh, jeez, you could hear that?”
I raised my eyebrows and waved my hand around the room at the others.
“Oh, jeez,” she said, “everybody could hear that? Oh jeez.” She leaned forward confidentially. “You won’t tell my mother, will you? Please don’t tell her.”
“The, I don’t even know who your mother is or where she lives.”
She leaned back smugly. “Ha! I knew that!”
“No, you didn’t. What happened?”
“He’s two-faced.”
“Well, yes, he is. What’s the problem?” It was a genetic abnormality, his faces.
“Well. He wanted another girl at the same time so both his faces could be kissing and stuff.”
“Oh.” That didn’t really sound like such a bad thing. “Why, that’s terrible, The.”
“Yeah. I’m not going to be part of a mangy tree.”
“We certainly can’t have that.” It was, of course, rude to be amused at her suffering, but I just couldn’t help it. Fortunately she seemed not to notice.
“It’s not funny, you know,” she said. “Get up off the floor and stop laughing.”
After a few minutes I managed to get back in my chair and dry my eyes.
“Perhaps we should play some backgammon,” I offered.
“No. I want you to talk to Guido.”
“Excuse me?” My old pappy told me the most dangerous thing in the world was to get involved in arguments between a man and a woman, no matter how many faces they had. (Okay, my pappy was a bounder and a cad and a lousy backgammon player, but he knew people and he played a mean chess game. Really. He always beat me in chess but would never help me learn. But he’s dead now. I never did beat him. The rotter.)
“Please, Knightie. Pleeeeease.” She batted her eyes, smiled winsomely, bounced a little. All the signs of a genuine psychotic. I don’t know how they allowed her in here.
Then from all corners of the game room came the cry, “Pleeeeeease Knightie.”
I knew none of them would play me for more than toothpicks if I didn’t at least try to get the three of them back together. I lifted my arms in surrender and set off to find The’s erstwhile lover, the bifaced Guido.
I searched several wings of the Asylum with no luck. Then, hearing a commotion, I trotted over to the Go wing, arriving just in time to see Guido racing out the door, his pockets overflowing with white and black Go pieces. He Hanseled and Greteled wildly down the hall, grinning madly at me as he raced past. I glanced at the mob starting to pour out from the doorway and decided the better part of valor involved serious cowardice and fast running. Guido detoured to the Chess wing, flung the remaining Go pieces into their ward and ran off. I followed him to his room, where he sat on his bed, doubled up laughing.
“G, what was that about?”
After a few moments he regained enough composure to talk out of one mouth. “Civil war. Chess. Go.” A burst of maniacal laughter.
“G, stop that. Maniacal laughter is my schtick.”
He stopped on both sides. “Oh, yeah, boss, sorry about that. I got carried away.” He started to snicker.
“The came to see me.”
He got serious right away. “She’s mad at me, huh?”
“Very hurt, Guido, very hurt.” Then I played him. “She told me to ask you for the Albanian’s phone number.”
“The pig farmer?” He sat right up, serious surprise crossing both faces. “The pig farmer? She wants to date the pig farmer? How could she do this to me?”
“Well, you broke up with her.”
“The pig farmer?”
“What shall I tell her?” I was of course gambling that the blow to his pride would bring him to his senses. While I may have my little fantasies about The, I couldn’t bring myself to interfere in her happiness. Besides, I still didn’t know if she had a trust fund.
“Jeez, don’t tell her nothing, boss. I was just trying to make her
a little jealous.”
“But why?”
“She was playing with George and I didn’t like the way he looked at her.”
“But George is married?”
“Oh, yeah, and he’s compassionate too,” he sneered.
“Well, don’t you worry about George. He and Tony will be moving into adjoining cells soon enough.”
“Cells? Down in the basement?”
“Mum’s the word, G, mum’s the word. I’ll deny everything.”
“Oh good, boss, a conspiracy.”
“And by the way, would you like to provide security for The Asylum’s Grand Tournament this year?”
Both of him giggled at the thought.
I left him happily contemplating the twists and turns of Asylum politics and went to find The.
She was sitting in the game room at a very nice Naylor board, idly twiddling a cube. I sat down across from her and began to arrange the chequers for a game.
“Well?” she demanded.
“You’re very demanding,” I said.
“I demand to know what happened.”
“See what I mean?”
“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” A tear made its way down her face.
