The Dice Man (39 page)

`Look, Rhinehart,' he hissed at me near the end of the intermission. `What will you do if we all get up and dance and go onto the stage?'

`I have brought you to Hair. I want you to enjoy yourselves. Be happy. Dance. Sing.'

He stared into my eyes like an oculist searching for signs of retinal decomposition and then barked out a short laugh.

'Jesus...' he said.

`Have a good time, son,' I said as he left.

`Dr. Rhinehart, I think the patients are whispering among themselves,' one of my big attendants said about three minutes later.

`A dirty joke no doubt,' I said.

`That Arturo Jones has been going around to everyone whispering.' `I told him to remind everyone to catch the bus back to the island with us.'

`What if someone tries to make a break for it?'

'Apprehend him gently but firmly.'

`What if they all make a break for it?'

`Apprehend those with the most acute socially debilitating illnesses - the zombies and killers in brief - and leave the rest to the police.'

I smiled at him serenely. `But no violence. We must not give our hospital attendants a bad name. We must not upset the audience.'

`Okay, Doctor.'

I seated myself between the most clearly homicidal patients, and when the men in our row began to rise to join the dance to the stage, I wrapped one of my huge arms around the throat of each of them and squeezed until they seemed strangely sleepy. I then watched the interesting opening to Act II Where thirty or so oddly dressed members of the cast who had apparently been posing as members of the audience around me began to dance down the aisles and upon to the stage frolicking with each other in a friendly roughhouse way. The onstage part of the cast pretended slight confusion but continued to sing on as the new weirdies mixed with the Act I wierdies and sang and danced and frolicked, all singing the opening number `Where Do I Go?' until most of the newcomers had gone.

The police questioned me for about half an hour at the theater, and I phoned the hospital and told the appropriate staff members there of the slight difficulties we had encountered and I phoned Dr. Mann at my apartment and informed him that thirty-three patients had escaped from Hair. My phone call had pulled him away from a hand in which he was holding a full house, aces over jacks, and he was as upset as I've ever heard him.

`My God, my God Luke, thirty-three patients. What have you done? What have you done?'

`But your letter said `What letter? NO, no, no, Luke, you know I would never write any letter about thirty-three - oh! you know it! How could you do it?'

`I tried to see you, to phone you.'

`But you didn't seem upset. I had no idea. Thirty-three patients!'

`We held onto five.'

`Oh Luke, my God, the papers, Dr. Esterbrook, the Senate Committee on Mental Hygiene, my God, my God.'

`They're just people,' I said. `Why didn't someone call me during the day, a note, a messenger, something? Why was everyone so stupid? To take thirty-three patients off the ward'

`Thirty-eight.'

`To a Broadway musical'

`Where should we have taken them? Your letter said `Don't say that! Don't mention any letter by me!'

`But I was just-'

`To Hair!' and he choked. `The newspapers, Esterbrook, Luke, Luke, what have you done?' `It'll be all right, Tim. Mental patients are always recaptured.'

`But no one ever reads about that. They get loose - that's news.'

`People will be impressed with our permissive, progressive policies. As you said in your let-'

`Don't say that! We must never let a patient out of the hospital again. Never.'

`Relax, Tim, relax, I've got to talk some more to the police and the reporters and '

`Don't say a word! I'm coming down. Say you've got laryngitis. Don't talk.'

`I've got to go now, Tim. You hurry on down.'

`Don't say-'

I hung up.

I talked to police and the reporters and minor hospital officials and then Dr. Mann in person for another hour and a half, not getting back to the poker party at my apartment until close to midnight.

Lil, I'm happy to report, was winning substantially, with Miss Welish and Fred Boyd the primary losers and Jake and Arlene breaking even. They were all rather interested in what had happened to so upset Dr. Mann, but I played it down, called it a minor Happening, a tempest in a teapot, implied that some subversive underground group had conspired a series of forgeries, and insisted I was sick of the subject and wanted to play poker.

