The Dice Man (45 page)

`She could confuse the poor kid before he developed any patterns to break.'

`Right.'

`It's possible the kid might grow up to be something of a weirdie.'

`True. Or worse yet, he might end up rebelling against diceliving and opt for permanent conformity to the dominant social norm.'

`Hey, that's a possibility. You think he might?'

`Sure,' I said. `Boys always rebel against their mothers.'

Jake paused in his pacing and I stopped beside him and looked down; he was staring at the floor.

`I suppose a little dice-throwing won't hurt him,' he said slowly.

`And in any case, who cares?'

Jake looked sharply up at me.

`Aren't you concerned about your baby?' he asked.

`Now, remember. Jake, it's our baby, not mine. Just because the dice told Arlene to tell you that I'm the father doesn't mean necessarily that I am.'

`Hey, that's right.'

`You may actually be the father but the dice told Arlene to lie.'

`That's a good point, Luke.'

`Or she may have been sleeping with dozens of guys that month and not know who the actual father is.' He looked down at the floor again.

`Thanks for the reassurance,' he said.

`So let's just call it our baby.'

`Let's just call it hers.'

Dear Dr. Rhinehart I have been a fan of yours ever since I read that interview in Playboy. I-have been trying to practice the dicelife now for almost a year but have run into several problems which I hoped you might be able to help me with. First, I was wondering if it were really necessary or important to follow the Die no matter what it says. I mean sometimes it vetoes something I really want to do or chooses the most absurd of the options I've created for it. I've found that disobeying the Die in such cases makes me feel real good, as if I were getting something for free. I find the Die most helpful in doing the things I want to do, mostly making girls. It's a big help there, since I never feel guilty when I try something that doesn't work since the die told me to do it. And I don't feel guilty when it does work since if the girl gets knocked up, it was the Die that did it. But why do you keep saying one should always follow the Die? And why bother to expand the areas it makes decisions in? I've got a good thing going and find a lot of your stuff distracts me from my end if you know what I mean.

Also I must warn you that when my girl took up using the dice and we tried some of those dice sex exercises some real problems developed. The sex exercises were fine, but my girl keeps telling me the Die won't let her see me anymore for a while. Sometimes she makes a date and then breaks it, blaming the Die. Aren't there some sort of rules I can impose on her? Do you have a code of dice ethics for girls I could show her? Also another girl I introduced to the dicelife began insisting that I ought to include as an option that I marry her. I only give it one chance in thirty-six, but she insists I cast the dice about it every time I go out with her. What is the probability of my losing if I date her ten more times? Twenty? Please include a table or graph if possible.
You've got some good ideas, but I hope you do more thinking about how special rules might be developed for girl dicepeople. I'm getting worried.

Sincerely, George Doog

`It's a girl,' Jake said, smiling dazedly.

`I know, Jake. Congratulations.'

`Edgarina,' he went on. `Edgarina Ecstein.'

He looked up at me. `Who named her that?'

'Don't ask silly questions. The baby's healthy, Arlene's healthy, I'm healthy: that's what counts.'

`You're right,' he said. `But do daughters rebel against their mothers too?'

`Here she comes,' I said.

Two nurses wheeled Arlene down the hall and past us into her room and, after she'd settled back into bed, they brought the baby in for her to hold. Jake and I watched benevolently. The baby squirmed a bit and hissed, but didn't say much.

`How'd it go, Arlene?' I asked.

`It was a snap,' she said, cuddling the child against her swollen breasts and smiling ecstatically. She stared at her infant and smiled and smiled.

`Doesn't she look just like Eleanor Roosevelt as a baby?' she said.

Jake and I looked; I think we both concluded it might be true.

`Edgarina has dignity,' I said.

`She's born for greatness,' Arlene said, kissing the top of the baby's head. 'Die willing.'

`Or nothingness,' I said. `You don't want to force any patterns on her, Arlene.'

`Except for making her cast the dice about everything she does, I plan to let her be entirely free.'

`Oh Jesus, Jesus,' said Jake.