“Alright, calm down, The.” She really was quite upset. Somewhat disconcerting. “Guido will talk to you. They were upset that you played with George.”
“But George is married,” she said, perplexed. “And really repulsive. Guido are so much better looking.”
“Yes, true.”
“So Guido doesn’t really want to do a mangy tree?”
“No. He said that just to get back at you for playing with George.”
“George is sick. No, really, I mean he’s a very sick man.”
I patted her arm. “We know. We know. How about we play a little backgammon?”
She wiped away the tear and smiled. Almost as dazzling as Marilyn. “Okay, but what do I do with this?” She held up the cube.
“Ah,” I said. Then I smiled knowingly. Cryptically, even. “Ah, the cube.” Perhaps it was too early to introduce the cube. Perhaps not. Cube Master Iki Picasso said, “Never cube too early the introduction, nor too late meeting novice under full moon with picnic basket and twin butterfly.”
Of course I didn’t tell The about Master Picasso. His sayings would only confuse her at this stage in her development. I took the cube from her lovely hand and looked into her eyes. Fortunately she wasn’t wearing the low cut blouse. Thus began her introduction to The Cube.
In Which George and Tony Get A Life, The Approaches the Cube, and Knightie Realizes a Mistake and Collapses
With Scooter
Institut pour des joueurs de jacquet de Deranged
Unfortunately The and I were unable to continue our initial cube discussion. A major disturbance erupted when the Bridge players attacked the Poker room in an attempt to retrieve their cards, stolen by the Poker players three nights before. The Backgammonites, whose allegiances split between the two groups, were drawn in. A great row ensued and a good time was had by all.
Several nights later I entered the game room and was met by a loud cheer and shouts of congratulations. In short order I was hoisted on the shoulders of several people and carried about the room to the sounds of huzzahs and merriment. After ten or fifteen minutes of raucous behavior, the crowd deposited me on a dais in the corner and handed me a microphone.
After a few moments of cheering they hushed.
“Thank you, thank you, fellow Backgammonites,” I began. Knowing that the attention span of this crowd could be measured in seconds, I wanted to keep the speech brief. “Once again The Asylum is safe for ordinary, decent, honest mental degenerates. We had nothing to lose but our George and Tony, and thank God we finally lost them.” More cheers. “Now let the backgammon begin.”
Merlin the Magician, who doubled as The Asylum’s audio-video wizard, whispered in my ear.
“Ah, yes. I forgot. We have cake! For everyone!” A large layer cake, almost two meters tall, stood in the middle of the room. I strode over to it and was just about to plunge in a very large plastic knife when the top flew off and out leaped Miranda, wearing… very… little. She did me proud (but that was later).
After half an hour of eating cake and commenting on Miranda’s attributes, the crowd dispersed to the backgammon tables. Miranda whispered to me, “Good plan, Knightie, good plan!” She was wearing Shalimar. My knees got all wobbly for a second or two. “See you later, babe,” she said. She patted my nether region and swiveled across the room.
My plan to give George a bunch of magic chequers he could use to bomb the Chess players had worked marvelously. He ran into their wing, flinging chequers left and right, screaming about heathens playing Terror Chess and how God told him, over cornflakes in the White House, to bomb all things Chess in the entire Asylum.
Naturally the chequers, the finest Crisloid could produce, didn’t explode. The Chess players rose up and pummeled George mercilessly, then rampaged over to Tony’s room and grabbed him up too, because the Chess players, great analysts that they are, suspected a grand conspiracy of stupidity. The crowd stripped off the men’s clothes and tossed both of them, naked, out a second story window.
Staff later found the two men on a pile of rocks, baying at the full moon. Each man received a new strait jacket and a private room in the basement. Adjoining, of course. Tony coos at George, and George swears at Bill Clinton, claiming everything was his fault and that he, George the Second, was only doing what God and Rummy told him to do.
George’s Daddy tried to buy his son’s way out, but Daddy was himself locked in a wing full of evangelizing atheists who had been stripped of their American citizenship because they refused to accept John Ashcroft as their One True God.
Cruelest of all, George, Tony, and Daddy had their backgammon privileges suspended indefinitely.
Now that I had put paid to George’s and Tony’s axis of evil, The Asylum became a much quieter, more peaceful place. Boring, almost, but that was a condition that could not long obtain. In the meantime, backgammon continued, as did The’s lessons. I had promised her, before George had tried to take over The Asylum, to discuss the doubling cube with her.
