“It’s a girl,” Jake said, smiling dazedly beside the bed.
“Congratulations, Jake,” I said.
“Edgarina,” he went on. “Edgarina Ecstein.” He looked up at me. “Who named her that?”
“Don’t ask silly questions. The baby’s healthy, Arlene’s healthy: that’s what counts. How’d it go, Arlene?” I added.
“The Die was with me,” she said, cuddling the child against her swollen breasts and smiling ecstatically. She stared at her infant and smiled and smiled.
“Doesn’t she look just like Eleanor Roosevelt as a baby?” she said.
Jake and I looked; I think we both concluded it might be true.
“Edgarina has dignity,” I said.
“She’s born for greatness,” Arlene said, kissing the top of the baby’s head. “Die willing.”
“Or born to nothingness,” I said. “You don’t want to force any patterns on her.”
“Except for making her cast the dice about everything she does, I plan to let her be entirely free.”
“Oh JesusJesus,” said Jake.
“We’ve got to start early,” Arlene went on. “I don’t want our baby corrupted by society the way I was for thirty-five years.”
“Still, Arlene,” I said. “For the first two or three years I think the child can develop randomly without using the dice.”
“But it wouldn’t be fair,” she replied. “It would be like keeping candy away from her.”
“But a child tends to express all his minority impulses …”
“She’ll see me casting dice to decide which breast she gets or whether we go for a walk or whether she naps and she’ll feel left out.”
“JesusJesus,” Jake said.
When we left a bit later Jake and I walked down the hall quite slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said to me after a while, squinting up hopefully. “I think this dice business may be getting out of hand.”
“I think so too,” I said.
“The dice may be good for uptight adults—even for me—but I’m not sure about two-year-olds.”
“‘I agree.
“She could confuse the poor kid before she developed any patterns to break.”
“Right.”
“It’s possible the kid might grow up to be something of a weirdie.”
“True. Or worse yet, she might end up rebelling against diceliving and opt for permanent conformity to the dominant social norm.”
“Hey, that’s a possibility. You think she might?”
“Sure,” I said. “Children always rebel against their mothers.”
Jake paused in his pacing and I stopped beside him and looked down; he was staring at the floor.
“I suppose a little dicethrowing won’t hurt her,” he said slowly.
“No matter how Edgarina turns out under Arlene’s regime, it’s scientifically significant. Genius or psychotic, something new will have been demonstrated.”
Jake perked up a bit.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said.
“This may be your greatest case study since ‘The Case of the Six-Sided Man.’”
Jake squinted up at me.
“You’ll need a title of course,” I went on. “ ‘A Case of Random Rearing,’” I suggested. “Or perhaps, ‘Dieper Training.’”
Jake shook his head slowly and frowned.
“Aren’t you concerned about your baby?” he asked.
“Now remember, Jake, it’s our baby, not mine. Arlene’s telling you I’m the father doesn’t mean a thing. It may actually be you but the dice told her to lie.”
“Hey, that’s a good point, Luke.”
“Or she may have been sleeping with dozens of guys that month and not know who the actual father is.”
“Thanks for the reassurance,” he said.
“So let’s just call it our baby.”
“Let’s just call it hers.”
51
“What do you really want, Luke?” Linda suddenly asked.
“Want?” I said, thinking. The rhythmic thud of the Caribbean surf thirty yards away made me long for a swim, but we’d only been out of the water for fifteen minutes and were only just now dry.
“Everything, I guess,” I finally said, writhing deeper into the hot sand. “To be everybody and do everything.”
“That’s modest of you,” she answered. She lay beside me, bikinied and beautiful, her lovely breasts breathing skyward against the strip of cloth that was theoretically a bikini top like two fruits growing and shrinking in a speeded-up film of the growing process. “But what are your natural desires? What do you really want?”
A sea gull careened into my reduced field of vision and then out again.
“I want being with you. Sunshine. Love, caresses, kisses. [Pause] Water. Dice Centers. Good books. Opportunities to play the dicelife with people.”
“But whose kisses, whose caresses?”
“Yours,” I answered, blinking into the sun. “Terry’s, Arlene’s, Lil’s. Gregg’s. A few others’. People I meet in the street.”
She didn’t respond.
“Good music, a chance to write,” I went on. “Good film occasionally, the sea.”
“Christ! You’re not even as romantic as I used not to be, are you?”
“Not this particular me.”
“You’ve been sort of quiet lately. Just another dice decision?”
“I’ve been feeling sleepy.”
“My ass. Is it a dice decision?”
“What differences does it make?”
She was now sitting up, her legs spread, leaning back on her upright arms.
“I keep wondering what you want, not the dice …”
“Who’s me?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“But don’t you see?” I said. “To know ‘me’ that way is to limit me, cement me into something stonelike and predictable.”