`Cheer up, Jake,' I said, putting my arm around him. `Don't you realize that as a scientist you're getting in on the ground floor of something which is of immense scientific importance?'

'Maybe,' he said.

`No matter how Edgarina turns out under Arlene's regime, it's scientifically significant. Genius or psychotic, something new has been demonstrated.'

Jake perked up a bit. `I suppose you're right,' he said.

`This may be your greatest case study since "The Case of the Six-Sided man."

'Jake looked up at me, beaming.

`Maybe I ought to do some more experimenting with the dicelife,' he said.

`You'll need a title, of course,' I went on.

`You certainly should,' Arlene snapped at Jake. `Any father of Edgarina Ecstein had better be a full-fledged diceperson or I'll disown and discredit him.'

Jake sighed.

`That won't be necessary, honey,' he said.

` "A Case of Random Rearing,"' I suggested. `Or perhaps, "Dieper Training."

'Jake shook his head slowly and then squinted aggressively up at me.

`Don't bother trying, Luke. It's beyond your depth. The title has already been made: "The Case of the Child of Whim."' He sighed. `The book may take a little longer.'

The sun dazzled down and warmed and softened my mountain of flesh. I writhed myself deeper into the hot sand, feeling the rays above like long-range caresses on my skin. Linda lay beside me, bikinied and beautiful, her lovely breasts breathing skyward against the strip of cloth that was theoretically a bikini top like two fruit growing and shrinking in a speeded-up biological film of the growing process. She had been reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and we had been talking about group dice therapy, but for the last fifteen minutes we had both lain silently, enjoying the solitude of the vast expanse of the Bahamas beach and the love-making of the hot touch of the sun. It was February in New York, but summer bare.

`What do you really want, Luke?' Linda suddenly asked. From the smudge at the corner of my half-closed eyes I gathered she had sat up or raised herself on an elbow.

`Want?' I said, thinking. The rhythmic thud of the surf thirty yards away made me long for a swim, but we'd only been out of the water for fifteen minutes and were only just now dry.

`Everything I guess,' I finally said. `To be everybody and do everything.'

She tossed her hair back away from her face with one hand and said `That's modest of you.'

`Probably.'

A sea gull careered into my reduced field of vision and then out again.

'You've been sort of quiet today. Just another dice-decision?'

`I've just been sleepy all the time.'

`My ass. Is it a dice decision?' `What difference does it make?'

She was definitely sitting up, her legs spread, leaning back on her upright arms.

`I sometimes wonder what you want, not the dice.'

`Who's me?'

`That's what I want to know.'

I sat up, blinking my eyes and looking toward the ocean past the rise of sand in front of me. Without my glasses it was a tan blur and blue blur.

`But don't you see,' I said. `To know "me" that way is to limit me, cement me into something stonelike and predictable.'

`Diceshit! I just want to know a you that's soft and predictable. How am I supposed to enjoy being with you if I feel you can go "goof" any minute from some random fall of a die?'

I sighed and lowered myself back onto my elbows.

`Were I a healthy, normal neurotic human lover, my love might evaporate any moment in just as haphazard a fashion.'

`But then I could see it coming; I could run out on you first.' She smiled.

I sat abruptly up.

`Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!' I said with surprising vehemence. `You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calvin Coolidge: death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.'

`But Luke,' she said putting a warm hand on my shoulder. `Life's going to go on more or less the same and ourselves too. If - '

`Never!'

She didn't speak. She slid her hand gently from my shoulder to the back of my neck and it played there with my hair. After a few moments I said quietly: `I love you, Linda. The "I" that loves you will always love you. Nothing is more certain than that.'

`But how long will this "I" last?'

'Forever,' I said.

Her hand became motionless.

`Forever?' she said in a very low voice.

`Forever. Maybe even longer.'

I turned on to my side and took her hand and kissed the palm. I looked into her eyes with a playful smile.

Staring seriously back at me, she said `But that "I" which loves me may be replaced by a different, unloving "I" and be forced to live forever underground and unexpressed?'

I nodded, still smiling.

