The Dice Man (25 page)

'Don't you feel anything strongly enough so that you don't want to use the dice?'

`Of course, but I try to overcome it.'

Dr. Rhinehart and Mrs. Ecstein looked at each other for a full minute, Dr. Rhinehart smiling self-consciously and Mrs. Ecstein looked awed. At last she pronounced judgment.

`You're insane,' she said.

`Absolutely. Look, I'll show you how it works. I write down two, say three options. A one or a two means we'll continue his conversation, a three or a four means we'll end the hour right now and each let the dice decide something else for us to do for the next forty minutes. A five and . .'

`And a five or a six means we'll fuck.'

`All right, yes.'

Dr. Rhinehart handed a die to Mrs. Ecstein and after shaking it vigorously in both hands for a few seconds she asked, `Shouldn't I be mumbling some mumbo-jumbo as I do this?'

`You may say simply: "Not my will, Die, but Thy will be done.,, ' 'Fuck us up good; Die,' she said and dropped it on the desk. It was a five.

`I don't feel like fucking anymore,' she said, but when she saw the frown on Dr. Rhinehart's face she smiled and felt she was beginning to see the merits of a dicelife. But before she could begin to let the large part of herself go to work, Dr. Rhinehart spoke.

`We may now toss the dice to determine how we will make love.'

She hesitated.

`What?' she said.

`There are innumerable ways to engage in sexual congress; parts of us are attracted to each of these ways. We must let the dice decide.'

'I see.'

`First of all, which of us shall be the sexual aggressor, I or you? If the dice say odd '

`Wait a minute. I'm beginning to understand this game. I want to play too.'

`Go ahead.'

Mrs. Ecstein picked up both dice and said `A one means we'll make love that funny way you seem to like.'

`Fine.'

`A two means I'll lie down and you use your hands, mouth, and Johnny Appleseed over every part of my body until I can't stand it and demand something else. A three-'

`Or rather we flip the die again.'

`A three ...-let's see: you play with my breasts for five minutes.'

`Go on.'

Mrs. Ecstein hesitated and then a slow smile began to brighten her face.

`We must always let the dice decide, huh?' she asked.

`That's right.'

'But we control the options.'

'Very good.'

She was smiling happily as if she were a child who has just learned how to read.

`If the die is a four or a five or a six it means we have to try to make a baby.'

`Ahh,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`I've removed that rubber sort of plug Jake had a doctor put in me and I think I've just ovulated. I read a book and it's told me the two best positions to make a baby.'

`I see. Arlene, I-'

`Shall I toss?'

`Just a minute.'

`What for?'

`I - I'm thinking.'

`Hand me the die.'

`I believe that you have loaded the odds a bit,' said Dr. Rhinehart with his accustomed professional coolness. `Let's say if it's a six we'll try one sexual position after another as determined from a list of six we will give it. Two minutes on each. Let the orgasms come where they may.'

`But the four and five still mean we make a baby?'

`Yes.'

`Okay. Do I flip?'

`All right.'

Mrs. Ecstein dropped the die. It read four.

`Ahh,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`Yippee,' said Mrs. Ecstein.

`Precisely what are these two medically recommended fucks?' Dr. Rhinehart asked a trifle irritably.

`I'll show you. And whoever has the most orgasms wins.'

`Wins what?'

`I don't know. Wins a free pair of dice.'

`I see.'

`Why didn't we begin this therapy a long time ago?' Mrs. Ecstein asked. She was rapidly undressing.

`You understand,' the doctor said, slowly preparing himself for the operation, `that after we have made love once, we must consult the die again.'

`Sure, sure, come here,' said Mrs. Ecstein and she was soon hard at work with Dr. Rhinehart in concentrated dice therapy. At 11 A.M. Dr. Rhinehart buzzed his secretary to announce that because he was probing particularly deeply that morning and because his work might bear long-range fruit, it would be necessary to cancel the hour with Mr. Jenkins so that he and Mrs. Ecstein might continue.

At noon, Mrs. Ecstein, glowing, left the doctor's office. The history of dice therapy had begun.

