The Diceman

`And I myself am not blind.'

'Ahh.'

`Batman over the telephone is not my idea of a joke.'

There was a silence.

`Your behavior has been undignified and unprofessional,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

Silence.

`You can read my report when it's done,' said Dr. Rhinehart finally.

Silence.

`Your report?' asked Dr. Cobblestone.

`I'm writing an article on the variety of human response to socially eccentric behavior.'

`Yes, yes, I see,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

`My hypothesis is-'

`No more, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.

`Pardon?'

`No more. You've just about convinced everyone, but Jake that you're splitting apart. He alone has faith'

`My hypothesis is-'

'No more. Your friends have protected you all they're going to. Either back into the old Luke Rhinehart or you're finished as a psychiatrist' Dr. Cobblestone arose solemnly.

`And if you wish to bring up your idea for some sort of new center to help our patients you must have it placed on the agenda before our meeting.'

`I understand,' said Dr. Rhinehart, also standing.

`No, more, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.

Dr. Rhinehart understood.

Chapter Thirty-six

I should have known when Lil sat me down on the armchair opposite her without even touching her champagne that there was trouble. As part of a one-in-six die decision I had been courting her anew with all the unselfish and romantic love I could imagine, and we'd been having a marvelous week. I'd climaxed four days of traditional courting (two plays, a concert, an evening of love on hashish) by suggesting that we end Love Lil Week by taking a three-day skiing holiday at a Canadian ski resort. I had bought her flowers at the airport and champagne for our first night. It had begun snowing thickly after we arrived and although the next day we both skied like untrained walruses, we soon made an art out of tumbling. The snow fell lightly and wetly in the afternoon and we removed our skis and made snowballs and wrestled and rolled and munched the snow more or less like a couple of aged dogs reliving their puppyhood, I a Saint Bernard and she a collie. She was pretty and bright-eyed and girlishly athletic, and I was handsome and affectionate and boyishly uncoordinated, and we enjoyed playing together again. We danced before a roaring fire and drank more champagne and played brilliant bridge against a couple from Boston and made sweet love under a foot-high mountain of blankets and slept the sleep of the just.

We did the same the next day and the next, and on our last evening, a little high on champagne and marijuana, we spent half an hour holding hands in front of the fire and another ten minutes sitting on our bed with the lights off staring out our window at the moonlight lighting in pale blue the slopes of snow which stretched away from the hotel. I'd opened yet another bottle of champagne and felt warm and complete and serene. The touch of Lil's hand seemed holy. But then Lil asked me to sit opposite her in the armchair and shook her head when I tried to hand her a glass of champagne, and I knew there was trouble.

After turning on the bedside lamp. I looked up at her and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She reached forward and took one of my hands and drew it to her face. Her lips touched my fingers delicately and she looked into my eyes. She smiled, slightly, lovingly, but with a tear running down one side of her face.

`Luke,' she said, and she paused for several seconds looking into my eyes. `What have you been acting so strangely for

so long now?'

'Ah Lil,' I began, `I'd like to tell you . . .' and I stopped.

`I know you aren't really unbalanced,' she went on. `It's some . . theory you're working on, isn't it?'

The warmth I'd been feeling froze, the lover solidified to stone. Sitting mute, hand being held, was a wary dice man.

`Please tell me,' she said. She was wetting her lips and squeezing my hand.

`Luke, we're together again. I feel so whole, so full of love for you, yet . . . I know that tomorrow, the next day, you

may change again. Everything that has made these last few days so sweet will disappear. And I don't know why: And I

won't know why.'

Maybe Lil could become the Dice Woman. It sounded like the name of a villainess on the Batman show but it offered me at the moment the only rationalization I could find for betraying the secret of my life and permitting me to hold Lil's happiness and love. I wavered. The band downstairs was playing a waltz. It wasn't too modern a ski resort..

`I…' I started. The dice man still fought.

`Tell me,' she said.

`I've been experimenting, Lil,' I began for a third time, `with practicing eccentric behavior, unusual roles, attitudes,

emotions - in order to discover the variety of human nature.'

I paused: wide-eyed she waited for what I was going to say. Narrow-eyed, so did I. I reached to my side and turned off the light again. Our faces, separated by only three feet, were still quite visible in the moonlight. `I didn't want to tell you until . . . I had learned whether the experiment had value: you might have rejected me, fought

the experiment, ended our love.'

`Oh no I wouldn't.'

`I knew a moment would come when I could tell you everything. Last week I decided to end the experiment for a

while so we could be together again.'

Her grip on my hand was frightening.

`I would have gone along,' she said. `I would have, sweetheart. Those asses think you're losing your mind. I would

have laughed at them if I knew. [Pause] Why? You should have told me.'

`I know that now. I knew that as soon as I freed myself 'from the experiment: I should have done it all with you. 'But..

Still staring, her eyes glittering in the moonlight, she seemed nervous, uncertain, curious. `What were the kind … kinds

of experiments?'

I was so pale and stonelike in the moonlight I imagine I looked like an abandoned statue.

`Oh, going to places I'd never seen before, pretending to be someone different from myself to see people's reactions.

Experimenting with food, fasting, drugs, even getting drunk that time was a conscious experiment.'

`Really?'

And she smiled, tears wetting her cheeks and chin, like a child in the rain.

`It proved that when I'm drunk I act like other people that are drunk.'

`Oh Luke, why didn't you tell me?'

'The mad scientist in me insisted that if I revealed to you that I was experimenting, your reaction would be

experimentally useless and a wealth of evidence would be missing.'

`And . . . and the experiment is . . . over?'

'No,' I answered. `No, Lil, it isn't. But now we'll begin . . . experimenting together, and the loneliness we've both felt

will end.'

`But…'

`What is it, honey?'

'Will our life like the last few days end too?'

A roar of laughter came from the assembled guests downstairs. `Sounds like they're having a good time,' I said.

`Will this end?' she asked again softly.

`Of course it will, honey,' I said, trying to dare look at her. `It would end whether I returned to experimenting or not,

you know that. The good things we've felt these last few days have come because they follow such hell. One doesn't

have to be a scientist to know that bliss doesn't last.'

She came forward heavily into my arms, sobbing.

`I want it to last. I want it to last,' she said.

I stroked her, kissed her, mumbled sweet nothings, felt numbly that I was handling the situation horribly, felt terrible.

A part of me imagined drawing Lit into even more radical dice deals than I could manage alone; perhaps I'd even

change her. Another part of me felt utterly abandoned by everyone.

She down-shifted from sobs to sniffles, then left me to trot to the bathroom. When she returned to her same spot on

the bed with her face and hair tidied up, I was surprised to see that she was looking at me coldly.

`Have you kept a written record of these experiments?' she asked.

`Of some. And I've written brief essays of analysis of various hypotheses I've been testing.'

`Have you experimented with me?'

`Of course I have, honey. Since it's me I experiment with, and me lives with you, you've been affected by many of the

experiments.'

`I mean have you directly experimented. .. tried to get me to do things?'

`I . .. no, no, I haven't' `Have you experimented with sex? With other women?'

Bingo! I hesitated.

My male friends, attention. There are some questions which demand any answer except hesitation. `Do you love me?' for example, is not a question; it is intended as a stimulus in the stimulus-response sequence `Do-you-love-me?-Oh #161;my precious yes.'

`Did you sleep with her?' demands a yes-or-no answer immediately: hedging implies guilt. `Have you experimented with other women?' demanded an immediate answer of `Yes, of course, honey, and it's made me closer to you than ever.'

This would bring tears, slaps, revilings, withdrawal and eventually, curiosity and reconciliation. Hesitation on 'the other

hand . . .

Hesitation brought Lil leaping to her feet.

`You Goddamn bastard,' she said.

`Don't touch me: `You don't even know what the experiments were.'

`I know your mind. I know . . . oh my God . . . I know … Arlene! You and Arlene!' She was rigid and trembling.

`Honey, honey, honey, you're blowing up about nothing. My experiments didn't include infidelity `I'll bet they didn't.

I'm no fool. I'm no fool,' she shouted and, sobbing, crumpled on to the couch.

`Oh. I'm such a fool,' she moaned, `such a fool.'

I went over and tried to comfort her. She ignored me. After another minute's crying she got up and went into the

bathroom. When I followed about two minutes later the door was hooked closed.

Now remember, my friends, I was still supposed to be playing the lover. For seven days I had been the lover, at one

with the role; now I was only artificially trying to go through the proper motions and emotions. The love was dead, but

the lover was commanded to live on.

I knocked and called and finally received a `Go away'; unoriginal but, I fear, sincere. My impulse was to do just that,

but my mind warned me that real lovers never leave their beloved in such cases except to blow out their brains or to

get drunk. Considering the alternatives I threw my shoulder against the door twice and broke in.

Lil was sitting on the edge of the tub with a pair of scissors in her hand; she looked up at me dully when I stumbled in.

A quick scrutiny indicated she had not slashed anything.

`What are you doing?' I asked.

`I thought I'd mend your pants, if you don't mind.'

Beside her, prosaically enough, was, in fact, some thread and the pants I'd ripped down the backside on the slopes that

afternoon.

`Mend my pants?'

`You have your experiments and I have … [she almost started crying again] my art projects. Pants and .. . I'm being

pathetic and maudlin.'

She placed the pants on the rim of the tub and turned on the water in the sink and began scrubbing her face. When

she'd finished, she brushed her teeth. I stood in the doorway, trying to marshal my creative faculties to tell a talc tale.

'Lil, an hour ago we had something which we can and will have again. But you've got to know all about my

experiments or-'

She looked up at me foaming at the mouth, toothbrush in hand.

'I'll listen to it all, Luke, to every scientific word but not now. Just not now.'

`You may not want to listen, but I must tell you. This hour is too important, our love is too-'

'Crap!'

`Important to let a night go by with this rock between us.'

`I'm going to bed,' she said as she left the bathroom and began to undress.

`Then go, but listen.'

She threw off her clothes on to her dresser, got into a nightgown and went to bed. She pulled the covers up so that only the top of her head was showing and turned her back to me. I began lumbering back and forth at the foot of the bed. I was trying to prepare a speech. I wanted to document my series of harmless; faithful-husband experiments but was floundering in the sea of harmful, faithless-husband facts. I didn't know what to do.

I knew door-slamming only postponed the ultimate confrontation and further soothing necessitated my saying something, an act I wished to avoid for a decade or two. Moreover, modest spiritual caresses would leave her free to continue thinking, and thinking, when you are guilty of something (and what man dare cast the first stone?), is dangerous sad must be stopped. Such soothing would also encourage her to consider herself the guiltless sad abused party, a truth best left unconsidered.

I paced like a starving rat back and forth at the foot of the bed, staring at the food I wanted (Lil) and at the electric grid which would make the eating painful (Lil). Irritably I threw back the covers. Her nightgown was twisted tightly around her and pulled almost to the knees. My blood, seeing that delicious, plump, helpless rear, sent representatives racing with the news to the capillaries of my penis.

I retrieved the scissors from the floor and with stealth and delicacy snipped the heavier material at the neck of her nightgown and with a swift yank tore it from top to bottom. Lil twisted upwards screaming and clawing.

The further details, while perhaps of anthropological value, would read something like the dry documentation of some invasion of a Japanese Pacific island during the Second World War: circling movements; advance of right thigh to position `V'; repulse of fingernail attack on left flank; main artillery piece to attack position; main artillery piece forced to withdraw when caught in classic pincers movement by two enemy ranks, etc.

Forced carnal knowledge, whatever else it may be, is good physical exercise and represents meaningful variation on normal marital relations. As pleasure, however, it has its Limitations. For myself, I was so distracted that night by scratches, bites and screams, and by wondering whether one could be arrested for violating one's wife (was pinching a felony or a misdemeanor?), that I must warn male readers that although desirable as tactic, as pleasure might better employ a quiet night alone with pornography.

The next morning my ears, neck, shoulders and back looked as if I'd spent the night wrestling with thirty-three kittens in a briar patch crisscrossed with barbed wire during a hailstorm. I was bloody and Lil was unbowed. But though she was cold and distant, she listened to my long, scientific report during the bus ride and plane flight back to New York and although she seemed unimpressed with my claims of innocence with Arlene, a part of her believed the rest. I told her nothing about my use of the dice, keeping it all a matter of some vague, temporary psychological testing having to do with responses to eccentric patterns. How much of her believed me isn't clear, but her majority self announced unequivocally that if I did not cease my experiments - whatever they might be - and cease them forthwith, she and the children would leave me forever.

`No, more, Luke,' she said as I left for work the first day back in Manhattan. `No more. From now on you're normal,

eccentric, boring Dr. Rhinehart, or I'm done.'

`Yes, dear,' I said (the die had fallen a two), and left.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Dr. Rhinehart should have known when Mrs. Ecstein summoned him to her living room couch that Wednesday that

there was trouble. They hadn't met in her apartment since she had begun therapy with him. After letting him in she

seated herself sedately on the couch, folded her hands and looked the floor. Her mannish gray suit, her glasses and her

hair tied back severely in a bun, made her look strikingly like a door-to-door purveyor of Baptist religious tracts.

`I'm going to have a baby,' she said quietly.

Dr. Rhinehart sat down at the opposite end of the couch, leaned back and mechanically crossed his legs. He looked

blankly at the wall opposite him, on which hung an ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria.

`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said.

'This is now the second straight month I've missed my period.'

'I'm happy.'

`I asked the Die what I should name it and gave it thirty-six options and the Die named it Edgar.'

`Edgar.'

`Edgar Ecstein.'

They sat there quietly not looking at each other.

`I gave ten chances to Lucius but the dice chose Edgar.'

'Ahh.'

Silence.

`What if it's a girl?'

Dr. Rhinehart asked after a while.

`Edgarina: `Edgarina Ecstein.'

Silence.

`Are you happy about it, Arlene?'

`Yes.'

Silence.

`It hasn't been decided yet who the father is,' Mrs. Ecstein said.

`You don't know who the father is?' asked Dr. Rhinehart, sitting up.

`Oh I know,' she said and turned smiling to Dr. Rhinehart.

`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling

automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.

`But, I haven't let the dice decide who I should say is the father.'

`I see.'

`I thought I'd give you two chances out of three of being the father.'

Ahh.

`Jake, of course, will get one chance in six.'

`Uhhuh.'

`And I thought I'd let "someone you don't know" have one chance in six.'

Silence.

`The dice will decide then who you tell Jake is the father?'

`Yes.'

'What about abortion? You're only in the second month, did you let the dice consider abortion?'

`Of, of course,' she said again smiling. `I gave abortion one chance in two hundred and sixteen.'

Ahh.

`The dice said no.'

Mm.'

Silence.

`So in seven months you're going to have a baby.'

`Yes I am. Isn't it wonderful?'

'I'm happy for you,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`And after I find out who the father is I'll have to let the dice decide whether I should leave Jake to be true to the

father.'

`Uhh.'

`And then let the dice decide whether I'm to have more children.'

`Um, 'But before that they'll have to tell me whether I should tell Lil I'm having a baby.'

Ahh.

`And whether I should tell Lil who the father is.'

'Uh.'

`It's all so wonderfully exciting.'

Silence.

Dr. Rhinehart took from his suit-jacket pocket a die and after rubbing it between his hands dropped it on the couch between himself and Mrs. Ecstein. It was a two. Dr. Rhinehart sighed.

`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Unfortunately for normal old Luke Rhinehart and his friends and admirers, the dice kept rolling and rolling, June turned out to be National Role-Playing Month and a bit too much. I was ordered to consult the Die regularly about varying the person I was from hour to hour, or day to day or week to week. I was expected to expand my role playing, perhaps even to test the limits of the malleability of the human soul.

Could there exist a Totally Random Man? Could a single human so develop his capabilities that he might vary his soul from hour to hour at whim? Might a man be an infinitely multiple personality? Or rather, like the universe according to some theorists, a steadily expanding multiple personality, one only to be contracted at death? And then, even then, who knows? At dawn of the second day I gave the dice six optional persons, one of whom I would try to be during the whole day. I was trying to create only simple, non socially upsetting options. The six were: Molly Bloom, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller, Jake Ecstein, a child of seven and the old pre-diceman Dr. Lucius Rhinehart.

The dice first chose Freud, but by the end of the day I had come to feel that being Sigmund Freud must have been something of a bore. I was aware of many unconscious sources of motivation where I usually overlooked them, but having seen them I didn't feel I had gained too much. I tried to examine my unconscious resistances to being Freud and uncovered the sort of thing Jake was good at in analysis: rivalry with the Father, fear of unconscious aggression being revealed: but I didn't find my insights convincing, or rather I didn't find them relevant. I might have an `oral personality' but this knowledge didn't help me change myself as much as did a single flip of the die.

On the other hand, when I read of a man who killed himself by slashing his wrists I immediately noted the sexual symbolism of the cutting of the limbs. I began thinking of other modes of suicide: throwing oneself into the sea; putting a pistol in one's mouth and pulling the trigger; crawling into an oven and turning on the gas; throwing oneself under a train All seemed to have obvious sexual symbolism and be necessarily connected with the psychosexual development of the patient. I created the excellent aphorism: Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured.

The next day I scratched Freud from my list, replaced him with a `slightly psychotic, aggressively anti-Establishment hippie' and cast a die: it chose Jake Ecstein.

Jake I could do very well. He was a real part of me and his superficial mannerisms and speech patterns I could easily imitate. I wrote half an article for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology analyzing the dice man concept from an orthodox Jakeian point of view and felt marvelous. During my analytic hour with Jake I entered so completely into his way of thinking that at the end he announced that we had covered more ground in this one session than in our previous two and a half months together. In a later article he wrote about my analysis `The Case of the Six-Sided Man' - (Jake's reputation will be eternal on the basis of his titles alone), he discussed this analytical hour in detail and attributes its success to the accidental discovery of a rarely read article by Ferenczi which he stumbled upon the night before lying open to a key page under his bathroom sink and which gave him the key `which began to unlock the door to the six-sided cube.'

He was ecstatic.

The dice rolled on and rolled me from role to roll to role in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope of dramatic play. Life became like a series of bit parts in a bad movie, with no script, no director, and with actresses and actors who didn't know their lines or their roles. I did most of my role playing away from people who knew me, for reasons which are obvious.

I can remember only vaguely what I did and said in those days; images are clearer than dialogues: I as Oboko the Zen master sitting mostly mute and smiling while a young graduate student tries to question me about psychoanalysis and the meaning of life: I as a child of seven riding a bicycle through Central Park, staring at the ducks in the pond, sitting cross legged to watch an old Negro fishing, buying bubble gum and ballooning out a big one, racing another cyclist on my bike and crashing and scratching my knee and crying, much to the bewilderment of the passersby: 240-pound crybabies being a rarity.

Despite all my efforts to limit my expanding personalities to strangers and to maintain a certain amount of normality ground my friends and colleagues, I always gave the Die at least an outside chance to undo me, and the Die, being God, couldn't long resist.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Once upon a time Dr. Rhinehart dreamt he was a bumblebee, a bumblebee buzzing and flitting around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't believe he was Dr. Rhinehart. Suddenly he felt that he had awakened, and he was old Luke Rhinehart lying in bed beside the beautiful woman Lil. But he didn't know if he was Dr. Rhinehart who had dreamt he was playing the role of a bumblebee, or a bumblebee dreaming he was Dr. Rhinehart. He didn't know, and his head was buzzing. After several minutes he shrugged: `Perhaps I'm actually Hubert Humphrey dreaming I'm a bumblebee dreaming of being Dr. Rhinehart.'

He paused for several more seconds and then rolled over and snuggled up to his wife.

`In any case,' he said to himself, `in this dream of being Dr. Rhinehart I'm glad I'm in bed with a woman and not a bumblebee.'

