The Dice Man (33 page)

'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.'

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 no `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 high-pitched 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 `incipient 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.

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 teen-age 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.

Then, surprise, the laughter must be my hallucination.

I sat back in my chair and tried briefly to block it out, but the laughter continued to flow. When I looked up, I saw very far away and high up a fat man shaking with laughter and pointing a finger at me. He seemed to think that my effort to find the right defense was the play of a, silly fool. He also found amusing my effort to smile at the realization that I was a fool. He thought my seeing his laughter at my smiling at his laughing was also funny. When I finally frowned, he laughed even harder. `Enough,' I said loudly, but began to laugh myself.

The old woman with the bushy brows stared at me coldly. The two men at the other table turned their heads. My attendant turned a page at last. The fat man above shook again with laughter, and I laughed harder, my big belly bumping against the table; I was almost out of control. The people stared, even the attendant. At last I stopped.

So did the fat man, although he still smiled, and I felt very dose to him. I thought again of the spectacular, nonsensical options that I'd been considering and decided I'd throw them out. The fat man began laughing again. I looked up startled, smiled socially at him and decided that I would instead use all three non-rational options. He laughed harder. With a flush I realized that I would have to abandon the dicelife completely, but the fat man laughed on and was joined by three, four other fat men all pointing at me and laughing joyously.

My mind was filled suddenly with the vision of thousands of fat men sitting up there in that fourth dimension watching the antics of human aspiration and purpose, and laughing - not a single one sober or compassionate or pitying. Our plan, hopes, expectations, and promises; and the realities of the future which they could also see: only a source of laughter. The men (they were both men and women actually, but all fat) often crowded together to look at one particular human whose life seemed to evoke special ironies or humor.

When I realized that neither abandoning the dicelife nor retaining it would end the eternal amusement of the fat people in the sky I felt like a man on some television show who is asked to guess what's behind the green wall. No matter what he guesses, the audience, which can see what is behind the wall while he can't, laughs. All my writhings in the present to find a future which will please me evoke only laughter in the audience in the sky. `The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft astray,' said Napoleon with a chuckle on his return from Moscow.

I was laughing again with my fat men, and the woman opposite me and my attendant with a finger to his lips were both hissing violent `shhhhshes.'

`Look!' I said with a huge smile, and pointed off toward the ceiling and the fourth dimension. `It's all there,' I went on between chuckles. `The answer - up there.'

The old woman glanced sternly up at the ceiling, adjusted her glasses twice and then looked back at me. She looked embarrassed and a little guilty.

`I . . . I don't see it, I'm afraid,' she said.

I laughed. I looked up at my fat man and he laughed at my laughing. I laughed at him. `That's all right,' I said to the old lady. `Don't worry about it. You'll be all right.'

The two men from the next table were firing: `shhhs,' and my attendant was standing nervously beside me, but I raised my hand to silence them. Smiling warmly I said `The great thing about the answer...' and I began again, big belly bubbling and joyous, `The great thing is that it doesn't do us any good at all.'

Laughing, I thumbed my nose at the laughing men in the sky - who laughed - and began walking through the library, trailed by my attendant and leaving behind me like a big boat a wake of `shhhhhs' as I passed.

`It's all right,' I said loudly to everyone. `Knowing the answer doesn't matter. You don't have to know.'

Interestingly enough, no one approached me as I walked on through the central reading room of the New York Public Library, my belly booming out its Answer to the stack upon stack of answers and the row upon row of seekers. Only at the exit did I find someone who responded to me. An ancient portly library guard with flushed face and huge Santa Claus pot came up to me as I was about to leave and, smiling as if his face would burst, said in a louder voice than mine `gotta tone dawn the laughing during hours,' and then we both roared out into new laughter louder than ever until I turned and left.

The Die is my shepherd;
I shall not want;
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, I lie;
He leadeth me beside the still waters, I swim.
He destroyeth my soul
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
For randomness sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Chance is with me; Thy two sacred cubes they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me In the presence of mine enemies
Thou anointest my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy and evil and cruelty shall follow ma
All the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of Chance for ever.

from The Book of the Die

The meeting of the executive committee of the Psychoanalysts' Association of New York took place early on the afternoon of 30 June, 1969, in a large seminar room at Dr. Weinburger's Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying. Dr. Weinburger, a bushy-haired, thickset man in his late forties, sat impatiently behind a long table with Doctors Peerman and Cobblestone on one side of him and old Dr. Moon and Dr. Mann on the other. All the gentlemen looked serious and intent except for Dr. Moon, who was sleeping quietly between Chairman Weinburger and Dr. Mann, occasionally sliding slowly sideways to rest against the shoulder of the one, and then, like a pendulum that badly needs oiling, after a hesitation, sliding slowly back across the arc to rest against the shoulder of the other.

The table at which the five sat was so long that they looked more like fugitives huddled together for mutual protection rather than judges. Dr. Rhinehart and Dr. Ecstein, who was present as friend and personal physician, sat on stiff wooden chairs in the middle of the room opposite them. Dr. Ecstein was slumped and squinting, but Dr. Rhinehart was erect and alert, looking extremely professional in a perfectly tailored gray suit and tie and shoes shined to such a luster that Dr. Ecstein wondered whether he hadn't cheated by using black Day-glo.
`Yes, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart said before anyone else had said a word.

`One moment, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Weinburger said sharply. He looked down at the papers in front of him. `Does Dr. Rhinehart know the charges being brought against him?'

'Yes,' said Doctors Mann and Ecstein at the same time.

`What's all this about dice, young man?' Dr. Cobblestone asked. His cane lay on the table in front of him as if it were a piece of evidence relevant to the proceedings.

`A new therapy I'm developing, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart replied promptly.

`I understand that,' he said. `What we mean is that you should explain.'

`Well, sir, in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid' Dr. Rhinehart spoke in a clear, firm and reasonable voice, but for some reason his answer was greeted by a silence, broken only by Dr. Moon's harsh, uneven breathing. Dr. Cobblestone's stern lower jaw became sterner.