“I’m going to have a baby,” she said quietly.
Dr. Rhinehart sat down at the opposite end of the couch, leaned back and mechanically crossed his legs. He looked blankly at the wall opposite him, on which hung an ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria.
“I’m happy for you, Arlene,” he said.
“This is now the second straight month I’ve missed my period.”
“I’m happy.”
“I asked the Die what I should name it and gave it thirty-six options and the Die named it Edgar.”
“Edgar.”
“Edgar Ecstein.”
They sat there quietly not looking at each other.
“I gave ten chances to Lucius but the dice chose Edgar.”
“Ahh.”
Silence.
“What if it’s a girl?” Dr. Rhinehart asked after a while.
“Edgarina.”
“Ahh.”
“Edgarina Ecstein.”
Silence.
“Are you happy about it, Arlene?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“It hasn’t been decided yet who the father is,” Mrs. Ecstein said.
“You don’t know who the father is?” asked Dr. Rhinehart, sitting up.
“Oh I know,” she said and turned smiling to Dr. Rhinehart. “But I haven’t let the dice decide who I should say is the father.”
“I see.”
“I thought I’d give you two chances out of three of being the father.”
“Ahhh.”
“Jake, of course, will get one chance in six.”
“Unhuh.”
“And I thought I’d let ‘someone you don’t know’ have one chance in six.”
Silence.
“The dice will decide then who you tell Jake is the father?”
“Yes.”
“What about abortion? You’re only in the second month. Did you let the dice consider abortion?”
“Oh, of course,” she said again smiling. “I gave abortion one chance in two hundred and sixteen.”
“Ahhh.”
“The dice said no.”
“Mm.”
Silence.
“So in seven months you’re going to have a baby.”
“Yes I am. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I’m happy for you,” said Dr. Rhinehart.
“And after I find out who the father is I’ll have to let the dice decide whether to leave Jake to be true to the father.”
“Unh.”
“And then let the dice decide whether I’m to have more children.”
“Um.”
“But before that they’ll have to tell me whether I should tell Lil I’m having a baby.”
“Ahh.”
“And whether I should tell Lil who the father is.”
“Uh.”
“It’s all so wonderfully exciting.”
Silence.
Dr. Rhinehart took from his suit-jacket pocket a die and after rubbing it between his hands dropped it on the couch between himself and Mrs. Ecstein. It was a two.
Dr. Rhinehart sighed.
“I’m happy for you, Arlene,” he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.
38
Once upon a time Dr. Rhinehart dreamt he was a bumblebee, a bumblebee buzzing and flitting around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t believe he was Dr. Rhinehart. Suddenly he felt that he had awakened, and he was old Luke Rhinehart lying in bed beside the beautiful woman Lil. But he didn’t know if he was Dr. Rhinehart who had dreamt he was playing the role of a bumblebee, or a bumblebee dreaming he was Dr. Rhinehart. He didn’t know, and his head was buzzing. After several minutes he shrugged:
“Perhaps I’m actually Hubert Humphrey dreaming I’m a bumblebee dreaming of being Dr. Rhinehart.”
He paused for several more seconds and then rolled over and snuggled up to his wife.
“In any case,” he said to himself, “in this dream of being Dr. Rhinehart, I’m glad I’m in bed with a woman and not a bumblebee.”
39
One day I awoke from my multiple sleep-walking to realize that an entire year had passed since my fateful Die-Discovery Day. A few days before the Die had selected July as National Role-playing Month but I can remember only vaguely what I did and said in those three or four days: I as Jake Ecstein analyzing the concept of the dice man from a Jakean point of view; I as Oboko the Zen master sitting mostly mute and smiling while a young graduate student tries to question me about psychoanalysis and the meaning of life, I as a child of seven riding a bicycle through Central Park, staring at the ducks in the pond, sitting crosslegged to watch an old Negro fishing, buying bubblegum and ballooning out a big one, racing another cyclist on my bike and crashing and scratching my knee and crying, much to the bewilderment of the passersby—240-pound crybabies being a rarity.
But one evening, after a satisfying day playing tennis with Lil in Central Park, a swim at Dr. Mann’s club, a frolic with Larry and Evie at a children’s toy exhibition on 57th Street and an ego-inflating phone call from another young psychiatrist who was experimenting with dice therapy with two of his patients, I remembered with a touch of nostalgia and pride that it was, in effect, my Birthday. Since, however, none of my conventional friends knew of my dicelife it was destined to be a lonely birthday and I celebrated by smoking two joints of high-quality marijuana—part of a new cache I had acquired for medical research—and letting Lil beat me in chess. When she went to bed at about midnight I remained up to pace back and forth across our living room floor and contemplate the meaning of life. A year before, I had been bored and restless, and now, now I was excited and restless. The dice had liberated several me’s from captivity and would undoubtedly liberate many more in the future. Although my dice therapy was not changing the world it was affecting a few people in haphazardly favorable ways.