Chapter Forty

Dr. Abraham Krum, the German-American researcher, had in just five years astounded the psychiatric world with three complex sets of experiments, each of which proved something unique. He began by being the first man in world history able experimentally to induce psychosis in chickens, a creature previously considered of too low intelligence to achieve psychosis. Secondly, he .had managed to isolate the chemical agent (moratycemate) which caused or was associated with the psychosis, thus being the first man to prove conclusively that chemical change could be isolated as a crucial variable in the psychosis of chickens. Thirdly, he discovered an antidote (amoratycemate) which completely cured ninety-three percent of the chickens of their psychosis in just three days of treatment, thus becoming the first man in world history to cure a psychosis exclusively by chemical means.

There was considerable speculation about the Nobel Prize. His current work on schizophrenia in pigeons was followed, like stock market reports by large numbers of people in the psychiatric world. The drug amoratycemate was being experimentally administered to psychotic patients at several mental hospitals in Germany and the United States with interesting results. (Side effects involving blood clots and colitis had not yet been conclusively confirmed, nor had they been eliminated.) Dr. Krum was to be the guest of honor at a party given by Dr. Mann for his friends and certain luminaries of the New York psychiatric world. It was to be a major occasion, with the president of PANY (Dr. Joseph Weinburger), the director of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and two or three other extremely big deals whom I can never remember. The dice, imps of the perverse, ordered that I vary my person every ten minutes or so throughout the evening among six roles: a gentle Jesus, an honest dice man, an uninhibited sex maniac, a mute moron, a bullshit artist and a Leftist agitator.

I had created the options under the influence of marijuana, which I had smoked for half an hour as the result of an option created under the influence of alcohol, which I had drunk because the dice - ad infinitum. My dicelife was getting out of control and the party for Dr. Krum was the climax. Dr. Mann's apartment manages to resemble both a funeral home and a museum. His servant, Mr. Thornton, a cadaver, opened the door that evening with all the warmth of a mechanical skeleton, removed Lil's coat, ignored her plunging neckline, said, `Good evening, Dr. Rhinehart,' as if Dr. Mann had just died, and led us down the hall - filled with portraits of famous psychiatrists - and into the living room.

Whenever I entered the room I was always surprised to find living people there. Jake was against a wall of bookcases in one corner talking with Miss Reingold (there to take notes for Jake), Professor Boggles (there because my dice had said to invite him and his dice had said to accept) and a couple of other, men, presumably world-famous psychiatrists. On an immense oriental couch in front of a Victorian fireplace sat Arlene, Dr. Felloni (who nodded her head rapidly at my appearance) and an elderly woman, presumably somebody's mother. Arlene was dressed as briefly as Lil and with a slightly more spectacular effect: her two luscious breasts made it look as if lovely white balloons had been stuffed into her dress from above but threatened to float out at any moment. In easy chairs opposite the couch were an elderly, retired big deal I vaguely knew, a chubby woman, presumably 'somebody's wife and a small man with a tiny pointed beard, slump-shouldered yet intense: the Dr. Krum I knew from photographs.

Dr. Mann greeted us wineglass in hand, his face slightly flushed with glory, worry and booze, and led us toward the women and Dr. Krum. I shook the tiny die in a specially built watchcase in my pocket, eased it out and glanced at the result to discover which of the six roles I was now to play for ten minutes or so.

`Dr. Krum, I'd like you to meet a former student and colleague of mine, Dr. Lucius Rhinehart,' said Dr. Mann. `Luke, this is Dr. Krum.'

`Dr. Rhinehart, a pleasure, a pleasure. Your work I have not read but Dr. Mann says highly of you.'

Dr. Krum shook hands with short emphatic stabs and bared his teeth in an exaggerated grimace as he looked confidently up into my face, looming nearly a foot above him.

`Dr. Krum, I'm speechless. I never hoped to meet a man who'd done such work in my own lifetime. I'm deeply, deeply honored.'

`It's nothing, nothing. In a few years, then I will show you my dear, delighted, delighted.'

He bowed slightly to, Lil and clicked his heels as he shook her hand with two quick pumps. He looked up at her and then at me with a pleased, flushed face.

`Such lovely ladies this evening, lovely ladies. I regret verking with chickens.'

He laughed.

`Dr. Krum, your loss is the world's gain.'

As I said this, Lil glanced briefly at me, raised her eyes ceiling-ward and turned to talk to Jake, who had edged to the outskirts of our group. Arlene was sunk into the couch smiling up at me and I smiled broadly back at her.

`You're terrific, Arlene, you really are. You look sexier every time I see you.'

She flushed prettily.

`Who are you tonight?' she asked nonchalantly, sitting up a bit straighter and inflating her balloons.

`Just terrific, Arlene, you really are. I don't understand, Dr. Krum, these women, why they try to distract us when we

want to talk about your work.'

Dr. Krum, an elderly has-been named Latterly and I were all looking with dazed grins at Arlene until I turned to Dr.

Krum and said: `Your ability to isolate variables amazes me.'

`My verk, my verk.'

He turned to me, shrugged his shoulders and stroked his tiny beard. 'I'm verking now with pigeons.'

`The whole world knows,' I said.

`Knows what?' asked Jake, joining us with a Scotch for me and some purple something for Dr. Krum.

`Dr. Krum, I trust you know my colleague, Dr. Ecstein.'

`Of course, of course, the accidental breakthrough. Ve met.'

`Jake is probably the finest theoretical analyst practicing in the United States today.'

`Yoah,' said Jake without expression. `What were you talking about?'

`Dr. Krum has moved to pigeons and the whole world knows.'

`Oh yeah. How's it going, Krum?'

`Good, good. We haven't induced schizophrenia complete yet, but the pigeons are nervous.'

He laughed again, a quick ratatat-tat hehheh-heh.

`Have you tried injecting 'em with that chicken stuff - that psychotic stuff - you discovered?' Jake asked.

`Oh no. No. It has no effect on pigeons.'

`What methods of inducing schizophrenia in your subjects have you tried after the failure of your cubical maze?'

I asked.

`Presently ve teach homing pigeons to find home. Then ve move pigeon long vay avay and move the home. Pigeon

gets very vorried.'

`What problems have you encountered?'

I asked.

`Ve lose pigeons.'

Jake laughed, but when I glanced at him he cut it short and squinted nervously at me. Dr. Krum stroked his beard,

focused his eyes intently on my knees and went on.

'We lose pigeons. It is nothing. Ve have many pigeons, but chickens could not fly. Pigeons are smart but ve may have

to remove their vings,' he frowned.

Dr. Mann joined us, glass in hand, Jake asked a question and I removed my watchcase and glanced at the single die for

a second role. The tall, gaunt Mr. Thornton arrived, dispensing tiny hors d'oeuvres, crackers with minute pearl-like deposits on them like fish eggs waiting to be fertilized. Each of my three colleagues mechanically took one, Jake downing his in a swallow, Dr. Mann briefly holding his under his nose and then chewing it for the next ten minutes and Dr. Krum taking an intense experimental bite, like a chicken pecking at seed.

`Dr. Rhinehart?'

Mr. Thornton asked, holding the silver tray and its obscene deposits up toward my chest where I could see it.

`Ununununun,' I vibrated noisily, my lower lip hanging sloppily and my eyes attempting an animal vacancy. With my

huge right paw I swept up and clutched six or seven crackers, almost upsetting the tray, and stuffed them into my

mouth, pieces falling in a splendid dry waterfall down my shirtfront to the floor.

A flicker of human surprise crossed for a millisecond the erased face of Mr. Thornton as he looked into my vacant

gaze and watched me chew ineptly, a bit of moist semi-chewed cracker dangling briefly from my lip before falling

forever to the deep brown rug below.

`Unununun,' I vibrated again.

'Thank you, sir,' said Mr. Thornton and turned to the ladies.

Dr. Krum was emphatically stabbing the air in front of Dr. Mann's stomach as if performing some magic rite before

making an incision.

`Proof! Proof! They do not know the meaning of the verd. They raise money with bribes, they are bankers, barbarians,

businessmen, beasts, they-'

`Shit, who cares?' interrupted Jake. `If they want to get rich and famous, let 'em. We're doing the real work.'

He squinted at me; or was it a wink? `That is true. That is true. Scientists like us and businessmen like them have

nutting in common.'

'un unun,' I said, looking at Dr. Krum, my mouth half open like a fish gasping wide-eyed on the deck of a ship. Dr.

Krum looked up at me seriously and respectfully and then stroked his beard three, four times.

`There are two classes of men: the creators and the - how you say - drudges. Is possible to tell immejetly creators.

Immejetly, drudges.'

`Ununununun.'

`I do not know your verk, Dr. Rhinehart, but from the moment you speak to me, I know, I know.'

`Unnh.'

`Dr. Rhinehart has the brains all right,' Dr. Mann said. `But he's got a writing block. He prefers to play games. He

expects every article to surpass Freud.'

`He ought, he ought. Is good to surpass Freud.'

`Luke's got a book in the works about sadism,' said Jake, `which may make Stekel and Reich read like Grandma

Moses.'

It was a wink.

They all three looked up expectantly at me. I continued to stare vacant-eyed, mouth agape, at Dr. Krum. There was a

silence.

`Yes, yes. Is interesting, sadism,' Dr. Krum said, and his face twitched.

`Unnnnnnnh,' I vibrated, but steadier.

Jake and Dr. Krum looked at me hopefully while Dr. Mann took a graceful sip of his wine.

`You have been verking lung on sadism?'

I stared back at him.

Dr. Mann suddenly excused himself and went to greet three more arrivals at the party, and Arlene took Jake's arm and

whispered something in his ear. He turned reluctantly to talk to her. Dr. Krum was still looking at me. I was only half

conscious of the conversation; I was focused on the crumb in his beard.

`Unununun,' I said. It was a little like a faulty transformer.

`Vunderful - I thought myself of experimenting with sadism in chickens, but is rare. Is rare.'

Dr. Mann returned with two other people, a man and a woman, and introduced them to us. One was Fred Boyd, a

young psychologist from Harvard I knew and liked, and the other was his date, a plump, pleasant blonde with a cream-

smooth complexion - a Miss Welish. She reached out her hand when she was introduced to me, and when I failed to

grasp it, she blushed.

Looking at her I said: `Ununununun.'

She blushed again.

`Hi, Luke, how's it going?' asked Fred Boyd. I turned to him blankly.

`How did Herder do with his grant application to Stonewall?' Dr. Mann asked Fred.

Not so good,' Fred answered. `They wrote that their funds are tied up this year and '

`Is that the Dr. Krum?' a voice asked at my elbow.

I looked down at Miss Welish and then over at Dr. Krum. The crumb was still in his beard, although better hidden

now.

'Blnnh,' I asked.

'Fred thinks so too,' Miss Welish said and she turned us aside from the other conversation. `He says one reason he

admires you is that you don't stand for any nonsense.'

Impulsively I lifted one great paw and dangled it loosely over her shoulder. She was wearing a silver, high-necked dress and the shimmering scales were rough against my wrist. `I beg your pardon,' she said, and when she backed away my paw slid down over a breast and swung briefly like a

pendulum at my side.

She blushed and glanced quickly at the three men talking nearby.

`Fred says that Dr. Krum is very good at what he does, but that what he does isn't really important. What do you think?

'

`Unn,' I said loudly and stamped one giant foot.

`Oh me too. I don't like animal experimenters myself. I've been doing social work in Staten Island now for two years

and there's so much to be done with people.'

She looked now over at the couch where Dr. Felloni, the elderly lady and the thin old big deal were talking: Miss

Welish seemed to be relaxing in my company.

`Even here, in this very room, there are people whose lives are unfulfilled, people who need help.'

I was silent, but a bit of drool escaped from my lower lip and begun its pilgrimage down my shirt front.

`Unless we can learn to relate to each other,' Miss Welish went on, `to be aware of each other, all the chicken cures in

the world won't help.'

I was staring at Arlene's balloons undulating in the light of the chandelier. A small orgasm of saliva spilled again from my lower lip. `What fascinates me about you psychiatrists is the way you hold yourselves in, remain detached. Don't you ever feel

the suffering you have to deal with?'

Miss Welish turned toward me again and grimaced at the sight of my tie and shirt front.

I began groping clumsily in my pocket for my watchcase with the die.

`Don't you feel the suffering?' Miss Welish repeated.

Pulling out the watchcase I let my head twitch three times sideways and grunted a single, 'Un.'

`Oh God, you men are so hard.'

I slowly raised my lower jaw; it ached from its drooped position. Running my tongue over my dry upper lip, I used

my handkerchief to wipe the saliva from my chest and turned my ryes full on Miss Welish.

`What time is it?' she asked.

`Time for us to stop playing word games and get down to business,' I said.

`I think so too. I can't stand cocktail-party chatter,' she looked pleased that we were at last going to be above it all.

`What's underneath that lovely dress?'

`You like it? Fred bought it for me at Ohrbach's. Don't you like the way it - glimmers?'

She gave the upper part of her body a little shake: her dress shimmered and her chubby arms vibrated.

`You're built, baby - Look, what's your first name?'

'Joya. It's corny, but I like it.'

`Joya. It's a beautiful name. You're beautiful. Your skin is incredibly smooth and creamy. I'd love to run my tongue

over it.'

I reached my hand up and caressed her cheek and then the back of her neck. She reddened again.

`I was born with it, I guess. My mother has a lovely complexion and Dad too. In fact, Dad-'

`Are your thighs and your belly and your breasts that same creamy white color?'

`Well. .. I guess they are. Except when I get a tan.'

`I'd love to be able to run my hands over your whole body.'

`It's nice. When I put suntan lotion on, it feels so smooth.'

I lowered my lids a little and tried to look sexy.

'You've stopped drooling,' she said.

'Look, Joya, this cocktail-party chatter is giving me a headache, Can't we go someplace for a few minutes where we

can be alone?'

I edged her away toward a hallway, which I knew led to Dr. Mann's office.

`Oh talk talk talk. It gets so sickening after a while.'

`Let me show you Dr. Mann's office. He has some fascinating illustrated books on primitive sexual practices.'

'No pictures of chickens?' and she laughed happily at herself, and I laughed too. Dr. Felloni nodded her head at us as

we passed the couch, and Jake squinted over an Important Person's shoulder as we passed behind the Krum group and

Arlene jiggled her breasts slightly and smiled and we were down the hall and into Dr. Mann's office. I heard a shrill

squeak when we entered and saw then that Dr. Boggles and Miss Reingold were seated on the floor with a pair of

green dice between them, and Boggles, with two-thirds of his clothes removed, was just reaching triumphantly to

remove Miss Reingold's (smiling triumphantly) blouse.

As we backed out, Miss Welish said: `Oh that's disgusting. In Dr. Mann's study! That's disgusting.'

`You're right, Joya, let's go to the bathroom.'

`The bathroom?'

'It's down this way.'

`What are you talking about?'

`A place to talk privately.'

`Oh.'

She had stopped in the middle of the hall now and her hands were both clenching her drink.

`No,' she said. `I want to get back to the party.'

`Joya, all I want to do is use your beautiful body. It won't take long.'

`What will we talk about?'

'What? We'll talk about Harry Stack Sullivan's theory of post-operative malaise. Come on.'

As she still remained immobile I realized I was being entirely too middle-class for the uninhibited sex maniac the Die certainly had in mind and, when Miss' Welish began talking of going back to the living room again, I strode forward, knocked her drink to the floor and tried to kiss her powerfully on the mouth.

The explosion of pain in my balls was so intense that for a moment I thought I had been shot. I was blinded with pain and staggered back against the wall with a thud. With the fierce willpower of a saint I forced my eyes open and saw the shimmering silvery back of Miss Welish returning toward the living room - Thank God! - leaving me alone - with my disaster.

I assumed I wouldn't be able to move from my folded-up position for a month and wondered vaguely if Mr. Thornton would dust me regularly. The question also came to my mind how an `uninhibited sex maniac' would react to a major kick in the balls. The answer seemed unequivocal: maniac, gentle Jesus, psychotic hippie, mute moron, Jake Ecstein, Hugh Hefner, Lao-Tzu, Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham all would react as I, simple, bespectacled Luke Rhinehart, was acting. Although both my hands were at the scene of the accident, they weren't touching anything; they seemed to be there to do something if anything could ever be done - say next month. Yet, I couldn't force my hands back to a different position. Dr. Krum and Arlene Ecstein were coming down the hall. I tried to straighten up and almost screamed. They stared down at the broken fragments of glass and then stopped in front of me.

`Nasty stomach-ache,' I said. `Severe abdominal cramps. May need an anesthetic.'

`Veil, vell. Tummy-ache, you say?'

`Lower tummy, abdomen, help.' I was whispering.

`Luke, what game are you playing now?' Arlene said and looked down at me (I was folded down a full foot and a half from my normal height) with a bemused smile.

`You're - you're terrific, baby,' I gasped. `Take off - that dress.'

I collapsed slowly sideways to the floor, the pain in my elbow being an almost blissful distraction from the other.

I heard Fred Boyd's voice from farther up the hall asking, `What happened?' and then heard him almost directly over me, laughing.

`I think he's been shot,' Dr. Krum said. `Is serious.'

`Oh, he'll survive,' Fred said, and I felt his hands on one of my arms and then Arlene's on the other, and Fred lifted one arm around his shoulder and dragged me into a bedroom. They threw me on to the bed.

The pain was, in fact, subsiding, and after the three had left, I was able to move a bit, my eyes mostly, but it was progress. Then I remembered it was time for a fresh consultation of the Die and, shuddering at the possibility of a second round of uninhibited sex maniac, I painfully drew the fake watch case out of my pocket and looked: a three: the honest dice man.

I lay back on the bed for a while and stared at the ceiling. I heard voices passing by out in the hall and then only the blurred distant buzz from the living room. The door opened and Lil came in.

`What happened?' she asked sharply. She was immaculately beautiful in her black, low-cut cocktail dress, but her eyes

and mouth were set and cold. I looked up at her and felt a hollowness inside me: what a time and place for this.

`Dr. Krum said you were sick. You disappear with Blondie and then turn up sick. What happened?'

I struggled to a sitting position and dragged my legs off the bed to the floor. I looked up at her.

`It's a long story, Lil.'

`You made a pass at Blondie.'

"Longer than that, much longer.'

`I hate you.'

`Yes. It's inevitable,' I said. `I'm the Dice Man:'

`Had you met her before? I thought Fred told me he'd just met her himself.'

`I'd never met her before. She was thrown into my path and the dice said take her.'

`The dice? What're you talking about?'

`I am the Dice Man.'

Hunched over and disheveled, I'm afraid it wasn't too impressive a moment. We stared at each other, separated by only

six feet in the little bedroom off the hallway of Dr. Mann's museum mausoleum. Lil shook her head as if trying to

clear it.

`What, if I may ask, is the dice man?'

Dr. Krum and Arlene again appeared, Dr. Krum carrying a black bag similar to those carried by general practitioners

in the early nineteenth century. .

`You are better?' he said.

`Yes. Thank you. I will rise again.'

`Good, good. I have an anesthetic. You vant?'

`No. It won't be necessary. Thanks.'

`What is the dice man, Luke?' Lil repeated. She hadn't moved since entering the room. I saw Arlene start and felt her

eyes upon me as I turned back to Lil.

`The Dice Man,' I said slowly, `is an experiment in changing the personality, in destroying the personality.'

`Is interesting,' Dr. Krum said.

`Go on,' Lil said.

To destroy the single dominant personality one must be capable of developing many personalities; one must become

multiple.'

`You're stalling,' Lil said. `What is the dice man?'

'The Dice Man,' I said, and I shifted my gaze to Arlene; who, wide-eyed and alert, watched me as if I were an

enthralling movie, `is a creature whose actions are decided from day to day by the roll of dice, the dice choosing from

among options created by the man.'

There was a silence, which lasted perhaps five seconds.

`Is interesting,' Dr. Krum said. `But difficult with chickens: Another silence followed and I turned my eyes back to Lil

who, straight, dignified and beautiful, raised now a hand to her forehead and rubbed softly just below the hairline. Her

expression was one of shock.

