The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
a surprise. If I come into you now, neither of us will learn anything.’ I brought my face dramatically down to within a few inches of hers. ‘A little girl picking flowers in a totally lush, green, beautiful but deserted field. Do you see that?’
She glared a moment longer, then lowered her head to the couch and closed her legs together. Two or three minutes passed. Very distantly I could hear Miss Reingold’s typewriter tit-tatting away.
‘I see a little kid picking tiger lilies near a swamp.’
‘Is the little girl a pretty girl?’
[Pause]
‘Yeah, she’s pretty.’
‘Parents – what are this little girl’s parents like?’
‘There are little field daisies too, and lilac bushes.’
[Pause]
‘The parents are bastards. They beat the kid … the little girl. They buy long necklaces and they whip her with them. They tie her up with linked bracelets. They give her poison candy which makes her sick, and then they force her to drink her own vomit. They never let the girl be alone. Whenever she goes to the fields, where she is now, they beat her when she comes home.’
(I didn’t say a word, but the impulse to say ‘and they beat her when she comes home’ had the strength of Hercules.) There was a long pause.
‘They beat her with books. They hit her on the head again and again with books. They stick pins and pencils in her. And tacks. When they’re done with her they throw her in the cellar.’
Linda was not relaxed; she wasn’t crying; she seemed her bitchy self essentially, complaining against the parents but not able to feel sorry for the little girl. She felt only bitterness.
‘Look very closely at the little girl in the fields, Linda. Look very closely at her. [Pause] The little girl –?’ [Pause]
‘The little girl … is crying.’
‘Why is the little … does she have … does the girl have any flowers?’
‘Yes, she has … It’s a rose, a white rose. I don’t know where …’
[Pause]
‘What is she … how does she feel toward the white rose?’
‘… The white rose is the only … thing in the world which she can talk to, the only thing that … loves her … She holds the flower in front of her eyes by the stem and she talks to it and … no … she doesn’t even hold it. It floats to her … like magic, but she never, not once ever, touches it, and she never kisses it. She looks at it and it sees her and in those moments … in those moments … the little girl … is happy. The white rose, with the white rose … she is happy.’
After another minute Linda’s eyes blinked open. She looked over at me, at my wilted penis, at the walls, the ceiling. At the ceiling. A buzzer sounded for what I now realized may have been the third or fourth time and I started.
‘The hour’s up.’ she said dazedly and then added: ‘What a funny, stupid story,’ but without bitterness, dreamily.
Except for the silent restoration of our clothing, the session was over.
Chapter Fourteen
During these first months of diceliving I never consciously decided to let the dice take over my whole life or to aim at becoming an organism whose every act was determined by the dice. The thought would have frightened me then. I tended to restrict my options so that Lil and my colleagues wouldn’t begin to suspect that I was into anything slightly unorthodox. I kept my shimmering green cubes hidden carefully from everyone, consulting them surreptitiously when necessary. But I found myself adapting quickly to following the die’s sporadic whims. I might resent a particular command, but like a well-oiled automaton I went and did the job.
The dice sent me to bars scattered throughout the city to sit, sip, listen, chat. They picked out strangers to whom I was sent to talk. They chose roles that I played with these strangers. I would be a veteran outfielder with the Detroit Tigers in town for a Yankee series (Bronx bar), English reporter with the Guardian (the Barbizon Plaza), playwright homosexual, alcoholic college professor, escaped criminal and so on. The dice determined that I try to seduce a stranger chosen at random from the phone book of Brooklyn (actually Mrs Anna Maria Sploglio was the lucky lady and she totally repulsed me. Thank God); that I try to borrow ten dollars from stranger ‘X’ (another failure); that I give twenty dollars to stranger ‘Y’ (he threatened to call the police, then took the money and ran, not walked, away). In bars, restaurants, theaters, taxis, stores – whenever out of sight of those who knew me – I was soon never myself, my old ‘normal self.’ I went bowling. I signed up at Vic Tanny’s to muscle my middle. I went to concerts, baseball games, sit-ins, open parties; anything and everything that I had never done, I now created as options, and the dice threw me from one to the other – and rarely the same man from day to day.
New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another’s behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.
I also created problems.
Although I tried to act so I would always give Lil a ‘rational’ explanation for my eccentricities, I let the dice increasingly determine what kind of a father and husband I would be, especially during the three weeks Lil, Larry, Evie and I (for three-day weekends) spent in our rented farmhouse on eastern Long Island.
Now historically, my friends, I had been a withdrawn, somewhat absentee father. My contacts with my two children had consisted primarily of: (a) yelling at them to stop yelling when I was on the telephone in the living room; (b) yelling at them to go play someplace else when I wanted to make love to Lil during the day; (c) yelling at them to obey their Mommy when they were most blatantly disobeying their Mommy; (d) yelling at Larry for being stupid when trying to do math homework.
There were times when I would not yell at them, it is true. Whenever I was daydreaming about something (‘Rhinehart Discovers Missing Link in Freudian Theory!’ ‘Sophia Loren to Divorce Ponti for NY Psychiatrist,’ ‘Incredible Stock Market Coup by MD Amateur’), or thinking about something (how to discover missing link, win Miss Loren, make a coup) I would talk calmly to the children about whatever it was they felt like talking about (‘That’s a beautiful painting, Larry, especially the chimney.’ Lil ‘That’s a ballistic missile.’), and even, upon occasion, play with them. (‘Bam bam, I got you, Daddy.’ I collapse to the floor. ‘Oh, Daddy, you’re only wounded.’)
I liked my kids but primarily as potential Jungs, Adlers and Anna Freuds to my Sigmund. I was much too wrapped up in being a great psychiatrist to compete in the game of being a father. My paternal behavior manifested flaws.
Among the alternatives which I gave the dice to consider were some which expressed the fond father buried deep within, and others which gave full rein to the not so benevolent despot.
On the one hand the dice twice determined that I pay extra attention to my children, that I spend a minimum of five hours a day with them for each of three days. (Such devotion! Such sacrifice! Mothers of the world, what would you give to spend only five hours a day with your children?)
In September one day, after breakfast in the big old kitchen with white cupboards and built-in sunshine in the big old farmhouse on the big plot surrounded by big trees and bright, flowing fields of poison ivy, I asked the children what they wanted to