The Dice Man

  `I beg your pardon,' she said, and when she backed away my paw slid down over a breast and swung briefly like a pendulum at my side.

  She blushed and glanced quickly at the three men talking nearby.

  `Fred says that Dr. Krum is very good at what he does, but that what he does isn't really important. What do you think? '

  `Unn,' I said loudly and stamped one giant foot.

  `Oh me too. I don't like animal experimenters myself. I've been doing social work in Staten Island now for two years and there's so much to be done with people.'

  She looked now over at the couch where Dr. Felloni, the elderly lady and the thin old big deal were talking: Miss Welish seemed to be relaxing in my company.

  `Even here, in this very room, there are people whose lives are unfulfilled, people who need help.'

  I was silent, but a bit of drool escaped from my lower lip and begun its pilgrimage down my shirt front.

  `Unless we can learn to relate to each other,' Miss Welish went on, `to be aware of each other, all the chicken cures in the world won't help.'

  I was staring at Arlene's balloons undulating in the light of the chandelier. A small orgasm of saliva spilled again from my lower lip.

  `What fascinates me about you psychiatrists is the way you hold yourselves in, remain detached. Don't you ever feel the suffering you have to deal with?'

  Miss Welish turned toward me again and grimaced at the sight of my tie and shirt front.

  I began groping clumsily in my pocket for my watchcase with the die.

  `Don't you feel the suffering?' Miss Welish repeated.

  Pulling out the watchcase I let my head twitch three times sideways and grunted a single, 'Un.'

  `Oh God, you men are so hard.'

  I slowly raised my lower jaw; it ached from its drooped position. Running my tongue over my dry upper lip, I used my handkerchief to wipe the saliva from my chest and turned my ryes full on Miss Welish.

  `What time is it?' she asked.

  `Time for us to stop playing word games and get down to business,' I said.

  `I think so too. I can't stand cocktail-party chatter,' she looked pleased that we were at last going to be above it all.

  `What's underneath that lovely dress?'

  `You like it? Fred bought it for me at Ohrbach's. Don't you like the way it - glimmers?'

  She gave the upper part of her body a little shake: her dress shimmered and her chubby arms vibrated.

  `You're built, baby - Look, what's your first name?' 'Joya. It's corny, but I like it.'

  `Joya. It's a beautiful name. You're beautiful. Your skin is incredibly smooth and creamy. I'd love to run my tongue over it.'

  I reached my hand up and caressed her cheek and then the back of her neck. She reddened again.

  `I was born with it, I guess. My mother has a lovely complexion and Dad too. In fact, Dad-'

  `Are your thighs and your belly and your breasts that same creamy white color?'

  `Well. .. I guess they are. Except when I get a tan.'

  `I'd love to be able to run my hands over your whole body.'

  `It's nice. When I put suntan lotion on, it feels so smooth.'

  I lowered my lids a little and tried to look sexy.

  'You've stopped drooling,' she said.

  'Look, Joya, this cocktail-party chatter is giving me a headache, Can't we go someplace for a few minutes where we can be alone?'

  I edged her away toward a hallway, which I knew led to Dr. Mann's office.

  `Oh talk talk talk. It gets so sickening after a while.'

  `Let me show you Dr. Mann's office. He has some fascinating illustrated books on primitive sexual practices.'

  'No pictures of chickens?' and she laughed happily at herself, and I laughed too. Dr. Felloni nodded her head at us as we passed the couch, and Jake squinted over an Important Person's shoulder as we passed behind the Krum group and Arlene jiggled her breasts slightly and smiled and we were down the hall and into Dr. Mann's office. I heard a shrill squeak when we entered and saw then that Dr. Boggles and Miss Reingold were seated on the floor with a pair of green dice between them, and Boggles, with two-thirds of his clothes removed, was just reaching triumphantly to remove Miss Reingold's (smiling triumphantly) blouse.

  As we backed out, Miss Welish said: `Oh that's disgusting. In Dr. Mann's study! That's disgusting.'

  `You're right, Joya, let's go to the bathroom.'

  `The bathroom?'

  'It's down this way.'

  `What are you talking about?'

