The Dice Man (26 page)

`But faith in what?' she asked.

`Faith in God,' I answered.

She looked puzzled.

`But what happened to the dice?' she asked.

`Look. I'm going to read a passage to you from a sacred book. Listen carefully.'

I reached into my desk and brought out some notes I'd been making lately in connection with my evolving dice theory and, after browsing a half-minute to find what I was looking for, I began reading.

` "Verily it is not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven innocence, the heaven Prankishness, the heaven Chance. And Chance is the most ancient Divinity of the world, and behold, I come to deliver all things from their bondage under Purpose and to restore on the throne to reign over all things the heaven Chance. The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it to Divine Accident and Prankishness when I teach that in all, one thing is impossible: reason. A little wisdom is possible indeed, just enough to confuse things nicely, but this blessed certainty I have found in every atom, molecule, substance, plant, creature or star: they would rather dance on the feet of Chance.

`Oh heaven over me pure and high! Now that I have learned that there is no purposeful eternal spider and no spider web of reason, you have become for me a dance floor for divine accidents; you have become a divine table for divine dice and dice players. But my listeners blush? Do I speak the unspeakable? Do I blaspheme, wishing to bless you?"

I ended my reading and after checking to see if there might be more related material I looked up.

`I didn't recognize it,' Terry said.

`It's Zarathustra. But did you understand it?'

`I don't know. I liked it. I liked something about it very much. But I don't - I don't see why I should have faith in the dice. I guess that's the trouble.'

`Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not see.'

`I know.'

`Can a single die fall to the table unseen by God?'

`No, I guess not.'

`Do you remember the great ending to the Book of Job? God speaks from the whirlwind and asks Job how he can presume to question the ways of God. For three long, beautiful chapters God indicts man's abysmal ignorance and impotence. He says things like: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . ."

Or "Who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb?"

And "have you commanded the morning since your days began?"

"Have the gates of death been revealed to you?"

On and on God rubs it in to poor Job, but stylishly - in the most beautiful poetry in the world - and Job realizes that he has been wrong in complaining and questioning. His last words to the Lord are "I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted . . .

Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

I paused, and Terry and I looked silently at each other for several moments.

`God can do all things,' I went on. `No purpose of His can ever be thwarted. Never.'

`Yes,' she replied. .

`We must despise ourselves and lose ourselves if we are to be saved.'

`Yes.'

`God sees the tiniest sparrow fall.'

`Yes.'

`The tiniest die tumble upon the table.' `Yes.

'He will always know what options you have given to the Die.'

`Yes.'

`Terry, the reason you must have faith in the Die is simple.'

`Yes.'

`The Die is God.'

`The Die is God,' she said.

I was sitting at a board meeting of Queensborough State Hospital one Wednesday evening that spring, when the idea of Centers for Experiments in Total Random Environments came to me. Fifteen old men, all doctors, Ph.D's and millionaires, were seated around a huge, rectangular table discussing plumbing expansion, salary scales, medication charts and rights-of-way, while the patients in the square mile around us settled ever more comfortably into their various defined stupors. In the middle of doing a doodle of a multi-armed, multi-legged, multi-headed Shivt, whammo! It hit me; a Dice Center, an institution to convert people into random men. I suddenly saw a short-term total environment of such overwhelming impact that the principles and practices of the dicelife would be infused after a few weeks to the same degree that they had in me after many, many months. I saw a society of dicepeople. I saw a new world.

"Old man Cobblestone, our tall, dignified chairman, was speaking with great deliberation about the intricacies of Queensborough law regarding rights of appropriation; six pipes, three cigars and five cigarettes were giving the greenwalled room a milky, underwater effect; a young doctor (forty-six) beside me had been wiggling his foot in the same motion for forty minutes without pause. Pens lay dormant by paper except for mine: the sole doodler. Yawns were smothered into coughs or hidden behind pipes. Cobblestone gave way to Dr. Wink on the inefficiency of bureaucratic systems in dealing with plumbing problems and suddenly, leaping at me from the seven arms, six legs and three heads of Shiva, was the idea of the Dice Center.

I took my green die from my vest pocket and gave it a fifty fifty chance that I would create such an institute. It said `yes.'