“Diceshit! I just want to know a you that’s soft and predictable. How am I supposed to enjoy being with you if I feel you can go ‘poof’ any minute from some random fall of a die?”
I grunted and raised myself onto my elbows.
“Were I a healthy, normal neurotic human lover, my love might suffocate you for a lifetime, or it still might evaporate any moment in just as haphazard a fashion.”
“But then I might be able to control …”
“No!” I said, sitting abruptly up. “Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything! You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calvin Coolidge: death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.”
“But Luke,” she said, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “Life’s going to go on more or less the same and ourselves too. If …”
“Never!”
She didn’t speak. She slid her hand gently from my shoulder to the back of my neck and it played there with my hair. The sun was dazzling down warming and softening my mountain of flesh in a long-range caress of its own. I slowly lowered myself back into the sand and sighed.
“Or hardly ever,” I added.
52
Tone, Reader, tone. You’ll find the tone of this book oscillating like the moods of a manic-depressive. Can’t help it. The Dice Man was born to be inconsistent, born to gloom and guffaw, serious aspiration and smiling shrug. Novels and autobiographies are usually written about people who, if they are established on page 3 as weepers, have flooded the book by page 347. Of if they are essentially shriekers they shout and claw their way consistently page after page. The Dice Man was created to destroy the self, destroy personality; in the process he has unfortunately destroyed the prerequisite of successful autobiography.
Moreover, the writing about a dicelife by a diceperson involves numerous arbitrary decisions about the importance of events. What should be included?
To the creator of the Dice Centers—the Die determined that I devote all of 1970 to their development—nothing is more important than the long,
hard, complicated series of acts which resulted in the formation of Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments in the Catskills, in Holby, Maine, in Corpus Die, California, and, more recently, elsewhere. At other times personal adventures of my dicelife seem more worth writing about. But in any case, it is the Die which decides.
It dictated that I devote thirty pages to my efforts to follow its decision that I try to murder someone, rather than that I write thirty pages about my efforts to create the Dice Centers. I asked the Die if I could throw in some letters from my fans and It said fine. Jake’s experience at a Dice Center? Okay. An article I wrote for Playboy entitled “The Potential Promiscuity of Man”? No. My chaotic, unpredictable and often joyful relationship with Linda Reichman? Nope, not this book. Can I dramatize my early efforts to be a revolutionary, my troubles with the law, my trial, my experiences in jail. Yes, said the Die, if there’s room. And so on. Obedience of the Die implies with every fall that nothing matters. And if nothing matters, then illogicality, whimsy, irrelevance, and failure don’t matter either.
So bear with it, friends. Remember the oft-quoted words of the American Secretary of Defense returning from Indochina: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.” If the tone of our book seems to oscillate from The Brothers Karamazov to the brothers Marx, do not lament. It is only accident, and accident is the very essence of interest. Accident and variety: these you won’t lack.
53
“I want you to help me to escape,” Eric said quietly, holding the tuna-fish-salad sandwich in his hands lightly, as if it were delicate. We were in the Ward W cafeteria crowded in amongst other patients and their visitors. I was dressed casually in an old black suit and a black turtleneck shirt; he was in stiff gray mental-hospital fatigues.
“Why?” I asked, leaning toward him so I could hear better over the surrounding din of voices.
“I’ve got to get out; I’m not doing anything here anymore.” He was looking past my shoulder at the chaos of men in line behind my back.
“But why me? You know you can’t trust me,” I said.
“I can’t trust you, they can’t trust you, no one can trust you.”
“Thanks.”
“But you’re the only untrustworthy one on their side who knows enough to help us.”
“I’m honored.” I smiled, leaning back in my chair and self-consciously taking a sip from the straw leading into my paper carton of chocolate milk. I missed the beginning of his next sentence.
“… will leave. I know that. Somehow it will come to pass.”
“What?” I said leaning forward again.
“I want you to help me to escape.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “When?”
“Tonight.”
“Ahhhh,” I said, like a doctor being given an especially interesting set of symptoms.
“Tonight at eight P.M.”
“Not eight fifteen?”
“You will charter a bus to take a group of patients to see Hair in Manhattan. The bus will arrive at seven forty-five P.M. You will come in and lead us out.”
“Why do you want to see Hair?”
His dark eyes darted at me briefly, then back to chaos beyond my shoulder.
“We’re not going to see Hair. We’re escaping,” he went on quietly. “You’ll let us all off on the other side of the bridge.”
“But no one can leave the hospital like that without a written order signed by Dr. Mann or one of the other directors of the hospital.”
“You will forge the order. If a doctor gives it to the nurse in charge no one will suspect a forgery.”
“After you’re free, what happens to me?”
He looked across at me calmly and with utter conviction said:
“That is not important. You are a vehicle.”
“I am a vehicle,” I said.