  `A place to talk privately.'

  `Oh.'

  She had stopped in the middle of the hall now and her hands were both clenching her drink. `No,' she said. `I want to get back to the party.'

  `Joya, all I want to do is use your beautiful body. It won't take long.'

  `What will we talk about?'

  'What? We'll talk about Harry Stack Sullivan's theory of post-operative malaise. Come on.'

  As she still remained immobile I realized I was being entirely too middle-class for the uninhibited sex maniac the Die certainly had in mind and, when Miss' Welish began talking of going back to the living room again, I strode forward, knocked her drink to the floor and tried to kiss her powerfully on the mouth.

  The explosion of pain in my balls was so intense that for a moment I thought I had been shot. I was blinded with pain and staggered back against the wall with a thud. With the fierce willpower of a saint I forced my eyes open and saw the shimmering silvery back of Miss Welish returning toward the living room - Thank God! - leaving me alone - with my disaster.

  I assumed I wouldn't be able to move from my folded-up position for a month and wondered vaguely if Mr. Thornton would dust me regularly. The question also came to my mind how an `uninhibited sex maniac' would react to a major kick in the balls. The answer seemed unequivocal: maniac, gentle Jesus, psychotic hippie, mute moron, Jake Ecstein, Hugh Hefner, Lao-Tzu, Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham all would react as I, simple, bespectacled Luke Rhinehart, was acting. Although both my hands were at the scene of the accident, they weren't touching anything; they seemed to be there to do something if anything could ever be done - say next month. Yet, I couldn't force my hands back to a different position. Dr. Krum and Arlene Ecstein were coming down the hall. I tried to straighten up and almost screamed. They stared down at the broken fragments of glass and then stopped in front of me.

  `Nasty stomach-ache,' I said. `Severe abdominal cramps. May need an anesthetic.'

  `Veil, vell. Tummy-ache, you say?'

  `Lower tummy, abdomen, help.' I was whispering.

  `Luke, what game are you playing now?' Arlene said and looked down at me (I was folded down a full foot and a half from my normal height) with a bemused smile.

  `You're - you're terrific, baby,' I gasped. `Take off - that dress.'

  I collapsed slowly sideways to the floor, the pain in my elbow being an almost blissful distraction from the other.

  I heard Fred Boyd's voice from farther up the hall asking, `What happened?' and then heard him almost directly over me, laughing.

  `I think he's been shot,' Dr. Krum said. `Is serious.'

  `Oh, he'll survive,' Fred said, and I felt his hands on one of my arms and then Arlene's on the other, and Fred lifted one arm around his shoulder and dragged me into a bedroom. They threw me on to the bed.

  The pain was, in fact, subsiding, and after the three had left, I was able to move a bit, my eyes mostly, but it was progress. Then I remembered it was time for a fresh consultation of the Die and, shuddering at the possibility of a second round of uninhibited sex maniac, I painfully drew the fake watch case out of my pocket and looked: a three: the honest dice man.

  I lay back on the bed for a while and stared at the ceiling. I heard voices passing by out in the hall and then only the blurred distant buzz from the living room. The door opened and Lil came in.

  `What happened?' she asked sharply. She was immaculately beautiful in her black, low-cut c
ocktail dress, but her eyes and mouth were set and cold. I looked up at her and felt a hollowness inside me: what a time and place for this.

  `Dr. Krum said you were sick. You disappear with Blondie and then turn up sick. What happened?'

  I struggled to a sitting position and dragged my legs off the bed to the floor. I looked up at her.

  `It's a long story, Lil.'

  `You made a pass at Blondie.'

  "Longer than that, much longer.'

  `I hate you.'

  `Yes. It's inevitable,' I said. `I'm the Dice Man:'

  `Had you met her before? I thought Fred told me he'd just met her himself.'

  `I'd never met her before. She was thrown into my path and the dice said take her.'

  `The dice? What're you talking about?'

  `I am the Dice Man.'

  Hunched over and disheveled, I'm afraid it wasn't too impressive a moment. We stared at each other, separated by only six feet in the little bedroom off the hallway of Dr. Mann's museum mausoleum. Lil shook her head as if trying to clear it.

