The Dice Man (20 page)

`Dr. Rhinehart-'

`You're efficient, but you've got a flat ass. Hired a 38-24-37 who knows all about fellatio, post hoc propter id, soixante-neuf, gesticulation and proper filing procedures.'

She was backing slowly towards Dr. Ecstein's office, eyes bulging, teeth gleaming like two parallel armies in disarray.

`She starts tomorrow morning,' I went on. `Has her own contraceptive device, I understand. You'll get full pay through the end of the century. Good-bye and good luck.'

I had begun jogging in place about halfway through my tirade and at its conclusion I sprinted neatly into my office. Miss Reingold was last seen sprinting not so neatly into Jake's.

I assumed the traditional lotus position on my desk and wondered what Miss Reingold would do with my chaotic cruelties. After minimal investigation I concluded that she had been given something to fill her dull life. I pictured her years hence with two dozen nieces and nephews clustered around her chubby knees telling them about the wicked doctor who stuck pins in patients and raped others and, under the influence of LSD and imported Scotch, fired good, hard-working people and replaced them with raving nymphomaniacs.

Feeling superior in my imaginative faculties and uncomfortable in my yoga position I stretched both arms upward. A knock on the door. .

`Yo!' I answered, arms still outstretched, my tuxedo straining grotesquely. Jake stuck his head in.

`Say, Luke, baby, Miss Reingold was telling me som-' He saw me. Jake's habitual piercing squint couldn't quite negotiate the sight: he blinked twice.

`What's up, Luke?' he asked tentatively.

I laughed. `Oh this,' I said, fingering the tuxedo. `Late party last night. I'm trying to wake myself up before Osterflood comes. Hope I didn't upset Miss R: He hesitated, his chubby neck and round face still the only parts of him which had eased their way into the room.

`Well,' he said, `yeah. She says you fired her.'

`Nonsense,' I replied. `I was telling her a joke I heard at the party last night; it was a little raunchy perhaps, but nothing that would upset Mary Magdalen.'

`Yeah,' he said, his traditional squint gathering strength, his glasses like two flying saucers with slits concealing deadly ray guns. `Righto,' he said. `Sorry to bother you.'

His face vanished, the door eased shut. While meditating I was interrupted a few minutes later by the door opening and Jake's glasses reappearing.

`She wants me to make sure she's not fired.'

`Tell her to come to work tomorrow fully prepared.'

`Righto.'

When Osterflood strode in I was limping around the room trying to get the circulation back into my feet' He walked automatically to the couch but I stopped him.

`No you don't, Mr. O. Today you sit over there and I'll use the couch.'

I made myself comfortable while he lumbered uncertainly to the chair behind my desk.

`What's the matter. Dr. Rhinehart, do you-'

`I feel elated today,' I began, noting in the corner of the ceiling an impressive cobweb. For how many years had my patients been staring at that? `I feel I've made a major breakthrough on the road to the New Man.' `What new man?'

`The Random Man. The unpredictable man. I feel today I am demonstrating that habits can be broken. That man is free.'

`I wish I could break my habit of raping little girls,' he said, trying to get the focus back on himself.

`There's hope, Oh there's hope. Just do the opposite of everything you normally do. If you feel like raping them, shower them with candy and kindness and then leave. If you feel like beating a whore, have her beat you. If you feel like seeing me, go to a movie instead.'

`But that's not easy. I like hurting people.'

`True, but you may find you'll get a kick out of kindness, too. Today, for example, I found running to work much more meaningful than my usual cab ride. I also found my cruelty to Miss Reingold, refreshing. I used to enjoy being nice to her.'

`I wondered why she was crying. What happened?'

`I accused her of bad breath and body odor.'

`Jesus.'

`Yes.'

`That was a horrible thing to do. I'd never do a thing like that.'

`I hope not. But the city health authorities had issued a formal complaint that the entire building was beginning to stink. I had no choice.'