I was tremendously keyed up and could barely sit still in my chair, but they kindly dealt me in, and by ignoring their further questions I was finally left to concentrate on my abominably bad luck with the cards. I lost badly to Fred Boyd on the first hand and even worse to Arlene on the second. By the end of seven hands without a winner I was thoroughly depressed and everyone else (except Miss Welish, who was sleepy and bored) was quite gay. The phone had rung just once and I had told the police that I didn't know how I had been cut off during my attempted phone call to Dr. Mann that afternoon, but that it obviously wasn't me since I was talking on the phone at the time.

I told them that I talked to Arturo Jones at Hair because he was an acute drama critic and that I had single-handedly held on to two of the most dangerous patients and that I'd appreciate a little respect since I felt badly enough about losing as it was.

I lost two more hands of poker and got gloomier and the party broke up with Fred telling about how he was using dice therapy with two of his patients and Jake telling me about a sentence he'd written in his article, and they were gone and Lil, laughing happily, went off to bell. I, despite several of her most obscene kisses, remained behind slumped in the easy chair brooding about my fate.

The events which occurred between 1.30 A.M. and 3.30 A.M. that morning, being of some historical note, must be recorded objectively. Dr. Rhinehart had realized for several weeks that the early morning hours of August 13 were, in effect, the first anniversary of his relationship with the Die. He had planned to do as he had at the beginning of 1969; create a list of longer range options from which the Die would choose to direct his life.

He found, however, that he was too distraught over the possible consequences of his activities of the previous day to concentrate on options running much longer than a few minutes. A year before, he had been bored and restless; now he was overexcited and restless. He lunged back and forth across the living room, gritting his teeth, clenching his fists, stroking them against his tensed belly, gulping in huge lungfuls of air, trying to determine whether the police would be able to build a convincing case against him. His only hope, as he saw it, was that when one or more of Mr. Cannon's or Mr. Jones's recaptured followers began alleging that he (Dr. Rhinehart) had aided and abetted their escape, their allegations would be taken as the statements of mentally imbalanced persons, creatures legally unfit to give reliable testimony. Dr. Rhinehart spent close to twenty minutes concocting his defense - mostly a lengthy indictment of the secret black and hippie conspiracy to frame all white doctors named Rhinehart.

At last, however, in exasperation at his nervousness, Dr. Rhinehart returned to reality and cast a die to determine whether he would brood about his problems with the police and Dr. Mann for zero, five, ten or thirty minutes or one day, or until the problems were resolved, and the die ordered ten more minutes. When the time had elapsed, he breathed an immense sigh and smiled.

`Now. Where are we?' he thought.

He then recalled that it was his anniversary, and with that inhuman casualness for which future generations of healthy normal people were to condemn him and for which future generations of dicepeople have admired him, he dictated that should he flip a one, a three or a five he would go downstairs and try to engage in sexual congress with Mrs. Ecstein. The Die fell three and he arose, informed his wife that he was going for a walk and left the apartment.

Since this episode is of little importance, we report it in Dr. Rhinehart's own words .

I clumped down the stairs, past the rusty railing and cast-off advertising circular and rang the doorbell. It was 2.20 A.M., a little late this year, and certainly no time for a little tete-a-tete. Arlene came bleary-eyed clutching Jake's old bathrobe - to her throat.

`Oh,' she said.

`I've come to engage in sexual congress, Arlene.'

`Come in,' she said.

`The dice told me to do it again.'

`But Jake's here,' she said, blinking her eyes absently and letting the robe fall slightly open.

`He's working in his study at the end of the hall.'

`I'm sorry, but you know how the Die is,' I said.

`I promised not to hide anything from him anymore.'

`But did you consult the Die about that?'

`Oh, you're right.'

She turned and went down the hall a short way and then into her bedroom: I joined her at her vanity table, where successive flips of a die determined that she was to tell Jake everything and that she was to permit sexual congress with me, but only in Kama Sutra positions eighteen and twenty-six, which, she said, were particularly suited for women in their fifth month of pregnancy.

I then followed her up the hall and watched over her shoulder as she stood in the slightly open doorway of Jake's study looking in at her husband hard at work at his desk.

