Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  The patients showed no respect but continued their illegal hugging until four attendants from Ward T plus R. Smith rescued me by breaking up the circle as gently as they could, unfortunately accidentally breaking my arm (the lower tibia minor, I believe).

  This event is typical of the poor conditions which have developed on our ward since patient Cannon came. He was in the circle but since there were eight, Dr. Vener said we couldn’t send them all to Ward W. Hugging is also not technically against the rules which again shows the need for more thinking.

  The boy never talks to me. But I hear. Among the patients I have friends. They say he is against mental hospitals. You should know that. They say he is the ringleader of all the trouble. That he is trying to make all the patients happy and not pay attention to us. They say he says that patients ought to take over the hospital. These patients, my friends, say this.

  Because of the facts which I have written I must respectfully recommend to you:

  (1) that all sedation be given by needle to prevent patients from falsely swallowing their tranquilizers and remaining active and noisy during the day.

  (2) that all illegal drugs should be strictly forbidden.

  (3) that strict rules be developed and enforced regarding singing, laughing, whispering, and hugging.

  (4) that a special iron mesh cage be developed to protect the television set and that its cord go directly from the set which is ten feet off the floor to the ceiling to protect the wire from those who would deny the television set to those who want to watch it. This is freedom of speech. The iron mesh must form about inch wide squares, thick enough to prevent flying objects from entering and smashing the screen but letting people still see the TV screen although with a waffle griddle effect. The TV must go on.

  (5) Most important. That patient Eric Cannon be transferred respectfully someplace else.

  Head Nurse Flamm sent this report to myself, Dr. Vener, Dr. Mann, Chief Supervisor Hennings, State Mental Hospital Director Alfred Coles, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

  I had seen Eric only three times since my Jesus session with him and he had been extremely tense each time and done very little talking, but when he walked into my office that afternoon he came as quietly as a lamb into a grassy meadow.

  He moved to the window and stared out. He was wearing blue jeans, a rather soiled T-shirt, sneakers and a gray hospital shirt, unbuttoned. His hair was quite long, but his skin was paler than it had been. After about a minute he turned and lay down on the short couch to the left of the desk.

  “Mr. Flamm,” I said, “reports that he believes that you are stirring up the patients to—improper behavior.”

  To my surprise he answered me right away.

  “Yeah, improper. Bad. Lousy. That’s me,” he said, staring at the green ceiling. “It took me a long time to realize what the bastards are up to, to realize that the good-game is their most effective method of keeping their fucking system going. When I did, it made me rage against the way I’d been fooled. All my kindness and forgiveness and meekness just let the system step on everybody all the more comfortably. Love is groovy if it’s for good guys but to love the fuzz, love the army, love Nixon, love the church, whoa man, that is one lost trip.”

  While he was speaking I took out my pipe and began filling it with marijuana. When he finally paused I said:

  “Dr. Mann indicates that if Flamm continues to complain you’ll have to be transferred to Ward W.”

  “Oh, boohoohoo,” he said, not looking at me. “It’s all the same. It’s a system, you see. A machine. You work hard to keep the machine going, you’re a good guy; you goof off or try to stop the machine going, you’re a commie or a loony. The machine may be plowing blacks under like weeds, or scattering ten-ton bombs over Vietnam like firecrackers or overthrowing reform governments in Latin America every other month, but the old machine must be kept working. Oh man, when I saw this I vomited for a week. Locked myself in my room for six months.”

  He paused and we both listened to the birds singing away among the maple trees outside the building. I lit the pipe and took a deep toke. I exhaled, the smoke drifting idly in his direction.

  “And all that time I began slowly to feel that something important was going to happen to me, that I was chosen for some special mission. I had only to fast and to wait. When I bopped my father in the face and was sent here I knew even more certainly that something was going to happen. Knew it.”

  He stopped talking and sniffed twice. I took another drag on my pipe.

  “Has anything happened yet?” I asked.

  He lay there quietly, and slowly—with such a dreamlike slowness that for a moment I wondered if two or three lungfuls of grass had already produced an effect—he raised his head and swiveled it to look at me. I exhaled in his direction.

  We looked at each other with equally expressionless faces and then I said:

  “Has anything happened yet?”

  He watched me take another lungful and then settled back onto the couch. He reached into his hair and brought out a homemade joint.

  “Got a match?” he said.

  “If you’re going to smoke, share mine,” I said.

  He leaned over to take the pipe, but it was out, so I handed him the matches too. He lit up and for the next three minutes we passed the pipe back and forth in silence. He was staring at the ceiling as if its green cracks contained, like the back of a turtle’s shell, portents of the future. By the time the pipe went out a second time, I was pleasantly high. I felt happy, as if I were embarking on a new voyage that for the first time, even in my dice man life, represented real, rather than superficial change.

  My eyes were focused on his face, which, under the influence of his high perhaps, was glowing. He smiled with a peacefulness well within my understanding. His hands were folded across his belly, and he lay like a dead man, but glowing, glowing. His voice when he spoke was slow, thick and gentle, as if it came from way off in the clouds.

