The Dice Man (7 page)

She returned after a few minutes uninterested in playing poker. Announcing that losing made her feel a frigid insomniac, she retired to bed.

We three doctors played on for another half-hour or so, discussing Dr. Ecstein's latest book, which I criticized brilliantly, and gradually losing interest in poker. Near midnight Dr. Felloni said it was time for her to leave, but instead of getting a ride cross-town with her, Dr. Mann said he'd stay a little longer and take a taxi home. After she'd left, we played four final hands of stud poker and with joy I won three of them.

When we'd finished, he lifted himself out of the straight-backed chair and deposited himself in the overstuffed one near the long bookcase. I heard the toilet flush down the hall and wondered if Lil had been sick again. Dr. Mann drew out his pipe, stuffed and lighted it with all the speed of a slow-motion machine being photographed is slow motion, sucked in eternally at the pipe as he lit it and then, finally, boom, let loose a medium-megaton nuclear explosion up toward the ceiling, obscuring the books on the shelves beside him and generally astounding me with its magnitude.

`How's your book coming, Luke?' he asked. He had a deep, gruff, old man's voice.

`Not coming at all,' I said from my seat at the poker table.

`Mmmmm.'

`I don't think I'm on to much of value...'

'Un ... Un. Huh.'

`When I began it, I thought the transition from sadistic to masochistic might lead to something important.'

I ran my finger over the soft green velvet of the poker table.

`It leads from sadism to masochism.' I smiled.

Puffing lightly and looking up at the picture of Freud hung on the wall opposite him, he asked `How many cases have you analyzed and written up in detail?'

`Three.'

`The same three?' 'The same three. I tell you, Tim, all I'm doing is un-interpreted case histories. The libraries are retching with them.'

'Nnnn.'

I looked at him, he continued to look at Freud, and from the street below a police siren whined upward from Madison Avenue.

`Why don't you finish the book anyway?' he asked mildly. `As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless."

'I am going with the flow. My flow with that book has totally stopped. I don't feel like pumping it up again.'

`Nnnn.'

I became aware that I was grinding a die into the green velvet. I tried to relax.

`By the way, Tim, I had my first interview with that boy you had sent to QSH for me. I found him-'

`I don't care about your patient at QSH, Luke, unless it's going to get into print.'

He still didn't look at me, and the abruptness of the remark stunned me.

`If you're not writing, you're not thinking,' he went on, `and if you're not thinking you're dead.'

I used to feel that way.'

`Yes you did. Then you discovered Zen.'

`Yes I did.'

`And now you find writing a bore.'

`Yes.'

`And thinking?'

`And thinking too,' I said.

`Maybe there's something wrong with Zen,' he said.

`Maybe there's something wrong with thinking.'

`It's been fashionable among thinkers lately to say so, but saying, "I strongly think that thinking is nonsense," that stems rather absurd to me.'

`It is absurd; so is psychoanalysis.'

He looked over at me; the crinkles around his left eye twitched.

`Psychoanalysis has led to more new knowledge of the human soul than all the previous two million years of thinking put together. Zen has been around a long time and I haven't noticed any great body of knowledge flowing from it.'

Without apparent irritability he let out another vigorous mushroom cloud toward the ceiling. I was fingering one of the dice, nervously pressing my fingers into the little dots; I still looked at him, he at Freud.
`Tim, I'm not going to argue the merits and demerits of Zen again with you. I've told you that whatever I've gained from Zen is not something I've been able to articulate.'

'What you've gained from Zen is intellectual anemia.'

`Maybe I've gained sense. You know that eighty percent of the stuff in the psychoanalytic journals is crap. Useless crap. Including mine.'

I paused. `Including . . . yours.'

He hesitated, and then bubbled up a chuckle.

`You know the first principle of medicine: you can't cure the patient without a sample of his crap,' he said.

`Who needs to be cured?'

He turned his eyes lazily into mine and said: `You do.'

`You analyzed me. What's the matter?' I shot back stare for stare. .

`Nothing the matter that a little reminder of what life is all about won't cure.'

`Oh, piss,' I said.

