by PV
��t was horrible,’ said A.
`The things he tried to make us do,’ said JW.
R only slobbered and grunted. The doctors had to dress him themselves, since he seemed incapable of it himself. K
and M both advanced the hypothesis that the patient had subsided into a catatonic state. E, however, even at this early date, was able to postulate that R’s breakdowns were random and sporadic and that a spontaneous remission of symptoms should be expected.
Such was the case. Ten minutes later as all sat quietly and in great fatigue waiting for an ambulance, R began talking again. He apologized sincerely and realistically for his behavior, praised the doctors for the gentle and intelligent way they had handled a difficult situation, reassured them that he was now at last completely himself again, and after twenty minutes or so had most of those present laughing at the whole situation, then abruptly, just as the ambulance arrived, he threw himself on the only woman left in the room. Dr. F, and seemed, to be attempting coitus. The attendants and doctor arrived, he was pulled off, an injection was administered and the patient was taken to - Clinic …
Thus, the following day, June 16, E, as his psychiatrist, was able to visit him. It soon became apparent that R was under the illusion that he was a young hippie of extremely sarcastic, bent. Although he related to E, it was in a negative, aggressive way. The patient, although in complete contact with reality and often extremely observant, was not himself, and thus was still insane.
On June 17 it was reported by the clinic that the patient spent his time in total silence, staring into space and occasionally grunting. He had to be spoon-fed and was unable to control his excretory functions. It seemed that a permanent catatonic state might have been reached.
But R’s recuperative powers continued to amaze. On the next day it was reported that he was talking again, relating well to the staff and physicians and requesting reading material, mostly of a religious nature. This last fact naturally worried E, but on June 19, 20 and 21 no new change was reported, so on June 22 E visited R again at the clinic..
Chapter Forty-four
While I bounced nicely from role to role in the Kolb Clinic, the rest of the world continued, I regret to say, to exist. Dr.
Mann informed me that the executive committee of PANY had decided to consider the motion of Dr. Peerman for my expulsion from the organization at its monthly meeting on June 30. He believed that although he himself was urging the committee to permit me to quietly resign, it was almost certain that they would vote to expel me and to write to the AMA suggesting that organization do the same.
Arlene wrote me that the dice, had told her that I was the father of the baby-to-be and that she had told Lil and Jake and most of the rest of the world the truth, or most of it, and thus Jake knew of our affair and of the dicelife. She said she couldn’t come to therapy for a while.
Lil came to visit me just once to congratulate me on my future fatherhood and to announce that she had initiated divorce proceedings by taking out the necessary separation papers and that her lawyer would be visiting me shortly.
(He did, but I was in the state of catatonia at the time.) She stated that separation and divorce were clearly best for both of us especially since I would undoubtedly be spending much of the rest of my life in mental institutions.
Dr. Vener of QSH told me that my former patient Eric Cannon had, after two months of leading a growing herd-of hippies in Brooklyn and in the East Village, been recommitted to the hospital by his father and was asking to see me. He also noted that Arturo Toscanini Jones had also been recommitted - on a technicality unearthed by diligent police -
and was not asking to see me.
In fact, the only good news I was getting from the rest of the world was from my patients in dice therapy. All took my being locked up perfectly in their stride, continued to develop their dicelife on their own and waited patiently and confidently for my return to them. Terry Tracy visited me twice at the clinic and spent two and a half hours trying to convert me to the Ultimata-Truth of the Religion of the Die. I was deeply moved.
Professor Boggles wrote me a long letter about a mystical experience he had had in Central Park after following the Die writing a particularly nonsensical article on Theodore and the Lyrical Impulse. Two of my new patients visited me regularly during my second wok at the clinic and dad me continue therapy with them there.
Arlene, too, seemed to grow in dice stature during this crisis period. Her letter explaining what was happening on the home front made me quite proud of her and prepared me for my interviews with Jake. She told me that Jake had taken her confession of infidelity quite calmly but had bawled her out for keeping it all to herself. It seems it was her ethical duty to provide him with as much information as possible about herself and everyone she knew since he could not fulfil his therapeutic duties without honesty and information. She had therefore gone on to tell him about her own and my dicelife and our dice games together. He had taken extensive notes and asked a lot of questions but was very calm. He had ordered her to limit her dicelife to the socially conventional until he had an opportunity to study the situation. She had then suggested that it might be of help to him if he experimented with some of the dice games with her in order to understand her problems and my problems better. He agreed, and they had had the best night together that they had had since high school days. Jake said he found it interesting. Arlene wrote that she could come visit me as soon as the Die said it was okay.
When Jake visited me on June 22 in the early evening I apologized to him immediately for any of my actions in the past which might have hurt him. It so fell that I was in the first day of The Old Pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart Week - a role I found very hard to play. I told him that by all conventional standards what I had done in seducing his wife was unforgivable, but that I hoped he understood my philosophical aims in following the dice.