`I - I never meant a thing to you,' she said quietly.

`But you did. I have to fight my attachment to you time and time again.'

`Come on, Dr. Krum, let's get out of here,' Arlene said.

Lil turned her head and looked away out the darkened window, oblivious of Arlene and Dr. Krum.

`You could do the things you did, to me, to Larry, to Evie,' because the dice . . .?' she finally said.

This time I didn't reply. Dr. Krum looked perplexed from me to Lil to me, shaking his head.

`You could use me, lie to me, betray me, mock, me, whore me and remain . . . happy: `For something greater than

either of us,' I said.

Arlene had pulled Dr. Krum away and they disappeared out the door.

Lil looked down at the wedding ring on her left hand, felt its texture between her fingers, her face soft, wistful.

`Everything. . ' she shook her head slowly, dreamily. `Every thing between us for a year, no. No. For all, for all our

lives, becomes ashes.'

`Yes,' I said.

`Because … because you want to play your maniac, your adulterer, your hippie, your dice man.'

`Yes.'

`And what, what if I told you now,' Lil went on, `that for a year I've been having an affair with - I know it sounds silly

but an affair with the garage attendant downstairs?'

'Lil, that's wonderful: pain flashed across her face.'

'What if I told you that tonight before coming here, in tucking the children in goodnight, in following a theory of mine

to show detachment, I had … I had strangled Larry and Evie?'

There we were opposite each other, an old married couple chatting about the- doings of the day.

`If it were done for a . . . a useful theory it would be..'

Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his children's lives for his theory.

`You would, of course, kill them if the dice told you to,' Lil said.

`I don't think I'd ever give that particular option into the hands of the dice.'

'Only adultery, theft, fraud and treason; `I might give Larry and Evie into . the hands of the Die, but myself too.'

She was rocking now on her heels, her hands clenched in front of her, still immaculately beautiful.

`I guess I should be thankful,' she said. `The mystery is over But … but it's not easy to have the death of the man you loved most in the world told to you by . . . by his corpse.'

`Interesting point,' I said.

Lil's head jerked back at my reply and her eyes widened slowly until, suddenly, she threw herself on me with a convulsive shriek, pulling my hair and then beating me with her fists. I hunched over to protect myself. but I felt so hollow inside that Lil's blows were like a gentle rain falling on an empty barrel. It occurred to me that it was long past time to consult the Die again. I wasn't interested. I didn't feel interested in anything. The blows stopped and Lil, crying loudly, ran toward the door. Arlene was standing there, looking terrified, and caught Lil in her arms. They disappeared, and I was alone.

Chapter Forty-one

As I sit here writing of that distant night, the tragedies and comedies bloom like flowers around me still, and I continue on from day to day or year to year to play a role, and certainly, sooner or later, I'll abandon that of dice man too. A role, a role. Star billing one day, walk-on the next. Vaudeville standup comic Shakespearian-fool. Alceste in the morning, Gary Cooper and a hippie during the day, Jesus at night. I no longer remember precisely when I stopped acting: when the fallen die began to click to life roles where there was no residual me fighting them and no dice man me feeling proud, only lives being lived. I do remember that alone in that room that night after Lil left I felt a full joyous uninhibited grief. I was in pain, I suffered, I was there.

And you, Friend, sprawled on your bed or sitting in your chair, you giggle perhaps as I slobber as Caliban, smile at my sufferings as an honest man, or sigh when I ponderously play the fool, philosophizing my madness, lecturing you on the metaphor of life as play. But I am the honest man - with all his senseless suffering for those who will feel; I am the fool. I've been Raskolnikov climbing the stairs, Julien Sorel hearing the clock strike ten, Molly Bloom writhing beneath the rhythmic push of Blazes Boylan's prick. Agonies are one of my changes of garments - fortunately not worn as often as my motley - of the fool.

And you, Reader, good friend and fellow fool my reader, you, yes you, my sweet cipher, are the Dice Man. Having read this far, you are doomed to carry with you burned forever in your soul the self I've here portrayed: the Dice Man. You are multiple and one of you is me. I have created in you a flea which will forever make you itch. Ah, Reader, you never should have let me be born. Other selves bite now and then no doubt. But the Dice Man flea demands to be scratched at every moment: he is, insatiable. You will never know an itchless moment again - unless, of course, you become the flea.

Chapter Forty-two

On the edge of the bed, alone, the party outside seeming to settle into precisely the businesslike buzz it manifested before, Luke Rhinehart sat hunched over, numbed. There was no retreat He was the Dice Man or he was no one. His body knew, dough he could not yet be aware consciously, that Luke Rhinehart was now an impossible existence. Numbed, he disturbed the Die by not consulting the watch for almost ten minutes. Then, having no place else to go, no one else to be, he took out the watch with the die and looked.

Slowly he straightened himself up and, standing, bowed his head in a brief prayer. Then he smoothed down his clothing and his hair and moved toward the party. He wanted first see his wife to abase himself before her. He walked down the hall to the living room and from the doorway squinted through the random clusters of faces, looking for her. Those talking and drinking paid him no special attention, but Mrs. Ecstein came up behind him and said that his wife was in Dr. Mann's office: He followed her down the hall and over the broken glass to the office. He found Dr. Mann and Dr. Ecstein standing awkwardly on either side of his wife, who sat, childlike, on the edge of Dr. Mann's consulting couch.

The sight of her, hunched over and small, her face pale but streaked with smeared eye shadow, her hair in disarray, an ugly man's sweater draped clumsily over her shoulders, knocked Dr. Rhinehart without conscious intention to his with his chest and head too lowering forward until he groveled at his wife's feet.

The room was silent that they could all hear quite distinctly from the centre of the house the ratatattat of Dr. Krum's laughter: `Forgive me, Lil, I am mad,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

Ne one spoke. Rhinehart raised his head and chest from the floor to look at his wife and he said: `For what I have done there is no forgiveness in this world; but I am repentant. I . . . I have been purified … by the hell that I am causing. I..' His eyes suddenly brightened with eagerness `I feel only love for you and for all here. The world can be a blessed place if we but love one another.'

'Luke, baby, what are you . . .?' Dr. Ecstein said, and he took a step forward as if to raise Dr. Rhinehart up but stopped.

`Beautiful, beautiful Jake, I'm talking about love.'

Dr. Rhinehart shook his head slowly as if confused, and a childlike smile appeared on his face. `I've been all mixed up,

all wrong; love, loving, loveliness is all there is: He turned and stretched out his arms to his wife. 'Lil, my darling, you

must realize that Heaven is here, is now, with me.'

His wife returned his gaze for a moment and then slowly raised her eyes to Dr. Mann beside her. A look of immense

relief began to appear on her face.

`He is insane, isn't he?' she asked.

'I don't know,' Dr. Mann said. `Now, of course, but he keeps changing so. It may be only temporary.'

'You fools, we've all been insane,' Dr. Rhinehart said. `I but look at each of you and love. God is shining forth from

each of you like fluorescent lights. Open your eyes and see: He was erect now on his knees, his fists clenched and his

face strangely exalted.

`Better give him a shot of sodium amaytol, Tim,' Dr. Ecstein said to Dr. Mann in a whisper.

`I've only got pills here in the house,' Dr. Mann whispered back.

`Careless,' Dr. Ecstein said.

`But why why why,' Dr. Rhinehart began forcefully, `do you want to quiet God? I am among you spraying love and

you do not hear, do not see, do not let it refresh you.'

He arose. `I must beg forgiveness of that poor innocent girl and show her my new love.'

And he abruptly strode from the room.

Down the hall and over the broken glass again and into the living room. Miss Welish was with Dr. Boyd beside the

bookcase in one corner. When he went to them, Dr. Boyd came protectively between Dr. Rhinehart and the girl.

`What now, Luke?' he said.

`I am deeply sorry for the insane attack I made on you, Miss Welish. I sincerely regret it. Only now do I see the true

meaning of love.'

Miss Welish, round-eyed, peeked around her escort's shoulder.

`Oh come off it, Luke,' Dr. Boyd said.

'You are beautiful; you are both beautiful, and I deeply regret having marred this wonderful evening.'

'I hope I didn't hurt you,' Miss Welish said.

'My pain was the initial source of my seeing the light. I can't thank you enough.'

'Any time,' Dr. Boyd said. `Come on, Joya, let's leave.'

`But I have to. . ' The voice of Miss Welish was lost behind the retreating figure of Dr. Boyd.

`You are better, true?' Dr. Krum said suddenly from below and beside Dr. Rhinehart as the two others moved away.

The min, elderly former Big Deal was with him, and so was a fiftyish Important Person puffing on a pipe. As they

began talking, Dr. Weinburger, president of PANY, the chubby middle-aged woman joined them.

`I am whole at last,' Dr. Rhinehart replied.

'What was this about the dice man, hey? Vas interesting.'

`The Dice Man is a deeply sick concept, totally lacking in love.'

`Seemed a bit schizophrenic the way Dr. Krum described it,' said Dr. Weinburger.

`But the idea of destroying the personality: is interesting,' Dr. Krum went on.

`Only if it shatters the shell which hides our love,' Dr. Rhinehart replied.

`Love?' Dr. Weinburger inquired.

`Our love.'

`Vat has love to do vith anything?' asked Dr. Krum.

`Love has something to do with everything. If I do not love I am dead.'

`How true,' the woman said.

`My whole recent life has been thrown away in a cold, mechanical dicelife. I see that now as clearly as your beautiful,

handsome faces.'

'Luke, I'd like you to come outdoors with me for a few minutes now,' Dr. Ecstein's voice said at Dr. Rhinehart's side.

`I will, Jake, but I must explain something first to' Dr. Krum.'

He turned to the little man beside him with a warm, pleading expression.

'You must stop your work with pigeons and work only with man. You can never approach what is essential to man's health and happiness through torturing chickens and pigeons. Schizophrenia is a failure to love, a failure to see loveliness. It will never be cured by a drug.'

`Oh, Dr. Rhinehart, you are being sentimental like poet,' Dr. Krum said.

`A single line of Shelley tells us more of man than all your chicken pigeon droppings ever can.'

`People haf been spouting love two thousand years. Nothing. With chemicals we change the world.'

'Thou shah not kill,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

We do not kill, only make psychotics.'

`You do not love your chickens.'

`Is impossible. No one who works with chickens can ever luf them.'

'A spiritual man loves all with a spiritual love that is never selfish, possessive or physical.'

`Oh, for Christ's sake, Luke Dr. Ecstein said.

`Precisely,' said Dr. Rhinehart. `Excuse me a moment.'

With the eminent physicians looking on, Dr. Rhinehart consulted his watch case. He groaned.

`Is late?'

Dr. Krum asked.

Dr. Rhinehart's eyes swiveled over the room like artillery radar seeking its target.

`I didn't know Dr. Rhinehart was an existentialist humanist,' the woman said.

`He's a nut,' Dr. Ecstein said, `even if he is my patient'

`Meetcha outside in five minutes, Jake. So long fellas,' Dr. Rhinehart said and strode off toward the entrance hall, but

after passing a cluster of people behind the couch he veered to his right and went down the same hallway again.

As he crunched over the broken glass he saw Miss Welish and Mrs. Ecstein emerging from the room opposite the one

he had been carried to. They stopped at the end of the hall and looked at him warily.

'Lil's been given a pill and is resting,' Mrs. Ecstein said. `I don't think you should disturb her.'

`My God, Arlene, your boobs make my mouth water. Let's go into the john.'

Mrs. Ecstein stared at him for a moment. She looked sideways at Miss Welish and then back to the doctor. Then, still

staring at her mentor, she shook her tiny purse up and down three times, opened it a crack, and peeked in. Closing the

purse, she said: `I love your big prick, Luke. Let's go: Miss Welish looked in awe from one to the other.

`You too, baby;' Dr. Rhinehart said to her.

`Come along, Joya,' Mrs. Ecstein said. `It'll be fun.'

She touched Miss Welish lightly on the breasts and went into the bathroom to her left. Miss Welish watched Mrs. Ecstein leave and then found herself face to face with Dr. Rhinehart again.

`Most beautiful body in the world, baby, except your knee. Let's go.'

She stared at him.

`But here?' she said.

`Here and now, baby, that's all there is' He moved around her to the bathroom, held the door open and waited. With a swift backward glance up the empty hallway she walked toward the bathroom.

`You people are really amazing,' she said. `Are all psychiatrists' parties like this?'

`Only Dr. Mann's,' Dr. Rhinehart said and followed her in.

Chapter Forty-three

[Being excerpts from Dr. Ecstein's case history entitled, `The Case of the Six-Sided Man'.]

After R had erratically broken off his conversation with the three psychiatrists, he left the party area. The three discussed the situation briefly and then were joined by Dr. M. after further discussion it was decided that R ought to be taken immediately to a private clinic. M telephoned the Clinic and asked for an ambulance. M and Dr. E. then went along with Dr. B to locate R.

He was not outside, nor was he in M's office, but it was soon ascertained that he had locked himself in the bathroom. At first the doctors were concerned for R's life, but were reassured by the sound of other voices from the room. He called to those inside, but received no answer. B banged loudly on the door until E warned him it might be dangerous to excite R. For two minutes M tried to talk rationally with the patient but E, B and M heard only grunts in reply. B wanted to break the door down and enter, but M and E urged caution considering R's bulk and strength. An ambulance with attendants would soon arrive. Then female screams were heard from within the bathroom, and it was ascertained that the women with R were in all likelihood A and JW, female acquaintances of E and B. The door was broken down. It was disclosed that R had been in the process of raping the two females. The clothes of both were in extreme disarray and R's genitals were exposed and tumescent. He stood in the center of the room slobbering lasciviously and grunting. He seemed to have regressed to the bestial state. He could answer none of our questions and resisted our efforts to separate him from the females only in the most clumsy and ineffectual way. He had become docile.

The two females seemed in a state of shock and could not explain their delay in calling for help. Whether it was the threat of R's great strength or some inexplicable hypnotic power occasionally exerted by the mentally imbalanced has never been determined. B had a different theory: Eventually, both females emerged from shock and burst into tears.

`It was horrible,' said A.

`The things he tried to make us do,' said JW.

R only slobbered and grunted. The doctors had to dress him themselves, since he seemed incapable of it himself. K and M both advanced the hypothesis that the patient had subsided into a catatonic state. E, however, even at this early date, was able to postulate that R's breakdowns were random and sporadic and that a spontaneous remission of symptoms should be expected.

Such was the case. Ten minutes later as all sat quietly and in great fatigue waiting for an ambulance, R began talking again. He apologized sincerely and realistically for his behavior, praised the doctors for the gentle and intelligent way they had handled a difficult situation, reassured them that he was now at last completely himself again, and after twenty minutes or so had most of those present laughing at the whole situation, then abruptly, just as the ambulance arrived, he threw himself on the only woman left in the room. Dr. F, and seemed, to be attempting coitus. The attendants and doctor arrived, he was pulled off, an injection was administered and the patient was taken to - Clinic ….

Thus, the following day, June 16, E, as his psychiatrist, was able to visit him. It soon became apparent that R was under the illusion that he was a young hippie of extremely sarcastic, bent. Although he related to E, it was in a negative, aggressive way. The patient, although in complete contact with reality and often extremely observant, was not himself, and thus was still insane.

On June 17 it was reported by the clinic that the patient spent his time in total silence, staring into space and occasionally grunting. He had to be spoon-fed and was unable to control his excretory functions. It seemed that a permanent catatonic state might have been reached.

But R's recuperative powers continued to amaze. On the next day it was reported that he was talking again, relating well to the staff and physicians and requesting reading material, mostly of a religious nature. This last fact naturally worried E, but on June 19, 20 and 21 no new change was reported, so on June 22 E visited R again at the clinic..

Chapter Forty-four

While I bounced nicely from role to role in the Kolb Clinic, the rest of the world continued, I regret to say, to exist. Dr. Mann informed me that the executive committee of PANY had decided to consider the motion of Dr. Peerman for my expulsion from the organization at its monthly meeting on June 30. He believed that although he himself was urging the committee to permit me to quietly resign, it was almost certain that they would vote to expel me and to write to the AMA suggesting that organization do the same.

Arlene wrote me that the dice, had told her that I was the father of the baby-to-be and that she had told Lil and Jake and most of the rest of the world the truth, or most of it, and thus Jake knew of our affair and of the dicelife. She said she couldn't come to therapy for a while.

Lil came to visit me just once to congratulate me on my future fatherhood and to announce that she had initiated divorce proceedings by taking out the necessary separation papers and that her lawyer would be visiting me shortly. (He did, but I was in the state of catatonia at the time.) She stated that separation and divorce were clearly best for both of us especially since I would undoubtedly be spending much of the rest of my life in mental institutions.

Dr. Vener of QSH told me that my former patient Eric Cannon had, after two months of leading a growing herd-of hippies in Brooklyn and in the East Village, been recommitted to the hospital by his father and was asking to see me. He also noted that Arturo Toscanini Jones had also been recommitted - on a technicality unearthed by diligent police #161;and was not asking to see me.

In fact, the only good news I was getting from the rest of the world was from my patients in dice therapy. All took my being locked up perfectly in their stride, continued to develop their dicelife on their own and waited patiently and confidently for my return to them. Terry Tracy visited me twice at the clinic and spent two and a half hours trying to convert me to the Ultimata-Truth of the Religion of the Die. I was deeply moved.

Professor Boggles wrote me a long letter about a mystical experience he had had in Central Park after following the Die writing a particularly nonsensical article on Theodore and the Lyrical Impulse. Two of my new patients visited me regularly during my second wok at the clinic and dad me continue therapy with them there.

Arlene, too, seemed to grow in dice stature during this crisis period. Her letter explaining what was happening on the home front made me quite proud of her and prepared me for my interviews with Jake. She told me that Jake had taken her confession of infidelity quite calmly but had bawled her out for keeping it all to herself. It seems it was her ethical duty to provide him with as much information as possible about herself and everyone she knew since he could not fulfil his therapeutic duties without honesty and information. She had therefore gone on to tell him about her own and my dicelife and our dice games together. He had taken extensive notes and asked a lot of questions but was very calm. He had ordered her to limit her dicelife to the socially conventional until he had an opportunity to study the situation. She had then suggested that it might be of help to him if he experimented with some of the dice games with her in order to understand her problems and my problems better. He agreed, and they had had the best night together that they had had since high school days. Jake said he found it interesting. Arlene wrote that she could come visit me as soon as the Die said it was okay.

When Jake visited me on June 22 in the early evening I apologized to him immediately for any of my actions in the past which might have hurt him. It so fell that I was in the first day of The Old Pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart Week - a role I found very hard to play. I told him that by all conventional standards what I had done in seducing his wife was unforgivable, but that I hoped he understood my philosophical aims in following the dice.

`Yeah, Luke,' he said, sitting down in a chair opposite my bod and in front of a lovely barred window overlooking a wall. `But you're a strange one, got to admit. Tough nut to crack, so to speak.'

He took out a small note pad and a pen. `Like to know more about this dice man life of yours'

`You're sure, Jake,' I said, `that there's no, well, no resentment over any of the ways which I may have betrayed you, lied to you or humiliated you?'

`Can't humiliate me, Luke; a man's mind should be above emotion.'

He was looking down at his pad and writing. `Tell me about this dice man stuff.'

I was sitting up in my bed and I leaned back comfortably into the four pillows I had had piled behind me and prepared to tell Jake what I had learned.

`It's really amazing, Jake. It's shown me emotions in myself I never knew existed.' I paused. `I think I've stumbled onto something important, something psychotherapy has been looking for for centuries. Arlene told you I've got a small group of students in dice therapy. There are other doctors trying it as well. It's … well, maybe I'd better give you the whole background theory and history…'

'You want I should cheer?'

