The Diceman

by Luke Rheinhart

  The next morning my ears, neck, shoulders and back looked as if I'd spent the night wrestling with thirty-three kittens in a briar patch crisscrossed with barbed wire during a hailstorm. I was bloody and Lil was unbowed. But though she was cold and distant, she listened to my long, scientific report during the bus ride and plane flight back to New York and although she seemed unimpressed with my claims of innocence with Arlene, a part of her believed the rest. I told her nothing about my use of the dice, keeping it all a matter of some vague, temporary psychological testing having to do with responses to eccentric patterns. How much of her believed me isn't clear, but her majority self announced unequivocally that if I did not cease my experiments - whatever they might be - and cease them forthwith, she and the children would leave me forever.

  `No, more, Luke,' she said as I left for work the first day back in Manhattan. `No more. From now on you're normal,

  eccentric, boring Dr. Rhinehart, or I'm done.'

  `Yes, dear,' I said (the die had fallen a two), and left.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Dr. Rhinehart should have known when Mrs. Ecstein summoned him to her living room couch that Wednesday that

  there was trouble. They hadn't met in her apartment since she had begun therapy with him. After letting him in she

  seated herself sedately on the couch, folded her hands and looked the floor. Her mannish gray suit, her glasses and her

  hair tied back severely in a bun, made her look strikingly like a door-to-door purveyor of Baptist religious tracts.

  `I'm going to have a baby,' she said quietly.

  Dr. Rhinehart sat down at the opposite end of the couch, leaned back and mechanically crossed his legs. He looked

  blankly at the wall opposite him, on which hung an ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria.

  `I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said.

  'This is now the second straight month I've missed my period.'

  'I'm happy.'

  `I asked the Die what I should name it and gave it thirty-six options and the Die named it Edgar.'

  `Edgar.'

  `Edgar Ecstein.'

  They sat there quietly not looking at each other.

  `I gave ten chances to Lucius but the dice chose Edgar.'

  'Ahh.'

  Silence.

  `What if it's a girl?'

  Dr. Rhinehart asked after a while.

  `Edgarina: `Edgarina Ecstein.'

  Silence.

  `Are you happy about it, Arlene?'

  `Yes.'

  Silence.

  `It hasn't been decided yet who the father is,' Mrs. Ecstein said.

  `You don't know who the father is?' asked Dr. Rhinehart, sitting up.

  `Oh I know,' she said and turned smiling to Dr. Rhinehart.

  `I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling

  automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.

  `But, I haven't let the dice decide who I should say is the father.'

  `I see.'

  `I thought I'd give you two chances out of three of being the father.'

  Ahh.

  `Jake, of course, will get one chance in six.'

  `Uhhuh.'

  `And I thought I'd let "someone you don't know" have one chance in six.'

  Silence.

  `The dice will decide then who you tell Jake is the father?'

  `Yes.'

  'What about abortion? You're only in the second month, did you let the dice consider abortion?'

  `Of, of course,' she said again smiling. `I gave abortion one chance in two hundred and sixteen.'

  Ahh.

  `The dice said no.'

  Mm.'

  Silence.

  `So in seven months you're going to have a baby.'

  `Yes I am. Isn't it wonderful?'

  'I'm happy for you,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

  `And after I find out who the father is I'll have to let the dice decide whether I should leave Jake to be true to the

  father.'

  `Uhh.'

  `And then let the dice decide whether I'm to have more children.'

  `Um, 'But before that they'll have to tell me whether I should tell Lil I'm having a baby.'

  Ahh.

  `And whether I should tell Lil who the father is.'

  'Uh.'

  `It's all so wonderfully exciting.'

  Silence.

  Dr. Rhinehart took from his suit-jacket pocket a die and after rubbing it between his hands dropped it on the couch between himself and Mrs. Ecstein. It was a two. Dr. Rhinehart sighed.