`Yeah, Luke,’ he said, sitting down in a chair opposite my bod and in front of a lovely barred window overlooking a wall. `But you’re a strange one, got to admit. Tough nut to crack, so to speak.’
He took out a small note pad and a pen. `Like to know more about this dice man life of yours’
`You’re sure, Jake,’ I said, `that there’s no, well, no resentment over any of the ways which I may have betrayed you, lied to you or humiliated you?’
`Can’t humiliate me, Luke; a man’s mind should be above emotion.’
He was looking down at his pad and writing. `Tell me about this dice man stuff.’
I was sitting up in my bed and I leaned back comfortably into the four pillows I had had piled behind me and prepared to tell Jake what I had learned.
��t’s really amazing, Jake. It’s shown me emotions in myself I never knew existed.’ I paused. �� think I’ve stumbled onto something important, something psychotherapy has been looking for for centuries. Arlene told you I’ve got a small group of students in dice therapy. There are other doctors trying it as well. It’s … well, maybe I’d better give you the whole background theory and history…’
‘You want I should cheer?’
With much dignity, praise and detail, I summarized in about half an hour the Dice Man in theory and practice. I thought a lot of what I had to say was quite funny, but Jake never smiled, except professionally: to give me confidence to go on.
Finally I concluded: ��nd thus my eccentricities, inconsistencies, absurdities, and breakdowns of the last year have all been the logical consequences of a highly original but highly rational approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
There was a silence.
�� realize that in developing dice theory I have done things which have caused suffering to others as well as myself, but in so far as all was necessary to bring me to my present spiritual state, it may be justified.’
Again there was a silence until at last Jake raised his head.
`Well?’ I asked. With my arms folded on my chest I awaited with incredible tension
Jake’s evaluation of my theory and my life.
`So?’ he said.
`So?’ I replied.
`But why not? I . .. aren’t I developing a facet of man too long impressed in the jail of personality?’
`You’ve just described to me in great detail the classic symptoms of schizophrenia: multiple selves, detachment, elation depression: you want I should cheer?’
`But the schizophrenic becomes split and multiple against his will; he longs for unity. I have consciously created schizophrenia.’
‘You show a total inability to relate to anyone personally.’
`But if the dice tell me to I can.’
��f it can be turned on and off it’s not normal human relatedness.’
He was looking at me calmly and without expression, whereas I was getting excited.
`But how do you know that normal, uncontrollable human relatedness is more desirable than my switch-button variety?
‘
He didn’t answer. After a while he said: `Did the dice tell you to tell me?’
`They told Arlene.’
`Did they tell you both to throw some lies in too?’
‘No, that was our personal contribution.’
‘The dice are wrecking your career.’
�� suppose so.’
‘They’ve ruined your marriage.’
`Naturally.’
`They make it impossible for me or anyone else to rely on anything you say or do from now on.’
‘True.’
‘They mean that anything you begin may be abandoned right at the point of fruition by a whim of a die.’
`Yes.’
��ncluding the investigations of the dice man.’
��h, Jake, you understand perfectly.’
�� think I do.’
`Why don’t you try it too?’ I asked warmly. ��t’s possible.’
`We could become the Dynamic Dice Duo, dealing dreams and destruction to the pattern-plagued world of modern man.’
`Yes, that’s interesting.’
`You’re about the only one I know intelligent enough to understand what the Dice Man is really all about.’ ��
suppose I am.’
`Well?’
`Have to think it over, Luke. It’s a big step.’
`Sure, I understand.’
��t’s got to be Oedipal; that damn father of yours.’
`Wha - what?’
‘That time when you were three and your mother-‘
`Jake! What are you talking about?’ I asked loudly and with irritation. ��‘ve just unfolded the most imaginative new life system in the history of man and you start talking old Freudian mythology.’
‘Huh? Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, smiling his professional smile. `Go ahead.’
But I laughed, bitterly I’m afraid. `No, never mind. I’m tired of talking today,’ I said. Jake leaned forward and stared at me intently.
‘I’ll cure you,’ he said. I’ll tie you back into the old Luke or my name isn’t Jake Ecstein. Don’t you worry.’ I sighed and felt sad. ‘Yeah,’ I said dully. I won’t worry.’
Chapter Forty-five
The pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart created by the dice for the week of June 22 appeared so conventional, so rational, so ambitious and so interested in psychology that Doctors Ecstein and Mann decided to take a chance and permit me to defend myself at the meeting of the executive committee of PANY on June 30. Jake, while not yet convinced of the soundness of my theory, was increasingly enjoying certain dice exercises to which Arlene was introducing him and wished to be generous. Dr. Mann, not having been informed of the radical nature of my dicelife, was vaguely hopeful that the rational, conventional, ambitious man he talked to during the week of June 22 would still exist on the thirtieth.
The executive committee had agreed to my presence because they could find nothing in their bylaws which forbade it.
The charges against me were simple - my theories and practice of dice therapy were incompetent, ridiculous, unethical and of n��lasting medical value.’