I stifled a scream. Whatever sound emerged slowed but did not stop the wiggling foot beside me. Four heads turned minutely toward me then back respectfully to Dr. Wink. I was ablaze with my idea. I cast the die a second time on the doodle pad.

`Gentlemen!' I said loudly and I shoved back my chair and stood. I towered over Dr. Wink, who stood just opposite me staring at me openmouthed. The others all turned to me respectfully foot-wiggler wiggled on.

`Gentlemen.'

I said again, groping for the right words. `Another sewer will only permit us to handle the shit better; it won't solve anything.'

`That's true,' a voice said encouragingly and several heads nodded.

`If we are to fulfill our duties as trustees we must have a vision of an institution which will change our patients and send them into the world as free men.'

I was speaking slowly and pompously and I earned two nods and a yawn.

`As Ezra Pound wrote in a late poem, a mental hospital is a total institution: it engulfs each patient with a consistency of rule, habit and attitude which effectively isolates him from the more unpredictable problems of life in the outside world. A patient can adjust successfully to hospital life because he can count on its limiting its horrors to certain predictable patterns. The outside world holds no such hope for him. He is thus often able to adjust to hospital life and yet be frightened foot less by the thought of having to leave. We have effectively prepared our patients to liveadequately in the mental hospital and no place else.'

`Is this to the point?' old Cobblestone asked from his seat at the head of the table.

`Oh it is, sir. It is,' I said a bit more quickly. Then with dignity: `I have a dream. A vision: we want to prepare our patients to fulfill themselves happily in all environments, to free the individual from the need to lock himself away from challenge and change. We-'

'This ... but, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Wink stammered uncertainly.

`We want to create a world of adult children without fear. We want the multiplicity built into each one of us by our anarchic and contradictory society to break free. We want people to greet each other on the street and not know who is who are not care. We want freedom from individual identity. Freedom from security and stability and coherence. We want a community of creators, a monastery for joy-filled madmen.'

`What are you talking about?' Old man Cobblestone said firmly. He was standing.

`For Christ's sake, Luke, sit down,' Dr. Mann said. Heads turned to each other and then back to me.

`Oh we've been fools! Fools!' I slammed my fist down on million years we've believed that -the choice lies only between control and discipline on the one hand and letting go on the other: we don't realize that both are equally methods of sustaining consistent-habit, attitude and personality. The Goddam personality!' I grit my teeth and shuddered. `We need disciplined anarchy, controlled letting go, queen for a day, Russian roulette, veto, eeny-meenyminey-moe: a new way of life, a new world, a community of dice men.'

I made my appeal directly to old Cobblestone, and he didn't even blink.

`What are you talking about?' he asked again more gently.

`I'm talking about converting QSH into a Center in which patients will be systematically taught to play games with life, to act out all of their fantasies, to be dishonest and enjoy it, to lie and pretend and feel hate and rage and love and compassion as determined by the whim of the dice. I'm talking about creating an institution where the doctors periodically pretend to be patients, for days, for weeks, where the patients pretend to be doctors and give therapy sessions, where the attendants and nurses play the roles of patients and visitors and doctors and TV repairmen, where the whole fucking institution is one great stage upon which all walk free.'

`I rule you are out of order, Dr. Rhinehart. Please sit down.'

Dr. Cobblestone stood erect at the end of the table and his face was neutral as he spoke these words. As the heads all swung back to me there was a total silence. When I spoke it was almost to myself.

The great Goddam machine society has made us all into hamsters. We don't see the worlds within us waiting to be born. Actors only able to play one role: whoever heard of such nonsense. We must create random men, dicepeople. The world needs dicepeople. The world shall have dicepeople.'

Someone had a firm grip on one of my arms and was pulling at me to come away from the table. About half the other doctors seemed to be standing now and jabbering to each other. I resisted the tug and raised my right arm with clenched fist and boomed out to old Cobblestone: `One more thing!' A fearful silence followed. All stared at me. I lowered my clenched fist and released the green die onto the doodle pad in front of me: a five.

`All right,' I said. `I'll leave.'