As I lunged back and forth across the room, striking my fists joyfully against my tensed belly, gulping in huge lungfuls of air, sweating profusely (the air-conditioner was off), stopping to admire myself in the half-length mirror, I felt it had been a good year. But it was also my Anniversary. I’d have to give a chance to going downstairs to rape Arlene again. I flipped a die across the rug in front of me and it stopped at three. I was surprised, then I shrugged. If it had been a three the year before, I’d still be reading the stock market reports.
My Birthday was also, of course, a Fate Day, I decided, and I surged into my study to get paper, pen and my two special green dice, exploding a suppressed yipyipyipyipyip as I went. As I was returning to the living room, however, Lil, apparently awakened by my noise, stood in the bedroom doorway and inquired sleepily if everything was all right.
“Everything is confused and unreliable,” I said happily. “As it should be.”
“Come to bed, Luke,” she said and lifted her slender arms up around my neck and leaned sleepily against me. The bedwarmed body that my hands found themselves enclosing was unconfused and reliable, and I lowered my head and embraced Lil.
“But I have miles to go before I sleep,” I said softly when we’d broken our kiss.
“Come to bed,” Lil said. “It’s late.”
“Had I but world enough and time …”
“There’s plenty of time … come,” and she began to drag me into our bedroom.
“But I have miles to go before I sleep,” I said again, stopping a few feet inside the door. Lil, still holding one of my large hands in hers, turned dreamily and smiled and yawned.
“I’ll be waiting,” she said, and with an unintended swinging of the more desirable parts of her anatomy, moved to our bed and climbed in.
“Goodnight, Lil,” I said, without much enthusiasm.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Check the kids ’fore you come.”
Still holding in my left hand the paper, pen and
two dice, I walked quickly to the children’s bedroom and tiptoed in to look at Larry and Eve. They were sound asleep, Larry with his mouth open like a child drunk, and Evie with her face so buried by the sheet that I could only make out the top of her head.
“Have good dreams,” I said and silently left the room and returned to the living room.
I placed the paper, pencil and dice on the floor in front of the easy chair and then, with a sudden lunge, took four strides towards the bedroom and stopped. Sighing, I returned to kneel on the rug beside the tools of my trade. To relax and prepare for my Fate Day, I performed a series of random dice exercises I’d been developing: random physical exercises, a one-minute spurt of a sinner-saint game, and a three-minute period of Emotional Roulette—the Die choosing lust, an emotion I found myself feeling with enthusiasm. Then I placed the two green dice on the easy chair in front of me and, kneeling on the rug, intoned a prayer:
“Great Godblob Die, I worship thee:
Awaken me this morn
With thy green gaze,
Quicken my dead life
With thy plastic breath,
Spill into the arid spaces of my soul
Thy green vinegar.
A hundred hungry birds scatter my seed—
You roll them into cubes and plant me.
I am thy grateful urn, O Die,
Fill me.”
I felt a serene joy such as always comes to me when I surrender to the Die: the Peace which passeth understanding. I wrote upon the white, blank paper the options for my life for the next year:
If the dice total two, three, or twelve: I will leave my wife and children forever. I recorded this option with a vague, distant dread. I’d given it one chance in nine.
I gave one chance in five (dice total of four or five) that I’d completely abandon the use of the dice for at least three months.
Dice total six (one chance in seven): I’d begin revolutionary activity against the injustice of the established order. I didn’t know what I had in mind by the option, but I began daydreaming about joining forces somehow with Eric Cannon until a police siren on the street outside my apartment building (the mere writing of the option might be a crime) made me go quickly on to the others.
Dice total of seven (one chance in six): I would devote the entire next year to the development of dice theory and therapy and dice centers. Recording this brought such pleasant excitement that I considered giving it the totals of eight and nine as well, but fought back such human weakness and went on.
Dice total of eight or eleven (one chance in five): I’d leave the profession of psychiatry, including dice therapy, for one year, letting the dice choose a new profession. I recorded this with pride; I wouldn’t be the prisoner of my fascination with dice therapy.
Dice total nine or ten (one chance in five): I’d begin writing an autobiography.
Examining the six options, I was pleased: each of them represented both the danger of disaster and the possibility of new power.
I placed the paper by my side and the two green dice in front of me on the floor.
“Tuck me in, Dad,” a voice said from the other end of the room. It was Larry, bleary-eyed with sleep and blinking into the light.
I arose irritably, marched to Larry, lifted him into my arms and carried him back to his bed. He was asleep as soon as I’d pulled the sheet up to his neck again, and I rushed back to my position on my knees in the living room.
The dice in position before me, I knelt silently for two minutes and prayed. I then picked up the two dice and began shaking them gaily in the bowl of my hands.
“Tremble in my hands, O Die,
As I so shake in yours.”
And holding the dice above my head I intoned aloud:
“Great bleak Blocks of God, descend, quiver, create.
Into your hands I commit my soul.”
The dice fell a one and a two: three: I was to leave my wife and children forever.
40
How about that?
41
I was stunned. Disbelief. Numbness. Terror. I was like a doctor who has just learned he gave a patient the wrong drug and the patient is dead: I kept analyzing where I had made my mistake rather than dealing with the consequences.
Three: leave Lil and the children forever. “Forever”? What stupid whim had made me add the word “forever.” I had never before permitted the dice to dictate my life for more than half a year. “Forever” was illegal. I would demand a reflip.