“Well. Well. Let’s get to it. Let’s get to it,” she said this evening. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and tight jeans. I figured my mental abilities would be okay as long as she didn’t stand up.
“Why are you saying everything twice?”
“You said we’d be doubling tonight. You said-”
I put up a hand to stop her. “Got it. Got it. I meant that you would learn something about the doubling cube tonight.”
“That’s that thing with the numbers on it,” she said, picking it up and turning it round and round.
“Yes, precisely. The Cube.”
“Yeah, the thing you guys are always having some kind of mystical organism over.”
“Organism?”
“Yeah, yeah, like when you’re in bed and–”
“Never mind, never mind.”
“You did it twice!” she said, grinning.
I considered arranging for an exorcism to be performed on her organism. However…
“Alright, The. Can we possibly get serious? Just for a minute or two?”
She shrugged, almost as well as Miranda. “Okay, Knightie. Listen, you don’t want me to call you sir, do you?”
“This,” I said, taking it firmly from her hand, “is the cube.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll be good for a while.”
“Hmmmph. Now, with your degree in nuclear physics from M.I.T., you must have noticed the numbers on the cube increase in a geometric procession, from two to sixty four, right?”
“University of Chicago, actually. Yes. Two, four, eight, sixteen. Yada yada.”
“Good. Very acute.”
“I am, aren’t I?” she said, primping.
I think I groaned, but it may have only been an inward groan. Perhaps it was gas.
“Yes, dear. Now then, you’ve seen people use the cube here. What do you think they’re doing?”
“Aggravating the hell out of each other?”
“Besides that?”
“They’re messing with the score somehow?”
“Good. I appreciate your use of precise technical terminology.”
She smiled coyly and started to take off her sweatshirt.
“Please don’t do that.”
“Then be nice.”
More gas.
“Okay, here’s the nitty gritty. When you think you’ve got a good advantage, you offer the cube to your opponent, doubling the stakes.”
“I’m a vegetarian. But yeah, okay.”
“So now if he takes the cube, you’re playing the game for twice as much.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole magilla?” She got up to go. “Gotta go see Guido about an organism.”
“No that is not it, and Guido left earlier on a mission.”
She sat down heavily. “Aw, geez, where’d you send him this time?”
“Siberia.”
“No, really. Where’d you send him?”
“Really. Siberia. Some backgammonites were only recently released from what’s left of the Gulag. They have some interesting documents on KGB suppression of arcane backgammon lore during the Soviet Union’s heyday. It’s quite interesting. You see…”
She held up a hand. Nicely manicured, but I didn’t care for the blue nail polish.
“Nope, don’t tell me. I’ll just fall asleep. When is Guido coming back?”
“I don’t know exactly. Couple of weeks maybe.”
She sat silently for several minutes. I did not want to imagine what was going through her mind. A nice Kevlar suit might be in order, I thought. Perhaps Miranda could get me one on her next trip off island. Perhaps tailored in Hong Kong. Dark blue, with a fine pinstripe. Double thickness.
“Okay. Get on with it, Knightie. Sir.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Neither one of his faces said a word.”
“Well, you may want to speak harshly to them when they return.”
She clapped her hands. “Oh, good idea,” she said smiling. “Because then we can make up after!”
“Yes. Hmmpph. Can we do this?” I said, holding up the cube.
“Full charge ahead, matey. Damn the speed. Up the torpedoes.”
“I suppose you have a doctorate in American History, too?”
“Louisiana State. I’m smart, Knightie, I’m smart.”
“Okay. So, now you’ve given your opponent the cube.”
“You mean I just hand my weapon to my enemy? Hardly makes sense. Can I hmmmph now?”
“Certainly.”
“Hmmmph.”
“Ready?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Not only have you handed the weapon to the enemy, he gets to keep it, and only he can use it next.”
“You mean I’m without a double from then on?”
“Unless he gives it back to you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he thinks he’s better than you.”
“Bah. I’ll see that he doesn’t make that mistake again!” She made a charming little fist and held it up in my face.
I patted her hand and pushed it away gently. “Perhaps some valium…”
She grinned.
“I meant his position on the board has improved to the point where he feels he has a good advantage over your position.”
“Did I tell you about this position that Guido and I found?”
“Please don’t.”
She cocked her head and winked at me. “Okay, but I told Miranda already.”