  `What, if I may ask, is the dice man?'

  Dr. Krum and Arlene again appeared, Dr. Krum carrying a black bag similar to those carried by general practitioners in the early nineteenth century. .

  `You are better?' he said.

  `Yes. Thank you. I will rise again.'

  `Good, good. I have an anesthetic. You vant?'

  `No. It won't be necessary. Thanks.'

  `What is the dice man, Luke?' Lil repeated. She hadn't moved since entering the room. I saw Arlene start and felt her eyes upon me as I turned back to Lil.

  `The Dice Man,' I said slowly, `is an experiment in changing the personality, in destroying the personality.'

  `Is interesting,' Dr. Krum said.

  `Go on,' Lil said.

  To destroy the single dominant personality one must be capable of developing many personalities; one must become multiple.'

  `You're stalling,' Lil said. `What is the dice man?'

  'The Dice Man,' I said, and I shifted my gaze to Arlene; who, wide-eyed and alert, watched me as if I were an enthralling movie, `is a creature whose actions are decided from day to day by the roll of dice, the dice choosing from among options created by the man.'

  There was a silence, which lasted perhaps five seconds.

  `Is interesting,' Dr. Krum said. `But difficult with chickens: Another silence followed and I turned my eyes back to Lil who, straight, dignified and beautiful, raised now a hand to her forehead and rubbed softly just below the hairline. Her expression was one of shock.

  `I - I never meant a thing to you,' she said quietly.

  `But you did. I have to fight my attachment to you time and time again.'

  `Come on, Dr. Krum, let's get out of here,' Arlene said.

  Lil turned her head and looked away out the darkened window, oblivious of Arlene and Dr. Krum.

  `You could do the things you did, to me, to Larry, to Evie,' because the dice . . .?' she finally said.

  This time I didn't reply. Dr. Krum looked perplexed from me to Lil to me, shaking his head.

  `You could use me, lie to me, betray me, mock, me, whore me and remain . . . happy: `For something greater than either of us,' I said.

  Arlene had pulled Dr. Krum away and they disappeared out the door.

  Lil looked down at the wedding ring on her left hand, felt its texture between her fingers, her face soft, wistful.

  `Everything. . ' she shook her head slowly, dreamily. `Every thing between us for a year, no. No. For all, for all our lives, becomes ashes.'

  `Yes,' I said.

  `Because ... because you want to play your maniac, your adulterer, your hippie, your dice man.'

  `Yes.'

  `And what, what if I told you now,' Lil went on, `that for a year I've been having an affair with - I know it sounds silly but an affair with the garage attendant downstairs?'

  'Lil, that's wonderful: pain flashed across her face.'

  'What if I told you that tonight before coming here, in tucking the children in goodnight, in following a theory of mine to show detachment, I had ... I had strangled Larry and Evie?'

  There we were opposite each other, an old married couple chatting about the- doings of the day.

  `If it were done for a . . . a useful theory it would be..'

  Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his children's lives for his theory. `You would, of course, kill them if the dice told you to,' Lil said.

  `I don't think I'd ever give that particular option into the hands of the dice.'

  'Only adultery, theft, fraud and treason; `I might give Larry and Evie into . the hands of the Die, but myself too.'

  She was rocking now on her heels, her hands clenched in front of her, still immaculately beautiful.

  `I guess I should be thankful,' she said. `The mystery is over But ... but it's not easy to have the death of the man you loved most in the world told to you by . . . by his corpse.'

  `Interesting point,' I said.

  Lil's head jerked back at my reply and her eyes widened slowly until, suddenly, she threw herself on me with a convulsive shriek, pulling my hair and then beating me with her fists. I hunched over to protect myself. but I felt so hollow inside that Lil's blows were like a gentle rain falling on an empty barrel. It occurred to me that it was long past time to consult the Die again. I wasn't interested. I didn't feel interested in anything. The blows stopped and Lil, crying loudly, ran toward the door. Arlene was standing there, looking terrified, and caught Lil in her arms. They disappeared, and I was alone.