`You don't like to push yourself, and along comes Zen and till you to "go with the flow".'

He paused and, still looking at me, dropped his pipe in an ashtray on the small table bide him.

`Your flow is naturally stagnant.'

`Makes a good breeding ground,' I said and tried to short laugh.

`For Christ's sake, Luke, don't laugh,' he said loudly. `You're wasting your life these days, throwing it away.'

`Aren't we all?'

`No, we're not. Jake isn't. I'm not. Good men in every profession aren't. You weren't, until a year ago.'

`When I was a child, I spoke like a child -'

`Luke, Luke, listen to me.'

He was an agitated old man.

`Well -?'

`Come back to analysis with me.'

I rubbed the die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered `No.'

`What's the matter with you?' he said sharply. `Why have you lost faith in the significance of your work? Will you please try to explain?'
Without premeditation I surged up from my chair like a defensive tackle at the sight of a shot at the quarterback. I strode across the room in front of Dr. Mann to the big window looking along the street toward Central Park.

`I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm sorry but that's about it. I'm sick of lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles `These are symptoms, not analysis.'

`To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I'd finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now ... they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.'

`You sound like a disillusioned sophomore.'

`The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs. The same old new philosophies. And the thing I'd really pinned my ego to, psychoanalysis, doesn't seem to be a bit relevant to the problem.'

`It's totally relevant.'

`Because analysis, were it really an the right track, should be able to change me, to change anything and anybody, to eliminate all undesired neurotic symptoms and to do it much more quickly than the two years necessary to produce most measurable changes in people.'

`You're dreaming, Luke. It can't be done. In both theory and practice it's impossible to rid an individual of all his undesired habits, tensions, compulsions, inhibitions, what-have-you.'

`Then maybe the theory and practice are wrong.'

`Undoubtedly.'

`We can perfect plants, alter machines, train animals, why not men?'

`For God's sake!' Dr. Mann tapped his pipe vigorously against a bronze ashtray and glared up at me irritably. `You're dreaming. There are no Utopias: There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors, which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man's personal proverb about himself is: "Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people."

The whole tendency is ... the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don't change corpses. Corpses aren't bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.'

`I absolutely agree: psychoanalysis rarely breaks this solidifying flow of personality, it has nothing to offer the man who is bored.'

Dr. Mann harumphed or snorted or something and I moved away from the window to look up at Freud. Freud stared down seriously; he didn't look pleased.

'There must be some other.. other secret [blasphemy!] some other . .. magic potion which would permit certain men to radically alter their lives,' I went on.

`Try astrology, the I Ching, LSD.' `Freud gave me a taste for finding some philosophical equivalent of LSD, but the effect of Freud's own potion seems to be wearing off.'

`You're dreaming. You expect too much. A human being, a human personality is the total pattern of the accumulated limitations and potentials of an individual. You take away all his habits, compulsions and channeled drives, and you take away him.'

`Then perhaps, perhaps, we ought to do away with "him".'

He paused as if trying to absorb what I'd said and when I turned to face him, he surprised me by booming two quick cannon shots of smoke out of the side of his mouth.

`Oh Luke you're nibbling on that Goddamn Eastern mysticism again. If I weren't a consistent self, a glutton at the table, sloppy in dress, bland in speech and rigidly devoted to psychoanalysis, to success, to publication - and all of these things consistently - I'd never get anything done, and what would I be?'

I didn't answer.

`If I sometimes smoked one way,' he went on, `sometimes another, sometimes not at all, varied the way I dressed, was nervous, serene, ambitious, lazy, lecherous, gluttonous, ascetic - where would my "self" be? What would I achieve? It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.'

With a satisfied and relaxed grunt he placed his pipe down again and smiled pleasantly at me. For some reason I hated him.

`And accepting these self-defeating limitations is mental health?' I said.

`Mmmmm.'

I stood facing him and felt a strange rush of rage surge through me. I wanted to crush Dr. Mann with a ten-ton block of concrete. I spat out my next words `We must be wrong. All psychotherapy is a tedious disaster. We must be making some fundamental, rock-bottom error that poisons all our thinking. Years from now men will look upon our therapeutic theories and our techniques as we do upon nineteenth-century bloodletting.'

