Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

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.

  8

  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 foghorn 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 light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll 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 up at me a cyclopean eye: a one.

  I was shocked into immobility for perhaps five seconds, but finally made an abrupt, soldierly about-face and marched to our apartment door, opened it and took one pace outside, wheeled, and marched with mechanical precision and joyous excitement back into the apartment, down the hall to our bedroom, opened the door a crack and announced loudly: “I’m going for a walk, Lil.” Turning, I marched out of the apartment a second time.

  As I walked woodenly down the two flights of stairs I noticed rust spots on the railing and an abandoned advertising circular crumpled into a corner. “Think Big,” it urged. On the Ecstein floor I wheeled like a puppet, marched to the door of their apartment and rang. My next clear thought swept with a dignified panic through my mind: “Does Arlene really take the pill?” A smile colored my consciousness at the thought of Jack the Ripper, on his way to rape and strangle another woman and worrying whether she was protected or not.

  After twenty seconds I rang again.

  A second smile (my face remained wooden) flowed through at the thought of someone else’s already having discovered the die and thus now busily banging away at Arlene on the floor just on the other side of the door.

  The door unlatched and opened a crack.

  “Jake?” a voice said sleepily.

  “It’s me, Arlene,” I said.

  “What do you want?” The door stayed open only a crack.

  “I’ve come downstairs to rape you,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “just a minute.”

  She unlatched and opened the door. She was wearing an unattractive cotton bathrobe, possibly even Jake’s, her black hair was straggling down her forehead, cold cream whitened her face, and she was squinting at me without her glasses like a blind beggar woman in a melodrama of the life of Christ.

  Closing the door behind me I turned toward her and waited, wondering passively what I was going to do next.

  “What did you say you wanted?” she asked; she was groggy with sleep.

  “I’ve come downstairs to rape you,” I replied and advanced toward her, she continuing to stand there with a widening and perhaps wakening look of curiosity. Feeling for the first time a faint hint of sexual desire, I put my arms around her, lowered my head and planted my mouth in her neck.

  Almost immediately I felt her hands pushing hard against my chest and soon a long-drawn-out “LuuuuuUUke,” part terror, part question, part giggle. After a good solid wet arousing kissing of her upper dorsal region I released her. She stepped back a step and straightened her ugly bathrobe. We stared at each other, in our differently hypnotized states, like two drunks confronting each other, knowing they are expected to dance.

  “Come,” I found myself saying after our mutual moment of awe, and I put my left arm around her waist and began drawing her toward the bedroom.

  “Let go of me,” she said sharply and pushed my arm away.

  With the mechanical swiftness of a superbly driven puppet my right hand slammed across her face. She was terror-stricken. So was I. A second time we faced each other, her face now showing a blotch of red on the left side. I mechanically wiped some cold cream off my fingers onto my trousers, then I reached out and took hold of the front of her robe and pulled her to me.

  “Come,” I said again.

  “Get your hands off Jake’s bathrobe,” she hissed uncertainly.

  I released her and said: “I want to rape you, Arlene. Now, this moment. Let’s go.”

  Like a frightened kitten she hunched down away from me with her hands tugging her robe at the throat. Then she straightened.

  “All right,” she said, and with a look which I can only describe as righteous indignation, began to move past me down the hall toward the bedroom, adding “But you leave Jake’s bathrobe alone.”

  The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination, passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene’s. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounted her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.

  “Why did you do it, Luke?”

  “I had to, Arlene. I was driven to it.”

  “Jake won’t like it.”

  “Ah … Jake?”

  “I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.”

  “But … this … have you been … raped before?”

  “No. Not since getting married. Jake’s the only one and he never rapes me.”

  “Are you sure you have to tell him?”

  “Oh yes. He’d want to know.”

  “But won’t he be tremendously upset?”

  “Jake? No. He’ll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we’d committed sodomy that would be even more interesting.�
�

  “Arlene, stop being bitter.”

  “I’m not bitter. Jake’s a scientist.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right but—”

  “Of course, there was that once …”

  “What once?”

  “That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull with a bottle of … bottle of … was it Cognac?”

  “Split his skull?”

  “Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy—”

  “I’m remembering—so look, Arlene, don’t be silly, don’t tell Jake about tonight.”

  She considered this.

  “But if I don’t tell him, it will imply I’ve done something wrong.”

  “No. I’ve done something wrong, Arlene. And I don’t want to lose Jake’s friendship and trust just because I’ve raped you.”

  “I understand.”

  “He’d be hurt.”

  “Yes he would. He wouldn’t be objective. If he’d been drinking …”

  “Yes he would …”

  “I won’t tell him.”

  We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.

  For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly:

  “Luke, baby, you’re just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He’s cured. I did it. I’m famous.”

  9

  Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. My legs and loins felt heavy, my mind light. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods—the die—rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die’s being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape obviously was dictated by fate. Not guilty.

  But by training I have learned to look for the causal insignificance of every overt cause. Pacing back and forth in the living room, I wondered whether I would have gone down to Arlene whether the die had been a one, a four, or a box of matches. It seemed doubtful. I knew in my big, hard-pumping heart that only the die could have pushed me down those stairs and into Arlene’s entranceway.

