The Dice Man (40 page)

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.

How about that?

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 

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.'