I picked up the die, replaced it in my vest pocket and left. I learned later that an entirely new sewage disposal system was rejected by unanimous vote and a system of temporary stop-gap repairs initiated to the satisfaction of no one.

As the normal, healthy, neurotic reader knows, one of the chief delights of life is daydreaming. After careful study of my own fantasies and those of hundreds of dice students met in dice therapy, I have noted that our dreams at any moment act as a block or a boost to our playing different roles. Moreover, I have discovered that about every four years from childhood until death the average man changes the goals of his daydreams and that these changes evolve in a remarkably predictable pattern. Since all the dreams are in a way related to power, I am modestly suggesting that the phenomena be called the Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men.

Daydreams begin sometime in the child's first decade, usually around the age of eight or nine. At this age the boy inevitably projects himself in terms of raw power. Frequently he is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and can leap buildings at a single bound. He becomes the Ghenghis Khan of the fourth grade, the Attila the Hun of the local shopping center, the General George Patton of Cub Scout Local 216. His parents are being tortured to death in a horribly creative way: for example, over some tremendous fire at the end of sharpened spears they are being fried as marshmallows. Sometimes the child arrives in time to save his parents; sometimes, in fact most times, he arrives just too late and, after demolishing the villains, concentrates his imagination on himself marching in the middle of a giant state funeral procession bathed in tears. The procession is attacked by the enemy and he leaps with his sword . . .

By the age of thirteen the scene has usually shifted to Yankee Stadium, where the boy, playing for the hopeless Yankees, with the bases loaded, two outs and his team trailing by three runs in the last half of the ninth inning in the seventh game of the World Series, manages to stroke a 495-foot drive off the highest part of the fence in right center field and, with a fantastic flash around the bases and an impossible headfirst slide, just touches home plate with the extended uncut fingernail of his left pinky. In December, late in the fourth quarter and his team trailing by five points he runs back an intercepted pass 109 yards, carrying fourteen men over the goal line on his back, eleven opposition players, one incompetent referee and two fans who are already trying to congratulate him. In the spring, with two seconds left to win the game he sinks a one handed jump shot from the foul line, his own foul line.

In the world of sports, girls are absent, but by the age of sixteen or seventeen the stroke of a baseball has been replaced by other strokes, and the only ones intercepting passes are female. The boy has become a man, and the man is commander-in-chief of a harem. Here things go on beyond the wildest imagination of anyone - except that of the boy doing the dreaming. A woman, panting helplessly, flings her nude body onto the hero, who, puffing nonchalantly on a Corsican cigarette and tastefully sipping a glass of rare New York State wine, and steering his Aston-Martin at 165 miles-per hour down a rarely used road in the Alps, manages to give the girl the most exciting love experience of her life. If a male at the age of seventeen is sometimes once again Attila the Hun it is in order to round up the conquered Roman women and, twirling his sword and his mustache, choose fifteen or sixteen to spend the night with him. If he once again scores the winning touchdown, it is in order to walk dramatically into the senior prom, limping badly and trailing blood along the floor behind him like a leaky oil truck, and watch the women melt into gooey syrup at the sight of him.

But by the age of twenty-one our male is either engaged, married or sated; the world he wants to rule is a new world he has become Horatio Alger. With grim determination and uncanny acuity he invests fifty-six dollars in the stock market and after buying and selling with cool nonchalance over a period of six months, finally sells out, pocketing a cool $4,862,927.33. When the board of General Motors is panicked by the threat of disarmament he calmly presents his invention of an inexpensive jet sportscar built in the shape of a Polaris missile and getting fifty miles per gallon of jet fuel. In three weeks he is on the covers of Time, Fortune and Success! But in the next few years he is earning a modest salary as second clerk at Pierce, Perkins and Poof and is upset at the injustice and hypocrisy that exist in the world: a world in which some men are athletic stars, James Bonds and millionaires and he is not; he is morally appalled. In his dreams he recreates the world, righting all wrongs, eliminating suffering, redistributing wealth, redistributing women, ending all wars. He becomes a reincarnation of Mahatma Buddha. Jesus Christ and Hugh Hefner. Evil governments topple, corrupt churches collapse, laws are revised, and Truth, written in Xeroxed tablets of stone by our hero, is presented to the world. Every one is happy.