The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
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the total pattern of the accumulated limitations and potentials of an individual. You take away all his habits, compulsions and channeled drives, and you take away him.’
‘Then perhaps, perhaps, we ought to do away with “him”.’
He paused as if trying to absorb what I’d said and when I turned to face him, he surprised me by booming two quick cannon shots of smoke out of the side of his mouth.
‘Oh Luke, you’re nibbling on that Goddam Eastern mysticism again. If I weren’t a consistent self, a glutton at the table, sloppy in dress, bland in speech and rigidly devoted to psychoanalysis, to success, to publication – and all of these things consistently – I’d never get anything done, and what would I be?’
I didn’t answer.
‘If I sometimes smoked one way,’ he went on, ‘sometimes another, sometimes not at all, varied the way I dressed, was nervous, serene, ambitious, lazy, lecherous, gluttonous, ascetic – where would my “self” be? What would I achieve? It’s the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy – and hence boredom – is not human. He’s insane.’
With a satisfied and relaxed grunt he placed his pipe down again and smiled pleasantly at me. For some reason I hated him.
‘And accepting these self-defeating limitations is mental health?’ I said.
‘Mmmmm.’
I stood facing him and felt a strange rush of rage surge through me. I wanted to crush Dr Mann with a ten-ton block of concrete. I spat out my next words:
‘We must be wrong. All psychotherapy is a tedious disaster. We must be making some fundamental, rock-bottom error that poisons all our thinking. Years from now men will look upon our therapeutic theories and our techniques as we do upon nineteenth-century bloodletting.’
‘You’re sick, Luke,’ he said quietly.
‘You and Jake are among the best and as humans you’re both nothing.’ He was sitting erect in his chair.
‘You’re sick,’ he said. ‘And don’t feed me any more bull about Zen. I’ve been watching you for months now. You’re not relaxed. Half the time you seem like a giggly schoolboy and the other half like a pompous ass.’
‘I’m a therapist and it’s clear I, as a human, am a disaster. Physician, heal thyself.’
‘You’ve lost faith in the most important profession in the world because of an idealized expectation which even Zen says is unrealistic. You’ve gotten bored with the day-to-day miracles of making people slightly better. I don’t see where letting them get slightly worse is much to be proud of.’
‘I’m not proud of –’
‘Yes, you are. You think you’ve got absolute truth or at least that you alone are seeking it. You’re a classic case of Horney’s: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving.’
‘I am.’ I stated it flatly: it happened to be true. ‘But you, Tim, are a classic case of the normal human being, and I’m not impressed.’
He stared at me not puffing, his face flushed, and then abruptly, like a big balloon bouncing, arose from his chair with a grunt.
‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said and chugged toward the door.
‘There must be a method to change men more radically than we’ve discovered –’
‘Let me know when you find it,’ he said.
He stopped at the door and we looked at each other, two alien worlds. His face showed bitter contempt.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘When you find it, just give me a ring. Oxford 4-0300.’
We stood facing each other.
‘Goodnight,’ I said.
‘Goodnight,’ he said, turning. ‘Give my best to Lil in the morning. And Luke,’ turning back to me, ‘try finishing Jake’s book. It’s always better to criticize a book after you’ve read it.’
‘I didn’t –’
‘Goodnight.’
And he opened the door, waddled out, hesitated at the elevator, then walked on to the stairwell and disappeared.
Chapter Eight
After closing the door I walked mechanically back into the living room. At the window I stared at the few lights and at the empty early-morning streets below. Dr Mann emerged from the building and moved off toward Madison Avenue; he looked, from three floors up, like a stuffed dwarf. I had an urge to pick up the easy chair he had been sitting in and throw it through the glass window after him. Distorted images swirled through my mind: Jake’s book lying darkly on the white tablecloth at lunch; the boy Eric’s black eyes staring at me warmly; Lil and Arlene wriggling toward me; blank pieces of paper on my desk; Dr Mann’s clouds of smoke mushrooming toward the ceiling; and Arlene as she had left the room a few hours earlier; an open, sensuous yawn. For some reason I felt like starting at one end of the room and running full speed to the other end and smashing right through the portrait of Freud which hung there.
Instead I turned from the window and walked back and forth until I was looking up at the portrait. Freud stared down at me dignified, serious, productive, rational and stable: he was every thing which a reasonable man might strive to be. I reached up and, grasping the portrait carefully, turned it around so that the face was toward the wall. I stared with rising satisfaction at the brown cardboard backing and then, with a sigh, returned to the poker table and put away the cards, chips and chairs. One of the two dice was missing but when I glanced at the floor it was not to be found. Turning to go to bed, I saw on the small table next to the chair Dr Mann had been lecturing me from, a card – the queen of spades – angled as if propped up against something. I went over and stared down at the card and knew that beneath it was the die.
I stood that way for a full minute feeling a rising, incomprehensible rage: something of what Osterflood must feel, of what Lil must have been feeling during the afternoon, but directed at nothing, thoughtless, aimless rage. I vaguely remember an electric clock humming on the mantelpiece. Then a fog-horn blast groaned into the room from the Eastriver and terror tore the arteries out of my heart and tied them in knots in my belly: if that die has a one face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs and rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene,’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror was boiled away by a pleasant excitement and my mouth swelled into a gargantuan grin: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the die?
I picked up the queen of spades and saw staring at me a cyclopean eye: a one.
I was shocked into immobility for perhaps five seconds, but finally made an abrupt, soldierly about-face and marched to our apartment door, opened it and took one pace outside, wheeled, and marched with mechanical precision and joyous excitement back into the apartment, down the hall to our bedroom, opened the door a crack and announced loudly: ‘I’m going for a walk, Lil.’ Turning, I marched out of the apartment a second time.
As I walked woodenly down the two flights of stairs I noticed rust spots on the railing and an abandoned advertising circular crumpled into a corner. ‘Think Big,’ it urged. On the Ecstein floor I wheeled like a puppet, marched to the door of their apartment and rang. My next clear thought swept with dignified panic through my mind: ‘Does Arlene really take the pill?’ A smile colored my consciousness at the thought of Jack the Ripper, on his way to rape and strangle another woman, and worrying whether she was protected or not.
After twenty seconds I rang again.
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