With much dignity, praise and detail, I summarized in about half an hour the Dice Man in theory and practice. I thought a lot of what I had to say was quite funny, but Jake never smiled, except professionally: to give me confidence to go on.

Finally I concluded: `And thus my eccentricities, inconsistencies, absurdities, and breakdowns of the last year have all been the logical consequences of a highly original but highly rational approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'

There was a silence.

`I realize that in developing dice theory I have done things which have caused suffering to others as well as myself, but in so far as all was necessary to bring me to my present spiritual state, it may be justified.'

Again there was a silence until at last Jake raised his head.

`Well?' I asked. With my arms folded on my chest I awaited with incredible tension Jake's evaluation of my theory and my life.

`So?' he said.

`So?' I replied.

`But why not? I . .. aren't I developing a facet of man too long impressed in the jail of personality?'

`You've just described to me in great detail the classic symptoms of schizophrenia: multiple selves, detachment, elation

depression: you want I should cheer?'

`But the schizophrenic becomes split and multiple against his will; he longs for unity. I have consciously created

schizophrenia.'

'You show a total inability to relate to anyone personally.'

`But if the dice tell me to I can.'

`If it can be turned on and off it's not normal human relatedness.'

He was looking at me calmly and without expression, whereas I was getting excited.

`But how do you know that normal, uncontrollable human relatedness is more desirable than my switch-button variety?

'

He didn't answer. After a while he said: `Did the dice tell you to tell me?'

`They told Arlene.'

`Did they tell you both to throw some lies in too?'

'No, that was our personal contribution.'

'The dice are wrecking your career.'

`I suppose so.'

'They've ruined your marriage.'

`Naturally.'

`They make it impossible for me or anyone else to rely on anything you say or do from now on.'

'True.'

'They mean that anything you begin may be abandoned right at the point of fruition by a whim of a die.'

`Yes.'

`Including the investigations of the dice man.'

`Ah, Jake, you understand perfectly.'

`I think I do.'

`Why don't you try it too?' I asked warmly. `It's possible.'

`We could become the Dynamic Dice Duo, dealing dreams and destruction to the pattern-plagued world of modern

man.'

`Yes, that's interesting.'

`You're about the only one I know intelligent enough to understand what the Dice Man is really all about.'

`I suppose I am.'

`Well?'

`Have to think it over, Luke. It's a big step.'

`Sure, I understand.'

`It's got to be Oedipal; that damn father of yours.'

`Wha - what?'

'That time when you were three and your mother-'

`Jake! What are you talking about?' I asked loudly and with irritation. `I've just unfolded the most imaginative new life

system in the history of man and you start talking old Freudian mythology.'

'Huh? Oh, I'm sorry,' he said, smiling his professional smile. `Go ahead.'

But I laughed, bitterly I'm afraid. `No, never mind. I'm tired of talking today,' I said. Jake leaned forward and stared at

me intently.

'I'll cure you,' he said. I'll tie you back into the old Luke or my name isn't Jake Ecstein. Don't you worry.'

I sighed and felt sad. 'Yeah,' I said dully. I won't worry.'

Chapter Forty-five

The pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart created by the dice for the week of June 22 appeared so conventional, so rational, so

ambitious and so interested in psychology that Doctors Ecstein and Mann decided to take a chance and permit me to defend myself at the meeting of the executive committee of PANY on June 30. Jake, while not yet convinced of the soundness of my theory, was increasingly enjoying certain dice exercises to which Arlene was introducing him and wished to be generous. Dr. Mann, not having been informed of the radical nature of my dicelife, was vaguely hopeful that the rational, conventional, ambitious man he talked to during the week of June 22 would still exist on the thirtieth. The executive committee had agreed to my presence because they could find nothing in their bylaws which forbade it.

The charges against me were simple - my theories and practice of dice therapy were incompetent, ridiculous, unethical

and of no `lasting medical value.' Consequently, I should be expelled from PANY and a letter should be sent to the president of the AMA urging that I be forbidden to practice medicine anywhere in the United States or Canada (the southern part of the hemisphere being considered beyond salvation). I looked forward to the meeting as a welcome break from the confinement of the Kolb Clinic. Then occurred one of those unfortunate accidents which flaw even the most well-ordered dicelife: I absentmindedly gave the dice a foolish option and the Die chose it. When considering what to do about the PANY indictment - to which my residual self was indifferent the old Luke Rhinehart I was being that week created as an option that if the committee voted to expel me I would cease dice therapy and dice living for one year. I gaily toppled a die onto my hospital bed and lost my gaiety: the Die chose that option.

In so far as anything is certain in this Die-dictated universe, it was certain that the executive committee would find me guilty. Not one of the five members of the committee was likely to be sympathetic. Dr. Weinburger, the chairman, was an ambitious, successful, conventional genius who hated everything that took time away from his glory-producing activities at his Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying.

He had never heard of me before his brief brush with me at the Krum party and it was clear he would hope never to hear of me again.

Old Dr. Cobblestone was a fair, rational, open-minded and just man who would thus naturally vote against me. Although Dr. Mann had been trying to get the fellow members of the committee to agree to force me to resign quietly from PANY, after he failed in this effort he would naturally vote to condemn everything he detested. Namely me.

The fourth member of the committee was Dr. Peerman, who had initiated the proceedings against me when two of his brightest young psychiatrist interns - Joe Fineman and Fuigi Arishi - had suddenly deserted him and begun practicing dice therapy under my random tutelage. He was a slight, pale, middle-aged man with a high-pitched voice, whose fame rested securely on his widely acclaimed research demonstrating that teenagers who smoked marijuana were more likely to try LSD than teenagers who did not. His vote in my favor seemed doubtful. Finally there was Dr. Moon, an ancient body in the heavens of New York psychoanalysis, a personal friend of Freud, the creator, in the early 1920s, of the widely discussed theory of the natural, irreversible depravity of children and a member of the executive committee of PANY since its origin in 1923. Although he was seventy-seven years old and one of the leading subjects in Dr. Weinburger's Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying, he still tried to take vigorous part in the proceedings. Unfortunately, his behavior was sometimes so erratic that from what I had heard it seemed he might be a secret diceperson, although his colleagues attributed his `slight eccentricities' to `incipient senility.'

Although he was reputed to be the most reactionary member in all of PANY, his was the only vote that - because of his unreliability - didn't seem certain to go against me.

Hang considered the likely attitudes of my judges, I gave the Die a one-in-thirty-six chance that I kill myself. Unfortunately, it spurned the offer.

But the fact remained that if the committee expelled me the Die had ordered me to abandon the dicelife for one year, and this thought depressed me beyond all my previous experience. It so terrified me that for the three days before the scheduled meeting I worked every hour to prepare what seemed to me a reasonable case for my dice theory and therapy. I took notes, wrote articles, practiced speeches and considered what roles would best permit me somehow to sway Doctors Cobblestone and Mann to vote against my expulsion. Then my only hope would lie in some accident permitting the erratic old Dr. Moon to also be on my side.

Such dedicated work was possible since I was still in The Old Luke Rhinehart Week, but on June 29 it would end and the Die would have to choose a new role or roles for the last two days. Would the Die choose that I switch roles rapidly as at the Krum party? Would it permit me to be my most rational and articulate? Would it tell me to blow the whole thing? I wouldn't know until the die was cast.

Chapter Forty-six

On June 28, 1969, at approximately 2.30 in the afternoon in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where Jake had permitted me to go with a bodyguard attendant, I discovered the laughing men in the sky.

I was sitting a trifle despondent at an isolated table alongside row upon row of stacks doing research on my defense. To my right was a small table with two men and a teen-age boy. There was no one at my table except an old woman opposite me with bushy eyebrows and hairy arms reading behind a pile of books. My attendant was standing in the corner near the window reading a comic. I had been sitting there for perhaps forty minutes, running my big fingers over the uneven grained surface of the table and daydreaming about what some of my options might be for my mode of defense and finding that my mind seemed drawn to such cheerful ones as strangling Dr. Peerman, sitting wordlessly throughout the proceedings but maintaining a continually low giggle, or peeing ostentatiously on any papers they might bring. With an effort I decided that I must force my mind back to its defense and I asked again, almost in an audible whisper: `What, then, can I do to save myself?'

As I was repeating this question to myself and doodling with a wooden pencil in one of the cracks in the table, there came above the street noises the sound of bubbling human laughter.

The sound made me smile; then I realized its un-likelihood in the New York Public Library. I looked around. The old lady opposite me was looking with knitted bush brows at one of her pile of books; the three males at the other table seemed neither amused nor offended; my attendant was scowling as if stuck with some tough words. Yet the bubbling laughter continued, even growing louder.

Then, surprise, the laughter must be my hallucination.

I sat back in my chair and tried briefly to block it out, but the laughter continued to flow. When I looked up, I saw very far away and high up a fat man shaking with laughter and pointing a finger at me. He seemed to think that my effort to find the right defense was the play of a, silly fool. He also found amusing my effort to smile at the realization that I was a fool. He thought my seeing his laughter at my smiling at his laughing was also funny. When I finally frowned, he laughed even harder. `Enough,' I said loudly, but began to laugh myself.

The old woman with the bushy brows stared at me coldly. The two men at the other table turned their heads. My attendant turned a page at last. The fat man above shook again with laughter, and I laughed harder, my big belly bumping against the table; I was almost out of control. The people stared, even the attendant. At last I stopped.

So did the fat man, although he still smiled, and I felt very dose to him. I thought again of the spectacular, nonsensical options that I'd been considering and decided I'd throw them out. The fat man began laughing again. I looked up startled, smiled socially at him and decided that I would instead use all three non-rational options. He laughed harder. With a flush I realized that I would have to abandon the dicelife completely, but the fat man laughed on and was joined by three, four other fat men all pointing at me and laughing joyously.

My mind was filled suddenly with the vision of thousands of fat men sitting up there in that fourth dimension watching the antics of human aspiration and purpose, and laughing - not a single one sober or compassionate or pitying. Our plan, hopes, expectations, and promises; and the realities of the future which they could also see: only a source of laughter. The men (they were both men and women actually, but all fat) often crowded together to look at one particular human whose life seemed to evoke special ironies or humor.

When I realized that neither abandoning the dicelife nor retaining it would end the eternal amusement of the fat people in the sky I felt like a man on some television show who is asked to guess what's behind the green wall. No matter what he guesses, the audience, which can see what is behind the wall while he can't, laughs. All my writhings in the present to find a future which will please me evoke only laughter in the audience in the sky. `The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft astray,' said Napoleon with a chuckle on his return from Moscow.

I was laughing again with my fat men, and the woman opposite me and my attendant with a finger to his lips were both hissing violent `shhhhshes.'

`Look!' I said with a huge smile, and pointed off toward the ceiling and the fourth dimension. `It's all there,' I went on between chuckles. `The answer - up there.'

The old woman glanced sternly up at the ceiling, adjusted her glasses twice and then looked back at me. She looked embarrassed and a little guilty.

`I . . . I don't see it, I'm afraid,' she said.

I laughed. I looked up at my fat man and he laughed at my laughing. I laughed at him.

`That's all right,' I said to the old lady. `Don't worry about it. You'll be all right.'

The two men from the next table were firing: `shhhs,' and my attendant was standing nervously beside me, but I raised

my hand to silence them. Smiling warmly I said `The great thing about the answer…' and I began again, big belly

bubbling and joyous, `The great thing is that it doesn't do us any good at all.'

Laughing, I thumbed my nose at the laughing men in the sky - who laughed - and began walking through the library,

trailed by my attendant and leaving behind me like a big boat a wake of `shhhhhs' as I passed.

`It's all right,' I said loudly to everyone. `Knowing the answer doesn't matter. You don't have to know.'

Interestingly enough, no one approached me as I walked on through the central reading room of the New York Public

Library, my belly booming out its Answer to the stack upon stack of answers and the row upon row of seekers. Only at

the exit did I find someone who responded to me. An ancient portly library guard with flushed face and huge Santa

Claus pot came up to me as I was about to leave and, smiling as if his face would burst, said in a louder voice than

mine `gotta tone dawn the laughing during hours,' and then we both roared out into new laughter louder than ever until

I turned and left.

Chapter Forty-seven

The Die is my shepherd;

I shall not want;

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, I lie;

He leadeth me beside the still waters, I swim.

He destroyeth my soul

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness

For randomness sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Chance is with me;

Thy two sacred cubes they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me In the presence of mine enemies

Thou anointest my head with oil;

My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy and evil and cruelty shall follow ma

All the days of my life

And I will dwell in the house of Chance for ever.

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Forty-eight

The meeting of the executive committee of the Psychoanalysts' Association of New York took place early on the

afternoon of 30 June, 1969, in a large seminar room at Dr. Weinburger's Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the

Dying. Dr. Weinburger, a bushy-haired, thickset man in his late forties, sat impatiently behind a long table with

Doctors Peerman and Cobblestone on one side of him and old Dr. Moon and Dr. Mann on the other. All the gentlemen

looked serious and intent except for Dr. Moon, who was sleeping quietly between Chairman Weinburger and Dr.

Mann, occasionally sliding slowly sideways to rest against the shoulder of the one, and then, like a pendulum that

badly needs oiling, after a hesitation, sliding slowly back across the arc to rest against the shoulder of the other.

The table at which the five sat was so long that they looked more like fugitives huddled together for mutual protection

rather than judges. Dr. Rhinehart and Dr. Ecstein, who was present as friend and personal physician, sat on stiff

wooden chairs in the middle of the room opposite them. Dr. Ecstein was slumped and squinting, but Dr. Rhinehart was

erect and alert, looking extremely professional in a perfectly tailored gray suit and tie and shoes shined to such a luster

that Dr. Ecstein wondered whether he hadn't cheated by using black Day-glo.

`Yes, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart said before anyone else had said a word.

`One moment, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Weinburger said sharply. He looked down at the papers in front of him. `Does Dr. Rhinehart know the charges being brought against him?'

'Yes,' said Doctors Mann and Ecstein at the same time.

`What's all this about dice, young man?' Dr. Cobblestone asked. His cane lay on the table in front of him as if it were a piece of evidence relevant to the proceedings.

`A new therapy I'm developing, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart replied promptly.

`I understand that,' he said. `What we mean is that you should explain.'

`Well, sir, in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid' Dr. Rhinehart spoke in a clear, firm and reasonable voice, but for some reason his answer was greeted by a silence, broken only by Dr. Moon's harsh, uneven breathing. Dr. Cobblestone's stern lower jaw became sterner.

`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

`My theory is that we all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. The desire to hit one's wife is forbidden by the concept of dignity, femininity and covetousness of unbroken crockery. The desire to be religious is stopped by the knowledge that orgy "is" an atheist. Your desire, sir, to shout "stop this nonsense!" is stopped by your sense of yourself as a fair and rational man.

The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded; they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and that until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he fines will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.'

`Negroes must be kept in their place,' said Dr. Moon suddenly, his round, wrinkled face suddenly coming alive with the appearance of two fierce red eyes in its ravaged landscape. He was leaning forward intensely, his mouth, after he had finished his short sentence, dangling open.

`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

Dr Rhinehart nodded gravely to Dr. Moon and resumed.

'Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop a consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality: ha would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.'

'He would be insane,' came Dr. Peerman's high-pitched voice from his end of the table. His thin, pale face was expressionless.

`Let us hear the man out,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

`In stable, unified, consistent societies the narrow personality had value; men could fulfill themselves with only one self. Not today. In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill. Each of us has a hundred suppressed potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire it to be multiple: to play many roles.

`If you will permit me, gentlemen, I would like to quote to you what a dice-patient of mine said in a recent therapy session which I taped.'

Dr. Rhinehart reached into his briefcase beside his chair and drew out some sheets of paper. After leafing through them, he looked up and continued: `What Professor O. B. says here seems to me to dramatize the crux of the problem for all men. I quote "`I feel I ought to write a great novel, write numerous letters, be friendly with more of the interesting people in my community, give more parties, dedicate more time to my intellectual pursuits, play with my children, make love to my wife, go hiking more often, go to the Congo, be a radical trying to revolutionize society, write fairy tales, buy a bigger boat, do more sailing, sunning and swimming, write a book on the American picaresque novel, educate my children at home, be a better teacher at the University, be a faithful friend, be more generous with my money, economize more, live a fuller life in the world outside me, live like Thoreau and not be taken in by material values, play more tennis, practice yoga, meditate, do those damn RCAF exercises every day, help my wife with the housework, make money in real estate, and … and so on.

"And do all these things seriously, playfully, dramatically, stoically, joyfully, serenely, morally, indifferently do them like D. H. Lawrence, Paul Newman, Socrates, Charlie Brown, Superman, and Pogo.

"But it's ridiculous. When I do any one of these things, play any one of these roles, the other selves are not satisfied. You've got to help me satisfy one self in such a way that the others will feel that they are somehow being considered too. Make them shut up. You've got to help me pull myself together and stop spilling all over the goddamn universe without actually doing anything."

'Dr. Rhinehart looked up and smiled. `Our Western psychologies try to solve O. B.'s problem by urging him to form some single integrated personality, to suppress his natural multiplicity and build a single dominant self to control the others. This totalitarian solution means that a large standing army of energy must be maintained to crush the efforts of the minority selves to take power. The normal personality exists in a state of continual insurrection.'

`Some of this makes sense,' added Dr. Ecstein helpfully.

`In dice theory we attempt to overthrow the totalitarian personality and -'

`The masses need a strong leader,' interrupted Dr. Moon.

The silence which followed was broken only by his uneven breathing.

`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

`All I've got to say for now,' replied Dr. Moon, closing the shutters on the red furnaces of his eyes and beginning to swing in a slow arc toward the shoulder of Dr. Mann.

`Go on, Dr. Rhinehart,' said Dr. Weinburger, his face expressionless but his hands crumpling up the papers in front of him like octopi demolishing squid.

Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his wristwatch and went on.

Thank you. In our metaphor - which has that same admirable degree of scientific precision and rigor as Freud's famous parable of the superego, the ego, and the id - in our metaphor, the anarchic chance - led person is governed in fact by a benevolent despot: the Die. In the early stages of therapy only a few selves are able to offer themselves as options to the Die. But as the student progresses, more and more selves, desires, value and roles are raised into the possibility of existence; the human being grows, expands, becomes more flexible, more various. The ability of major selves to overthrow the Die declines, disappears. The personality is destroyed. The man is free. He-' `I see no need to let Dr. Rhinehart go on,' said Dr. Weinburger, suddenly standing up. `Although, as Dr. Ecstein has so helpfully observed, some of it makes sense, the idea that the destruction of the personality is the way to mental health may be rejected on a priori grounds. I need only remind you gentlemen of the first sentence of Dr. Mann's brilliant textbook on abnormal psychology: "If a person has a strong sense of his identity, of the permanency of things and of an integral selfhood, he will be secure."

He smiled over at Dr. Mann. `I therefore move-'

`Precisely,' said Dr. Rhinehart. `Or rather, precisely, sir. It is always rejected on a priori grounds and not on empirical grounds. We have never experimented with the possibility of a strong man being able to demolish his personality and become more various, happy and creative than he was before. The first sentence of our textbook will read: "If a person can attain a strong confidence in his inconsistency and unreliability, a strong yea-saying sense of the impermanence of things and of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves, he will be fully at home in a multivalent society - he will be joyous ….

`We have plenty of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the personality,' said Dr. Cobblestone quietly. `Our mental hospitals are overflowing with people who have a sense of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves.'

`Yes, we do,' replied Dr. Rhinehart calmly. `But why are they there?'

There was no answer to this question, and Dr. Rhinehart, after waiting while Dr. Weinburger sat down again, continued, `Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn't it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?'

Again there was a silence, except for Dr. Moon's expiring breaths and an irritable throat-clearing by Dr. Weinburger.

`Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,' Dr. Rhinehart went on, `it seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr. Raymond Felt has observed: "The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed `cures' by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century."