Consequently, I should be expelled from PANY and a letter should be sent to the president of the AMA urging that I be forbidden to practice medicine anywhere in the United States or Canada (the southern part of the hemisphere being considered beyond salvation). I looked forward to the meeting as a welcome break from the confinement of the Kolb Clinic. Then occurred one of those unfortunate accidents which flaw even the most well-ordered dicelife: I absentmindedly gave the dice a foolish option and the Die chose it. When considering what to do about the PANY
indictment - to which my residual self was indifferent the old Luke Rhinehart I was being that week created as an option that if the committee voted to expel me I would cease dice therapy and dice living for one year. I gaily toppled a die onto my hospital bed and lost my gaiety: the Die chose that option.
In so far as anything is certain in this Die-dictated universe, it was certain that the executive committee would find me guilty. Not one of the five members of the committee was likely to be sympathetic. Dr. Weinburger, the chairman, was an ambitious, successful, conventional genius who hated everything that took time away from his glory-producing activities at his Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying.
He had never heard of me before his brief brush with me at the Krum party and it was clear he would hope never to hear of me again.
Old Dr. Cobblestone was a fair, rational, open-minded and just man who would thus naturally vote against me.
Although Dr. Mann had been trying to get the fellow members of the committee to agree to force me to resign quietly from PANY, after he failed in this effort he would naturally vote to condemn everything he detested. Namely me.
The fourth member of the committee was Dr. Peerman, who had initiated the proceedings against me when two of his brightest young psychiatrist interns - Joe Fineman and Fuigi Arishi - had suddenly deserted him and begun practicing dice therapy under my random tutelage. He was a slight, pale, middle-aged man with a highpitched voice, whose fame rested securely on his widely acclaimed research demonstrating that teenagers who smoked marijuana were more likely to try LSD than teenagers who did not. His vote in my favor seemed doubtful. Finally there was Dr. Moon, an ancient body in the heavens of New York psychoanalysis, a personal friend of Freud, the creator, in the early 1920s, of the widely discussed theory of the natural, irreversible depravity of children and a member of the executive committee of PANY since its origin in 1923. Although he was seventy-seven years old and one of the leading subjects in Dr.
Weinburger’s Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying, he still tried to take vigorous part in the proceedings. Unfortunately, his behavior was sometimes so erratic that from what I had heard it seemed he might be a secret diceperson, although his colleagues attributed his `slight eccentricities’ to ��ncipient senility.’
Although he was reputed to be the most reactionary member in all of PANY, his was the only vote that - because of his unreliability - didn’t seem certain to go against me.
Hang considered the likely attitudes of my judges, I gave the Die a one-in-thirty-six chance that I kill myself.
Unfortunately, it spurned the offer.
But the fact remained that if the committee expelled me the Die had ordered me to abandon the dicelife for one year, and this thought depressed me beyond all my previous experience. It so terrified me that for the three days before the scheduled meeting I worked every hour to prepare what seemed to me a reasonable case for my dice theory and therapy. I took notes, wrote articles, practiced speeches and considered what roles would best permit me somehow to sway Doctors Cobblestone and Mann to vote against my expulsion. Then my only hope would lie in some accident permitting the erratic old Dr. Moon to also be on my side.
Such dedicated work was possible since I was still in The Old Luke Rhinehart Week, but on June 29 it would end and the Die would have to choose a new role or roles for the last two days. Would the
Die choose that I switch roles rapidly as at the Krum party? Would it permit me to be my most rational and articulate? Would it tell me to blow the whole thing? I wouldn’t know until the die was cast.
Chapter Forty-six
On June 28, 1969, at approximately 2.30 in the afternoon in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where Jake had permitted me to go with a bodyguard attendant, I discovered the laughing men in the sky.
I was sitting a trifle despondent at an isolated table alongside row upon row of stacks doing research on my defense.
To my right was a small table with two men and a teenage boy. There was no one at my table except an old woman opposite me with bushy eyebrows and hairy arms reading behind a pile of books. My attendant was standing in the corner near the window reading a comic. I had been sitting there for perhaps forty minutes, running my big fingers over the uneven grained surface of the table and daydreaming about what some of my options might be for my mode of defense and finding that my mind seemed drawn to such cheerful ones as strangling Dr. Peerman, sitting wordlessly throughout the proceedings but maintaining a continually low giggle, or peeing ostentatiously on any papers they might bring. With an effort I decided that I must force my mind back to its defense and I asked again, almost in an audible whisper: `What, then, can I do to save myself?’
As I was repeating this question to myself and doodling with a wooden pencil in one of the cracks in the table, there came above the street noises the sound of bubbling human laughter.
The sound made me smile; then I realized its un-likelihood in the New York Public Library. I looked around. The old lady opposite me was looking with knitted bush brows at one of her pile of books; the three males at the other table seemed neither amused nor offended; my attendant was scowling as if stuck with some tough words. Yet the bubbling laughter continued, even growing louder.