  `I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Unfortunately for normal old Luke Rhinehart and his friends and admirers, the dice kept rolling and rolling, June turned out to be National Role-Playing Month and a bit too much. I was ordered to consult the Die regularly about varying the person I was from hour to hour, or day to day or week to week. I was expected to expand my role playing, perhaps even to test the limits of the malleability of the human soul.

  Could there exist a Totally Random Man? Could a single human so develop his capabilities that he might vary his soul from hour to hour at whim? Might a man be an infinitely multiple personality? Or rather, like the universe according to some theorists, a steadily expanding multiple personality, one only to be contracted at death? And then, even then, who knows? At dawn of the second day I gave the dice six optional persons, one of whom I would try to be during the whole day. I was trying to create only simple, non socially upsetting options. The six were: Molly Bloom, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller, Jake Ecstein, a child of seven and the old pre-diceman Dr. Lucius Rhinehart.

  The dice first chose Freud, but by the end of the day I had come to feel that being Sigmund Freud must have been something of a bore. I was aware of many unconscious sources of motivation where I usually overlooked them, but having seen them I didn't feel I had gained too much. I tried to examine my unconscious resistances to being Freud and uncovered the sort of thing Jake was good at in analysis: rivalry with the Father, fear of unconscious aggression being revealed: but I didn't find my insights convincing, or rather I didn't find them relevant. I might have an `oral personality' but this knowledge didn't help me change myself as much as did a single flip of the die.

  On the other hand, when I read of a man who killed himself by slashing his wrists I immediately noted the sexual symbolism of the cutting of the limbs. I began thinking of other modes of suicide: throwing oneself into the sea; putting a pistol in one's mouth and pulling the trigger; crawling into an oven and turning on the gas; throwing oneself under a train All seemed to have obvious sexual symbolism and be necessarily connected with the psychosexual development of the patient. I created the excellent aphorism: Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured.

  The next day I scratched Freud from my list, replaced him with a `slightly psychotic, aggressively anti-Establishment hippie' and cast a die: it chose Jake Ecstein.

  Jake I could do very well. He was a real part of me and his superficial mannerisms and speech patterns I could easily imitate. I wrote half an article for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology analyzing the dice man concept from an orthodox Jakeian point of view and felt marvelous. During my analytic hour with Jake I entered so completely into his way of thinking that at the end he announced that we had covered more ground in this one session than in our previous two and a half months together. In a later article he wrote about my analysis `The Case of the Six-Sided Man' - (Jake's reputation will be eternal on the basis of his titles alone), he discussed this analytical hour in detail and attributes its success to the accidental discovery of a rarely read article by Ferenczi whi
ch he stumbled upon the night before lying open to a key page under his bathroom sink and which gave him the key `which began to unlock the door to the six-sided cube.'

  He was ecstatic.

  The dice rolled on and rolled me from role to roll to role in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope of dramatic play. Life became like a series of bit parts in a bad movie, with no script, no director, and with actresses and actors who didn't know their lines or their roles. I did most of my role playing away from people who knew me, for reasons which are obvious.

  I can remember only vaguely what I did and said in those days; images are clearer than dialogues: I as Oboko the Zen master sitting mostly mute and smiling while a young graduate student tries to question me about psychoanalysis and the meaning of life: I as a child of seven riding a bicycle through Central Park, staring at the ducks in the pond, sitting cross legged to watch an old Negro fishing, buying bubble gum and ballooning out a big one, racing another cyclist on my bike and crashing and scratching my knee and crying, much to the bewilderment of the passersby: 240-pound crybabies being a rarity.

  Despite all my efforts to limit my expanding personalities to strangers and to maintain a certain amount of normality ground my friends and colleagues, I always gave the Die at least an outside chance to undo me, and the Die, being God, couldn't long resist.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Once upon a time Dr. Rhinehart dreamt he was a bumblebee, a bumblebee buzzing and flitting around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't believe he was Dr. Rhinehart. Suddenly he felt that he had awakened, and he was old Luke Rhinehart lying in bed beside the beautiful woman Lil. But he didn't know if he was Dr. Rhinehart who had dreamt he was playing the role of a bumblebee, or a bumblebee dreaming he was Dr. Rhinehart. He didn't know, and his head was buzzing. After several minutes he shrugged: `Perhaps I'm actually Hubert Humphrey dreaming I'm a bumblebee dreaming of being Dr. Rhinehart.'

