The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  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.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  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 s
eries 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.

  If the dice total two, three or twelve: he would leave his wife and children forever. He recorded this option with dread. He'd given it once chance in nine.

  He gave one chance in five (dice total of four or five) that he would completely abandon the use of his dice for at least three months. He desired this option as a dying man the wonder drug to end his ills and feared it as a healthy man does a threat to his balls.

  Dice total six (one chance in seven): be would begin revolutionary activity against the injustice of the established order. He didn't know what he had in mind by the option, but it gave him pleasure to think of thwarting the police, who were making him so uncomfortable. He began daydreaming about joining forces with Arturo or Eric until a police siren on the street outside his apartment building so frightened him that he thought of erasing the option (the mere writing of it might be a crime) and then decided to go quickly on to the others.

  Dice total of seven (one chance in six): he would devote the entire next year to the development of dice theory and therapy. Recording this brought such pleasant excitement that he considered giving it the totals of eight and nine as well, but fought back such human weakness and went on.

  Dice total of eight (one chance in seven): he would write an autobiographical account of this adventures.

  Dice total nine, ten or eleven (one chance in four): he would leave the profession of psychiatry, including dice therapy, for one year, letting the dice choose a new profession. He recorded this with pride; he would not be the prisoner of his fascination for his beloved dice therapy.

  Examining his six options, Dr. Rhinehart was pleased; they showed imagination and daring. Each of them represented both threat and treat, both the danger of disaster and the possibility of new power.

  He placed the paper by his side and the two green dice in front of him on the floor.

  'Tuck me in, Dad,' a voice said from the other end of the room. It was his son Larry, practically asleep on his feet.

  Dr. Rhinehart arose irritably, marched to the swaying boy, lifted him up into his arms and carried him back to his bed. Larry was asleep as soon as his father had pulled the sheet up to his neck again, and Dr. Rhinehart rushed back to his position on his knees in the living room.

  The dice in position before him, he knelt silently for two minutes and prayed. He then picked up the two dice and began shaking them gaily in the bowl of his hands.

  Tremble in my hands, O Die, As I so shake in yours.

  And holding the dice above his head he intoned aloud `Great bleak Blocks of God, descend, quiver, create. Into your hands I commit my soul.'

  The dice fell: a one and a two - three. He was to leave his wife and children forever.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  How about that?

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  The heavens declare the glory of Chance;

  And the firmament showeth his handywork.

  Day unto day uttereth accident,

  And night unto night showeth whim.

  There is no speech nor language

  Where their voice is not heard.

  Their line is gone out through all the earth,

  And their deeds to the end of the world.

  In them hath Chance set a tabernacle for the sun, Whose going forth is from the end of the heaven, And his circuit unto the ends of it:

  And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

  The law of Chance is perfect, converting the soul: The testimony of Chance is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of Chance are right, rejoicing the heart: The commandment of Chance is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of Chance is clean, enduring forever:

  The judgments of Chance are true and righteous altogether.

  from The Book of the Die

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus and dictators throughout the world continually tell us. I spent many days that August thinking about what I would do with my life, oscillating hour to hour from joy to gloom, madness to boredom.

  I was lonely. There was no one to whom I could go and say: `Aren't I wonderful; I left Lil and my job in order to toss dice and become a totally random man. If you're lucky the dice may let me finish this conversation.'

  I had not given, a last kiss to Lil and the children. I hadn't left a note. I had gathered up a few personal notebooks, a checkbook, two or three books (chosen by a Die at random), several pairs of green dice and left the apartment. I returned two minutes later and left the only message in the world I felt Lil might understand and believe: on the floor in front of the easy chair I had placed two dice, their upturned faces showing a two and a one.

  I had thought at first that nothing should be impossible to the Dice Man at any given moment. It was an elevating aspiration. I might not be more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but in terms of being free at any given moment to do whatever the dice or the spontaneous `I' might dictate, I would be, compared to all known past human beings, a superman.

  But I was lonely. Superman at least had a regular job and Lois Lane. But being a real superbeing, one capable of marvels and miracles compared to the mechanical and repetitious acrobatics of Superman and Batman, was lonely, I'm sorry, fans, but that's how I felt.

  I had gone to a dingy hotel in the East Village that made the geriatrics ward at QSH seem like a plush retirement villa. I sweated and sulked and wandered out to play a few dice roles and dice games and sometimes I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but those nights alone in that hotel room were not among the high points of my life.

  The problem of boredom which the Die had so successfully solved seemed, now that I was approaching the totally free state, to be reappearing. My own family and friends had been boring enough, but I began to feel that the average humans I was encountering on the streets and bars and hotels of Fun City were far worse. The dice had introduced me already to such variety that I was- beginning to find, like Solomon, that it was difficult to find anything new under the sun.

  As a wealthy southern aristocrat I had seduced a young, reasonably presentable typist and kept her two nights (`Y'all shore do have a nice boahdy') before the dice reincarnated me as a Bowery bum. I stored all my cash and some new clothes I had bought in a locker, stopped shaving and for two days and nights panhandled and got drunk on the lower East Side. I didn't get much sleep and felt lonelier than ever, my only friends being an occasional stray derelict who would hang around until he was sure I was really broke. I got so hungry that I finally straightened up my clothes as best I could and stole a box of crackers and two cans of tuna fish from a small supermarket. A young `clerk looked very suspicious but after I'd finished my `browsing' I asked him if they sold amoratycemate and that shut him up while I left.

  As a life-insurance salesman looking for a
fresh lay, I failed to get anywhere and spent another lonely night.

  The dice permitted me to phone the police three times: once to say in a thick Negro accent that the Black Panthers had sprung Arturo Jones from the hospital; once as Dr. Rhinehart to inform that I had left my wife but if they wanted to question me about anything I'd make myself available; and once as an anonymous hippie informer, telling them that Eric Cannon had been permitted to escape by an act of God.

  I spent two days playing with a thousand dollars in a Wall Street brokerage house, letting the Die buy and sell or hold at its discretion and I only lost two hundred dollars but I was still bored.

  About nine o'clock one hot August evening, sitting crowded and lonely at one end of a packed Village bar and having crumpled up in the course of the previous two days at least four separate lists of options, I had to face the fact that now that I was free to be absolutely anything, I was rapidly becoming interested in absolutely nothing: a somewhat distressing development. It was such an original experience, however, that I began to laugh happily to myself, my big belly shaking like an old engine warming up. I would obviously have to give the dice a brief vacation and see what happened. I would grow for a few weeks organically instead of randomly.

  Having thus decisively decided not to decide, I felt vaguely better, even with a tart, rather evil-tasting beer awash in my tummy and unfinished in my glass. I wanted rest. I'd left Lil: a great triumph (I felt tired). Let me drift in peace.

  Trying to feel serenity I left the noisy bar and, after a half hour's organic wandering, entered another just like it. The beer tasted the same too. I thought of telephoning Jake and pretending to be Erich Fromm calling from Mexico City. I dismissed it as a symptom of loneliness. I thought of yelling, `Drinks on me!' but my organic frugality vetoed the impulse. I daydreamed about buying a yacht and circling the globe.