"The "I" that loves you would like to arrange things so that the whole rest of my life is fixed to guarantee the continued fulfillment of himself. But it would mean the permanent burial of most of the other "I's.'

`But ego or no ego, there are natural desires and imposed actions: To come over on top of me and fuck would be a natural act; to follow the fall of a die and kneel in the sand to jerk off wouldn't.'

I maneuvered myself clumsily into a kneeling position in the sand and began to lower my swim-trunks.

`O Jesus,' Linda said. `Me and my big mouth.'

But I smiled and pulled up my trunks. `You're right,' I said, and moved myself over and lay my head naturally onto her warm, soft thigh.

`So what are your natural desires? What do you really want?'

Silence.

`I want being with you. I want sunshine. Love, caresses, kisses. [Pause] Water. Good books. Opportunities to practice the dicelife with people.'

`But whose kisses, whose caresses?'

`Yours,' I answered, blinking into the sun. `Terry's, Arlene's, Lil's, Gregg's. A few others. Women I meet in the street.'

She didn't respond.

`Good music, a chance to write,' I went on. `Good film occasionally, the sea.'

`I feel . . . Huh! You're not even as romantic as I used not to be, are you?'

`Not this particular me.'

`You love me deeply though,' she said, and I looked up to catch her smiling down at me.

`I love you,' I said holding her eyes with mine. We looked deeply and warmly at each other for more than a minute.

Then she said softly: 'Up yours.'

We watched a gull circling and swooping, and she started to ask something but stopped. I turned my head to press my mouth against the inside of one thigh. It was hot and salty.

She sighed and pushed my head away.

`Then don't spread your legs,' I said.

`I want to spread my legs.'

`Well,' I said, and buried my head between them and sucked in a firm hot fold of the other thigh. She pushed medium hard at my head, but I had one arm around her now and held fast.

Letting her fingers relax in my hair, she said `Some things are naturally good and others aren't' `Mmmmmm,' I said.

'The dicelife sometimes takes us away from what's naturally good.'

`Mmmmmm' `I think that's too bad.'

I broke my mouth hold and hauled myself up on an elbow alongside her.

`Was that crazy slavery deal I created with you a natural and good thing?' I asked.

She smiled at me.

`It must have been,' she said.

`Everybody is always doing what seems to them to be naturally good. Why is everybody miserable?'

I unhooked her bikini top and slid it off her onto the blanket. A ridge of sand lay across the upper half of each breast. I brushed it off.

`Everybody's not miserable,' she said. `I'm not miserable.'

`You were before you discovered the dicelife.'

`But that's because before I had a sex hang-up. Now I don't'

`Mmmmmm,' I said, my mouth filled with her left breast and my right hand holding the warmth of the other.

`The Die is good for getting you over certain hang-ups,' she said, `but then I think maybe it isn't so necessary any more.'

I un-swallowed her breast, licked the taut nipple a few seconds and said `Personally, I think you may be right'

`You do?'

`Certainly.'

I untied the near side of her bikini bottom. `I don't consult it about a lot of things,' I said. `But when I'm in doubt, I find it nice to consult the Die.'

I untied the far side of the bikini.

`Bur why bother?' Linda said. She had a hand now under my trunks and was pushing them down with the other.

`In consult the Die at dawn every day about whether I should consult it about everything during the day, about only the big things or not consult it at all under any circumstances. Today, for example, it told me not to consult it about anything.'

'so even your dicelessness is filled with the Die?'

`Mmmmmmnnnrui.'

`So you're acting naturally today, huh?' `MmmmmmMmmmmm., 'I hope you're enjoying eating the sand down there.'

'Mmmmmm.'

'That's nice,' she said. `I like that I'm glad you told me. I like 'to know that what you're doing is natural.'

I came up for air and said: `Most things people do aren't natural the first time they do them. That's what learning is all about. That's what the dicelife is all about.'

'Mmmmmm,' she said.

`If we always limited ourselves to what was natural to us, we would be midget dwarfs compared to our potential. We must always be incorporating new areas of human action which we can make natural.'