`Why have our efforts to cure neurosis been so uniformly unsuccessful? Why does civilization expand unhappiness faster than we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is booming obvious. We have carried over from the simple, unified, stable societies of the past an image of the ideal norm for man which is totally wrong for our complex, chaotic, unstable and mufti-' valued urban civilizations of today. We assume that "honesty" and "frankness" are of primary importance in healthy human relations, and the lie and the act are, in the anachronistic ethics of our time, considered evil.'

'Ah, but Dr: Rhinehart, you can't-' said Dr. Cobblestone.

'No, sir. I regret to say I'm serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society of today is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, un-contradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.

`The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors that his beliefs arc not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving -him insane.

`On the other hand, to free him from his unending conflict we must urge him to let go, to act, to pretend, to lie. We must give him the means to develop these abilities. He must become a diceperson.'

`See! See!' Dr. Peerman interrupted. `He just confessed to advocating a therapy which encourages lying. Did you hear him?'

`I believe we have been listening to Dr. Rhinehart, thank you, Dr. Peerman,' said Dr. Weinburger, again mangling the papers in front of him. `Dr. Rhinehart, you may go on.'

Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch and continued.

`When all men lie by their very being in a multi-lie society, only the sick try to be honest, and only the very sick ask for honesty in others. Psychologists, of course, urge the patient to be authentic and honest. Such methods '

`If our methods are so bad,' asked Dr. Weinburger harshly, `then why do any of our patients improve at all?'

`Because we've encouraged them to play new roles,' Dr. Rhinehart answered promptly. `Primarily the role of "being honest", but also the roles of feeling guilty, having sinned, being oppressed, discovering insights, being sexually liberated and so on. Of course, the patient and therapist are under the illusion that they are getting at true desires, when in fact they are only releasing and developing new and different selves.`

'Good point, Luke,' said Dr. Ecstein.

'The limitations placed on this new role-playing are catastrophic. The patient is being pressed to get at his "true" feelings and thus to be single and unitary. In discovering unlived roles in his search for a "true self" he may experience brief periods of liberation, but as soon as he is urged to enthrone some new self as the true one, he will again feel locked up and divided. Dice therapy alone acknowledges what we all know and choose to forget: man is multiple.'

`Sure, man is multiple,' Dr. Weinburger said, banging his fist abruptly on the table. `But the whole point of civilization is to keep the rapist, the killer, the liar and the cheat locked up, suppressed. You seem to be saying we should unlock the cage and let all our minority murderers roam free.'

Dr. Weinburger gave an irritable shrug of his left shoulder, sending the inert body of Dr. Moon on its slow journey through its orbit to come to rest against the softer but no less irritable shoulder of Dr. Mann.

`That's right, Luke,' said Dr. Mann, looking coldly across the table at Dr. Rhinehart. `Just because we have a fool within us is no reason to feel he ought to be expressed.'

Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch, sighed, took out a die, dropped it from his right hand into the palm of his left and looked at it.

`Fuck it,' he said.

`Beg pardon?' asked Dr. Cobblestone.

'The idea of freeing the rapist, the murderer and the fool seems nutty,' continued Dr. Rhinehart, `to the jailer called the normal, rational personality. So does the idea of freeing the pacifist seem nutty to the jailer personality of a murderer. But the normal personality is today a study in frustration, boredom and despair. Dice therapy is the only theory which offers to blow up the whole works.'

`But the social consequences-' began Dr. -Cobblestone.

`The social consequences of a nation of dicepeople are, by definition, unpredictable. The social consequences of a nation. of normal personalities are obvious: misery, conflict, violence, war and a universal joylessness.'

`But I still don't see what you've got against honesty,' Dr. Cobblestone said.

`Honesty and frankness?' Dr. Rhinehart said. `Jesus! They're the worst possible things in normal human relations. "Do you really love me?" this absurd question, so typical of our diseased minds, should always be answered "My God NO!" or "More than mere reality is my love; it is imaginary."

'The more someone tries to be honest and authentic, the more he's going to be blocked and inhibited. The question "How do you realty feel about me?" ought always to be answered with a belt in the teeth. But if someone were asked: "Tell me fantastically and imaginatively how you feel about me," he'd be free from that neurotic demand for unity and truth. He could express any of his conflicting selves - one at a time of course. He'd be able to play each role to the hilt. He'd be at one with his schizophrenia.'

Dr. Rhinehart stood up. `Mind if I pace about a bit?' he asked.

`Go ahead,' said Dr. Weinburger. Dr. Rhinehart began striding back and forth in front of the long table, for a while his pace just matching the shorter roll of Dr. Moon between the shoulders of his two colleagues.

`Now, about how all this works in practice,' he began again.

`It's tough starting dice therapy with a patient. His resistance to chance is as great today as was his resistance to Freud's sexual mythology seventy years ago. When we ask a typical miserable American to let the dice make a decision he goes along only if he thinks it's a temporary game. When he sees I seriously expect him to make important decisions by chance, he inevitably pees in his pants. - `Figuratively speaking. In most cases this initial resistance pants peeing, we call it - is overcome and the therapy begins.

`We have to begin in the most trivial ways. The psychotic has no areas free to be spontaneous and original. The neurotic has few normal, "healthy" persons like yourselves have only a small handful. All other areas are controlled by the dictatorship of personality. It's the job of dice therapy, like the job of revolution in the world as a whole, to enlarge free territory.

`We work first in areas where there's not much threat to the normal personality. Once a patient's got the ground rules and got into the spirit of playfulness, we expand the dice decisions into other areas.'

`Exactly what do your patients do with the dice?' Dr. Cobblestone asked.

`Well, first we let the dice make decisions for the patient where he's in conflict. "Two roads diverged within a wood, and I, I took the one directed by the Die, and that has made all the difference." So Little Red Riding Hood wrote; and so we must all do. The patients groove to this use of the dice right away..'

`We also show them how to use the die as a veto. Every time they do something we ask them to shake a die and if it comes up a six they can't do it; have to ask the die to choose something else for them. Veto's a great method but hard. Most of us go through our lives from one thing to the next mechanically, without thought. We study, write, eat, flirt, fornicate, fuck as the result of habitual patterns. "Pop" comes a dice veto: it wakes us up. In theory, we're working toward the purely random man, one without habit or pattern, eating from zero to six or seven times a day, sleeping haphazardly, responding sexually randomly to men, women, dogs, elephants, trees, watermelons, snails and so on. In practice, of course, we don't shoot so high.

Instead we let the patient judge at first how he uses the dice. Of course, sooner or later he sticks himself in some small slot of diceliving where he's willing to let the dice play. Unless he's pushed he'll stay clogged up there forever.'

'How do you overcome the patient's reluctance to expand his use of the dice?' Dr. Cobblestone asked. He seemed interested.

Dr. Rhinehart stopped in front of him and smiled. `To overcome this secondary resistance - constipation we call it we use mostly the method of scare. We tell the patient to cast the dice concerning his biggest problem: "Give the dice the option of your getting into bed with your mother and feeling her up."

"Let the dice decide whether you say: `Up yours, Dad."

"Cast a die to see whether you're going to destroy your diaries."

`What happens?'

`The patient generally craps or faints,' said Dr. Rhinehart, beginning, to pace again while scowling at the floor. `But when he revives we suggest something a little less threatening but still outside his previous diceliving area. In utter gratefulness he goes along.'

Dr. Rhinehart's face brightened, and he smiled at each of the doctors as he passed them in his pacing.

`Then he's on his way. Within a month we hope he'll have achieved either ecstatic liberation, abandonment of dice therapy, or a psychosis. The psychotic break is caused by his need to avoid admitting that he can act, and he can change, that he can do something about his problems. He can't face the fact that he's free, and not the helpless, pitiable object he's under the illusion be is.

`He feels liberated when he realizes that his horrible problems can be-solved, but are not his to worry about any longer: they've been shifted to the square shoulders of the dice. He becomes ecstatic. He experiences the transfer of control from an illusory self to the dice as a conversion or as salvation. It's something like newly born Christians giving up their souls to Christ or God, or the Zen student or Taoist surrendering to the Tao. In all these cases the ego control game is abandoned and the student surrenders to a force which is experienced as being outside himself.

'Let me quote to you what one of our dice students has written about his experience.'

Dr. Rhinehart returned to his chair, extracted some papers from his briefcase and began to read from one.

'It was great. It was a real religious feeling, a spiritual, thing. Suddenly I was free of all my hang-ups about raping little girls and buggering boys. I gave up the struggle and put the whole mess into the hands of the dice. When they ordered rape, I raped. When they ordered abstention, I abstained. No problem. When they say fly to Peru, I fly to Peru. It's like being in the middle of a movie I've never seen before. It's tremendously interesting and I'm the star. In the last couple of months I haven't even bothered to give the dice any little-girl or little-boy options.

I don't know, everything else is so fascinating I just don't seem to have the old get-up-and-go anymore.'

Dr. Rhinehart placed the paper back on his chair and resumed his pacing.

`Of course, it takes a while for our students to reach this level of freedom. At first they often cast the dice and think: "Now I must have the willpower to do it" That's bad. The illusion that an ego controls or has "willpower" must be abandoned. The student's got to see his relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; he doesn't need to know where he's going or when, if ever, he'll arrive. Motion is all. And then he's got to reach the point where he and the Die are each playing with one another. It's not that the person has gained equality with the Die, it's that the human vessel is now so infused with the Spirit of the Die that it's become in effect a Sacred Vehicle, a Second Cube. The student has become Die.'

Dr. Rhinehart stopped pacing for the moment and looked intently at his listeners. He had become increasingly excited by what he was saying and five doctors behind the table had begun staring at him with increasing awe, except for Dr. Moon, who was still settled in openmouthed sleep against Dr. Mann.

`Actually, I may be going too fast for you' Dr. Rhinehart began again. `Maybe I should tell you about some of our dice exercises. Emotional roulette, for example. The student lists six possible emotions, lets a die choose one and then expresses that emotion as dramatically as he can for at least two minutes. It's probably the most useful of the dice exercises, letting the student express all kinds of long-suppressed emotions which he usually doesn't even know he has. Roger Meters reports that a dice-student of his found after ten minutes of a dice-dictated love for a specific person that he remained in love; in fact, the student has since married her.'

Dr. Rhinehart paused in his pacing to smile benevolently at Dr. Weinburger.

'Let's see, in the Horatio Alger-Huck Finn game,' he went on, `a die determines at regular intervals whether the student is to work hard, achieve and be fantastically productive or to goof off and laze around and do nothing. It's good in this exercise to have the intervals very short: the absurdity of hard work is nicely alternated with absurdity of trying to laze around and do nothing.'

'Dr. Rhinehart,' interrupted Dr. Weinburger, squeezing the crumpled papers in his fist. `It would -'

'Wait! Wait! Russian roulette. We've got two versions. In one the student creates from three to six unpleasant options and casts a die to see which if any he has to do. In the second, he creates one extremely challenging option - say, quitting a job, insulting a mother or husband, robbing a bank, murder and gives it a long-shot chance of being chosen.

`This second form of Russian roulette is one of our best dice exercises. Dr. Rhineholt Budweir cured what seemed to be a hopeless case of death anxiety by every morning taking out a revolver loaded with one live cartridge, spinning the cylinder, placing the barrel at his temple and casting two dice. If they came up snake eyes, he pulled the trigger. The odds each morning were thus two hundred and sixteen to one against his death.

`From the moment he discovered the dice exercise Dr. Budweir's death anxiety disappeared; he felt a lightness such as he hadn't experienced since his earliest childhood. His sudden death last week at the age of twenty-nine is a tragic loss.'

As he looked from one doctor to another, Dr. Rhinehart's eyes glittered behind his glasses. He continued.

`Then there's Exercise K - named in honor of the eminent German-American researcher, Dr. Abraham Krum.'

Dr. Rhinehart smiled at Dr. Mann. `The student lists six optional roles or selves he might adopt for periods varying from a few minutes to a week or more. Exercise K is the key to a successful dicelife. The student who practices this daily for an hour or two, or each week for a whole day, is on his way to becoming a full-blooded diceperson.

`Families and friends assume, of course, that the student is on the road to insanity and that his therapist is already there, but ignoring doubt and ridicule is a necessary part of becoming a diceperson. Dr. Fumm tells me that a student of his expanded Exercise K hour by hour until he had gone from an hour a day to twenty-three hours a day, varying who he was every day of the week - except Sunday, which he reserved for rest. At first his friends and family were hysterical 'with fear and rage, but once he'd explained to them what he was doing they began to adjust. At the end of a few months his wife and children would simply ask him at breakfast each morning who he was and make the necessary accommodations. Since among his many roles he was Saint Simeon Stylites, Greta Garbo, a three year-old child and Jack the Ripper, the members of his family deserve a lot of credit for their psychological maturity. May they rest in peace: Dr. Rhinehart stopped pacing and looked, solemn and sincere, directly at Dr. Mann.

Dr. Mann stared back blankly; then his face flushed. Scowling at the floor briefly, Dr. Rhinehart resumed his pacing.

`As you can see,' he said, `like all potent medications dice therapy has certain not-so-hot side effects.

`For example, the student usually gets the idea that the dice ought to determine whether he stays in therapy or not. Since he gives the option a lot of chances, the dice sooner or later order him to leave therapy. Sometimes they tell him to return: And then leave again. Sometimes they tell him to pay his therapy bill, sometimes not. It must be admitted that dice students are, as patients, a little unreliable. You'll be happy to know, however, that the more unreliable a student becomes, the closer he probably is to total cure.

`A second side effect is that a student does zany things, thus attracting attention to both himself and, inevitably, his psychotherapist.

`Another thing is that during' tertiary resistance the student is likely to try to kill the psychotherapist.'

Dr. Rhinehart paused in his pacing in front of Dr. Peerman and, looking benevolently into Dr. Peerman's averted eyes, said `This should normally be avoided.'

He resumed his pacing.

`A fourth side effect is that the student insists that the therapist also make decisions by the die. If the therapist is honest in his options he's likely to have to do something inconsistent with medical ethics. It must be admitted that the more medical ethics that the therapist tramples on, the more progress the student makes.'

Dr. Rhinehart stopped his pacing at the far end of the room, glanced at his wristwatch and then marched back along the table, looking solemnly into the faces of each of his judges as he passed.

`Prognosis,' he went on. `You probably want to know about prognosis.

`Students who enter dice therapy are usually normal, everyday, miserable Americans. About one out of five can't get past pants-peeing and drops out of therapy within two weeks. Another fifth succumb within two months to one of the periodic onsets of constipation. We're less certain of this fraction since it's possible that some of those who disappear from therapy within those first months have actually liberated themselves and no longer need the therapist to continue their dice-living.

`Of the thirty-three students who have worked with the dice for more than two months, six are now in mental institutions with little hope of ever being released.'

`Good God,' exclaimed Dr. Cobblestone, retrieving his cane from the top of the table as if preparing to defend himself.

`You'll be glad to know, however, that one of these six, although he's been catatonic for six weeks, may, in fact, be totally cured on May 13th of next year. His last recorded dice decision six weeks ago resulted in his being ordered to go into a catatonic state and remain there for one year.'

Dr. Rhinehart stopped in front of Dr. Cobblestone and smiled warmly at the bleak-faced old director.

`It is my personal prediction that after the year is gone the student will undergo a "spontaneous, remission" of all his symptoms and thus be released a few decades thereafter.'

The doctors behind the table were now staring openmouthed at Dr. Rhinehart.

'The other five inmates seem to be victims of the psychotic break, which is an obvious danger if the student is pushed too rapidly into sensitive-areas of his life. In the majority of these cases, however, the therapist believes that the personality of the student improved considerably after the psychotic break.'

Dr. Rhinehart glanced again briefly at his watch. He hurried on.

`Of the remaining twenty-seven patients who have stayed in dice therapy for more than two months, sixteen are still oscillating between bliss and breakdown; nine seem to have achieved a stable level of high joy, and two are dead, having both died in the line of duty. So to speak.'

Dr. Rhinehart stopped in the center of the room, his back to Dr. Ecstein, and faced his five judges, a soft, serene smile on his face.

`Such results are not all that could be hoped for,' he said, and after another pause, `but it should be noted that we have not with our method produced any well-adjusted miserable humans. All thirty-one of our surviving dice students are completely maladjusted to the insane society. There is thus hope.'

Dr. Rhinehart was beaming.

`I see no reason to let him go on,' said Dr. Mann quietly, shrugging his right shoulder in an-effort to dislodge Dr: Moon.

`I think perhaps you're right,' said Dr. Weinburger, neatening the crumpled papers in front of him.

`Dice therapy and money,' Dr. Rhinehart said, and began his intent pacing again. `Since Freud's pioneer work, not much has been done with the problem of money. As you gentlemen know, Freud associated money with excrement and argued shrewdly that "Tightness" was an effort to withhold excrement, to maintain, in his immortal phrase, "an Immaculate Anus."

`Dr. Rhinehart,' interrupted Dr. Weinburger, `if yon don't mind, I think . 'Two more minutes,' said Dr. Rhinehart, glancing at his watch. `Freud postulated that a neurotic will find outflow of money, excrement, time or energy a loss, a sullying of the soul, or, more precisely, the anus. Obviously any such effort to withhold is doomed to failure. As Erich Fromm has so acutely 'observed: "It is the tragedy inherent in the fate of man that he shit."

'Dr. Rhinehart's eyes gleamed, in, his solemn face. 'I forget the reference.'

`Obviously the old therapies couldn't solve this dilemma. Whereas conventional psychoanalysis sees the desire for an Immaculate Anus as neurotic and counterproductive, we maintain that the desire, like all desires, is good, and causes trouble only when followed too consistently. The individual must come to embrace, in effect, both the Immaculate Anus and the excreted lumps of ford.'

He was standing in front of Dr. Cobblestone and leaned on the table in front of him with both immaculately tailored arms. `We look not for moderation in the excretory functions, but a joyful variety: a random alteration, as it were, of constipation and diarrhea, with, I suppose, sporadic bursts of regularity.'

`Dr. Rhinehart, please said Dr. Cobblestone.

`Figuratively speaking, of course. In curing a man of compulsive worry about money we begin by giving him simple dice exercises which require him to spend or not spend small amounts of money at the whim of a Die and which make him let the Die determine how the money is spent. Slowly but surely we increase the stakes.'

`That's all,' said Dr. Weinburger, standing and confronting Dr. Rhinehart, who moved over and stopped opposite him. `You've had your say; we've heard enough.'

Dr Rhinehart glanced at his watch and then pulled a die from his pocket and glanced at it.

`You'll never get him to stop,' said Dr. Mann quietly.

`I guess I'm done,' said Dr. Rhinehart, and he walked back and resumed his seat. Dr. Ecstein was staring at the floor.

Dr. Weinburger again made motions of trying to neaten up the pile of crumpled papers in front of him and cleared his throat noisily.

`Well, gentlemen,' he said, `I suppose while Dr. Rhinehart is still here I ought to ask if any of you have any questions for him before we proceed to the vote.'

He looked nervously first to his right where Dr. Peerman was grinning sickly and Dr. Cobblestone was staring sternly at the head of his cane between his legs. Neither responded. Dr. Weinburger then looked nervously to his left where Dr. Moon, his breath coming in even harsher and more uneven gasps than earlier, was beginning a slow arc from Dr. Mann toward the chairman.

Dr. Mann said very quietly `The man is no longer human.'

`I beg your pardon?' said Dr. Weinburger.

'The man is no longer human.'

`Oh. Yes.' Dr. Weinburger stood up. `Then if there are no further questions, I must ask Dr. Rhinehart to leave the room so that we may proceed to a vote on the issue before us.'

`I'm inhuman you say?' said Dr. Rhinehart quietly, remaining in his chair next to Dr. Ecstein. `Big deal, I'm inhuman. But with the human pattern such as it is these days can the word inhuman constitute an insult? Considered in the light of normal, everyday, garden variety human cruelty in the marketplace, the ghetto, the family, in war, your inhuman refers to the abnormality of my actions, not their level of moral depravity.'

`Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Weinburger interrupted, still standing, `would you please `Come on, I've only been talking nonsense an hour, give me a chance.'

He stared wordlessly at Dr. Weinburger until the chairman slowly lowered himself into his chair.

`The suffering our dice-dictated actions causes is clearly nothing as compared man for man to that caused by rational, civilized man. Dicepeople are amateurs at evil. What seems to disturb you guys is that others are sometimes manipulated not by an ego-motivated me but by a dice-motivated me. It's the seeming gratuity of the occasional suffering we cause that shocks. You prefer purposeful, consistent, solidly structured suffering. The idea that we create love because the dice order us to, that we express love, that we feel love, all because of accident, shatters the fabric of your illusions about the nature of man.'

When Dr. Weinburger began to rise in his chair again Dr. Rhinehart simply raised his huge right arm and continued calmly `But what is this nature of man you're so gung-ho to defend? Look at yourselves. Whatever happened to the real inventor in you? to the lover? or the adventurer? or the saint? or the woman? You killed them. Look at yourselves and ask: "Is this the Image of God in which man was created?"

Dr. Rhinehart looked from Peerman to Cobblestone to Weinburger to Moon to Mann. `Blasphemy. God creates, experiments, rides the wind. He doesn't wallow in the accumulated feces of his past' Dr. Rhinehart put two sheets of paper back into his briefcase and stood up.

`I'm going now, and you can vote. But remember, you are all potentially chameleons of the spirit, and thus of all the illusions that rob men of their divinity this is the cruelest; to call the rocklike burdensome shell of "character" and "individuality" man's greatest development. It's like praising a boat for its anchor.'

Dr. Rhinehart walked away alone to the door.

`A genuine fool,' he said. `A few genuine fools. A few a generation, a few per nation. Until the discovery of the Die it was too much to ask.'

With a final smile at Dr. Ecstein, he left the room.

Chapter Forty-nine

[Being a Special Die-Dictated Dramatization of the Judicial Deliberations of the Executive Committee of PANY as Recreated from the Tape Recording and Testimony of Dr. Jacob Ecstein.]

For several moments the five members of the committee sat in silence, broken only by the harsh, uneven 'breathing of the sleeping Dr. Moon. Doctors Weinburger, Cobblestone and Mann, were all staring at the door which had closed behind Dr. Rhinehart. Dr. Peerman broke the silence `I believe we should conclude our business: 'Ah. Ah. Ah, yes,' said Dr. Weinburger. `The vote. We must have the vote.'

But he remained staring at the door. Thank God, he's insane,' he added.

`The vote,' repeated Dr. Peerman in his shrill voice.

`Yes, of course. We are now voting on Dr. Peerman's motion that our committee expel Dr. Rhinehart for the reasons

listed and request that the AMA consider taking action against him as well. Dr. Peerman?'

`I cast my vote in favor of my motion,' he said solemnly to the chairman.

`Dr. Cobblestone?'

The old doctor was fingering nervously the cane held erect between his legs and staring blankly at the empty chair of

Dr. Rhinehart.

`I vote aye,' he said neutrally.

`Two votes to condemn,' announced Dr. Weinburger. `Dr. Mann?'

Dr. Mann shrugged his right shoulder violently and jarred Dr. Moon into a more or less vertical position, Moon's eyes

flaming open briefly and erratically.

`I still think we ought to have asked Dr. Rhinehart quietly to resign,' said Dr. Mann. `I make a pro forma vote of no.'

`I understand, Tim,' said Dr. Weinburger sympathetically. `And you, Dr. Moon?'

Dr. Moon's body was balanced erect, and his eyelids slowly rose, revealing the red coals of his dying eyes. His face

looked as if it had suffered all the miseries of every human that had ever lived.

`Dr. Moon; do you vote yes to the motion to expel this man we've been listening to, or do you vote no in order to

permit him to continue?'

Dr. Moon's fierce red eyes seemed the only things alive in his wrinkled, ravaged face, but they were staring at nothing,

or at the past or at everything. His mouth was open; he drooled.

`Dr. Moon?' repeated Dr. Weinburger a third time.

Slowly, so slowly that it must have taken thirty or forty seconds for him to complete the motion, Dr. Moon raised his

two arms up over his head, feebly closed the palms of his hands into a half-fist, and then, mouth still open, dropped

them with a crash onto the table in front of him.

'NO!' he thundered.

There was a shocked silence, broken only by the explosive gasps of Dr. Moon's now totally sporadic breathing.

`Would you care to explain your vote?'

Dr. Weinburger asked gently after a while.

Dr. Moon's body was beginning to slump and slide toward Dr. Mann's shoulder again and his fierce, all-seeing eyes

were now only half open.

`My vote's obvious,' he said weakly. `Get on with it'

Dr Weinburger stood up with a dignified smile on his face.

`The vote on the motion to expel Dr. Rhinehart being tied at two to two, the chairman is obliged to cast his vote to

break the tie.'

He paused briefly and poked formally at the crumpled papers in front of him. `I vote yes. Consequently, by a vote of

three to two, Dr. Rhinehart is expelled from PANY. A letter will be sent to -'

`Point of order,' came Dr. Moon's weak voice, his eyes now open just a slit, as if permitting people only the tiniest of

glances into his red inferno.

`Beg pardon?' said the surprised chairman.

"Cording to our, bylaws . . . man presenting charges 'gainst colleague can't . . . vote . .. on motion to accept . . .

charges.'

`I'm afraid I don't understan-' `Created bylaw m'self in thirty-one,' continued Dr. Moon with a gasp. He seemed to be

trying to push himself away from Dr. Mann's shoulder but lacked the strength. `Peerman brought charges. Peerman

can't vote.'

No one spoke. There was only the hoarse explosive rattle of Dr. Moon's occasional breath.

Dr. Mann finally said in a very quiet voice `1n that case the vote is two to two.'

'Vote's two to one for acquittal,' said Dr. Moon and, after a desperate, hollow, rattling intake of air, he finished

`Chairman of committee can't vote except to break ties.'

`Dr. Moon, sir,' said Dr. Weinburger weakly, bracing himself against the table to keep himself from fainting: `Could

you please consider changing your vote or at least explaining it?'

The red coals of Dr. Moon's dying eyes blazed forth one last time from the face which looked as if it had suffered all

the miseries of every human that had ever lived.

`M'vote's obvious,' he said.

Dr. Weinburger began re-crumpling the papers which he had finished neatening in front of him.

`Dr. Moon, sir,' he said again weakly. 'Would you consider changing your vote in order to … simplify … to simplify …

Dr. Moon! Dr. Moon!' But the silence in the room was total.

Was total.

Chapter Fifty

Dr. Moon's death in the line of duty was greeted with mixed reviews in the psychiatric world of New York as was my

momentary escape from the fate I so obviously deserved. I quietly resigned from PANY, but Dr. Weinburger wrote a personal letter to the president of the AMA; my removal from the elite sections of civilization continued its slow, rational, bureaucratic course.

They probably would have kept me locked up in Kolb Clinic forever, but Jake Ecstein was my psychiatrist and unlike most other ambitious, successful doctors, Jake listened only to Jake. Thus, when I seemed perfectly normal (it was back to Normalcy Month) he ordered them to let me out. It seemed an unreasonable thing to do, even to me.

Chapter Fifty-one

`Luke, you're a quack,' Fred Boyd said to me, smiling and looking out our kitchen windows toward the old barn and

poison ivy fields.

`Mmmm,' I said, as Lil moved past our table back outdoors to get the groceries.

`A Phi Beta Kappa quack, a brilliant quack, but a quack,' he skid.

`Thanks, Fred. You're kind.'

`The trouble is,' he said, dunking a somewhat stale doughnut into his lukewarm coffee, `that some of it makes sense.

That confuses the issue. Why can't you just be a complete fool or charlatan?'

`Huh. Never thought of that. I'll have to let the Die consider it' Lil and Miss Welish came in from the yard with the

two children clamoring after them, clawing at the bags of groceries Lil carried in her arms. When Lil took out a box of

cookies and distributed three each to the two children, they wandered back outdoors, arguing halfheartedly about who

had the largest.

Miss Welish, dressed in white tennis shirts and blouse, bounced girlishly and a bit chubbily across the floor to hustle

up some fresh coffee and deliver the fresh pastry we'd been promised. Fred watched her, sighed, yawned and tipped

way back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head.

`And where's it all going to end, I wonder?' he said.

`What?' I asked.

`Your dice therapy business: `The Die only knows.'

`Seriously. What do you think you'll achieve?'

`Try it yourself,' I said.

`I have. You know I have. And it's fun; I admit it. But my God, if I took it seriously I'd have to change completely.'

`Precisely.'

`But I like the way I am: `So do I, but I'm getting bored with you,' I said. `It's variety and unpredictability we like in

our friends. Those capable of the unexpected we cherish; they capture us because we're intrigued by how they "work."

After a while we learn how they work, and our boredom resumes. You've got to change, Fred.'

'No, he hasn't,' said Lil, bringing us lemonade, a Sara Lee Coffee Cake and a bottle of vitamins and sitting at the end

of the table. `I liked Luke the way he was before, and I want Fred to stay just the way he is.'

`It's just not so, Lil. You were bored and unhappy with me before I became the Dice Man. Now you're entertained and

unhappy. That's progress.'

Lil shook her head.

`If it weren't for Fred, I don't think I'd have survived, but he's made me see your behavior for what it is: the sick

rebellion of an elephantine child.'

`Fred!'

'Now wait a minute, Lil,' he said. `That isn't quite what I think at all.'

`All right,' Lil said'. 'The sick rebellion of an elephantine Phi Beta Kappa child quack.'

'That's better,' he said, and we laughed.

Miss Welish brought us coffee and sat down with her cup in the chair in front of the window. She smiled at our thank #161;you's and took a big bite out of a sugared bun.

`Actually,' Lil said, `now that you've let me know what you're up to and I no longer give a damn about you, I find it

interesting. You should have told me about your dicelife before.'

`The dice didn't tell me to.'

`Don't you ever do anything all by yourself?' Miss Welish asked.

`Not if I can help it.'

`Luke is the only man I've ever known,' Fred said, `who consults his God every time before going to the john.'

`I think Dr. Rhinehart is a true scientist,' Miss Welish said. We all looked at her. She flushed.

`He doesn't let personal considerations enter into anything he does,' she went on. She flushed again. `So I've noticed,' said Lil. There was a somewhat embarrassed silence. Lil had questioned me extensively on my return from the clinic about what had occurred in Dr. Mann's bathroom that night, and I had told her the truth, which was extensive. She had replied extensively, and I had begun an extensive period of sleeping alone in my study. Presumably Fred had questioned Miss Welish extensively also, but her replies didn't seem to have deflected his aim. Since the Krum party, Fred had slowly but surely, with all that scholarly discipline and thoroughness for which Harvard men are renowned, worked his way into Miss Welish's not inconsiderable pants; he seemed undisturbed about whether other scholars had worked on the subject previously or not.

`The only problem I can see with all this,' Fred said, `is that you've got a poor sense of limits, Luke. To a degree, dice living has value, extraordinary value. I've experienced it. I've talked to Orv Boggles and that Tracy girl and a couple of other students of yours and I know. But good God, Luke, the trouble you've caused by not taking it easy, not using common sense.'

`Understatement of the century,' said Lil.

`I may overdo it occasionally, but in good cause: A good cause. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" #161;so said Calvin Coolidge, and I believe him.'

`But no more Krum parties, okay?' Fred asked with a smile.

`I promise never to play six roles at a party ever again.'

`But he's got to keep experimenting,' Miss Welish said.

`I promise to be only a moderate quack,' I said. `All day.'

`Well, is it tennis, a swim at the ocean, the club, or a sail?' Fred said and got up from the table.

`We need two more options,' Lil added.

`I throw,' said Miss Welish, and she got up to go to the cupboard and get out our family dice. Eventually we all gathered around the kitchen table as Miss Welish flipped the die onto the soiled tablecloth: tennis. We cast again to see whose car we would take and once more to see who played whom and we were off.

It was the first weekend of August, and we were vacationing in our old farmhouse out in the poison ivy fields of eastern Long Island, and things were going quite well. Lil, after questioning me all month about dice theory and therapy, had become more and more interested and less antagonistic. I had brought Professor Boggles home for dinner one night and he had given a fine testimonial to the gifts of the Die.

Our separation and divorce was in temporary abeyance. Lil was putting up with me on the condition that I behave myself with rational irrationality.

Fred Boyd had been a frequent visitor since my release from the clinic in mid-July, and we'd enjoyed half a dozen discussions of dice theory and practice. He tended to quote Jung or Reik or R. D. Laing to show that my ideas weren't all that original, but in doing so he seemed also to be implying that they might be credible. He began experimenting with dice play himself. He even hinted that it might have helped in his scholarly penetration into Miss Welish.

Lil had granted me my conjugal rights again near the end of July and, although she had refused bitterly at first to try any of my dice bed games, she had in the last week surrendered somewhat. We had had two interesting sessions together, Lil especially enjoying one half hour of the sinner-saint game in which the dice had twice made me a saint and she a sinner.

When we played chess she often tossed a die to determine which of two moves she would make, and she always let a die choose which movie we would see. She even let Larry play with the dice again as long as she had veto power over the options.

But the real breakthrough in our relations had come when we had played a game of emotional roulette together one afternoon when the children were at the beach. We had simplified the standard game by using only three emotions as options - love, hate and pity - but had complicated it by having both of us randomized at the same time. We had each cast a die to determine what would be our first individual three-minute emotion. Lil got hatred, I got love.

I pleaded and she reviled me; I tried to embrace her and she kicked me hard in the left thigh (thank God!); I got down on my knees and she spit on me. The three-minute sand egg-timer finally ran out and we cast again. I got pity and she got hatred again.

`Poor Lil,' I said to her as soon as I saw my dice command, and if I hadn't ducked I think her fist would have gone through my head and come out the other side. The bitterness of months and years, which had earlier been expressed only in restrained sarcasm, came flooding out in physical action and verbal massacre. She was crying and screaming, gritting her teeth and flailing at me with her fists, and even before the timer had run out she collapsed on the edge of the bed in tears.

`Onward,' I said when the time was up and cast a die and got hate. She lethargically cast and got love.

`You lifeless clump of cunt,' I hissed out at the little bitch. `You scarecrow zombie, you weepy tomb. I'd rather caress Miss Reingold's left elbow than have to touch your corpse: At first I saw anger flare in her eyes and then, like a flashbulb going off in her head, her eyes lit up, and she looked tender and compassionate.

`-boobs like bee-bees, ass so flat and bony you can use it to iron with -'

`Luke, Luke, Luke,' she repeated gently.

`LooLooLoo yourself, bitch. You have no more courage than a squashed ant. A mouse. I married a mouse.'

Anger flared again across her face.

`Look at her can't even follow a dice command for thirty seconds without losing control…'

Bewilderment. I paced in intense anger in front of her.

`To think, I might have been fucking a woman all these years: a big-booted bundle of orgasms like Arlene -'

`Luke she said.

`- or a honey-cunted tiger like Terry'

`My poor, poor Luke `I get a beady-eyed red-rimmed, tail-dragging mouse.'

She was smiling and shaking her head and her eyes, though red-rimmed, were clear and bright.

`- me, puke to think of it.'

I was towering over her, fists clenched, sneering and hissing and gasping for breath. It felt so good, but she was

looking up at me soft-eyed and defenseless and unhurt. It made me rail harder and harder until I was shamelessly

repeating myself.

`Luke, I love you' she said when I paused.

`Pity, stupid. You're supposed to feel pity. Can't even play a game right-'

`My Luke -'

'Brainless, chestless, assless clump of -'

`My poor sweet sick hero.'

`I'm not sweet! You bitch. I'll stick a dustmop up your-'

`Time,' she said. `It's time.'

`I don't give a fuck. I'd like to chop off your mousy head and peddle your cunt to lepers. I'd like-'

`The three minutes is up, Luke,' she said quietly.

`Oh,' I said, towering over her and slobbering.

`Oh. Sorry about that,' I added.

`It's enough for now,' she said. `And thanks.'

She then proceeded to bury her face in my belly and we went on to a fine fierce diceless fuck, such as is usually

associated with the highly charged emotions of the beginnings or ending of an affair. She'd been compassionate or

loving ever since.

Mostly. That morning when the Die chose tennis we drove afterward to a beach on the bay and swam and played keep away with Larry and Evie and sunned and swam and back at the farm house had nice stiff gin drinks and talked some more, eating soup and cheeseburgers and smoking pot and while Lil made brownies Miss Welish played her guitar and Fred and I sang a duet about Harvard and Cornell and we smoked more pot and retired to our rooms, Lil and I making a slow, languorous giggly love and she cried, and Fred wandered in naked and asked if he could join us in an orgy and after casting the Die I had to say no and he said fuck the Die and I cast again which said that he could fuck the Die but not us and Miss Welish came in, Lil not casting the Die but saying no, and we all sat around discussing poetry and

promiscuity and pot and pornography and the pill and possible positions and penises and pudenda and potency and

permissiveness and playing and pricks.

Much later I made another long, languorous, giggly love to Lil who was all honeyed up from all the talk and before we

fell asleep she said to me dreamily `Now the dice man has a home' and I said `mmmm' and we slept.

Chapter Fifty-two

`I want you to help me to escape,' Eric said quietly, holding the tuna-fish-salad sandwich in his hands lightly, as if it

were delicate. We were in the Ward W cafeteria crowded in amongst other patients and their visitors. I was dressed

casually in an old black suit and a black turtleneck shirt, he was in stiff gray mental-hospital fatigues.

`Why?' I asked, leaning toward him so I could hear better over the surrounding din of voices.

`I've got to get out; I'm not doing anything here anymore.'

He was looking past my shoulder at the chaos of men in line behind my back.

`But why me? You know you can't trust me,' I said.

`I can't trust you, they can't trust you, no one can trust you.'

`Thanks'

`But you're the only untrustworthy one on their side who knows enough to help us.'

`I'm honored. 'I smiled, leaning back in my chair and self-consciously taking a sip from the straw leading into my

paper carton of chocolate milk. I missed the beginning of his next sentence.

`. . . will leave. I know that. Somehow it will come to pass.'

`What?' I said leaning forward again.

`I want you to help me to escape.'

`Oh, that,' I said. `When?'

'Tonight.'

`Ahhhh,' I said, like a doctor being given an especially interesting set of symptoms.

`Tonight at 8 P.M.'

`Not eight fifteen?'

`You will charter a bus to take a group of patients to see Hair in Manhattan. The bus will arrive at 7.45 P.M. You will

come in and lead us out.'

`Why do you want to see Hair?'

His dark eyes darted at me briefly, then back to chaos beyond my shoulder.

`We're not going to see Hair. We're escaping,' he went on quietly. `You'll let us all off on the other side of the bridge.'

`But no one can leave the hospital like that without a written order signed by Dr. Mann or one of the other directors of

the hospital.'

'You will forge the order. If a doctor gives it to the nurse in charge no one will suspect a forgery.'

`After you're free, what happens to me?'

He looked across at me calmly and with utter conviction said `That is not important. You are a vehicle.'

`I am a vehicle,' I said.

We looked at each other.

`A bus, to be exact,' I added.

`You are a vehicle, you will be saved.'

'That's a relief to know.'

We stared at each other.

`Why should I do this?' I finally asked. The noise around us was terrific and we had unconsciously brought our heads

closer and closer to each other until they were separated now by only six inches. For the first time a hint of a smile

crossed his lips.

'Because the die will tell you to,' he answered softly.

`Ahhh,' I said, like a doctor who has finally found the symptom which makes the whole syndrome come together. 'The

Die will tell me to '

`You will consult it now,' he said.

`I will consult it now.'

