The Dice Man (15 page)

`That is true, and you and Dr. Rhinehart must stop doing that which is so clearly sinful and which must hurt her.'

`We're not doing anything, it's you that makes her suffer.'

`Dr. Rhinehart will be a better man.'

`Good. I hate to see her so upset with you: She gave the Sacred Tool a little friendly squeeze and then lowered her head to his lap and sucked in the Spiritual Spaghetti.

`But Arlene!' He said. `Dr. Rhinehart's making love to you is fornication, is what might hurt her.'

The woman tempted Jesus further with her serpent's tongue, but producing no measurable effect, raised herself. Denied her sinful pleasure she looked peevish.

`What are you talking about? What's fornication, another of your perversions?'

`Physical intercourse with Dr. Rhinehart is a sin.'

`Who's this Dr. Rhinehart you keep talking about? What's the matter with you today?'

`What you have been doing is cruel and selfish and against the word of God. Your affair might have disastrous effects upon Lillian and the children.'

`How?'

'If they found out'

'She'd only divorce you.' Jesus stared at the woman.

`We are speaking of human beings and of the Sacred Institution of Marriage,' He said.

`I don't know what you're talking about' Jesus became wrathful and thrust the woman's hand away and zipped up the Holy Fly.

`You are so buried in your sin you cannot see what you do.'

The woman was angry too.

`You've been enjoying yourself for three months and now all of a sudden you discover sin and that I'm a sinner.'

`Dr. Rhinehart is a sinner too.'

The woman poked back at the Crotch.

'Not much of a one today,' she said.

Jesus stared out through the windshield of the car at a small cruiser plodding across the bay. Two gulls which had been following it swerved away and spiraled up about fifty feet and then spiraled down and over toward Him, wheeling out of sight past the car. A signal? A Sign? Jesus realized humbly that of course he was being insane, By fucking Mrs. Ecstein with great gusto for months in the body of Dr. Rhinehart He had confused her. It was difficult for her to recognize him in the -body of someone she had knows playing the role of a sinner. Looking over at her, he saw her staring crossly out over the water, her hands clasping a half-finished almond bar in her lap. Her bare knees suddenly appeared to Him as those of a little child, her emotions those of a little girl. He remembered His injunction about children.

`I'm very very sorry Arlene. I'm insane. I recognize this. I'm not always myself. I frequently lose myself. To cast you off by suddenly talking about sin and Lil and Jake must seem cruel hypocrisy.'

When she turned to face Him. He saw tears brimming at her eyes.

`I love your cock and you love my breasts and that's not sin.'

Jesus considered these words. They did seem reasonable.

`It is good,' He said. `But there are greater goods.'

`I know that, but I like yours.'

They stared at each other: two alien spiritual worlds.

`I have to go now,' He said. `I may return. My insanity is sending me away. My insanity says I will not be able to make love to you for a while.'

Jesus started the car.

`Boy,' she said and took a healthy bite from the almond bar, `you ought to be seeing a psychiatrist yourself five times a week if you ask me.'

Jesus drove them back to the city.

Ego, my friends, ego. The more I sought to destroy it through the dice the greater it grew. Each tumble of a die chipped off another splinter of the old self to feed the growing tissues of the dice man ego. I was killing past pride in myself as analyst, as article writer, as good-looking male, as loving husband, but every corpse was fed to the cannibalistic ego of that superhuman creature I felt I was becoming. How proud I am of being the Dice Man! Whose primary purpose is supposedly to kill all sense of pride in self. The only options I never permitted were those which might challenge his power and glory. All values might be shat upon except that. Take away that identity from me and I am a trembling dread-filled clod, alone in an empty universe. With determination and dice, I am God.

Once I wrote down as an option (one chance in six) that I could (for a month) disobey any of the dice decisions if I felt like it and if I shook a subsequent odd number. I was frightened by the possibility. Only the realization that the act of `disobedience' would in fact be an act of obedience removed my panic. The dice neglected the option. Another time I thought of writing that from then on all dice decisions would be recommendations and not commands. In effect, I would be changing the-role of dice from commander-in-chief to advisory council. The threat of having `free will' again paralyzed me. I never wrote the option.