  Chapter Forty-one

  As I sit here writing of that distant night, the tragedies and comedies bloom like flowers around me still, and I continue on from day to day or year to year to play a role, and certainly, sooner or later, I'll abandon that of dice man too. A role, a role. Star billing one day, walk-on the next. Vaudeville standup comic Shakespearian-fool. Alceste in the morning, Gary Cooper and a hippie during the day, Jesus at night. I no longer remember precisely when I stopped acting: when the fallen die began to click to life roles where there was no residual me fighting them and no dice man me feeling proud, only lives being lived. I do remember that alone in that room that night after Lil left I felt a full joyous uninhibited grief. I was in pain, I suffered, I was there.

  And you, Friend, sprawled on your bed or sitting in your chair, you giggle perhaps as I slobber as Caliban, smile at my sufferings as an honest man, or sigh when I ponderously play the fool, philosophizing my madness, lecturing you on the metaphor of life as play. But I am the honest man - with all his senseless suffering for those who will feel; I am the fool. I've been Raskolnikov climbing the stairs, Julien Sorel hearing the clock strike ten, Molly Bloom writhing beneath the rhythmic push of Blazes Boylan's prick. Agonies are one of my changes of garments - fortunately not worn as often as my motley - of the fool.

  And you, Reader, good friend and fellow fool my reader, you, yes you, my sweet cipher, are the Dice Man. Having read this far, you are doomed to carry with you burned forever in your soul the self I've here portrayed: the Dice Man. You are multiple and one of you is me. I have created in you a flea which will forever make you itch. Ah, Reader, you never should have let me be born. Other selves bite now and then no doubt. But the Dice Man flea demands to be scratched at every moment: he is, insatiable. You will never know an itchless moment again - unless, of course, you become the flea.

  Chapter Forty-two

  On the edge of the bed, alone, the party outside seeming to settle into precisely the businesslike buzz it manifested before, Luke Rhinehart sat hunched over, numbed. There was no retreat He was the Dice Man or he was no one. His body knew, dough he could not yet be aware consciously, that Luke Rhinehart was now an impossible existence. Numbed, he disturbed the Die by not consulting the watch for almost ten minutes. Then, having no place else to go, no one else to be, he took out the watch with the die and looked.

  Slowly he straightened himself up and, standi
ng, bowed his head in a brief prayer. Then he smoothed down his clothing and his hair and moved toward the party. He wanted first see his wife to abase himself before her. He walked down the hall to the living room and from the doorway squinted through the random clusters of faces, looking for her. Those talking and drinking paid him no special attention, but Mrs. Ecstein came up behind him and said that his wife was in Dr. Mann's office: He followed her down the hall and over the broken glass to the office. He found Dr. Mann and Dr. Ecstein standing awkwardly on either side of his wife, who sat, childlike, on the edge of Dr. Mann's consulting couch.

  The sight of her, hunched over and small, her face pale but streaked with smeared eye shadow, her hair in disarray, an ugly man's sweater draped clumsily over her shoulders, knocked Dr. Rhinehart without conscious intention to his with his chest and head too lowering forward until he groveled at his wife's feet.

  The room was silent that they could all hear quite distinctly from the centre of the house the ratatattat of Dr. Krum's laughter: `Forgive me, Lil, I am mad,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

  Ne one spoke.

  Rhinehart raised his head and chest from the floor to look at his wife and he said: `For what I have done there is no forgiveness in this world; but I am repentant. I . . . I have been purified ... by the hell that I am causing. I..' His eyes suddenly brightened with eagerness `I feel only love for you and for all here. The world can be a blessed place if we but love one another.'

  'Luke, baby, what are you . . .?' Dr. Ecstein said, and he took a step forward as if to raise Dr. Rhinehart up but stopped.

  `Beautiful, beautiful Jake, I'm talking about love.'

  Dr. Rhinehart shook his head slowly as if confused, and a childlike smile appeared on his face. `I've been all mixed up, all wrong; love, loving, loveliness is all there is: He turned and stretched out his arms to his wife. 'Lil, my darling, you must realize that Heaven is here, is now, with me.'

  His wife returned his gaze for a moment and then slowly raised her eyes to Dr. Mann beside her. A look of immense relief began to appear on her face.