The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

  `I'd like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don't think it would bother him much. I think he'd consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] "Stunning novel" - Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that's teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. "Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?"

  [Pause] He's another ball-less masturbator. [pause] `You sure are quiet today. Can't you even throw in a few uhhuhs or yesses? I'm paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.'

  `I don't feel like it today.'

  `You don't feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on Dr. Rhinehart, you've gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste: Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let's hear that faithful echo.'

  `Today I'd like to hear what you'd like to do if you could recreate the world to suite your own . . . highest dreams.'

  `Cut the crap: I'd turn it into a great big testicle, what else?'

  [Pause] [Longer pause] `I'd . . . I'd eliminate all the human beings first . . . except . . . eh ... maybe for a few. I'd destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I'd put - all the animals would still be there - No. No, they wouldn't. I'd eliminate all of them too. There'd be grass though, and flowers. [Pause] `I can't picture the humans. [Pause] I can't even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of as empty world. Boy, that's something. The little lays at Remo's would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They're gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.'

  `Can you imagine a human being that you would like?'

  `Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I'm in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I've got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phony. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.'

  `Why do you say that?'

  `Your phony code of ethics. You hide behind it. I've sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I've twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don't know what I'm doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I'd like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, "You say you'd like to feel my prick," and I'll say "Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father..." and you'll say "You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back..." and we'll both go right on acting as if the words didn't count.'

  Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.

  `I don't blame you: I've been acting like as automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.'

  Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned from the waist to stare at me. `What did you say?'

  `You feel you don't know what I said?'

  But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.

  `Holy shit, there's a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I've never heard you say anything before.'

  'Well, Linda, I'd say it was time to end non-directive therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?'

  'That's what I just said.'

  `First, I think we'd better acknowledge that you're outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much less than many women, since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he's got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly; that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breath of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you've slept with and who've proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.'

  Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished, her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.

  `Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concrete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are sounding off about me? You don't know me at all. I haven't told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.'

  `Do you want to show me your breasts?'

  `Fuck you.'

  `Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?'

  'You can't judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don't forget it. They know they've had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you'll hide behind your precious ethics and fuel superior because all you see is the surface.'

  `What other good qualities do you have?'

  `I call a spade a spade. I know. I'm not perfect and I say so, and I've learned that you psychiatrists are priggish little voyeurs and I tell you, and that's why you all end up attacking me. You can't stand the truth.'

  `My ethics kept me from making love to you?'

  `Yes, unless you're a fairy, like another headshrinker I knew.'

  `Let me then formally announce that in my future relations with you I will not seek to maintain the traditional patient doctor relationship and I will not abide by the standard of ethics set down in the code of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. From now on I shall respond to you as human to human. As psychiatrist human I will advise you, but no more. How's that?'

  Linda shifted her feet to the floor and looked over at me with a slow smile, meant to suggest sexiness? She was, in fact, reasonably sexy. She was slender, clear-complexioned, full-lipped. As long as she had been my patient, however, I had not responded to her sexually one millimeter, or to any other female patient in five years, despite writhings, declarations, propositions, strippings and attempted rapes - all of which had occurred during one session or another. But the doctor-patient relationship froze my sexual awareness as completely as doing fifty push-ups under a cold shower. Looking at Linda Reichman smile and perceptibly arch her back and project her (true or false?) bosom, I felt my loins, for the first time in my analytic history, respond.

  Her smile slowly curled into a sneer.

  `It's better than you were, but that's not saying much.'

  `I thought you wanted to feel my prick.'

  `I can't be bothered.'

  `In that case, let's get back to you. Lie down again and let your mind go.'

  `What do you mean, lie down again. You just said you were going to be human. Humans don't talk to each other with their backs to each other.'

  'True. So go ahead, we'll talk . . . eyeball to eyeball.'

  She looked at me again and her eyes narrowed slightly and her upper lip twitched twice. She stood up and faced me. The light from my desk picked up a light perspiration on her face, which revealed this time no suggestive smile although one may have been intended - but rather a tense grimace. She roved slightly toward me, unbuttoning her skirt at the side as she approached.

  `I think maybe it would be good for both of us - if we got to know each other physically. Don't you?'

  She came to the
chair and let her skirt fall to the floor. Her half-slip must have gone with it. She had on white silk bikini panties but no stockings. Sitting down in my lap (the chair tipped back another three inches with an undignified squeak), .her eyes half closed, she looked up into my face and said drowsily; 'Don't you?'