  “About three weeks ago I got up in the middle of the night when all the attendants were asleep to take a piss, but I didn’t have to take a piss. I was drawn into the day room as if by a magnet and there I stared out through the window at the Manhattan skyline. Manhattan: the central cog of the machine, or maybe just the sewage system. I knelt and I prayed. Yeah, I prayed. To the Spirit which had lifted Christ above the mass of men to bring His Spirit to me, to give to me the light that could light the world. To let me become the way, the truth and the light. Yeah.”

  He paused and I emptied the ashes out into an ashtray and began refilling the pipe.

  “How long I prayed, I can’t tell. Suddenly, wham! I was flooded by a light that made an acid trip seem like sniffing glue. I couldn’t see. My body seemed to swell, my spirit swelled, I seemed to expand until I filled the whole universe. The world was me.”

  He paused briefly, the sound of the Jefferson Airplane coming from someplace up the hall.

  “I hadn’t smoked a thing for three days. I wasn’t loony. I filled the whole universe.”

  He paused again.

  “I was crying. I was weeping for joy. I was on my feet I guess, and the whole world was all light and was all me and it was good. I stood with my arms outstretched to embrace everything and then I was conscious of this terrific mad grin I had on my face and the vision kind of faded and I shrunk back to me. But I felt that, I knew that I had been given a job … a role, a mission … yeah. This gray-green hellhouse couldn’t be left standing. The gray factories, the gray offices, the gray buildings, the gray people … everything without light … has to go. I saw it. I see it. What I’d been waiting for had happened. The Spirit I’d been looking for, I … had … I know I’m not for all men. The mass of men will always see and live in the gray world. But a few will follow me, a few, and we’ll change the world.”

  I passed him the relit pipe when he’d finished talking and he took it and inhaled and passed it back to me. He didn’t look at me.

&nb
sp; “And you, what’s your game?” he said. “You’re not smoking pot with me just because you feel like smoking pot.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why?”

  “Just chance.”

  He stared at the green ceiling until I passed him back the pipe. When he finally exhaled he said again as if from very far away:

  “If you want to follow me you must give up everything.”

  “I know.”

  “Pot-smoking doctors who get stoned with mental patients don’t stay doctors long.”

  “I know.” I felt like giggling.

  “Wives and brothers and fathers and mothers don’t usually like my way.”

  “So I gather.”

  “Someday you will help me.”

  We were both staring at the ceiling now, the hot bowl of the pipe resting unused in the palm of my hand.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s a marvelous game we’ll play—the best,” he said.

  “For some reason I feel I’m yours,” I said. “Whatever you want me to do, I’ll want to do.”

  “Everything will happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “The blind bastards [his voice was quiet and serene and remote] will panic and kill, panic and kill, trying to control the uncontrollable, trying to kill what can only live.”

  “We will panic and kill.”

  “And I’ll,” he interrupted himself with a chuckle, “I’ll try to save the whole fucking world—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Divine, you know,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, believing it.

  “I’ve come to wake the world to evil, to goose mankind to good.”

  “We’ll hate you—”

  “To slash the mash-potato minds until their sin is seen.”

  “We’ll be blind—”

  “Try to make the blind see, the lame walk, the dead live again.” He laughed.

  “And we’ll try to make the seeing blind, the walking lame, the living dead.” I smiled.

  “I’ll be the insane Savior of the world, and you’ll kill me.”

  “Whatever you want will be done.” I eased out a slow-motion bubbling of mirth.

  “I’ll be …” he was chuckling too, in slow motion. “I’ll be … the Savior … of the world … and do nothing, and you … I’ll kill … me.”

  “And I … [Goddam it, it was funny! How beautiful it was!] … I’ll kill you.”

  The room was a beautiful blur bouncing up and down on the bubbles of our laughter. Tears were in my eyes and I took off my glasses and put my face in my folded arms and laughed, my big body rumbling from cheeks to belly to knees, laughing, tears wetting my jacket, the soft cotton material caressing my wet face like bear’s bristle, and crying with an ecstasy that I hadn’t known before that moment, and looking up because I couldn’t believe I was crying and Eric’s face blurred, blurred bright but blurred and I looked for my glasses—such terror that I might never see again—and after groping for forty days I found them and put them on and looked at the blurred brightness and it was Eric’s holy face flowing tears like mine and he wasn’t laughing.

  18

  In the evolution of the totally random man the next event worth noting is that on January 2, 1969, at 1 A.M. I determined to begin the new year (I’m a slow starter) by letting the dice determine my long-term fate.

  I wrote with unfirm hand and dazed eyes the first option, for snake-eyes or double sixes: I would leave my wife and children and begin a separate life. I trembled (which is hard for a man with so much meat on him) and felt proud. Sooner or later the dice would roll a two or a twelve and the last great test of the dice’s ability to destroy the self would occur. If I left Lil there would be no turning back; it would be dice unto death.