  Had I perhaps seen the die that was on the side table before it had been covered with a card or at any rate before I made my solemn vow to commit holy rape if it turned out to have a one face up? I tried to determine who had left the card and die there and guessed it must have been Lil during her headlong flight to the bathroom. Had I seen from the angle of my chair the sides of the die and thus unconsciously known that the die must have turned upward either a one or a six? I walked over to the little table and tumbled a die onto it and, without looking at what came face up, covered the die with the queen of spades more or less as it had been covered. I went back and sat at the poker table. From there, staring through my glasses, squinting, straining, trying with superhuman effort, I managed to make out the table and the slightly humped playing card. If there was a die under the card it was unpublished news as far as my eyes were concerned. For me to have seen the die from my chair at the poker table I would have had to have an unconscious with a telescopic sight. The case was clear: I couldn’t possibly have known what was under the queen of spades; my rape was determined by fate.

  Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located spittoon in front of my jury.

  But on the whole it seemed a pretty weak defense, and I began vaguely hunting for a new one when I became ablaze at the thought: I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die!

  Excited and proud, I stood for a moment on my own personal Rubicon. And then I stepped across. I established in my mind at that moment and for all time, the never-to-be-questioned principle that what the die dictates, I will perform.

  What else might the dice dictate? Well, that I stop writing silly psychoanalytic articles; that I sell all my stock, or buy all I could afford; that I make love to Arlene in our double bed while my wife slept on the other side; that I take a trip to San Francisco, Hawaii, Peking; that I bluff every time when playing poker; that I give up my home, my friends, my profession. After giving up my psychiatric practice I might become a college professor … a stock broker … a real estate salesman … Zen master … used-car salesman … travel agent … elevator man. My choice of professions seemed suddenly infinite. That I didn’t want to be a used-car salesman, didn’t respect the profession, seemed almost a limitation on my part, an idiosyncracy.

  My mind exploded with possibilities. The boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saying after each random decision, “The die is cast,” and sloshing stoically across some new, ever wider Rubicon. If one life was dead and boring, so what? Long live a new life!

  But what new life? During the last months nothing had seemed worth doing. Had the die changed that? What specifically did I want to do? Well, nothing specific. But in general? All power to the dice! Good enough, but what might they decide? Everything.

  Everything?

  Everything.

  The next moment was anticlimactic. I picked up the die and announced: “If it’s a one, three, or five, I’ll go to bed; if it’s a two I’ll go downstairs and ask Jake if I can relate to Arlene again; if it’s a four or a six I’ll stay up and think about this some more.” I shook the die violently in the cup of my two hands and flipped it out onto the poker table; it rolled to a stop: five. Astonished and a bit let down, I went to bed. It was a lesson I was to learn many times in subsequent casts: the dice can show almost as poor judgment as a human.

  10

  Everything didn’t turn out to be too much at first.

  That afternoon the dice scorned all sorts of exciting options and steered me instead to the corner drugstore to choose reading matter at random. Admittedly, browsing through the four magazines chosen—Agonizing Confessions, Your Pro-Football Handbook, Fuck-it! and Health and You—was more interesting than my usual psychoanalytic fare, but I vaguely regretted not having been sent by the dice on a more important or absurd mission.

  That evening and the next day I seemed to avoid the dice. The result was that two nights after my great D-Day I lay in bed brooding about what to do with Arlene. I wanted, no doubt about it, to press her to my bosom once again, but the dangers, complications and comedy seemed almost too much to pay. I tossed and turned in indecision, anxiety and lust until Lil ordered me to take a sedative or sleep in the bathtub.

  I rolled out of bed and retreated to my study. I was halfway through a complicated imaginary conversation with Jake in which I was explaining with great clarity what I was doing under his bed and pointing out the legal complications involved in homicide, when I realized with a rush of relief that I’d simply let the dice decide. Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair.

  I took out a pen and wrote out the numbers one to
six. The first option to occur to my essentially conservative nature was to chuck the whole thing: I’d ignore my brief affair and treat Arlene as if nothing had happened. After all, the sporadic screwing of another man’s wife might provide complications. When the woman is the wife of your Best Friend, nearest Neighbor, and closest Business Associate, the intrigue and betrayal are so complete that the end hardly seemed worth the effort. Arlene’s end wasn’t so different from Lil’s that it justified painful hours of scheming as to how one might enter it in dice-dictated ways and painful hours of brooding about whether one should brood about having entered it. Nor were the convolutions of her soul likely to offer any more originality than those of her body.

  Arlene and Jake had married seventeen years before when they were both juniors in high school. Jake had been a highly precocious teenager and after seducing Arlene one summer, he found himself sexually inconvenienced in the fall when they were separated by his being away at Tapper’s Boarding School for Brilliant Boys. Masturbation drove him to a fury of frustration since no daydream or self-caress remotely approached Arlene’s round breasts cupped in his hands or filling his mouth. At Christmas he announced to his parents that he must either return to the public high school, commit suicide or marry Arlene. His parents brooded briefly between the last two of these options and then reluctantly permitted marriage.

  Arlene was quite happy to leave school and miss her algebra and chemistry finals; they were married over the Easter holiday and she began working to help support Jake through his schools. Arlene’s education had thus come from life, and since her life had been spent clerking at Gimbel’s, girl-Fridaying at Bache and Company, typing at Woolworth’s and controlling a switchboard at the Fashion Institute of Technology, her education was a limited one. In the seven years since she’d stopped working, she had devoted herself to philanthropic causes of which no one had ever heard (The Penny Parade for Puppies, Dough for Diabetes, Help Afghanistanian Sheepherders!), and reading lurid fiction and advanced psychoanalytic journals. It’s not clear to what degree she understood any of her activities.