The race car came down on Community Chest, between St. James Place and Tennessee Avenue, three houses on each, and Sarah set her wine down on the oak before she said anything. “Okay. I want to make sure I’m following. Four laps, and you have never once paid anybody rent?”
“Right, so, the car likes Community Chest.” Marcus opened his hands over the board as if the board had done this to him. “The digits are the digits. I just read them out.”
Elena’s pencil moved down the legal pad. “Forty moves. Eighteen on squares nobody can own. Zero on a property with a house on it.” She set the pencil down.
The variant had been Elena’s idea, after Marcus’s dice came up doubles four turns running in July and were impounded by the bank. Each player chose an irrational number in secret. The player on your left chose how many digits deep you started, and every turn you read off your next digit and drove that many squares. A zero meant you sat. Elena had typed the rules on an index card. The last line said that a run of digits from deep enough inside any irrational number was indistinguishable from a ten-sided die, and Sarah had read it twice, decided it was probably true, and gone back to lobbying for the Scottie dog.
Sarah read her digits off her phone, Elena hers off a printout folded into the pad. Marcus announced his and moved. His first digit had been a zero. He had sat out the opening turn like a man who’d heard the joke already.
The dining room held the light the way it always did on game night, the amber pendant pooling on the quarter-sawn oak so the board sat in a circle of gold and the rest of the table went to honey and shadow. Sarah had found the table at an estate sale and spent a winter stripping it down to the ray fleck, and she knew its grain by heart. Outside the circle sat the banker’s tray of pastel cash and a bowl of cashews nobody had touched since the oranges sold. The Scottie dog sat on Park Place under Sarah’s second hotel. The top hat stood on Pacific, the first of Elena’s greens, four houses to a lot. And across the board waited the hotel on Marvin Gardens, which Marcus had built with two hundred dollars left while Sarah asked him, twice, whether he had thought about rent.
By eleven the cashews were gone, and so was any sense that the car would ever stop. From Community Chest it drew a five and landed on Chance, between Kentucky and Indiana. A three to the B. & O., one square past Illinois. A four home to Marvin Gardens. A six, over Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania Avenue, to the Short Line. A six again, over Park Place, the luxury tax, and Boardwalk, both of Sarah’s hotels, two hundred dollars for passing Go, and down on Mediterranean Avenue, the cheapest dirt in the game. An eight to Connecticut, a zero to sit there, a four to States. A nine, over all three of Elena’s oranges, back to Chance.
“Wait.” Sarah took her glasses off. “I want to understand. Is the race car allergic to houses? Is that something I should have known before I built mine?”
“Totally fair question.” Marcus leaned in over the board. “And I think the answer is the car has a great relationship with the railroads.”
Elena put a number on the table. “Odds of forty-nine moves without touching a developed square: somewhere between one in ten thousand and one in a million, depending on when you start counting houses.” Her eyes stayed on the pad. “Your phone has been face-down since the zero.”
Sarah looked at the phone. A black rectangle on the green felt she still put out from habit, eleven years of thrown dice and nothing left to throw. It had been a black rectangle all night.
Marcus read his next digit. “Eight.”
From Chance, an eight cleared Indiana, Illinois, and his own yellows and landed on the corner. GO TO JAIL. He drove the car backward around the board to the cell, humming.
“You want to go to jail.”
“Love jail. Nobody charges rent in jail.” He paid his fifty and fanned his fingers at everything he had just been lifted over. “Your turn.”
Sarah’s five took the Scottie dog from Illinois to Marvin Gardens. She looked at the hotel, at the nine houses she would have to sell back at half price to pay for it, and said she was done. Elena did a subtraction and said the same.
Sarah had the bills in her hand, pinks and whites. She had a question ready too, the careful kind, and she set them all down. “You’re cheating.”
“Right, so, in my defense.” Marcus leaned in and then sat back without the rest of it. He left the phone where it was. “It’s pi.”
“Pi.”
“Three thousand digits. Flash cards on the train since July. I figured nobody would start me deeper than two thousand.” He opened his hands toward Elena. “And then you gave me seventeen twenty-nine, and I swear I heard you smile.”
“Seventeen twenty-nine is the smallest number that’s a sum of two cubes two different ways.” Elena already had pi on her phone. She counted in and read down the screen against the column on the pad. “Zero. Nine. Nine. Two. One. Nine.”
Sit. Connecticut. Tennessee. Free Parking. Kentucky. Go to jail. It matched, and it was going to match all the way down, so Elena set the phone on the pad and said the part she usually left to other people. “It was a ten-sided die from our two chairs. From his it was a timetable.”
Sarah looked at the hotel on Marvin Gardens, built with two hundred dollars left because nothing on the board could reach him, and picked up the index card.
“New rule. Next month you’re on a square root.”
“Of what?”
“You find out when you sit down in that chair.”
“I could do all of them over the weekend.”
“There are infinitely many,” Elena said.
The laugh got away from him then, and he put the phone in his pocket without ever having turned it over. “Deal. Somebody write that down.”
Elena already was.