The Search for the Dice Man
The sequel to the cult classic The Dice Man, available in e-book format for the first time.The rules are down to you. The rules that stop you seducing your neighbour downstairs, that stop you hitting your boss, that stop you leaving your family and leaving the country. The rules that stop you living.The dice don’t do rules; the dice do life.Luke Rhinehart is a psychiatrist, a husband and a father, his life locked down by routine and order – until he picks up the dice. The dice govern his every decision and each throw takes him further into a world of risk, discovery and freedom. As the cult of the dice grows around him the old order fades: chance becomes his religion, the dice his god.If you haven’t lived the life of the dice, you haven’t lived at all. Let the dice decide. And roll with it.
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LUKE RHINEHART
THE SEARCH FOR THE DICE MAN
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith. London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Luke Rhinehart 1993
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006513919
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007322251 Version: 2014-09-05
Accident is the creator of life.
Charles Darwin
Life is at best a tenuous and hazardous enterprise, but mankind’s puny efforts to protect himself from its instability and randomness seem worse than futile. It appears the best course is simply chancing it.
Emerson
It is necessary to resign from the human race – with a forged signature, of course.
Luke
CONTENTS
You don’t know about me unless you’ve read a book by the name of The Dice Man, but no matter. That book was made by me and I told the truth, mainly. There were things which I stretched, but mainly I told the truth.
In my fashion.
The book was all about how I came to make all my decisions by casting dice, to convert and pervert my psychiatric patients into the dicelife, and to blow my previous life to smithereens.
Now the way that book winds up is in the middle of a sentence, with me dangling on a vine over a cliff. That was in the seventies.
This book you’re browsing through now doesn’t pick up the story then. It skips a bit – about twenty years. It’s mostly about my son Larry and his quest to locate me and give me a piece of his mind. He runs into a lot of my friends and followers and gets a little confused. He tells some of the story himself and I tell some, and to keep the intellectual reader awake, we’ve thrown in some excerpts from my journals. It’s a good read.
Luke Rhinehart
The man is an incorrigible liar. He and his followers are utterly untrustworthy.
Larry Rhinehart
I might never have gone on a quest for my father if it hadn’t been for an unexpectedly light rain in Iowa. I was long three hundred futures contracts of December wheat based on a forecast of torrential rains in the Midwest. I expected the heavy rains to ruin the harvest and raise the price of wheat. Unfortunately, the rains didn’t fall mainly in the plain. They fell primarily on Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit, where very little wheat is grown. The price of wheat plummeted the next day and I lost about two million dollars for my clients. My employer called me in for a chat. My clients phoned me for chats. My employees and colleagues avoided me. The only people who phoned or dropped by were people who wanted to shoot me.
I’d lost big money for my clients a few other times, but somehow having to explain that ‘I thought it was going to rain harder’ was the sort of explanation that incites rather than soothes. And it didn’t help matters that the rains that didn’t fall mainly in the plains hadn’t been my only recent miscalculation. For almost three months I’d been on what is charitably called a losing streak. If my indicators said corn and wheat were going up, corn and wheat immediately changed their minds and took a dive. If I took a long position in the stock market, some unexpected inflation report or mad Iraqi dictator would set stocks spiralling downwards.
For three years I’d been something of a trading hotshot – ever since at the tender age of twenty-five I’d accidentally made a name for myself. I happened to be short several stock market futures on that lovely day in October 1987 when the stock market dropped six hundred points. While all around me friends, colleagues and strangers stood shell-shocked at the monitors watching the value of their stock holdings nosedive, I stood beside them watching myself and my clients grow richer and trying desperately to repress giggles.
