Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  “What other good qualities do you have?”

  “I call a spade a spade. I know I’m not perfect and I say so, and I’ve learned that you psychiatrists are priggish little voyeurs and I tell you, and that’s why you all end up attacking me. You can’t stand the truth.”

  “My ethics keep me from making love to you?”

  “Yes, unless you’re a fairy, like another headshrinker I knew.”

  “Let me then formally announce that in my future relations with you I will not seek to maintain the traditional patient-doctor relationship and I will not abide by the Standard of Ethics set down in the Code of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. From now on I shall respond to you as human to human. As psychiatrist human I will advise you, but no more. How’s that?”

  Linda shifted her feet to the floor and looked over at me with a slow smile, meant to suggest sexiness? She was, in fact, reasonably sexy. She was slender, clear-complexioned, full-lipped. As long as she had been my patient, however, I had not responded to her sexually one millimeter, or to any other female patient in five years, despite writhings, declarations, propositions, strippings and attempted rapes—all of which had occurred during one session or another. But the doctor-patient relationship froze my sexual awareness as completely as doing fifty push-ups under a cold shower. Looking at Linda Reichman smile and perceptibly arch her back and project her (true or false?) bosom, I felt my loins, for the first time in my analytic history, respond.

  Her smile slowly curled into a sneer.

  “It’s better than you were, but that’s not saying much.”

  “I thought you wanted to feel my prick.”

  “I can’t be bothered.”

  “In that case, let’s get back to you. Lie down again and let your mind go.”

  “What do you mean, lie down again. You just said you were going to be human. Humans don’t talk to each other with their backs to each other.”

  “True. So go ahead, we’ll talk … eyeball to eyeball.”

  She looked at me again and her eyes narrowed slightly and her upper lip twitched twice. She stood up and faced me. The light from my desk picked up a light perspiration on her face, which revealed this time no suggestive smile—although one may have been intended—but rather a tense grimace. She moved slowly toward me, unbuttoning her skirt at the side as she approached.

  “I think maybe it would be good—for both of us—if we got to know each other physically. Don’t you?”

  She came to the chair and let her skirt fall to the floor. Her half-slip must have gone with it. She had on white silk bikini-panties but no stockings. Sitting down in my lap (the chair tipped back another three inches with an undignified squeak), her eyes half closed, she looked up into my face and said drowsily, “Don’t you?”

  Frankly, the answer was yes. I had a fine erection, my pulse was up forty percent, my loins were being activated by all the requisite hormones and my mind, as nature intended it in such cases, was functioning vaguely and without energy. Her lips and tongue came wetly against and into my mouth, her fingers along my neck and into my hair. She was role-playing Brigitte Bardot and I was responding accordingly. After a prolonged, satisfactory kiss, she stood up, and with a set, drowsy, mechanical half-smile removed, item by item, her blouse, bra (she hadn’t needed falsies), bracelet, wristwatch and panties.

  Since I continued to sit with a blissfully unplanned and idiotic expression, she hesitated, and I sensed that somewhere about now was my cue to embrace her passionately, carry her to the couch and consummate our union. I decided to miss the cue. After this brief hesitation (her now wet upper lip twitched once), she knelt down beside me and fingered my fly. She undid the belt, a hook and lowered the zipper. Since I didn’t move one millimeter (voluntarily) she had some trouble extricating her desired object from my boxer undershorts. When she had succeeded in freeing him from his cage, he stood with dignified stiffness, trembling slightly, like a young scholar about to have a doctoral hood lowered over his head. (The rest of me was cold and immobile as the code of ethics of the AAPP encourages us.) She leaned forward to put her mouth over it.

  “Did you ever see the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre?” I asked.

  She stopped, startled, then closing her eyes completely, drew my penis into her mouth.

  She did what intelligent women do in such cases. Although the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her tongue produced predictable feelings of euphoria, I found I was not much mentally excited by what was happening. That mad scientist dice man was looking at everything too hard.

  After what began to seem like an embarrassingly long time (I sat mute, dignified, professional through it all), she rose up and whispered, “Take off your clothes and come.” She moved nicely to the couch and lay down on her stomach with face to the wall.

  I felt that if I sat immobile any longer she would snap out of it and become angry, get dressed and demand her money back. I had seen her in two roles, sex kitten and intellectual bitch. Was there some sort of third Linda? I walked over (my left hand pants-clutching) to the couch and sat down. Linda’s white, nude body looked cold and babyish against the formal brown leather. Her face was turned away but my weight on the edge of the couch let her know I had arrived.

  Whatever limitations Linda might have as a human being seemed adequately compensated for by a round and apparently firm posterior. Her instinct—or probably her well-learned habit—of stuffing her buttocks at an obviously aroused man seemed correct. My hand actually arrived within two and one-quarter inches of that flesh before the mad scientist in the London fog got the message though.