I reached into my suit-coat pocket and pulled out two green dice.

`As I may have already explained to you, I control the options and their probability.'

'It makes no difference,' Eric said.

`But I don't think much of the option to lead you in-such an escape.'

'It makes no difference,' he said, his slight smile returning.

`How many am I supposed to take to Hair with you?'

`Thirty-seven,' he said quietly.

I believe my mouth fell open.

`I, Dr. Lucius M. Rhinehart, am going to lead thirty-seven patients in the largest and most sensational mental-hospital

escape in American history tonight at eight?'

'Thirty-eight,' he said.

'Ah, thirty-eight,' I said. We probed into each other's eyes at six-inch range, and he seemed utterly without the slightest

doubt about the outcome of events.'

`Sorry,' I said, feeling angry. 'This is the, best I can do.'

I thought for several seconds and then went on: `I'm going to cast one die. If it's a two or a six I'll try to help you and

thirty-seven others escape somehow from this hospital sometime tonight.'

He didn't reply. `All right?'

'Go ahead and shake a six,' he said quietly. I stared back at him for a moment and then cupped my hands, shook the

die hard against my palms and flipped it onto the table between my empty milk carton and two lumps of tuna salad

and the salt. It was a two.

`Ha!' I said instinctively.

`Bring us some money too,' he said, leaning back slightly but without expression. `About a hundred bucks should do.'

He pushed back his chair and stood up and looked down at me with a bright smile.

`God works in mysterious way,' he said.

I looked back at him and for the first time realized that I too wanted not my will but the Die's will to be done.

`Yes,' I said. `The vehicles of God come in many shapes and-'

`See you tonight,' he said and edged his way out of the cafeteria.

Actually I wouldn't mind seeing Hair again, I thought, and then, smiling in dazed awe at the day I had before me, I set

to work planning the Great Mental Hospital Escape.

Chapter Fifty-three

`You're cured,' Jake said. `If I do say so myself.'

`I'm not sure, Jake.'

I said. We were in his office that afternoon and he was trying to tell me that this would be our last analytic session

together.

`Your interest in dice therapy has given you a rational base upon which to work with the dice. Before, you were using

the dice to escape your responsibilities. Now they have become your responsibility.'

`That's very acute, I must admit. But how do we know the Die won't flip me off in some new direction?'

`Because you've got a purpose now. A goal. You control the options, right?'

'True.'

`You think dice therapy's hot stuff, right?'

'Sometimes.'

`You aren't going to risk the advance of dice therapy for another roll in the hay with some dumb broad. You're not.

You know now what you want.'

`A smart broad?'

`The advance of dice therapy. The advance of dice therapy. It gives your life precisely that foundation which it's been

lacking since you rejected your father in the form of Freud and Dr. Mann and began this random rebellion.'

`But a good dice therapist must lead a random life.'

`But he's got to meet the patient regularly. He's got to show up ' `Mmmmm.'

`He's got to listen. He's got to teach.'

`Hmmm.'

`Moreover, you've got Lil trying dice therapy, your kids. Your new self is being accepted. You don't have to play the

fool anymore.'

`I see.'

`I even accept the new Luke. Arlene has introduced me to several, Ah, positions of dice therapy. I spoke to Boggles.

Dice therapy makes sense.'

`1t does?'

`Of course it does.'

`But it will tend to break down the sense of a stable self so necessary for a human to feel secure.'

`Only superficially. Actually, it builds a dice-student's - Jesus, I'm using your terms already - a patient's strength by

forcing him into continual conflict with others.'

`Builds ego strength?'

'Sure. You're not afraid of anything now, are you?'

`Well, I don't know.'

`You've made an ass of yourself so many times that you can't be hurt.'

'Ahh, very acute.'

'That's ego strength.'

`Without any ego.'

`Semantics, but it's what we're after. I can't be hurt because I analyze everything. A scientist examines his wound, his

wounder and his healer with equal neutrality.'

`And the dice-student obeys the dice decision, good and bad, with equal passion.'

`Right,' he said.

`But what kind of a society will it be if people begin consulting the Die to make their decisions?'

`No problem. People are only as eccentric as their options and most of the people who will go through dice therapy are

going to develop just like you; that's what makes your case so important. They're all going to go through a period of

chaotic rebellion and then move into a lifetime of moderate, rational use of the dice consistent with some overall

purpose.'

'That's very nice, Jake,' I said and leaned back on the couch from the alert sitting position I had been in.

`I'm depressed,' I added.

`Moderate, rational use of the dice is rational and moderate and every man should try it.'

`But the dicelife should be unpredictable and irrational and immoderate. If it isn't, it isn't dicelife.'

`Nonsense. You're following the dice these days, right?'

`Yes.'

`You're seeing your patients, living with your wife, seeing me regularly, paying your bills, talking to your friends,

obeying the laws: you're leading a healthy, normal life. You're cured.'

`A healthy, normal life -'

`And you're not bored anymore.'

`A healthy, normal life unbored -'

`Right. You're cured.'

`It's hard to believe.'

`You were a tough nut to crack.'

`I don't feel any different than I did three months ago.'

`Dice therapy, purpose, regularity, moderation, sense of limits: you're cured.'

`So this is the end of my booster analysis?'

`It's all over but the shouting.'

'How much do I owe you?'

`Miss R'll have the bill for you when you leave.'

`Well, thank you, Jake.'

`Luke, baby, I'm finishing up "The Case of the Six-Sided Man" this afternoon and after poker tonight. I thank you.'

`It's a good article?'

`Tougher the case, better the article. By the way I've asked old Arnie Weissman to try to get you invited to speak at

this fall's annual AAPP convention - on Dice Therapy. Pretty good, huh?'

`Well, thank you, Jake.'

`Thought I'd present "The Case of the Six-Sided Man" on the same day.'

'The dynamic duo,' I said.

`I thought of titling the article "The Case of the Mad Scientist," but settled on "The Six-Sided Man."

What do you think?'

`The "Case of the Six-Sided Man."

'It's beautiful.'

Jake came around from behind his neat desk and put his arm way up on my shoulder and grinned up into my face.

`You're a genius, Luke, and so am I, but moderation.'

'So long,' I said, shaking his hand.

`See you tonight for poker,' he said as I was leaving.

`Oh that's right. I'd forgotten. I may be a bit late. But I'll see you.'

As I was softly closing the door behind me, he caught my eye one last time and grinned.

`You're cured,' he said.

`I doubt it, Jake, but you never can tell. Die be with you.'

`You too, baby.'

Chapter Fifty-four

[From The New York Times, Wednesday, August 13, 1969, late edition.] In the largest mass escape in the history of

New York State Mental Institutions, thirty-three patients of Queensborough State Hospital of Queens escaped last

night during a performance of Hair at the Blovill Theater in midtown Manhattan.

By 2 A.M. this morning ten of these had been recaptured by city police and hospital officials, but twenty-three

remained at large.

At the Blovill Theater the patients sat through the first act of the hit musical Hair, but as the second act was beginning they made their escape. Most of the patients began to snake-dance their way onto the stage to the music of the first number of Act 2 `Where Do I Go?', mingled with the cast, and then fled backstage and hence to the street. The Blovill

audience apparently assumed the performance of the patients was part of the show.

Hospital officials claim that someone apparently forged the signature of Hospital Director Timothy L. Mann, M.D., on documents ordering staff members to make arrangements to transport thirty-eight patients from the admissions ward to see the musical by chartered bus.

Dr. Lucius M. Rhinehart, whom the forged documents had ordered to organize and guide the expedition, stated that he and his attendants had concentrated on holding the three or four potentially dangerous patients and could not make an effort to pursue the majority when they fled backstage. In all, five patients were restrained within the theater.

`The excursion was ill-tuned and ill-planned - ridiculous in fact and I knew it,' he said. `But I attempted on four separate occasions to get in touch with Dr. Mann to question him about the request, and, failing, had no choice but to carry it out.'

Police indicated that the size of the mass escape, the character of some of the patients involved, and the complicated series of forgeries needed to fool responsible staff members indicate a plot of major proportions.

Among those who escaped were Arturo Toscanini Jones, a Black Party member who recently made news when he spat in Mayor Lindsay's face during one of the mayor's walking tours of Harlem, and hippie figure Eric Cannon, whose followers recently caused a disturbance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine during the Easter Mass.

A complete list of the names of those who have escaped was being withheld pending communication by hospital officials with the relatives of those who fled.

The patients who escaped were dressed for the most part in khakis and tee-shirts and informal footwear such as sneakers, sandals, and slippers. A few patients, it was reliably reported, had been wearing pajama tops or bathrobes.

Police warned that some of the patients might be dangerous if cornered and urged citizens to approach all known escapees with caution. They noted that among them were two of Mr. Jones's Black Party followers.

A full investigation of the breakout was under way.

Officials of the Blovill Theater and Hair Productions, Inc., denied that they had managed the mass escape as a publicity stunt.

How simple it all seems now reading about it again in the Times. Forge documents, charter bus, drive to theater, flee during performance.

Do you have any idea how many documents have to be forged to get one single patient released for one single hour from a mental hospital? From the time I left Eric at 11.30 A.M. that morning until my analytic hour with Jake at 3

P.M. I was continually typing documents, forging Dr. Mann's signature and rushing away to have the orders delivered to the appropriate staff. I got so I could sign Dr. Mann's signature faster and more accurately than he. As it was, I still had signed eighty-six fewer documents than were legally required for such an excursion.

Would you be suspicious if someone called up in muffled voice with a hint of a Negro accent and requested a forty-five seat bus to take thirty-eight mental patients to a Broadway musical on six hours' notice that very evening. Have you ever tried to lead thirty-eight mental patients off a ward when half of them don't know where they're going or don't want to go, aren't dressed for it or want to watch the Mets' night game on TV? Since I didn't know which thirty-eight of the forty-three patients on the ward my sponsor wanted to lead to freedom, I had to choose at random thirty-eight names - which naturally did not correspond with those Mr. Cannon had in mind. Do you think that the head nurse or Dr. Lucius M. Rhinehart would permit any substitution for the names on this list? `Look here, Rhinehart, two of my best men are not on this list,' Arturo whispered desperately into my ear at seven fifty-three that night.

'They'll have to see Hair another night,' I said.

`But I want these men,' he went on fiercely.

`These are the thirty-eight names on the list. These are the thirty-eight patients whom I will escort to Hair.

He dragged me farther off into the corner.

`But Cannon said only that the dice said-'

`The dice said only that I would try to help Mr. Cannon and thirty-seven other mental patients escape. It mentioned no

names. If you want to take some initiative, I assure you I don't know Smith from Peterson from Kling, but I myself am

taking only people who call themselves Smith, Peterson and Klug.'

He rushed away.

Five minutes later Head Nurse Herbie Flamm waddled up `Say, Dr. Rhinehart, I don't see Heckelburg on this list but I

just saw him leave with that last group with your attendants.'

'Heckelburg?' I said. `Perhaps not. I'll check.'

I walked away.

Flamm caught me again just as I was leaving.

`Sorry to bother you again, Doc, but four of the guys on your list are still here and four guys who aren't on your list

have just left.'

`Are you positive, Mr. Flamm, that you now have five patients left on the ward?'

`Yes sir.'

`And that only thirty-eight have left?'

'Yes sir.'

`Are you sure my name is Rhinehart?'

He stared up at me and began using his big belly nervously.

`Yes, sir. I think so, sir.'

`Yon think my name is Rhinehart?'

`Yes Sir.'

`Who is that patient - over there?'

I asked, pointing to one I'd never seen before and hoped was a new admission.

'Er . . . ah . . . him?'

`Yes, he,' I said coldly towering over him.

`I'll have to check with the attendant, Higgens. He-'

`We're going to be late for the opening curtain, Mr. Flamm. I'm afraid I can't rely on your fuzzy memory for names to delay us any longer. Goodbye.' `Goo - goodbye, Doc-'

'Rhinehart. Remember it.' Have you ever walked down Broadway in the middle of a line of thirty-eight men dressed variously in khakis, sneakers, sandals, Bermuda shorts, hospital fatigues, torn T-shirts, African capes, bathrobes, bedroom slippers, pajama tops and sweat suits and led by an utterly serene eighteen-year-old boy wearing a white hospital robe and whistling `The Battle Hymn of the Republic'? Have you ever then walked beside the beatific boy to lead such a line into a Broadway theater? And looked natural? And relaxed? When half the seats were in the front row? (The summer doldrums made it possible for me to get seats at the last minute - 4.30 P.M. that afternoon - but twenty of them cost $8.50 apiece.) Have you then tried to seat thirty-eight odd people when half the seats were scattered like buckshot over a five-hundred seat theater? When three of your patients were walking zombies, four manic-depressives and six alert homosexuals? Have you then tried to maintain a sense of dignity, firmness and authority when one of these unfortunates keeps coming up to you and whispering hysterically about when are they all supposed to escape?

`Rhinehart!' Arturo X hissed at me in anguish. `What the hell are we doing here at Hair?'

`My orders were to bring you to Hair. This I have done. The die specifically rejected the option that I release you on

Lexington Avenue. I hope you enjoy yourself.'

'There're four pigs standing at the back. I saw them when we came in. Is this some. sort of trap?'

`I know nothing about the police. There are other ways out of a theater. I hope you enjoy yourself. Be happy.'

`The Goddam houselights are dimming. What the hell are we supposed to do?'

`Listen to the music. I have brought you to Hair. Enjoy yourself. Dance. Be happy.'

Through it all Erie Cannon retained the serenity of a golfer with a two-inch putt and never once approached me #161;

except .for two seconds just after the end of the first act (`Groovy show, Dr. Rhinehart, glad we came'). But Arturo X

squirmed in his seat every second that he wasn't lunging up the aisle to speak to one of his followers or to me.

`Look, Rhinehart,' he hissed at me near the end of the intermission. `What will you do if we all get up and dance and

go onto the stage?'

`I have brought you to Hair. I want you to enjoy yourselves. Be happy. Dance. Sing.'

He stared into my eyes like an oculist searching for signs of retinal decomposition and then barked out a short laugh.

'Jesus…' he said.

`Have a good time, son,' I said as he left.

`Dr. Rhinehart, I think the patients are whispering among themselves,' one of my big attendants said about three

minutes later.

`A dirty joke no doubt,' I said.

`That Arturo Jones has been going around to everyone whispering.'

`I told him to remind everyone to catch the bus back to the island with us.'

`What if someone tries to make a break for it?'

'Apprehend him gently but firmly.'

`What if they all make a break for it?'

`Apprehend those with the most acute socially debilitating illnesses - the zombies and killers in brief - and leave the

rest to the police.'

I smiled at him serenely. `But no violence. We must not give our hospital attendants a bad name. We must not upset

the audience.'

`Okay, Doctor.'

I seated myself between the most clearly homicidal patients, and when the men in our row began to rise to join the

dance to the stage, I wrapped one of my huge arms around the throat of each of them and squeezed until they seemed strangely sleepy. I then watched the interesting opening to Act II Where thirty or so oddly dressed members of the cast who had apparently been posing as members of the audience around me began to dance down the aisles and upon to the stage frolicking with each other in a friendly roughhouse way. The onstage part of the cast pretended slight confusion but continued to sing on as the new weirdies mixed with the Act I wierdies and sang and danced and frolicked, all singing the opening number `Where Do I Go?' until most of the newcomers had gone.

The police questioned me for about half an hour at the theater, and I phoned the hospital and told the appropriate staff members there of the slight difficulties we had encountered and I phoned Dr. Mann at my apartment and informed him that thirty-three patients had escaped from Hair. My phone call had pulled him away from a hand in which he was holding a full house, aces over jacks, and he was as upset as I've ever heard him.

`My God, my God Luke, thirty-three patients. What have you done? What have you done?'

`But your letter said `What letter? NO, no, no, Luke, you know I would never write any letter about thirty-three - oh! #161;you know it! How could you do it?'

`I tried to see you, to phone you.'

`But you didn't seem upset. I had no idea. Thirty-three patients!'

`We held onto five.'

`Oh Luke, my God, the papers, Dr. Esterbrook, the Senate Committee on Mental Hygiene, my God, my God.'

`They're just people,' I said. `Why didn't someone call me during the day, a note, a messenger, something? Why was

everyone so stupid? To take thirty-three patients off the ward'

`Thirty-eight.'

`To a Broadway musical'

`Where should we have taken them? Your letter said `Don't say that! Don't mention any letter by me!'

`But I was just-'

`To Hair!' and he choked. `The newspapers, Esterbrook, Luke, Luke, what have you done?'

`It'll be all right, Tim. Mental patients are always recaptured.'

`But no one ever reads about that. They get loose - that's news.'

`People will be impressed with our permissive, progressive policies. As you said in your let-'

`Don't say that! We must never let a patient out of the hospital again. Never.'

`Relax, Tim, relax, I've got to talk some more to the police and the reporters and '

`Don't say a word! I'm coming down. Say you've got laryngitis. Don't talk.'

`I've got to go now, Tim. You hurry on down.'

`Don't say-'

I hung up.

I talked to police and the reporters and minor hospital officials and then Dr. Mann in person for another hour and a half, not getting back to the poker party at my apartment until close to midnight.

Lil, I'm happy to report, was winning substantially, with Miss Welish and Fred Boyd the primary losers and Jake and Arlene breaking even. They were all rather interested in what had happened to so upset Dr. Mann, but I played it down, called it a minor Happening, a tempest in a teapot, implied that some subversive underground group had conspired a series of forgeries, and insisted I was sick of the subject and wanted to play poker.

I was tremendously keyed up and could barely sit still in my chair, but they kindly dealt me in, and by ignoring their further questions I was finally left to concentrate on my abominably bad luck with the cards. I lost badly to Fred Boyd on the first hand and even worse to Arlene on the second. By the end of seven hands without a winner I was thoroughly depressed and everyone else (except Miss Welish, who was sleepy and bored) was quite gay. The phone had rung just once and I had told the police that I didn't know how I had been cut off during my attempted phone call to Dr. Mann that afternoon, but that it obviously wasn't me since I was talking on the phone at the time.

I told them that I talked to Arturo Jones at Hair because he was an acute drama critic and that I had single-handedly held on to two of the most dangerous patients and that I'd appreciate a little respect since I felt badly enough about losing as it was.

I lost two more hands of poker and got gloomier and the party broke up with Fred telling about how he was using dice therapy with two of his patients and Jake telling me about a sentence he'd written in his article, and they were gone and Lil, laughing happily, went off to bell. I, despite several of her most obscene kisses, remained behind slumped in the easy chair brooding about my fate.

Chapter Fifty-five

The events which occurred between 1.30 A.M. and 3.30 A.M. that morning, being of some historical note, must be recorded objectively. Dr. Rhinehart had realized for several weeks that the early morning hours of August 13 were, in effect, the first anniversary of his relationship with the Die. He had planned to do as he had at the beginning of 1969; create a list of longer range options from which the Die would choose to direct his life.

He found, however, that he was too distraught over the possible consequences of his activities of the previous day to concentrate on options running much longer than a few minutes. A year before, he had been bored and restless; now he was overexcited and restless. He lunged back and forth across the living room, gritting his teeth, clenching his fists, stroking them against his tensed belly, gulping in huge lungfuls of air, trying to determine whether the police would be able to build a convincing case against him. His only hope, as he saw it, was that when one or more of Mr. Cannon's or Mr. Jones's recaptured followers began alleging that he (Dr. Rhinehart) had aided and abetted their escape, their allegations would be taken as the statements of mentally imbalanced persons, creatures legally unfit to give reliable testimony. Dr. Rhinehart spent close to twenty minutes concocting his defense - mostly a lengthy indictment of the secret black and hippie conspiracy to frame all white doctors named Rhinehart.

At last, however, in exasperation at his nervousness, Dr. Rhinehart returned to reality and cast a die to determine whether he would brood about his problems with the police and Dr. Mann for zero, five, ten or thirty minutes or one day, or until the problems were resolved, and the die ordered ten more minutes. When the time had elapsed, he breathed an immense sigh and smiled.

