The Dice Players

A player will take a train halfway across a continent,
go without sleep and suffer Asiatic winds through cracked windows
if only he can arrive just at sunset in the newly sprung up town
where on a certain crooked street there is an obscure doorway
that the hesitant gait and averted eyes of his brother gamblers
guide him to more surely than any street sign. Like foreign laborers
specially imported for a task almost impossible to explain

to people outside the industry, the player and his anonymous companions
guard a silence often mistaken for listlessness. Under banks of red lamps
and between velvet hangings he will proceed toward the back room
where his fate is translated into numbers. In the center of a dark glow
stirred by clacks and murmurs there occurs a falling away
of all that cannot be counted. They have a term -- "smoke" --
for what others might call "the rest of the world" and which for them

is simply what drifts off. Here are the precincts where out of blankness
a three or a seven starts up like a furious god. In twisting arcs
the dice tumble over themselves as if to imitate the convolutions
by which a world might be created. And he, who watches and counts,
is himself that world, transformed with each fresh random recombination
into a quantity unstable -- in the next instant it will be added to
or subtracted from -- but quivering in the intensity of its momentary life.

It would be dreadful to think, if there were time in the middle of this fever
to think, that no number has inherent value. Its worth is determined
only by what rolls out alongside it. A number merely plays at identity
or location or permanence, and its cleverest trick is to reverse its nature --
to become the one less rather than the one more -- before the dice
have even stopped spinning. The horror of the masquerade
is bliss to him who lost in play contemplates the bubble empires

that rise and fall within a minute. There is such beauty
in the abysses that open without warning, like a flute note breaking in
where a pause was expected. The player is so deep in his game
that the numbers have altogether disappeared. In place of numbers
there are clouds, shells, rings. On a white beach a perfect egg
waits for the beginning of time. He rolls and the penumbra of a planet
forces its way between spirals that resemble the spokes of bicycles

moving at high speed toward an empty yellowish splash
that might be the stretch of sand where he can hold up to the light
the unquantifiable trinkets. Here where there are no numbers anywhere --
blotches uncountable because they have no edges, colors radiating
endlessly from a center too remote to be measurable—the dice
will nevertheless continue to roll. It was for this that the wrist moved,
to reveal a pattern like cracked lava forms, striated and already eroding.

It will hardly matter to him that when light breaks through the windows --
the attendants having opened the curtains as a signal
that another night has ended—he will stand up from the table
with empty pockets and glide from among his companions,
nodding like one ghost to another. If he were to whisper that the only number
after all is zero, how could he be certain what language to say it in?
The only number is red. The only number is blue.




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