  “Roll over,” I said. (Get her best weapon aimed elsewhere.)

  She rolled slowly over, reached up two white arms and pulled my neck down until our mouths met. She began to groan authoritatively. She pressed first her mouth hard against mine and then, somehow getting me to lift my legs up on the couch beside her, pressed her abdomen hard into mine. She tongued, writhed, groaned and clutched with intelligent abandon. I just lay, wondering not too acutely what to do.

  Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.

  “Linda,” I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) “Linda,” I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dante and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dante back. “Linda,” I said a third time.

  “Put it in,” she said.

  “Linda, wait a minute.”

  “What’s the matter, put it in.” She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.

  “Linda, I’ve got my period.”

  Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.

  Linda either hadn’t read Freud or didn’t care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.

  She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half closed her eyes again, groaned and said, “Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.”

  Although her hands weren’t pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one-eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.

  “Linda, there’s something I’d like you to do, first,” I said (What? What? For God’s sake, what?). This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn’t tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Lie here just as you are without movi
ng, and close your eyes.”

  She looked at me—our bodies were separated by only three or four inches and one of her hands was still pulling me toward the great melting pot—and again she was neither Bardot nor bitch. When she sighed, let go of me and closed her eyes, I eased myself to a seat on the edge of the couch again.

  “Try to relax,” I said.

  Her eyes shot open and her head up like a doll’s.

  “What the hell do I want to relax for?”

  “Please, for me, do this … one thing. Lie there in your full beauty and let your arms, legs, face, everything relax. Please.”

  “What for? You’re not relaxed.” And she laughed coldly at my denied, deprived, but still unbending middle leg.

  “Please, Linda, I want you. I want to make love to you, but first I want to caress you and kiss you and I want you to receive my love without—with complete relaxation. I know it’s impossible, so I’ll suggest a way you might do it. I want you to think of a little girl picking flowers in a field. Can you do that?”

  Bitch glared up at me.

  “Why?”

  “If you do it, you may—if you follow my instructions you may be in for a surprise. If I come into you now, neither of us will learn anything.” I brought my face dramatically down to within a few inches of hers. “A little girl picking flowers in a totally lush, green, beautiful but deserted field. Do you see that?”

  She glared a moment longer, then lowered her head to the couch and closed her legs together. Two or three minutes passed. Very distantly I could hear Miss Reingold’s typewriter tit-tatting away.

  “I see a little kid picking tiger lilies near a swamp.”

  “Is the little girl a pretty girl?”

  [Pause]

  “Yeah, she’s pretty.”

  “Parents—what are this little girl’s parents like?”

  “There are little field daisies too, and lilac bushes.”

  [Pause]

  “The parents are bastards. They beat the kid … the little girl. They buy long necklaces and they whip her with them. They tie her up with linked bracelets. They give her poison candy which makes her sick, and then they force her to drink her own vomit. They never let the girl alone. Whenever she goes to the fields, where she is now, they beat her when she comes home.”

  (I didn’t say a word, but the impulse to say “and they beat her when she comes home” had the strength of Hercules.) There was a long pause.

  “They beat her with books. They hit her on the head again and again with books. They stick pins and pencils in her. And tacks. When they’re done with her they throw her in the cellar.”

  Linda was not relaxed; she wasn’t crying; she seemed her bitchy self essentially, complaining against the parents but not able to feel sorry for the little girl. She felt only bitterness.

  “Look very closely at the little girl in the fields, Linda. Look very closely at her. [Pause] The little girl—?” [Pause]

  “The little girl … is crying.”

  “Why is the little … does she have … does the girl have any flowers?”

  “Yes, she has … It’s a rose, a white rose. I don’t know where …”

  [Pause]

  “What is she … how does she feel toward the white rose?”

  “… The white rose is the only … thing in the world which she can talk to, the only thing that … loves her … She holds the flower in front of her eyes by the stem and she talks to it and … no … she doesn’t even hold it. It floats to her … like magic, but she never, not once ever, touches it, and she never kisses it. She looks at it and it sees her and in those moments … in those moments … the little girl … is happy. The white rose, with the white rose … she is happy.”

  After another minute Linda’s eyes blinked open. She looked over at me, at my wilted penis, at the walls, the ceiling. At the ceiling. A buzzer sounded for what I now realized may have been the third or fourth time and I started.

  “The hour’s up,” she said dazedly and then added: “What a funny, stupid story,” but without bitterness, dreamily.

  Except for the silent restoration of our clothing, the session was over.