`Now. Where are we?' he thought.

He then recalled that it was his anniversary, and with that inhuman casualness for which future generations of healthy

normal people were to condemn him and for which future generations of dicepeople have admired him, he dictated

that should he flip a one, a three or a five he would go downstairs and try to engage in sexual congress with Mrs.

Ecstein. The Die fell three and he arose, informed his wife that he was going for a walk and left the apartment.

Since this episode is of little importance, we report it in Dr. Rhinehart's own words .

I clumped down the stairs, past the rusty railing and cast-off advertising circular and rang the doorbell. It was 2.20

A.M., a little late this year, and certainly no time for a little tete-a-tete. Arlene came bleary-eyed clutching Jake's old

bathrobe - to her throat.

`Oh,' she said.

`I've come to engage in sexual congress, Arlene.'

`Come in,' she said.

`The dice told me to do it again.'

`But Jake's here,' she said, blinking her eyes absently and letting the robe fall slightly open.

`He's working in his study at the end of the hall.'

`I'm sorry, but you know how the Die is,' I said.

`I promised not to hide anything from him anymore.'

`But did you consult the Die about that?'

`Oh, you're right.'

She turned and went down the hall a short way and then into her bedroom: I joined her at her vanity table, where

successive flips of a die determined that she was to tell Jake everything and that she was to permit sexual congress

with me, but only in Kama Sutra positions eighteen and twenty-six, which, she said, were particularly suited for

women in their fifth month of pregnancy.

I then followed her up the hall and watched over her shoulder as she stood in the slightly open doorway of Jake's study

looking in at her husband hard at work at his desk.

`Jake?' she said tentatively.

`What's up?' he barked back, not looking up. - `Luke's here,' she said.

`Oh. Come on in Luke baby, I'm just about finished.'

`We're sorry to bother you, Jakie,' Arlene said, `but the Die said Luke had to-'

`I've got a ring-linger last chapter, Luke, if I do say so myself,' Jake said, smiling, and scratching furiously with his

pen across some errant phrase.

`- engage in sexual congress,' I heard Arlene finish.

`What's that?' Jake said and looked up again.

`What?'

`It's our anniversary,' I added.

He scratched his throat and grimaced and looked a little annoyed.

`Oh that,' he finally said. `Jesus, Moses, Freud. I don't know what the world's coming to.'

He stared at us both a long time, squinting horribly. Then he reached to his side, rolled a die across his desk and

frowned again. `Yeah, well, take it easy with my bathrobe.'

`We will,' Arlene said, wheeling around with a beaming smile, and she bounced past me back up the hall to her room.

Dr. Rhinehart returned to his own apartment approximately thirty-eight minutes after leaving it and again felt

depressed. The exhilaration he had felt a year ago upon returning from a superficially similar undertaking was absent. He cast himself into the easy chair in his living room in a tired, anxious, apathetic state such as he had not previously experienced in his dicelife. When he became aware again of his merely human anxiety, he grunted an extremely loud `Ahhggh,' and surged out of the chair to get paper, pencil and dice.

As he returned from his study to the living room, however, he was met by his wife, who had been awakened by his

loud grunt and stood in the bedroom doorway to inquire sleepily if everything was all right. `Everything is confused and unreliable,' Dr. Rhinehart said irritably. `If I could only count definitely upon either the stupidity or the intelligence of the police `Come to bed, Lukie,' his wife said and lifted her slender arms up around his neck and leaned sleepily against him. The bed warmed body that Dr. Rhinehart's hands found themselves enclosing was unconfused and reliable, and with a different sounding `Ahhhh' he lowered his head and embraced his wife.

`But I have miles to go before I sleep,' he said softly when he had broken their kiss.

`Come to bed,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. `The police will never touch you when you're in your wife's bed.'

`Had I but world enough and time-'

`There's plenty of time - come,' and she began to drag her husband into their bedroom. 'I've even dreamed of a new

option,' she said.

But Dr. Rhinehart had stopped a few feet inside the door, and, slump-shouldered and bedraggled, he said: 'But I have

miles to go before I sleep.'

Mrs. Rhinehart, still holding one of his large hands in hers, turned dreamily and smiled and yawned.

`I'll be waiting, sweetheart,' she said, and with an unintended swinging of the more desirable parts of her anatomy, she

moved to her bed and climbed in.

`Goodnight, Lil,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

`Mmmm,' she said. `Check the kids 'fore you come.'

Dr. Rhinehart, still holding in his left hand the paper, pen and two dice, walked quickly to the children's bedroom and

tiptoed in to look at Larry and Evie. They were sound asleep, Larry with his mouth open like a child drunk and Evie

with her face so buried by the sheet that he could only make out the top of her head.

`Have good dreams,' he said and silently left the room and returned to the living room.

He placed the paper, pencil and dice on the floor in front of the easy chair and then, with a sudden lunge, took four

strides toward his bedroom and stopped. Sighing, he returned to kneel on the rug beside the tools of his trade. To relax

himself and prepare for what he had to do, he performed a series of random dice exercises; four random physical

exercises, two one-minute spurts of the sinner-saint game, and one three minute period of emotional roulette - the Die

choosing self pity, an emotion he found himself expressing with enthusiasm. Then he placed the two green dice on the

easy chair in front of him and, kneeling on the rug, intoned a prayer:

Great God blob Die, I worship thee;

Awaken me this morn With thy green gaze,

Quicken my dead life With thy plastic breath,

Spill into the arid spaces of my soul Thy green vinegar.

A hundred hungry birds scatter my seed,

You roll them into cubes and plant me.

The people I fear are

Puppets poking puppets,

Playthings costumed by my mind.

When you fall,

O Die,

The strings collapse and I walk free.

I am thy grateful urn, O Die, Fill me.

Dr. Rhinehart felt a serene joy such as always came to him when he surrendered his will to the Die: the peace which

passeth understanding. He wrote upon the white, blank paper the options for his life for the next year.

If the dice total two, three or twelve: he would leave his wife and children forever. He recorded this option with dread.

He'd given it once chance in nine.

He gave one chance in five (dice total of four or five) that he would completely abandon the use of his dice for at least

three months. He desired this option as a dying man the wonder drug to end his ills and feared it as a healthy man does

a threat to his balls.

Dice total six (one chance in seven): be would begin revolutionary activity against the injustice of the established

order. He didn't know what he had in mind by the option, but it gave him pleasure to think of thwarting the police,

who were making him so uncomfortable. He began daydreaming about joining forces with Arturo or Eric until a police

siren on the street outside his apartment building so frightened him that he thought of erasing the option (the mere

writing of it might be a crime) and then decided to go quickly on to the others.

Dice total of seven (one chance in six): he would devote the entire next year to the development of dice theory and

therapy. Recording this brought such pleasant excitement that he considered giving it the totals of eight and nine as

well, but fought back such human weakness and went on.

Dice total of eight (one chance in seven): he would write an autobiographical account of this adventures.

Dice total nine, ten or eleven (one chance in four): he would leave the profession of psychiatry, including dice therapy,

for one year, letting the dice choose a new profession. He recorded this with pride; he would not be the prisoner of his

fascination for his beloved dice therapy.

Examining his six options, Dr. Rhinehart was pleased; they showed imagination and daring. Each of them represented

both threat and treat, both the danger of disaster and the possibility of new power.

He placed the paper by his side and the two green dice in front of him on the floor.

'Tuck me in, Dad,' a voice said from the other end of the room. It was his son Larry, practically asleep on his feet.

Dr. Rhinehart arose irritably, marched to the swaying boy, lifted him up into his arms and carried him back to his bed.

Larry was asleep as soon as his father had pulled the sheet up to his neck again, and Dr. Rhinehart rushed back to his

position on his knees in the living room.

The dice in position before him, he knelt silently for two minutes and prayed. He then picked up the two dice and

began shaking them gaily in the bowl of his hands.

Tremble in my hands, O Die, As I so shake in yours.

And holding the dice above his head he intoned aloud `Great bleak Blocks of God, descend, quiver, create. Into your

hands I commit my soul.'

The dice fell: a one and a two - three. He was to leave his wife and children forever.

Chapter Fifty-six

How about that?

Chapter Fifty-seven

The heavens declare the glory of Chance;

And the firmament showeth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth accident,

And night unto night showeth whim.

There is no speech nor language

Where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth,

And their deeds to the end of the world.

In them hath Chance set a tabernacle for the sun,

Whose going forth is from the end of the heaven,

And his circuit unto the ends of it:

And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

The law of Chance is perfect, converting the soul:

The testimony of Chance is sure, making wise the simple.

The statutes of Chance are right, rejoicing the heart:

The commandment of Chance is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of Chance is clean, enduring forever:

The judgments of Chance are true and righteous altogether.

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Fifty-eight

Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus and dictators throughout the world continually tell us. I spent many days that August thinking about what I would do with my life, oscillating hour to hour from joy to gloom, madness to boredom.

I was lonely. There was no one to whom I could go and say: `Aren't I wonderful; I left Lil and my job in order to toss dice and become a totally random man. If you're lucky the dice may let me finish this conversation.'

I had not given, a last kiss to Lil and the children. I hadn't left a note. I had gathered up a few personal notebooks, a checkbook, two or three books (chosen by a Die at random), several pairs of green dice and left the apartment. I returned two minutes later and left the only message in the world I felt Lil might understand and believe: on the floor in front of the easy chair I had placed two dice, their upturned faces showing a two and a one.

I had thought at first that nothing should be impossible to the Dice Man at any given moment. It was an elevating aspiration. I might not be more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but in terms of being free at any given moment to do whatever the dice or the spontaneous `I' might dictate, I would be, compared to all known past human beings, a superman.

But I was lonely. Superman at least had a regular job and Lois Lane. But being a real superbeing, one capable of marvels and miracles compared to the mechanical and repetitious acrobatics of Superman and Batman, was lonely, I'm sorry, fans, but that's how I felt.

I had gone to a dingy hotel in the East Village that made the geriatrics ward at QSH seem like a plush retirement villa. I sweated and sulked and wandered out to play a few dice roles and dice games and sometimes I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but those nights alone in that hotel room were not among the high points of my life.

The problem of boredom which the Die had so successfully solved seemed, now that I was approaching the totally free state, to be reappearing. My own family and friends had been boring enough, but I began to feel that the average humans I was encountering on the streets and bars and hotels of Fun City were far worse. The dice had introduced me already to such variety that I was- beginning to find, like Solomon, that it was difficult to find anything new under the sun.

As a wealthy southern aristocrat I had seduced a young, reasonably presentable typist and kept her two nights (`Y'all shore do have a nice boahdy') before the dice reincarnated me as a Bowery bum. I stored all my cash and some new clothes I had bought in a locker, stopped shaving and for two days and nights panhandled and got drunk on the lower East Side. I didn't get much sleep and felt lonelier than ever, my only friends being an occasional stray derelict who would hang around until he was sure I was really broke. I got so hungry that I finally straightened up my clothes as best I could and stole a box of crackers and two cans of tuna fish from a small supermarket. A young `clerk looked very suspicious but after I'd finished my `browsing' I asked him if they sold amoratycemate and that shut him up while I left.

As a life-insurance salesman looking for a fresh lay, I failed to get anywhere and spent another lonely night.

The dice permitted me to phone the police three times: once to say in a thick Negro accent that the Black Panthers had sprung Arturo Jones from the hospital; once as Dr. Rhinehart to inform that I had left my wife but if they wanted to question me about anything I'd make myself available; and once as an anonymous hippie informer, telling them that Eric Cannon had been permitted to escape by an act of God.

I spent two days playing with a thousand dollars in a Wall Street brokerage house, letting the Die buy and sell or hold at its discretion and I only lost two hundred dollars but I was still bored.

About nine o'clock one hot August evening, sitting crowded and lonely at one end of a packed Village bar and having crumpled up in the course of the previous two days at least four separate lists of options, I had to face the fact that now that I was free to be absolutely anything, I was rapidly becoming interested in absolutely nothing: a somewhat distressing development. It was such an original experience, however, that I began to laugh happily to myself, my big belly shaking like an old engine warming up. I would obviously have to give the dice a brief vacation and see what happened. I would grow for a few weeks organically instead of randomly.

Having thus decisively decided not to decide, I felt vaguely better, even with a tart, rather evil-tasting beer awash in

my tummy and unfinished in my glass. I wanted rest. I'd left Lil: a great triumph (I felt tired). Let me drift in peace. Trying to feel serenity I left the noisy bar and, after a half hour's organic wandering, entered another just like it. The beer tasted the same too. I thought of telephoning Jake and pretending to be Erich Fromm calling from Mexico City. I dismissed it as a symptom of loneliness. I thought of yelling, `Drinks on me!' but my organic frugality vetoed the impulse. I daydreamed about buying a yacht and circling the globe.

`Well, if it isn't old coitus-interruptus himself.'

The voice, sharp and feminine, was followed by the fact, soft and feminine, and the recognition, hard and masculine, of the half-smiling face of Linda Reichman. 'Er, hello, Linda,' I said, not to suavely. I found myself instinctively trying to remember what role I was supposed to be

playing.

`What brings you here?' she asked.

`Oh. I .. don't know. I sort of drifted here.'

She edged between my neighbor and me and placed her drink on the bar. Her eyes were heavily made up, her hair a

more deeply bleached blonde than I remembered it, her body no need to speculate about her measurements; her breasts swayed bralessly against a tight-fitting multicolored T-shirt. She looked very sexy in a debauched sort of way and she eyed me with curiosity.

`Drifted? The Great Psychiatrist drifted? I had the impression that you never even picked your nose without writing a

treatise proving its value.'

'That was the old days. I've changed, Linda.'

`Ever managed an orgasm?' I laughed and she smiled.

`How about yourself?'

I asked. 'What've you been doing?'

`Disintegrating,' she said and gracefully swallowed the last of her drink. `You ought to try it, it's fun.'

`I think I'd like to.'

A man appeared next to her, a small frail man with glasses who looked like a graduate student in organic chemistry,

and after glancing once at me, he said to Linda: `Come on, let's go.'

Linda slowly turned her eyes to the man and, with a look that made all previous looks I'd seen on her face seem like

idolatrous administration, announced: `I'm staying awhile.'

Organic chemistry blinked at her, looked at my impressive bulk nervously and took her by the elbow.

`Come on,' he said.

She lifted the dregs of her drink carefully off the bar past my face and poured it slowly down organic chemistry's back

inside his shirt, ice cubes and all.

`Go change your shirt first,' she said.

He never batted an eye. With a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders he merged back into the surrounding mob.

`You think you'd like to disintegrate, huh?' she said to me and then signaled to a bartender for another drink.

`Yes, but it seems an awfully hard thing to do. I've been trying it for over a year now and it takes tremendous effort.'

`A year! You don't look it. You look like a middle-class insurance salesman who comes once every four months to the

Village for a fresh lay.'

`You're wrong. I've been trying to disintegrate myself. But tell me, how do you go about it?'

'Me? Same as always. I haven't changed since you last saw me. Get my kicks the same ways. I spent three months in

Venezuela even lived with a man for almost a month, twenty four days to be precise - but nothing's new.'

`Then you're failing,' I said.

`What d'you mean?'

'I mean if you're really trying to disintegrate you're not succeeding. You're not changing. You're staying the same.'

She wrinkled her clear, still youthful brow and took a big gulp from her fresh drink.

`It was just a word. Disintegration doesn't mean anything. I'm just living my life.'

`Would you like a new kick, one you've never had before and really disintegrate the old self?'

She laughed abruptly. `I've had enough of your brand of kicks.'

`I've developed new brands.'

`Sex bores me. I've made love with every possible number and configuration of men, women and children, had penises

and other appropriately shaped objects up every orifice in every possible combination and sex is a bore.'

`I'm not necessarily talking about sex.'

`Then maybe I'm interested.'

`It will mean a partnership with me for a while.'

`What kind of partnership?'

`It will mean giving up your freedom entirely into my hands for - well - a month, let's say.'

She looked at me intently, thinking.

`I become your slave for one month?' she asked.

`Yes.'

A middle-aged woman with dyed black hair, sharp dark eyes and no makeup knifed out of the moiling sea behind us,

glided up beside Linda and whispered in her ear. Linda, watching me, listened.

`No, Tony,' she said. `No. I've changed my plans. I may not be able to make it.'

Another whisper.

`No. Definitely no. Goodbye.'

The raven-haired shark fell back into the sea.

`I do whatever you want for one month?'

`Yes and no. You follow a special way of life which I've developed. It gives you a new kind of freedom, but if you're

going to get the kicks, you must follow the system unconditionally.'

She smiled a little bitterly: `I'm not sure I really need any more kicks.'

`You'll learn more about yourself and life in one month than you have in all your previous twenty-five years.'

`Twenty-eight,' she said indifferently. She placed her half-empty drink on the bar and started to move away restlessly

but returned. She stared at the ring of sweat her glass had made on the counter and .then looked up at me coldly.

`Where does old coitus-interruptus suddenly get all the time?' she asked. `The famous half-lay method not getting

good results?'

`I've retired,' I said.

`You've retired!'

`I've left my wife, my job and my friends and I am on vacation for life.'

She eyed me with new respect: as one citizen of hell to another.

`Jesus, you don't do things in fractions;' she said. But then a cold sneer returned: `But I become your slave for a

month? Huh. I know a lot of people who would pay plenty for that privilege. What do I get in return?'

`In return?'

I said, momentarily impressed with the logic of recompense. `I will do whatever you want for one month following

your service to me.'

`After I've been your slave, big deal. What guarantee do I have?'

`None. Except that when you experience your new life with me and my madness, you'll realize that my form of slavery

is desirable.'

`Why don't you be my slave first?'

`Because you wouldn't be an intelligent and imaginative master. I've been practicing this game on myself for years. I'll

teach you first and then submit' `Maybe,' Linda said to me. `But first I bat. For the next twenty-four hours you be my

slave. You obey all I say except what might physically harm you or unnecessarily destroy your professional image.

The same will be true when I obey you. How's that?'

'All right,' I said.

We looked at each other speculatively.

`How do we seal this agreement?' she asked.

`Total slavery is a new path and we both want to travel new paths - that's what disintegration is all about. I'm satisfied

you have the desire and will live up to the agreement.'

`Okay. Have we begun?'

I glanced at my watch. `We have begun. I obey you until tomorrow evening at nine forty-five. For the sake of

anonymity my name is Charlie, Herbie (Flames).'

`Your name is what I choose.'

`Yes, all right.'

`Follow me.'

Leaving the bar, we hailed a taxi and she took me to an apartment - hers I supposed - on the West Side in the twenties.

There, after she had had me fix her a drink, she pulled her knees up under her on the couch and stared up at me with a

look of cold analysis.

`Stand on your head.'

With an effort I awkwardly tried to balance myself on my head. Despite my recent efforts at yoga and yoga meditation

I collapsed, tried and collapsed. About the fifth time down she said: `All right, stand up.' She lit a cigarette, her hand

trembling - perhaps from all she had drunk.

`Take off your clothes,' she said.

I took them off.

`Masturbate,' she said quietly.

`It seems like a waste,' I said.

When I want you to say something I'll say so.'

The command was easier said than done. Like most other red-blooded healthy American youth I had masturbated my

way through high school and part of college and after graduating to more frequent social and sexual intercourse with women, had more or less abandoned the habit. I had been pleased to learn when I studied psychology that my mind was not deteriorating after all, but a residual layer of guilt somewhere remained. After all, can we picture Jesus beating his meat? Or Albert Schweitzer? Undoubtedly Linda believed in the intrinsic indignity of masturbation or she wouldn't have assigned it to me. For some reason I didn't find it easy to create images of fantasies of pleasure which would raise the old cannon into firing position. I stood there immobile, trying to think sexy thoughts.