  He paused for several more seconds and then rolled over and snuggled up to his wife.

  `In any case,' he said to himself, `in this dream of being Dr. Rhinehart I'm glad I'm in bed with a woman and not a bumblebee.'

  Chapter Forty

  Dr. Abraham Krum, the German-American researcher, had in just five years astounded the psychiatric world with three complex sets of experiments, each of which proved something unique. He began by being the first man in world history able experimentally to induce psychosis in chickens, a creature previously considered of too low intelligence to achieve psychosis. Secondly, he .had managed to isolate the chemical agent (moratycemate) which caused or was associated with the psychosis, thus being the first man to prove conclusively that chemical change could be isolated as a crucial variable in the psychosis of chickens. Thirdly, he discovered an antidote (amoratycemate) which completely cured ninety-three percent of the chickens of their psychosis in just three days of treatment, thus becoming the first man in world history to cure a psychosis exclusively by chemical means.

  There was considerable speculation about the Nobel Prize. His current work on schizophrenia in pigeons was followed, like stock market reports by large numbers of people in the psychiatric world. The drug amoratycemate was being experimentally administered to psychotic patients at several mental hospitals in Germany and the United States with interesting results. (Side effects involving blood clots and colitis had not yet been conclusively confirmed, nor had they been eliminated.) Dr. Krum was to be the guest of honor at a party given by Dr. Mann for his friends and certain luminaries of the New York psychiatric world. It was to be a major occasion, with the president of PANY (Dr. Joseph Weinburger), the director of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and two or three other extremely big deals whom I can never remember. The dice, imps of the perverse, ordered that I vary my person every ten minutes or so throughout the evening among six roles: a gentle Jesus, an honest dice man, an uninhibited sex maniac, a mute moron, a bullshit artist and a Leftist agitator.

  I had created the options under the influence of marijuana, which I had smoked for half an hour as the result of an option created under the influence of alcohol, which I had drunk because the dice - ad infinitum. My dicelife was getting out of control and the party for Dr. Krum was the climax. Dr. Mann's apartment manages to resemble both a funeral home and a museum. His servant, Mr. Thornton, a cadaver, opened the door that evening with all the warmth of a mechanical skeleton, removed Lil's coat, ignored her plunging neckline, said, `Good evening, Dr. Rhinehart,' as if Dr. Mann had just died, and led us down the hall - filled with portraits of famous psychiatrists - and into the living room.

  Whenever I entered the room I was always surprised to find living people there. Jake was against a wall of bookcases in one corner talking with Miss Reingold (there to take notes for Jake), Professor Boggles (there because my dice had said to invite him and his dice had said to accept) and a couple of other, men, presumably world-famous psychiatrists. On an immense oriental couch in front of a Victorian fireplace sat Arlene, Dr. Felloni (who nodded her head rapidly at my appearance) and an elderly woman, presumably somebody's mother. Arlene was dressed as briefly as Lil and with a slightly more spectacular effect: her two luscious breasts made it look as if lovely white balloons had been stuffed into her dress from above but threatened to float out at any moment. In easy chairs opposite the couch were an elderly, retired big deal I vaguely knew, a chubby woman, presumably 'somebody's wife and a small man with a tiny pointed beard, slump-shouldered yet intense: the Dr. Krum I knew from photographs.

  Dr. Mann greeted us wineglass in hand, his face slightly flushed with glory, worry and booze, and led us toward the women and Dr. Krum. I shook the tiny die in a specially built watchcase in my pocket, eased it out and glanced at the result to discover which of the six roles I was now to play for ten minutes or so.