  But then I felt fatigued. The dice man seemed boring, unattractive, other. It seemed like too much work. Why not relax and enjoy everyday life, play around in minor ways with the dice as I had at the beginning, and forgo this senseless, theatrical challenge of killing the self? For the first time in the six months since becoming the dice man, the thought of totally giving up the dice appealed to me.

  I wrote as the option for a six, seven or eight that I return to a normal diceless life for six months. I felt pleased.

  But immediately thereafter, my friends, I felt frightened, depressed. The realization that I might be without the dice produced precisely the same heavy depression which the thought of being without Lil had produced. Erasing the seven as a possibility for the option of giving up the dice, I felt a little better. I tore up the entire page and dropped it in the wastebasket: I would abandon the whole conception of long-range dice decisions. I heaved myself up out of my chair and walked slowly off to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I stared at myself in the mirror.

  Clark Kent stared back at me, clean-cut and mediocre. Removing my glasses helped, primarily because it blurred the image sufficiently so that my imagination was given leeway. The blurred face was at first eyeless and mouthless: a faceless nobody. By concentrating I conjured up two gray slits and a toothless mouth: a death’s head. With my glasses back on it was just me again, Luke Rhinehart, M.D., the Clark Kent of New York psychoanalysis. But where was Superman? Indeed, that was what this water-closet identity crisis was all about. Where indeed was Superman if I went back to bed?

  Back at my desk I rewrote the first two options: leaving Lil and giving up the dice. I then gave one chance in five to the option that I decide at the beginning of each of the next seven months (until the birthday of D-Day in mid-July) what each particular month was to be devoted to. I gave the same probability to the option that I try to write a novel for seven months. Slightly better odds went to the option that I spend three months touring Europe and the rest of the time traveling at the whim of the die. My last option was to turn my sex research with Dr. Felloni over to the imagination of the dice.

  The first biannual fate-dealing day had arrived—a momentous occasion. I blessed the dice in the name of Nietzsche, Freud, Jake Ecstein and Norman Vincent Peale and shook them in the bowl of my hands, rattling them hard against my palms. I gurgled with anticipation: the next half-year of my life, perhaps even more, trembled in my hands. The dice tumbled across the desk: there was a six and there was a … three. Nine—survival, anticlimax, inconclusion, even disappointment: the dice had ordered me to decide anew each month what my special fate was to be.

  19

  National Habit-Breaking Month must have been dictated by the die in a fit of pique over my easy enjoyment of my dice life; the month provided a hundred little blasts toward the breaking up of Lucius Rhinehart, M.D. Habit breaking had won out over (1) dedicated-psychiatrist month, (2) begin-writing-a-novel month, (3) vacation-in-Italy month, (4) be-kind-to-everybody month, and (5) help-Arturo-X month. The command was, to be precise, “I will attempt at every moment of every day of this month to alter my habitual behavior patterns.”

  First of all it meant that when I rolled over to cuddle Lil at dawn I had to roll back again and stare at the wall. After staring a few minutes and then beginning to doze off, I realized that I never rose at dawn, so with effort and resentment, I got out of bed. Both feet were in my slippers and I was plodding toward the bathroom before I realized habit had me in his fist. I kicked off my slippers and plodded, then jogged into the living room. I still, however, felt like urinating. Triumphantly, I did so in a vase of artificial gladiolas. (Three days later Dr. Felloni remarked on how well they seemed to be doing.) A few minutes later I woke up in the same standing position, conscious that I still had a silly proud smile on my face. Careful examination of my conscience revealed that I did not make a habit of falling asleep on my feet after urinating in the living room so I let myself doze off again.

  “What are you doing?” a voice said through my sleep.

  “Huh?”

  “Luke, what are you doing?”

  “Oh.” I saw Lil standing nude with her arms folded across h
er chest looking at me.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “Dinosaurs.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  “All right.”

  I started to follow her back to bed but remembered that following nude women into beds was habitual. When Lil had plopped in and pulled the blankets over her I crawled under the bed.

  “Luke???”

  I didn’t answer.

  The squeak of springs and the wandering low-cloud ceiling above me implied that Lil was leaning over first on one and then on the other side of the bed. The spread was lifted and her upside-down face peered into my sideways face. We looked at each other for thirty seconds. Without a word her face disappeared and the bed above me became still.

  “I want you,” I said. “I want to make love to you.” (The prosaicness of the prose was compensated for by the poetry of my position.)

  When the silence continued I felt an admiration for Lil. Any normal, mediocre woman would have (a) sworn, (b) looked under the bed again, or (c) shouted at me. Only a woman of high intelligence and deep sensitivity would have remained silent.

  “I’d love to have your prick inside me,” her voice suddenly said.

  I was frightened: a contest of wills. I must not reply habitually.

  “I want your left knee,” I said.

  Silence.

  “I want to come between your toes,” I went on.

  “I want to feel your adam’s apple bob up and down,” she said.

  Silence.

  I began humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I lifted the springs above me with all my might. She rolled off to one side. I changed my position to try to push her off. She rolled back into the middle. My arms were exhausted. Although whatever I did from under the bed was, a priori, a nonhabitual act, my back was aching. I got out from under, stood up and stretched.