Dread. Loneliness. A feeling that the whole seething sea of humanity was drifting away from me and I was being left alone on an iceberg. Where had I made my mistake? Didn’t I write something else for three? Had I shaken the dice sufficiently? Was it legal to include leaving Lil forever as an option? As I paced, all my thinking was devoted to undoing the decision of the dice. At last, I returned to the scene of the accident and slumped down in my easy chair. I couldn’t do it.
Depression. Heavy weight in the tummy. The failure to follow the command to leave Lil meant that dicethrowing was insignificant, that Luke was in control and that the Die didn’t exist. I was free. No more bowling, Miss Reingolds, Kama Sutra 36, bicycle accidents … I was free …
Depression, heavy tummy, a sneer: free to be solely Lucius Rhinehart, normal human clod: permanent Clark Kent to Dr. Felloni’s Lois Lane.
But you can still act eccentrically if you feel like it, you …
Normal human clod doing what he feels like doing. The possible death of the Dice Man lowered over me a shroud of gloom.
After a while, like a pendulum whose momentum has been lost I came to rest between the terror at leaving and the depression at not leaving, just sitting slumped and hollow-eyed feeling nothing. I must have remained thus, awake but emotionless, for close to thirty minutes. I thought of Larry’s drunken face in sleep, of Lil’s warm flesh in my hands, of the noise the electric dishwasher had made earlier in the evening. These were reality. What was this incredible world I was creating with dice? I leaned forward and looked down at the two neat, powerful statements: a two and a one.
“Well, gotta leave Lil,” I said for the sake of saying something. No feeling. “And what’ll I do next?” This question flowed a second time, more slowly, in capital letters. Curiosity, like a snake that had been curled up at the bottom of my mind during this whole turbulent experience, slowly unwound and raised his alert, beady-eyed head. “And what will I do next?”
The Die only knows.
Joy, like the sudden explosion of tiny birds off the ground, fluttered up through me. I arose from my chair and stood indecisively a moment, waiting for the joy that was flooding through me to evaporate or be displaced by dread, but nothing happened. The Die giveth, the Die taketh away; Blessed be the name of the Die. Should I leave this very moment? A last word or kiss for Lil or Larry or Evie?
Never. The Dice said leave, not play the sentimental husband. But … Leave! Now! Forever! Into Thy hands, O Die, I commit my soul.
And after putting Dice records, a checkbook and several green dice into a briefcase, my sacred pair of dice in my suit-jacket pocket, and putting on a raincoat, I left the apartment. I returned two minutes later and left the only message in the world appropriate to the occasion: on the floor in front of the easy chair I placed again two dice with their upturned faces showing a two and a one.
42
The heavens declare the glory of Chance;
And the firmament showeth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth accident,
And night unto night showeth whim.
There is no speech nor language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth,
And their deeds to the end of the world.
In them hath Chance set a tabernacle for the sun,
Whose going forth is from the end of the heaven,
And his circuit unto the ends of it:
And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
The law of Chance is perfect, converting the soul:
The testimony of Chance is sure, making wise the simple.
The statutes of Chance are right, rejoicing the heart:
The commandment of Chance is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of Chance is clean, enduring forever:
The judgments of Chance are true and righteous altogether.
from The Book of the Die
43
My first days of freedom from all the old psychological ties of family and friends were at first triumphant and then, it must be admitted, disastrous. The Die was asking me that week to vary the person I was from hour to hour or day to day or week to week. I was to expand my role-playing to test the limits of the malleability of the human soul.
As Sigmund Freud the second day I phoned Jake to explain to him that I would be unable to attend my hour of analysis with him that week and to have Miss Reingold cancel my appointments for a few days—because of incomplete Oedipal development and a retroverted object cathexis. He said Lil was upset and angry and asked where I was and I told him I was someplace between the oral and the anal stage. He asked if I had a phone number there but I said no. I told him it was possible I’d be back at the office on Monday.
Except for that brief contact with the old world the dice rolled me from role to roll to role in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope of dramatic play. Life then was like a series of bit parts in a bad movie, with no script or director and with the actors and actresses all playing static and stereotyped roles, except for the star, who improvised. The climax of my first experiment in total randomness occurred four days after I’d left Lil, at a party given by Dr. Mann for his friends and certain luminaries of the New York psychiatric world in honor of Dr. Abraham Krum. I have always given the Die at least an outside chance to undo me, and the Die that night apparently couldn’t resist.
Dr. Krum, the German-American researcher, had in just five years astounded the psychiatric world with three complex sets of experiments, each of which proved something unique. He began by being the first man in world history able experimentally to induce psychosis in chickens, a creature previously considered of too low intelligence to achieve psychosis. Secondly, he had managed to isolate the chemical agent (moratycemate) which caused or was associated with the psychosis, thus being the first man to prove conclusively that chemical change could be isolated as a crucial variable in the psychosis of chickens. Thirdly, he discovered an antidote (amoratycemate) which completely cured 93 percent of the chickens of the psychosis in just three days of treatment, thus becoming the first man in world history to cure a psychosis exclusively by chemical means.
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