The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  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 p
ersonal, 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.'

  `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.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  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.'<
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  `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.'