`Jake?' she said tentatively. `What's up?' he barked back, not looking up. - `Luke's here,' she said.

`Oh. Come on in Luke baby, I'm just about finished.'

`We're sorry to bother you, Jakie,' Arlene said, `but the Die said Luke had to-'

`I've got a ring-linger last chapter, Luke, if I do say so myself,' Jake said, smiling, and scratching furiously with his pen across some errant phrase.

`- engage in sexual congress,' I heard Arlene finish.

`What's that?' Jake said and looked up again.

`What?'

`It's our anniversary,' I added.

He scratched his throat and grimaced and looked a little annoyed.

`Oh that,' he finally said. `Jesus, Moses, Freud. I don't know what the world's coming to.'

He stared at us both a long time, squinting horribly. Then he reached to his side, rolled a die across his desk and frowned again. `Yeah, well, take it easy with my bathrobe.'

`We will,' Arlene said, wheeling around with a beaming smile, and she bounced past me back up the hall to her room.

Dr. Rhinehart returned to his own apartment approximately thirty-eight minutes after leaving it and again felt depressed. The exhilaration he had felt a year ago upon returning from a superficially similar undertaking was absent. He cast himself into the easy chair in his living room in a tired, anxious, apathetic state such as he had not previously experienced in his dicelife. When he became aware again of his merely human anxiety, he grunted an extremely loud `Ahhggh,' and surged out of the chair to get paper, pencil and dice.

As he returned from his study to the living room, however, he was met by his wife, who had been awakened by his loud grunt and stood in the bedroom doorway to inquire sleepily if everything was all right.

`Everything is confused and unreliable,' Dr. Rhinehart said irritably. `If I could only count definitely upon either the stupidity or the intelligence of the police `Come to bed, Lukie,' his wife said and lifted her slender arms up around his neck and leaned sleepily against him. The bed warmed body that Dr. Rhinehart's hands found themselves enclosing was unconfused and reliable, and with a different sounding `Ahhhh' he lowered his head and embraced his wife.

`But I have miles to go before I sleep,' he said softly when he had broken their kiss.

`Come to bed,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. `The police will never touch you when you're in your wife's bed.'

`Had I but world enough and time-'

`There's plenty of time - come,' and she began to drag her husband into their bedroom. 'I've even dreamed of a new option,' she said.

But Dr. Rhinehart had stopped a few feet inside the door, and, slump-shouldered and bedraggled, he said: 'But I have miles to go before I sleep.'

Mrs. Rhinehart, still holding one of his large hands in hers, turned dreamily and smiled and yawned. `I'll be waiting, sweetheart,' she said, and with an unintended swinging of the more desirable parts of her anatomy, she moved to her bed and climbed in.

`Goodnight, Lil,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

`Mmmm,' she said. `Check the kids 'fore you come.'

Dr. Rhinehart, still holding in his left hand the paper, pen and two dice, walked quickly to the children's bedroom and tiptoed in to look at Larry and Evie. They were sound asleep, Larry with his mouth open like a child drunk and Evie with her face so buried by the sheet that he could only make out the top of her head.

`Have good dreams,' he said and silently left the room and returned to the living room.

He placed the paper, pencil and dice on the floor in front of the easy chair and then, with a sudden lunge, took four strides toward his bedroom and stopped. Sighing, he returned to kneel on the rug beside the tools of his trade. To relax himself and prepare for what he had to do, he performed a series of random dice exercises; four random physical exercises, two one-minute spurts of the sinner-saint game, and one three minute period of emotional roulette - the Die choosing self pity, an emotion he found himself expressing with enthusiasm. Then he placed the two green dice on the easy chair in front of him and, kneeling on the rug, intoned a prayer:

Great God blob 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.
The people I fear are
Puppets poking puppets,
Playthings costumed by my mind.
When you fall,
O Die,
The strings collapse and I walk free.
I am thy grateful urn, O Die, Fill me.

Dr. Rhinehart felt a serene joy such as always came to him when he surrendered his will to the Die: the peace which passeth understanding. He wrote upon the white, blank paper the options for his life for the next year.