  `Dr. Krum, I'd like you to meet a former student and colleague of mine, Dr. Lucius Rhinehart,' said Dr. Mann. `Luke, this is Dr. Krum.'

  `Dr. Rhinehart, a pleasure, a pleasure. Your work I have not read but Dr. Mann says highly of you.'

  Dr. Krum shook hands with short emphatic stabs and bared his teeth in an exaggerated grimace as he looked confidently up into my face, looming nearly a foot above him.

  `Dr. Krum, I'm speechless. I never hoped to meet a man who'd done such work in my own lifetime. I'm deeply, deeply honored.'

  `It's nothing, nothing. In a few years, then I will show you my dear, delighted, delighted.'

  He bowed slightly to, Lil and clicked his heels as he shook her hand with two quick pumps. He looked up at her and then at me with a pleased, flushed face.

  `Such lovely ladies this evening, lovely ladies. I regret verking with chickens.'

  He laughed.

  `Dr. Krum, your loss is the world's gain.'

  As I said this, Lil glanced briefly at me, raised her eyes ceiling-ward and turned to talk to Jake, who had edged to the outskirts of our group. Arlene was sunk into the couch smiling up at me and I smiled broadly back at her.

  `You're terrific, Arlene, you really are. You look sexier every time I see you.'

  She flushed prettily.

  `Who are you tonight?' she asked nonchalantly, sitting up a bit straighter and inflating her balloons.

  `Just terrific, Arlene, you really are. I don't understand, Dr. Krum, these women, why they try to distract us when we

  want to talk about your work.'

  Dr. Krum, an elderly has-been named Latterly and I were all looking with dazed grins at Arlene until I turned to Dr.

  Krum and said: `Your ability to isolate variables amazes me.'

  `My verk, my verk.'

  He turned to me, shrugged his shoulders and stroked his tiny beard. 'I'm verking now with pigeons.'

  `The whole world knows,' I said.

  `Knows what?' asked Jake, joining us with a Scotch for me and some purple something for Dr. Krum.

  `Dr. Krum, I trust you know my colleague, Dr. Ecstein.'

  `Of course, of course, the accid
ental breakthrough. Ve met.'

  `Jake is probably the finest theoretical analyst practicing in the United States today.'

  `Yoah,' said Jake without expression. `What were you talking about?'

  `Dr. Krum has moved to pigeons and the whole world knows.'

  `Oh yeah. How's it going, Krum?'

  `Good, good. We haven't induced schizophrenia complete yet, but the pigeons are nervous.'

  He laughed again, a quick ratatat-tat hehheh-heh.

  `Have you tried injecting 'em with that chicken stuff - that psychotic stuff - you discovered?' Jake asked.

  `Oh no. No. It has no effect on pigeons.'

  `What methods of inducing schizophrenia in your subjects have you tried after the failure of your cubical maze?'

  I asked.

  `Presently ve teach homing pigeons to find home. Then ve move pigeon long vay avay and move the home. Pigeon

  gets very vorried.'

  `What problems have you encountered?'

  I asked.

  `Ve lose pigeons.'

  Jake laughed, but when I glanced at him he cut it short and squinted nervously at me. Dr. Krum stroked his beard,

  focused his eyes intently on my knees and went on.

  'We lose pigeons. It is nothing. Ve have many pigeons, but chickens could not fly. Pigeons are smart but ve may have

  to remove their vings,' he frowned.

  Dr. Mann joined us, glass in hand, Jake asked a question and I removed my watchcase and glanced at the single die for

  a second role. The tall, gaunt Mr. Thornton arrived, dispensing tiny hors d'oeuvres, crackers with minute pearl-like deposits on them like fish eggs waiting to be fertilized. Each of my three colleagues mechanically took one, Jake downing his in a swallow, Dr. Mann briefly holding his under his nose and then chewing it for the next ten minutes and Dr. Krum taking an intense experimental bite, like a chicken pecking at seed.