The dice continually humbled me. They ordered me to get drunk one Saturday: an act which I had found to be inconsistent with my dignity. Being drunk meant an absence of self-control which was inconsistent also with the detached, experimental creature I was becoming as the Dice Man. However, I enjoyed it. The letting go was not very different from the insanities I had been committing while sober. I spent the evening with Lil and the Ecsteins and at midnight began making paper airplanes out of the manuscript pages of my proposed book on sadism and flying them out the window onto 72nd Street. My drunken pawing of Arlene was interpreted as drunken pawing. The incident marked another piece of evidence of the slow disintegration of Lucius Rhinehart.

I provided my friends with plenty of other pieces of evidence. I rarely ate lunch with my colleagues anymore since I usually was sent by the dice to other places whenever I had free time. When I did lunch with them the dice often had dictated some eccentric role or action which seemed to unsettle them. One-day during a forty-eight hour total fast (except for water) which the die had dealt me, I felt weak and decided not to let the die send me anyplace: I would share my fast with Tim, Jake and Renata.

They talked, as they had for several months, primarily to each other. Whenever they directed a question or comment to me they did it warily, like animal trainers feeding a wounded lion. This particular afternoon they were talking about the hospital's policy of releasing patients conditionally, and I, staring hysterically at Jake's sirloin steak, was drunk with hunger. Dr. Mann was slobbering his scallops all over the table and his napkin, and Dr. Felloni was delicately escorting each separate tiny piece of lamb (Lamb!) to her mouth and I was insane. Jake as usual managed to talk and eat faster than both the others together.

`Got to keep 'em in,' he said. `Harmful to us, the hospital, society, everybody, if a patient is prematurely released. Read Bowerly.'

Silence. (Actually chewing [I heard every nibble], other restaurant voices, laughter, dishes clattering, sizzling [I heard every single bubble explosion] and a loud voice which said, `Never again.') `You're-absolutely right, Jake,' I uttered unexpectedly. They were my first words of the afternoon.

`Remember that Negro released on probation who killed his parents? We were idiots. What if he'd only wounded them?'

`He's right, Tim,' I said.

Dr. Mann didn't deign to interrupt his eating, but Jake shot me a second piercing squint.

`I'll bet,' he went on, `that two-thirds of the patients released from QSH - and the other state hospitals - are released far too early, that is, when they're still a menace to themselves and society.'

`That's true,' I said.

`I know that the professional opinion in vogue is that hospitalization is at best a necessary evil, but it's a stupid vogue. If we've got anything to offer our patients, then our hospitals do too. There are three times as many doctor-hours for a patient as he gets in the best out-patient treatment. Read Hegalson, Potter and Busch, their revised edition.'

'And they don't miss appointments, either,' I added.

'That's right,' Jake went on, `there's no home life to mess up their lives.'

'No wives or husbands or children or home-cooked meals.'

'Yeah.'

Dr. Felloni interrupted: 'Isn't adjustment to the home environment what we're striving for though?'

"Adjustment to some environment,' Jake answered. `I try to get my Negro patients in group therapy to see the sickness of the white world so that they will end their resentment and find themselves satisfied with either their lives on the ward or their necessary ghetto existence.'

'And God knows,' I said, `that the white world is sick. Look at the starving millions in East Germany.' This slowed Jake down for a moment: he lived the rhythm of agreement but wasn't certain that my statement here was entirely satisfactory. With that brilliance which was his essence he hedged: `Our job is to shoot psychological penicillin into the whole social fabric, white and black, and we're doing it.'

'But with regard to Mrs. Lansing,' Dr. Felloni said, `you do feel she should be released.'

'She's your baby, Renata, but remember, "When is doubt, don't let 'em out."

'Dr. Mann sent up a belch as an apparent warning signal that he was about to speak. We all looked at him respectfully.

`Jake,' he said. `You would have been at home as commander of a concentration camp.'

Silence.

Then I said: `What a lousy thing to say. Jake wants to help his patients not exterminate them. And besides, in concentration camps the commander sometimes ... didn't give them food: Silence. Dr. Mann seemed to be chewing a cud; Dr. Felloni was moving her head from side to side and up and down very slowly, like someone watching a tennis match consisting entirely of lobs. Jake, leaning forward intently and peering without fear into Dr. Mann's bland face, said with the rapidity of a typewriter `I don't know what you mean by that, Tim. I'll stack my patient record against yours any day. My policy on patient' release is the same as the director's. I think you should apologize.'