Professor Orville Boggles of Yale tried it; Arlene Ecstein found it productive; Terry Tracy rediscovered God through it; patient Joseph Spezio of QSH thought it was a plot to drive him insane: dice therapy slowly but surely, and unbeknownst to my wife and colleagues, grew; but the Great Columbia Copulation Caper climaxed and was spent.

Two Bernard College girls who had been instructed separately to enter into Lesbian relations with each other complained to their dean of women, who promptly began investigating. Although I assured her that Dr. Felloni and I were bona fide professionals, members of the American Medical Association, registered Republicans and in only moderato opposition to the war is Vietnam, she still fund the experiment to be `suspiciously outrageous' and I ended it.

Actually all our scheduled appointments had already been completed. Less than sixty percent had taken place as set up, and two graduate students and I were busy for weeks afterward flying to collect the manila folders with the completed questionnaires and trying to interview our lab assistants; but the experiment was finished. When I published an article on our work in the fall (Dr. Felloni. declined to be associated with the article or the experiment), it created a mild stir and was one of the pieces of evidence used by my enemies to have me exiled from the AMA.

Although most of our subjects seem to have derived pleasure from their participation in the study, a few were traumatized. About ten days after my own pas de trots my office received a request that I treat one of Dr. Felloni's subjects in our joint experiment. This Miss Vigliota maintained that she had become neurotic because of her participation in our experiment and she was requesting therapy. The appointment was set up and the next day I was seated in my office at the scheduled hour elaborating in writing upon new dice exercises I had been creating. My office door opened and closed, a small girl entered, and when I looked at her, she staggered forward and collapsed on the couch.

It was Terry `Tracy' Vigliota. It took me twenty minutes to assure her that I was really Dr. Rhinehart, a psychiatrist, and that nay participation with her in the experiment had been a perfectly natural extension of my data-gathering role. When she had become calm, she told me why she had come requesting therapy. She sat on the edge of the couch with her short legs dangling many inches from the floor. Dressed in a conservative grayish suit with short skirt, she seemed, as she discussed her problems, more slight, nervous and intense than she had less than two weeks before. I noticed as she talked and in subsequent sessions that she found it difficult to look at me and always entered or left the office with her soft brown eyes on the floor, as if absorbed in thought.

Terry had apparently undergone an identity crisis as a result of her unusual evening with me and George. Her conversation with the professor of history and with Father Fortes had given her new insights into her Catholic faith, but her sexual experience had not been related, she began to think, to the `greater glory of God.'

She found herself increasingly indifferent to the glory of God and increasingly interested in men. But lust and sex were evil, or so her whole previous life had told her. But Father Fortes had indicated that the Church enjoyed sex. But Father Fortes had turned out to be a psychiatrist, a scientist, a doctor; but they also enjoyed sex. She had felt fulfilled in relieving the loneliness of George X, but after Father Fortes had left it seems George permitted her to relieve his loneliness one more time and then began berating her as a whore and a slut. She found as a result of all this that she could no longer believe in anything. All of her desires and beliefs had been shattered by the emotions of her experimental evening: nothing new was taking its place. All seemed unreliable and meaningless.

Although anxious to begin dice therapy with her, I had to let her pour out her troubles uninterrupted over the first two analytic hours. In the third session - she was still sitting, her legs dangling, staring at the floor - she finally ran out of misery and began repeating that most human of refrains: `I don't know what to do.'

`You keep coming back to the same basic feeling,' I said. 'That all of your desires and beliefs are illusory and meaningless.'

`Yes. I asked for therapy because I can't stand the feeling of emptiness. After that evening I didn't know who I was. When I got you as my therapist last week I thought I must be going insane. Even my emptiness seemed empty.' She smiled a sad, soft Natalie Wood smile, her eyes-down.

`What if you're right?' I said.

`Pardon?'

`What if your feeling that all desires are unreliable and all beliefs illusions is right, is the mature, valid vision of reality, and the rest of men are living under illusions which your experience has permitted you to shed?'

`Of course, that's what I think,' she said.