We looked at each other.
“A bus, to be exact,” I added.
“You are a vehicle; you will be saved.”
“That’s a relief to know.”
We stared at each other.
“Why should I do this?” I finally asked. The noise around us was terrific and we had unconsciously brought our heads closer and closer to each other until they were separated now by only six inches. For the first time a hint of a smile crossed his lips.
“Because the die will tell you to,” he answered softly.
“Ahhh,” I said, like a doctor who has finally found the symptom which makes the whole syndrome come together. “The die will tell me to—”
“You will consult it now,” he said.
“I will consult it now.”
I reached into my suit-coat pocket and pulled out two green dice.
“As I may have already explained to you, I control the options and their probability.”
“It makes no difference,” Eric said.
“But I don’t think much of the option to lead you in such an escape.”
“It makes no difference,” he said, his slight smile returning.
“How many am I supposed to take to Hair with you?”
“Thirty-seven,” he said quietly.
I believe my mouth fell open.
“I, Dr. Lucius M. Rhinehart, am going to lead thirty-seven patients in the largest and most sensational mental-hospital escape in American history tonight at eight?”
“Thirty-eight,” he said.
“Ah, thirty-eight,” I said. We probed into each other’s eyes at six-inch range, and he seemed utterly without the slightest doubts about the outcome of events.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling angry. “This is the best I can do.” I thought for several seconds and then went on: “I’m going to cast one die. If it’s a two or a six I’ll try to help you and thirty-seven others escape somehow from this hospital sometime tonight.” He didn’t reply. “All right?”
“Go ahead and shake a six,” he said quietly.
I stared back at him for a moment and then cupped my hands, shook the die hard against my palms and flipped it onto the table between my empty milk carton and two lumps of tuna salad and the salt. It was a two.
“Ha!” I said instinctively.
“Bring us some money too,” he said, leaning back slightly but without expression. “About a hundred bucks should do.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up and looked down at me with a bright smile.
“God works in mysterious ways,” he said.
I looked back at him and for the first time realized that I too wanted not my will but the Die’s will to be done.
“Yes,” I said. “The vehicles of God come in many shapes and sizes.”
“See you tonight,” he said and edged his way out of the cafeteria.
Actually I wouldn’t mind seeing Hair again, I thought, and then, smiling in dazed awe at the day I had before me, I set to work planning the Great Mental Hospital Escape.
54
“You’re cured,” Jake said. “If I do say so myself.”
“I’m not sure, Jake,” I said. We were in his office that afternoon and he was trying to tell me that this would be our last analytic session together.
“Your interest in dice therapy has given you a rational base upon which to work with the dice. Before, you were using the dice to escape your responsibilities. Now they have become your responsibility.”
“That’s very acute, I must admit. But how do we know the Die won’t flip me off in some new direction?”
“Because you’ve got a purpose now. A goal. You control the options, right?”
“True.”
“You think dice therapy’s hot stuff, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“You aren’t going to risk the advance of dice therapy for another roll in the hay with some dumb broad. You’re not. You know now what you want.”
“A smart broad?”
“The advance of dice therapy. It gives your life precisely that foundation which it’s been lacking since you rejected your father in the fo
rm of Freud and Dr. Mann and began this random rebellion.”
“But a good dice therapist must lead a random life.”
“But he’s got to meet the patient regularly. He’s got to show up.”
“Hmmmm.”
“He’s got to listen. He’s got to teach.”
“Hmmm.”
“Moreover, you’ve got your friends trying dice therapy, other doctors. Your new self is being accepted. You don’t have to play the fool anymore.”
“I see.”
“I even accept the new Luke. Arlene has introduced me to several valid positions of dice therapy. I spoke to Boggles. Dice therapy makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Of course it does.”
“But it will tend to break down the sense of a stable self so necessary for a human to feel secure.”
“Only superficially. Actually, it builds a dicestudent’s—Jesus, I’m using your terms already—a patient’s strength by forcing him into continual conflict with others.”
“Builds ego strength?”
“Sure. You’re not afraid of anything now, are you?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You’ve made an ass of yourself so many times that you can’t be hurt.”
“Ahh, very acute.”
“That’s ego strength.”
“Without any ego.”
“Semantics, but it’s what we’re after. I can’t be hurt because I analyze everything. A scientist examines his wound, his wounder, and his healer with equal neutrality.”
“And the dicestudent obeys the dice decision, good and bad, with equal passion.”
“Right,” he said.
“But what kind of a society will it be if people begin consulting the Die to make their decisions?”
“No problem. People are only as eccentric as their options and most of the people who will go through dice therapy are going to develop just like you; that’s what makes your case so important. They’re all going to go through a period of chaotic rebellion and then move into a lifetime of moderate, rational use of the dice consistent with some overall purpose.”
Dice Man Page 26