  13

  I was Christ for a day. As a pattern-breaking event, being a loving Jesus certainly qualified, and I was surprised how humble and loving and compassionate I began to feel. The dice had ordered me to “Be as Jesus” and to be constantly filled with a Christian (pronounced “Chr-eye-steean”) love for everybody I met. I voluntarily walked the children to school that morning, holding their little hands and feeling paternal, benevolent and loving. Larry’s asking me “What’s wrong, Daddy, why are you coming with us?” didn’t faze me in the least. Back in my apartment study I reread the Sermon on the Mount and most of the Gospel of Mark, and when I said good-bye to Lil prior to her leaving on a shopping spree, I blessed her and showed her such tenderness that she assumed something was wrong. For a horrible instant I was about to confess my affair with Arlene and beg forgiveness, but instead I decided that that was another man—and another world. When I saw Lil again that evening she confessed that my love had helped her to spend three times more than she usually did.

  I tried to be especially compassionate with my morning patients, but it didn’t seem to have much effect.

  Linda Reichman seemed put off when, after she had stripped to the waist, I suggested that we pray together. When she began kissing my ear I talked to her about the necessity of spiritual love. When she got angry, I begged her forgiveness, but when she unzipped my fly I began reading from the Sermon on the Mount again.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you today?” She sneered. “You’re even worse than you were last time.”

  “I’m trying to show you that there’s a spiritual love far more enriching than the most perfect of physical experiences.”

  “You really believe that crap?” she asked.

  “I believe that all men are lost until they become filled with a great warm love for all men, a spiritual love, the love of Jesus.”

  “You really believe that crap?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want my money back.”

  After she left at the end of the hour I didn’t see her again for almost a year.

  I almost cried that day when I met Jake for lunch. I so wanted to help him, trapped by that relentless overcharged engine of his, zooming through life missing everything, and especially missing the great warm love that filled me. He was forking down great gobs of beef stew and lima beans and telling me about a patient of his who had committed suicide by mistake. I was searching for some way to break down the seemingly impenetrable wall of his armored self and finding none. As the meal progressed I became sadder and sadder. I felt tears forming in my eyes. I irritably stopped the sentimentality and searched again for some way to his heart.

  “Jake,” I finally said. “Do you ever feel great warmth and love toward people?”

  He stopped with fork at mouth and gaped at me for a second.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Do you ever, have you ever felt a great rush of warmth and love toward some person or toward all humanity?”

  He stared a moment more, then said:

  “No. Freud associated such feelings with pantheism and the stage of development of two-year-olds. I’d say the irrational flooding of love was regression.”

  “And you’ve never felt it?”

  “Nope. Why?”

  “But what if such feelings are … wonderful. What if they seem better, more desirable than any other state? Would its being a regressive mode of feeling still make it undesirable?”

  “Sure. Who’s the patient? That Cannon kid you were telling me about?”

  “What if I were to tell you that I feel such a surge of love and warmth for everyone?”

  This stopped the steam-shovel machine.

  “And especially love for you,” I added.

  Jake blinked behind his glasses and looked—it’s only my interpretation of a facia
l expression I’d never seen on his face before—frightened.

  “I’d say you were regressing,” he said nervously. “You’re blocked in some line of development and to escape responsibility and to find help you feel this great childish love for everyone.” He began eating again. “It’ll pass.”

  “Do you think I’m joking about this feeling, Jake?”

  He looked away, his eyes jumping from object to object around the room like trapped sparrows.

  “Can’t tell, Luke. You’ve been acting strangely lately. Might be game, might be sincere. Maybe you ought to get back in analysis, talk it up with Tim there. I can’t judge you here as a friend.”

  “All right, Jake. But I want you to know that I love you and I don’t think it has anything at all to do with object cathexis or the anal stage.”

  He blinked at me nervously, not eating.

  “It’s a Christ-eean love, or rather, a Judaic-Christ-eean love, of course,” I added.

  He was looking more and more terrified. I began to be afraid for him.

  “I’m only referring to warm, passionate brotherly love, Jake, it’s nothing to worry about.”

  He smiled nervously, snuck in a quick squint and asked:

  “Have these attacks very often, Luke?”

  “Please don’t worry about it. Tell me more about that patient. Have you finished your article about it?”

  Jake was soon back on the main line, throttle wide open, his colleague, love-filled Lucius Rhinehart, successfully sidetracked at Podunk Junction, there to be stationed hopefully until it was possible to write an article about him.

  “Sit down, my son,” I said to Eric Cannon when he entered my little green room at QSH that afternoon. He looked back at me as though he believed he could see into my soul, his large black eyes glimmering with apparent amusement. Despite his gray khakis and torn T-shirt he was serene and dignified, a lithe, long-haired Christ who looked as though he did gymnastics every day and had fucked every girl on the block.

  He dragged a chair over near the window as he always did and flopped down with casual unconcern, his legs stretched out in front of him, a hole staring mutely at me from the bottom of his left sneaker.