In the ensuing silence I heard his chair squeak; he may have tipped back in it, but from where I lay I couldn't tell. I could see only part of two walls, bookcases, books, my cobweb and a single small portrait of Socrates draining the hemlock. My taste in soothing pictures for patients seemed dubious.

`I've been pretty cheerful lately too,' Osterflood said meditatively, and I realized I wanted to get the focus back on my problems.

`Of course, habit breaking can also be a chore,' I said. 'For example, I find it difficult to improvise new methods and places for urinating.'

`I think . . . I almost think you may have brought me toward a breakthrough,' Osterflood said, ignoring me.

`I'm particularly concerned with my next bowel movement,' I went on. `There seem to be definite limits as to what society will stand for. All sorts of eccentricity and nonsensical horrors can be permitted - wars, murder, marriage, slums - but that bowel movements should be made anywhere except in the toilet seems to be pretty universally considered despicable.'

`You know that if . . . I felt that if I could just kick my little girl addiction, just ... lose interest, I'd be all right. The big ones don't mind, or can be bought'

`Also locomotion. There are only a certain number of limited ways of moving from spot A to spot B. Tomorrow, for example, I won't feel free to jog to work. What can I do? Walk backward?'

I looked over to Osterflood with a serious frown, but he was immersed in his own thoughts. `But now ... lately ... I got to admit it ... I seem to be losing my interest in little girls.'

`Walking backwards a solution, of course, but only a temporary one. After that and crawling and running backward and hopping on one foot, I'll feel confined, limited, repetitious, a robot'

`And that's good, I know it is. I mean I hate little girls and now that I'm less interested in fucking them I feel that's ... definitely an advance.'

He looked down at me sincerely and I looked sincerely back.

`Conversations too are a problem,' I said. `Our syntax is habitual, our diction, our coherence. I have a habit of logical thought which clearly must be broken. And vocabulary. Why do I accept the limits of our habitual words. I'm a clod! A clod!'

`But ... but ... lately ... I'm afraid ... I've sensed ... I'm almost afraid to say it...'

`Umpwillis. Art fodder. Wishmonger. Gladsull. Parminkson. Jombie. Blit. Why not? Man has limited himself artificially to the past. I feel myself breaking free.'

`. . that I'm, I feel I'm beginning to want, to be like . . . little boys.'

`A breakthrough. A definite breakthrough if I can continue to contradict my habitual patterns as I have this morning. And sex. Sexual patterns must be broken too . .

`I mean really like them,' he said emphatically; `Not want to rape them or hurt them or anything like that, just bugger them and have them suck me off.'

`Possibly this experiment could get me into dangerous ground. I suppose since I've habitually not been interested in raping little girls that theoretically I ought to try it.'

`And boys ... little boys are easier to get at. They're more trusting, less suspicious.'

`But really hurting someone frightens me. I suppose - No! It is a limitation. A limitation I must overcome. To be free from habitual inhibitions I will have to rape and kill: His chair squeaked, and I heard one of his feet hit the ground.

`No,' he said firmly. `No, Dr. Rhinehart. I'm trying to tell you, raping and killing aren't necessary anymore. Even hitting may be out.'

`Raping, or at least killing, is absolutely necessary to the Random Man. To shirk that would be to shirk a clear duty.'

`Boys, little boys, even teen-age boys, will do just as good, I'm sure. It's dangerous with little girls, Doc, I warn you.'

`Danger is necessary. The whole concept of the Random Man is the most dangerous and revolutionary ever conceived by man. If total victory demands blood then blood it must be.'

`No, Dr. Rhinehart, no. You must find another way to work it out. A less dangerous way. These are human beings you're talking about.'

`Only according to our habitual perceptive patterns. It may well be that little girls are actually fiends from another world sent to destroy us.

He didn't reply but I heard the chair give one small squeak. `It's quite clear,' I went on, `that without little girls we wouldn't have women, and women - snorfu buck clisting rinnschauer.'