`Then why not act upon your belief?'

The smile left her face and she frowned, still not looking at, me.

`What do you mean?'

`Treat all of your desires as if they had equal value and each of your beliefs as if it were as much an illusion as the next.'

`How?'

`Stop trying to create a pattern, a personality; just do whatever you feel like.'

`But I don't feel like doing anything; that's the trouble.'

'That's because you're letting one desire, the desire to believe strongly and be a clearly defined person, inhibit the rest of your various desires.'

'Maybe, but I don't see how I can change it.'

`Become a dice person.'

She lifted her head and looked up into my eyes slowly and without emotion.

`What?'

`Become a dice person,' I repeated.'

`What do you mean?'

`I,' I leaned forward with appropriate gravity, `am the Dice Man.'

She smiled slightly and looked away and to the side.

`I don't know what you're talking about.'

`You believe that each of your desires is as arbitrary, meaningless and trivial as the next?'

`Yes.'

`In some sense it makes absolutely no difference what you do or don't do?'

'That's exactly it.' `Then why not let the flip of dice - chance - decide what you do?'

She looked up again.

Is that why you keep changing roles and acting so strangely?'

'Partly.'

'You let . . . chance . . , a pair of dice decide your life?'

`Within limits, yes.'

'How do you do it?'

For the first time her eyes brightened. Legs dangling, she listened intently as I explained briefly my option-creating, dice deciding life.

`My God,' she said when I had finished. She stared some more. `That's wonderful.'

She paused. `First you were a professor of history; then Father Forbes, then a lover, a pander, a psychiatrist, and now you're - the dice man.'

My face was aglow with triumph.

'Actually,' I said, `I work for "Candid Camera."

Terry paled: it took two minutes for me to reassure her that I'd been joking. When she'd recovered or seemed to have recovered, she smiled her soft smile, looked up at me, grinned and then began giggling. She giggled for about two more minutes and stopped. She took a handkerchief from a pocket in her suit jacket and wiped away the tears. Biting at her lower lip but trying to look me in the eye, she said quietly: `I think I might like to try to be a - dice woman.'

`It will be good for you,' I said.

`It can't be any worse.'

`That's the spirit.'

As a matter of fact Terry and I got nowhere at first. She was too apathetic and skeptical to obey dice decisions except in the most perfunctory way. Her apathy led her to create unimaginative options, or, when I pressed her to be more daring, to disobey the die.

It was almost two weeks later that we finally had a session, which led to her breakthrough into belief in the dicelife. She was the one who got to the core of the problem `I ... I'm having trouble ... believing. I have to have ... faith, but I don't...'

She trailed off.

`I know,' I said slowly. `The dice-life is related to having faith, to religion, to genuine religion.'

There was a silence.

`Yes, Father,' she said, and gave me a rare smile. I smiled back at her and continued `A healthy skepticism is an essential ingredient of genuine religion.'

'Yes, Father,' she said, still smiling.

I leaned back is my chair. `Maybe I ought to preach to you.'

I flipped a die onto the desk between us. It said yes to the lecture. I frowned.

`I'm listening,' she said as I continued my pause.

`This may sound Father Forbesish, but who am I to question the will of the Die?'

I stared at her and we both looked solemn. `Christ's message is clear: you must lose yourself to save yourself. You must give up personal, worldly desires, become poor in spirit. By surrendering your personal will to the whim of the die you are practicing precisely that self-abnegation prescribed in the scriptures.'

She looked at me blankly as if listening but not understanding.

`Do you see,' I went on, `that the only selfless action is one not dictated by the self?'

She frowned.

`I can see that following the dice might be selfless, but I thought the Church wanted us to overcome sinfulness on our own.'

I tipped forward and stretched forth an arm to take one of Terry's little hands in my own. I felt - and naturally looked totally sincere in what I was saying.

`Listen carefully, Terry. What I'm about to say contains the wisdom of the world's great religions. If a man overcomes what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to even the Bible, is the very foundation stone of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external forces does the man realize his own insignificance; only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either have failure - and an accompanying guilt - or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.'