`You're sick, Luke,' he said quietly.

`You and Jake are among the best and as humans you're both nothing.'

He was sitting erect in his chair.

`You're sick,' he said. `And don't feed me any more bull about Zen. I've been watching you for months now. You're not relaxed. Half the time you seem like 'a giggly schoolboy and the other half like a pompous ass.'

`I'm a therapist and it's clear I, as a human, am a disaster. Physician heal thyself.'

'You've lost faith in the most important profession in the world because of an idealized expectation which even Zen says is unrealistic. You've gotten bored with the day-to-day miracles of making people slightly better. I don't see where letting them get slightly worse is much to be proud of.'

'I'm not proud of-'

`Yes you are. You think you've got absolute truth or at least that you alone are seeking it. You're a classic case of Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves but with what he dreams of achieving.'

`I am.'

I stated it flatly: it happened to be true. `But you, Tim, are a classic case of the normal human being, and I'm not impressed.'

He stared at me not puffing, his face Rushed, and then abruptly, like a big balloon bouncing, arose from his chair with a grunt.

`I'm sorry you feel that way,' he said and chugged toward the door.

`There must be a method to change men more radically than we've discovered-'

`Let me know when you find it,' he said.

He stopped at the door and we looked at each other, two alien worlds. His face showed bitter contempt.

`I will,' I said.

`When you find it, just give me a ring. Oxford 4-0300.'

We stood facing each other.

`Goodnight,' I said.

`Goodnight,' he said, turning. `Give my best to Lil in the morning. And Luke,' turning back to me, `try finishing Jake's book. It's always better to criticize a book after you've read it.'

`I didn't-'

`Goodnight' and he opened the door, waddled out, hesitated at the elevator, then walked on to the stairwell and disappeared.

After closing the door I walked mechanically back into the living room. At the window I stared at the few lights and at the empty early morning streets below. Dr. Mann emerged from the building and moved off toward Madison Avenue; he looked, from three floors up, like a stuffed dwarf. I had an urge to pick up the easy chair he had been sitting in and throw it through the glass window after him. Distorted images swirled through my mind: Jake's book lying darkly on the white tablecloth at lunch; the boy Eric's black eyes staring at me warmly; Lil and Arlene wriggling toward me; blank pieces of paper on my desk; Dr. Mann's clouds of smoke mushrooming toward the ceiling; and Arlene as she had left the room a few hours earlier; an open, sensuous yawn. For some reason I felt like starting at one end of the room and running full speed to the other end and smashing right through the portrait of Freud which hung there.

Instead I turned from the window and walked back and forth until I was looking up at the portrait. Freud stared down at me dignified, serious, productive, rational and stable: he was everything which a reasonable man might strive to be. I reached up and, grasping the portrait carefully, turned it around so that the face was toward the wall. I stared with rising satisfaction at the brown cardboard backing and then, with a sigh, returned to the poker table and put away the cards, chips and chairs. One of the two dice was missing but when I glanced at the floor it was not to be found. Turning to go to bed, I saw on the small table next to the chair Dr. Mann had been lecturing me from, a card - the queen of spades - angled as if propped up against something. I went over and stared down at the card and knew that beneath it was the die.
I stood that way for a full minute feeling a rising, incomprehensible rage: something of what Osterflood must feel, of what Lil may have been feeling during the afternoon, but directed at nothing, thoughtless, aimless rage. I vaguely remember an electric clock humming on the mantelpiece. Then a fog-horn blast groaned into the room from the East River and terror tore the arteries out of my heart and tied them in knots in my belly: if that die has a one face up, I thought, I'm going downstairs and rape Arlene. `If it's a one, I'll rape Arlene,' kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon tight and my terror increased. But when I thought if it's not a one Ill go to bed, the terror was boiled away by a pleasant excitement and my mouth swelled into a gargantuan grin: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the die? I picked up the queen of spades and saw staring at me a cyclopean eye: a one.