I had a feeling I was about to be surprised, or ambushed, on my next rendezvous with Miranda. Actually an exciting thought. There was that time outside The Asylum wall… well, never mind.
“The cube?” she said.
If ever there was a wench in the works…
“Okay, so he redoubles you. Now you’re at four times the original stake, you own the cube, and only you can double next.”
She pondered that for a few minutes.
“When you’re done pondering…” I said.
“Okay. I got it. Whoever owns it is the only one who can double.”
“Right. Except at the start of the game, when the cube is in the middle.”
“Well, suppose I just grab it at the start.”
“Well, that’s not how it’s done, The.”
“Oh, pish. I can beat anybody here with one hand tied behind my back.”
“Of course you can, The. Nobody doubts that.” I had in mind a Cyclopean bargain, since she stood barely a meter and a half and weighed maybe five stone.
“Hey, I read the Odyssey. None of that Noman stuff, okay? I’m a kung-fu double black mocha belt. Beat anybody here.”
“I believe you, The.” I almost did. Well, maybe more than almost. I’d seen bruises on Guido. “Okay. The rule is that you can’t just grab the cube when the game starts. Unless you want to double after the first move.” Alice in Wonderland had wandered over and was watching us. “Hello, Al,” I said. He nodded.
“But who would do that?”
“That’s a little advanced for you right now.”
Alice chimed in. “Oh, listen sweetie, don’t pay any attention to him. I always take six impossible cubes before breakfast every morning.” He stopped, then counted on his fingers. “Actually that’s thirty-six separate cube faces, but the permutations, the permutations.” He sighed and wandered away, muttering something about the Queen and practicing a little Queen wave as he walked.
Joe Stalin snickered as Alice walked by him. “The, you want it, you take it, you hear me. You play with capitalist pig, you got to play rough.” He lit his pipe and twinkled at me.
I nodded and tried not to roll my eyes about in my head. That always made me dizzy.
The said, “See. From an expert, no less.”
“Perhaps you’d care to take lessons from him?”
“Hmmm. When did you say Guido would be back?”
“The!”
“Kidding!”
I wasn’t so sure. “Alright, a little bit more cube lore.”
“Lore away.”
I placed a red chequer on The’s six point and a black chequer on my one point. “If red is on roll, would he double? Would black take?”
She looked at it for several minutes, finally looking up at me and shrugging helplessly.
“Are you alright? You’re not speaking.”
“I’m shrugging helplessly. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
“Sorry. Okay, there are twenty-seven combinations on the dice that take the red chequer off the board, and nine that take the black one off. Seventy-five percent for red and twenty-five percent for black. Very important.”
“Umm, so? And how do you know that? And what’s the point?”
I suddenly realized that there was a gaping hole in The’s backgammon education. We had never talked about the probabilities of a dice roll. I rolled my eyes at my stupidity and had to lie down until the dizzy spell passed.
“Sir, sir, what’s wrong?” I heard The saying. I think there was a genuine note of concern in her voice.
Then I heard Ziggy Freud’s voice close to my ear. “Ztop dis nonsense. Remember your position.”
The said, “Hey, I tried to talk to him about positions, but he don’t wanna listen. Is he alright?”
Ziggy slapped me. “You’re disgracing your class! Get up. I vant to know vhat you are dreamink.”
Stalin picked him up and carried him away, muttering about capitalist nightmares. Ziggy said to him, “Joe, Joseph, vhat did your mudder do to you?”
When I was finally upright in the chair again, I told The that I had sorely neglected an aspect of her education.
“Oh, don’t worry, I got a book.”
“Oh. Excellent. Who did you get? Magriel? Robertie?”
“Don’t know those guys. No, I got Comfort.”
I dug in my memory, but could not recall an expert named Comfort. I shrugged helplessly.
“Oh, Knightie, you know, The Joy of Sex. Jeez, sir.”
“Wrong aspect, The. I meant a backgammon aspect.”
“Jellied backgammon? I don’t understand.”
I explained that I hadn’t instructed her in the probabilities of dice rolls.
She thought a moment.
“Well,” she said, “what’s the probability Guido gets back before I play with Stalin?”
I shrugged helplessly. “How many points?”
“Two,” she said, throwing her shoulders back and once more looking remarkably like the love of my fantasy life, Liz Hurley.
“Oy,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll talk probability.”
[Here endeth the series…]
The Grumpy Writer 