`Quite right,' Dr. Mann wiped his mouth with his napkin (or he may have been nibbling from it). `Apologize. I'd be at home as commander too. Only one who wouldn't is Luke, he'd let everyone go - on a whim.'

Dr. Mann had not been enthusiastic about the release of Arturo Toscanini Jones.

`No, I wouldn't,' I said. `If I were commander I'd increase food allotments two hundred percent and do experiments with the inmates which would advance psychiatry a hundred years past Freud in twelve months.'

`Are you-talking about Jewish inmates?' Jake asked.

`Damn right. Jews make the best subjects for psychological experiments.'

I paused about one and a half seconds, but as Jake started to speak, I went on. `Because they're so intelligent,' sensitive and flexible.'

That slowed Jake down. Somehow the racial stereotype I had created with my three adjectives didn't seem to leave him much to shoot at.

`What do you mean by flexible?' he asked.

`Not rigid - open-minded, capable of change.'

`What experiments would you perform, Luke?'

Dr. Mann asked, watching a chubby waiter quiver past with a platter of lobsters.

`I wouldn't touch the inmates physically. No brain operations, sterilizations, that stuff. All I'd do is this: Turn all the ascetics into hedonists; all the epicureans into flagellants; nymphomaniacs into nuns; homosexuals into heterosexuals, and vice versa. I'd train them all to eat non kosher food, give up their religion, change their professions, their styles of dress, grooming, walking and so on, and train them all to be unintelligent, insensitive and inflexible. I would prove that man can be changed: Dr. Felloni looked a little startled; she was nodding rather emphatically: `We're going to do this at Queensborough State, Hospital?'
`When I become director,' I answered.

`But I'm not certain it would be ethical,' she said.

`How would you do all this?' asked Dr. Mann.

`Drole therapy.'

`Drole therapy?'

Jake asked.

`Yes. Honker, Ronson and Gloop, APB Journal, August, 1958, pages sixteen to twenty-three, annotated bibliography. It's short for drama-role therapy.'

'Dessert menu, please, waiter,' said Dr. Mann and seemed to lose interest.

'The same thing as Moreno?' Jake asked.

`No. Moreno has patients act out their fantasies in staged playlets. Drole therapy consists of forcing patients to live their pressed latent impulses.'

'What's the APB Journal?' Jake asked.

`Jake, I agree with everything you say,' I said pleadingly. Don't challenge me. The whole thin tissue supporting our argument will tear and collapse the whole thing on us.'

`I wasn't urging experimentation on patients.'

`Then what do you do during a typical hour?'

`Cure 'em.'

'Dr. Mann began what might have been a long rumbling laugh but was infected by food swallowed the wrong way and ended as a fit of coughing.

But, Jake,' I said, `I thought it was our idea to gradually increase the facilities of and enrolment in mental hospitals one percent a year until the whole nation was being cured.'

Silence.

`You'd have to be first, Luke,' Jake said quietly. ""Let me start now, today. I need help. I need food.'

`You mean analysis?'

`Yes. We all know I need it badly.'

`Dr. Mann was your analyst.'

'I've lost faith in him. He's got bad table manners. He wastes food.'

`You knew that before.'

`But I didn't know until now the importance of food:' Silence. Then Dr. Felloni:

`I'm glad you mentioned Tim's table manners, Luke, because for some time now...'

'How about it, Tim,' Jake said. `Can I take on Luke?'

`Certainly. I only work with neurotics.'

That ambiguous remark (was I schizophrenic or mentally healthy?) essentially ended the conversation. A few minutes later I staggered away from the table engaged to begin analysis with Dr. Jacob Ecstein on Friday in our mutual office.

Jake left the table like a man handed the Sonship of God on a silver platter; his greatest triumph was about to begin. And, by Fromm, he was right.

As for myself, when I finally ate again eighteen hours later, it killed my appetite for therapy, but, as it turned out, going back under analysis with Jake was a stroke of genius. Never question the Way of the Die: Even when you're starving to death.