  Frankly, the answer was yes. I had a fine erection, my pulse was forty percent, my loins were being activated by all the requisite hormones and my mind, as nature intended it in such cases, was functioning vaguely and without energy. Her lips and tongue came wetly against and into my mouth, her fingers along my neck and into my hair. She was roleplaying Brigitte Bardot and I was responding accordingly. After a prolonged, satisfactory kiss, she stood up, and with a set, drowsy, mechanical half-smile removed, item by item, her blouse, bra (she hadn't needed falsies), bracelet, wristwatch and panties.

  Since I continued to sit with a blissfully unplanned and idiotic expression, she hesitated, and sensed that somewhere about now was my cue to embrace her passionately, carry her to the couch and consummate our union. I decided to miss the cue. After this brief hesitation (her now wet upper lip twitched once), she knelt down beside me and fingered my fly. She undid the belt, a hook and lowered the zipper. Since I didn't move one millimeter (voluntarily) she had trouble extricating her desired object from my boxer undershorts. When, she had succeeded in freeing him from his cage, he stood with dignified stiffness, trembling slightly, like a young scholar about to have a doctoral hood lowered over his head. (The rest of me was cold and immobile as the code of ethics of AAPP encourages us.) She leaned forward to put her mouth over it.

  `Did you ever see the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre?' I asked.

  She stopped, startled, then closing her eyes completely, drew my penis into her mouth.

  She did what intelligent women, do in such cases. Although the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her tongue produced predictable feelings of euphoria, I found I was not much mentally excited by what was happening. That mad scientist dice man was looking at everything too hard.

  After what began to seem like an embarrassingly long time (I sat mute, dignified, professional through it all), she rose up and whispered. `Take off your clothes and come.'

  She moved nicely to the couch and lay down on her stomach with her face to the wall.

  I felt that if I sat immobile any longer she would snap out of it and become angry, get dressed and demand her money back. I had seen her in two roles, sex kitten and intellectual bitch. Was there some sort of third Linda? I walked over (my left hand pants clutching) to the couch and sat down. Linda's white, nude body looked cold and babyish against the formal brown leather. Her face was turned away but my weight on the side of the couch let her know I had arrived.

  Whatever limitations Linda might have as a human being seemed adequately compensated for by a round and apparently firm posterior. Her instinct - or probably her well-learned habit - of stuffing her buttocks at an obviously aroused man seemed correct. My hand actually arrived within two and one-quarter inches of that flesh before the mad scientist in the London fog got the message through.

  `Roll over,' I said. (Get her best weapon aimed elsewhere.) She rolled slowly over, reached up two white arms and pulled my neck down until our mouths met. She began to groan authoritatively. She pressed first her mouth hard against mine and then, somehow getting me to lift my legs up on the couch beside hers, pressed her abdomen hard into mine. She tongued, writhed, groaned and clutched with intelligent abandon. I just lay, wondering not too acutely what to do.

  Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.

  `Linda,' I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) `Linda,' I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dente and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dente back. `Linda,' I said a third time.

  `Put it in,' she said.

  `Linda, wait a minute.'

  `What's the matter; put it in.'

  She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.

  `Linda, I've got my period.'

  Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.

  Linda either hadn't read Freud or didn't care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.

  She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half closed her eyes again, groaned and said, `Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.'

  Although her hands weren't pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.

  `Linda, there's something I'd like you to do, first,' I said (What? What? For God's sake, what?) This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn't tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.

  `What?' she asked.

  `Lie here just as you are without moving, and close your eyes.'

  She looked at me - our bodies were separated by only three or four inches and one of her hands was still pulling me toward the great melting pot - and again she was neither Bardot nor bitch. When she sighed, let go of me and closed her eyes, I eased myself to a seat on the edge of the couch again.

  Try to relax,' I said.

  Her eyes shot open and her head jerked up like a doll's.

  `What the, bell do I want to relax for?'

  Please, for me, do this ... one thing. Lie there in your full beauty and let your arms, legs, face, everything relax. Please.'

  `What for? You're not relaxed.'

  And she laughed coldly at my denied, deprived, but still unbending middle leg. `Please, Linda, I want you. I want to make love to you, but first I want to caress you and kiss you and I want you to receive my love without - with complete relaxation. I know it's impossible, so I'll suggest a way you might do it. I want you to think of - a little girl picking flowers in a field.. Can you do that?'

  Bitch glared up at me.

  Why?'

  `If you do it, you may - if you follow my instructions you may be in for 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 gig. 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 alms 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. 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.