`No, no, Doc, you're tempting me. I know it, I see it now. Woman are human beings, they must be.'

`Call them what you will, they differ from us, Osterflood, and you can't deny it' `I know, I know, and boys don't. Boys are us. Boys are good.

I think I could learn to love boys and not to have to worry so much about the police anymore.'

`Candy and kindness to girls, O., and a stiff prick to boys you may be right. It would, for you, definitely be a habit breaker.'

`Yes, yes.'

Someone knocked on the door. The hour was, up. As I dazedly rolled my feet onto the floor I felt Mr. Osterflood pumping my hand vigorously: his eyes were blazing with joy.

"This has been the greatest therapeutic hour of my life. You're . . . you're ... you're a boy, Dr. Rhinehart, a genuine boy.'

`Thank you, O. I hope you're right.'

Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and be my `natural self I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, `I'm Batman,' at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann - all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.

I would break into laughter for no reason at all, I would overreact to situations, becoming angry, fearful or compassionate far in excess of that normally demanded. I wasn't consistent. Sometimes I'd be gay, at others sad; sometimes I'd be articulate, serious, brilliant; at others, absurd, abstracted, dumb. Only my being in the process of analysis with Jake kept me free to walk the streets. As long as I did nothing violent, people could still feel relatively at ease: `Poor Dr. Rhinehart, but Dr. Ecstein is helping him: Lil was becoming increasingly worried about me, but since the die always rejected the option that I tell her the truth, I kept making semi-rational excuses for my absurdities. She talked with Jake and Arlene and Dr. Mann, and they all had perfectly rational and usually brilliant explanations of what was happening, but unfortunately no suggestions as to how to end it.

`In a year or two...' said Dr. Mann benevolently to Lil, who told me she almost started screaming.

I assured her that I'd try harder to control my whims.

National Habit-Breaking Month certainly didn't help matters. How upset people become when confronting the breakdown of patterns, how upset or how joy-filled. My jogging into the office, my absurd speeches, my blasphemous efforts to seduce the sexless and incorruptible Miss Reingold, my drunkenness, my nonsensical behavior with my patients - all brought to those who witnessed them shock and dismay, but also, I began to notice, pleasure.

How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd: Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.
By the end of that month I was thinking if only Nixon would get drunk and say to someone, `Fuck you, buddy: If only William Buckley or Billy Graham would say, `Some of my best friends are Communists'; if only a sportscaster would just once say `Sure is a boring game, folks.'

But they don't. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experience.

But in most ways National Habit-Breaking Month turned out to be impractical; I ended up at one point letting the die decide when I would go to bed and for haw, long I would sleep. My sleeping a random number of hours at randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, specially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passers-by looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a night-club lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny's and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at Nedick's.

Another time the Die ordered me to sensitize myself to every moment, to live each moment fully awake. It seemed a marvelously aesthetic thing to do. I pictured myself as Walter Pater John Ruskin Oscar Wilde all rolled into one. What I first became aware of during Aesthetic Sensitivity Day was that I had the sniffles. I may have had them for months, years even, and never noticed it. In January, thanks to this random command of the Die, I became conscious of a periodic intake of air through my nostrils running through some accumulated mucus which produced a sound normally denoted as a `sniff.'

Were it not for the dice I would have remained an insensitive clod.

I became aware of other previously unrealized sense experiences during that Sensitivity Week. Lying in bed with Lil is the early morning hours I would listen fascinated to the symphony of street noises from below, noises which previously I had named silence - meaning that Larry and Evie were not awake. Admittedly after about two days they became a quite monotonous and second-rate symphony, but for two mornings they - and I - lived again. Another day I went to the Museum of Modern Art and tried desperately to experience aesthetic bliss, decided after half an hour to shoot for simple pleasure and settled at the end of a footsore hour and a half for being content with a low level of pain. My visual sense must have atrophied at some point and even the mighty dice couldn't resurrect it. The next day I was happy the dice killed off Walter Pater.