The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
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and scabs on both chubby legs and bleached yellow hair hiding most of his suspicious frown.
‘Play,’ he answered.
‘Play what?’
‘I already took out the garbage yesterday.’
‘I’d like to play with you today. What do you plan to do?’
From her seat Evie looked at Larry wondering what they were going to do.
‘You want to play with us?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t hog the dump truck?’
‘No. I’ll let you be the complete boss.’
‘You will?’
‘Yep.’
‘Hooray, let’s go play in the sand.’
The sand was actually the farmer’s plowed field, which rectangled the farmhouse on three and a half sides. There, winding in an intricate maze among the green explosions of cabbage, was a road system to put Robert Moses to shame. For an hour I traveled in a 1963 pickup truck (Tonka, 00 h.p., .002 c.c. engine, needed new paint job) over these roads. There was frequent criticism that I wrecked too many secondary roads while maneuvering my bulk down tertiary roads, and that tunnels that had been standing for years through cyclones and hurricanes (three and a half days through one brief shower) had collapsed under the weight of my one errant elbow. Otherwise the children enjoyed my presence, and I enjoyed the earth and them. Children are really quite nice once you get to know them.
They’re more than nice.
‘Daddy,’ Larry said to me later that day when we were lying in the sand watching the surf of the Atlantic come rolling onto Westhampton Beach, ‘why does the ocean make waves?’
I considered my knowledge of oceans, tides and such, and decided on
‘Wind.’
‘But sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, but the ocean always makes waves.’
‘It’s the god of the sea breathing.’
This time he considered.
‘Breathing what?’ he asked.
‘Breathing water. In and out, in and out.’
‘Where?’
‘In the middle of the ocean.’
‘How big is he?’
‘One mile tall and as fat and muscley as Daddy.’
‘Don’t ships bump his head?’
‘Sometimes. Then he makes hurricanes. That’s what’s called an “angry sea”.’
‘Daddy, why don’t you play with us more?’
It was like dropping a heavy sea anchor into my stomach. The phrase ‘I’m too busy’ came into my mind and I flushed with shame. ‘I’d like to but –’ entered and the flush got deeper.
‘I don’t know,’ I said and huffed down to the surf and bulldozed my way in. By floating on my back just beyond the breakers all I could see was the sky, rising and falling.
Both the dice and my own desires permitted me to be with the children more in August and September. The dice once dictated that I take them to a Coney Island Amusement Park for a day, and I look back on that afternoon as one of the two or three absolute islands of joy in my life.
I brought toys home to them spontaneously a couple of times and their gratitude at this unexplained, unprecedented gift of the god was almost enough to make me give up psychiatry and the dice and devote myself to fulltime fatherhood. The third time I tried it, Larry’s crane wouldn’t work and the children fought solidly for three days over the other one. I considered vacationing in Alaska, the Sahara, the Amazon, anywhere, but alone.
The dice made me a very unreliable disciplinarian. They willed that in the first two weeks in September I should never yell, scold or punish the children for anything. Never had the house been so quiet and peaceful for so long. In the last week of September (school had begun) the dice ordered that I be an absolute dictator regarding homework, table manners, noise, neatness and respect. Fifteen hard spanks were to be administered for all transgressions. By the sixth day of my trying to enforce my standards Lil, the maid and the children locked themselves in the playroom and refused to let me enter. When Lil chastised me for my sudden week-long spasm of tyranny I explained that I’d been overwhelmed by a speech by Spiro Agnew on the evils of permissiveness.
Events like these strained, to say the least, my relations with Lil. One does not live seven years with a person – an intelligent, sensitive person who (periodically) shows you great affection – without forming certain emotional ties. You do not father two handsome children by her without strengthening that bond.
Lil and I had met and mated when we were both twenty-five. We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love – one of society’s many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. We soon discovered that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being married which being single can’t cure. Or so, for a while, it seemed to us.
I was in medical school earning nothing, and Lil, the spoiled daughter of Peter Daupmann, successful real estate man, went to work to support me. Lil, sole support of Lucius Rhinehart, MD to be, became pregnant. Lucius, practical, firm (except at confining sperm to their quarters), urged abortion. Lil, sensitive, loving, female, urged child. Practical man sulked. Female fed foetus, foetus left female: handsome son Lawrence: happiness, pride, poverty. After two months, spoiled child Lil works again for dedicated, practical, impoverished Luke, MD (but under analysis and interning and not practicing). Lil soon develops healthy resentment of work, poverty and dedicated, practical MD. Our bond to each other grows, but the intense pleasurable passion of yesteryear diminishes.
In brief, as the alert reader has concluded long before this, we were typically married. We had happy moments which we could share with no one; we had our insider jokes; we had our warm, sensual, sexual love as we had our mutual concern for (well, Lil anyway), interest in and pride in our children; and we had our two increasingly frustrated, isolated private selves. The aspirations we had for these selves did not find fulfillment in marriage, and all the twisting and writhing on the bed together couldn’t erase this fact, although our very dissatisfaction united us.
Now the dice treated everything and everyone as objects and forced me to do the same. The emotions I was to feel for all things were determined by the dice and not by the intrinsic relationship between me and the person or thing. Love I saw as an irrational, arbitrary binding relationship to another object. It was compulsive. It was an important part of the historical self. It must be destroyed. Lillian must become an object: an object of as little intrinsic effect upon or interest for me as … Nora Hammerhill (name picked at random from Manhattan phone book). Impossible, you say? Perhaps. But if a human being can be changed, this most basic of relationships must be susceptible to alteration. So I tried.
The dice sometimes refused to cooperate. They commanded me to show her concern and generosity. They bought her the first piece of jewelry I’d given her in six years. She accused me of infidelity. Reassured, she was very pleased. The dice sent us to three dramas on three consecutive nights (I had averaged three plays a year, two of which were inevitably musicals with record short runs); we both felt cultured, avant-garde, unphilistine. We swore we’d see a play a week all year. The dice said otherwise.
The dice one week requested that I give in to her every whim. Although she twice called me spineless and at the end of the week seemed disgusted with my lack of authority, I found myself listening and responding to her at times where normally I wouldn’t have known she existed, and at times I touched her with my thoughtfulness.
Lil even enjoyed the dice’s sudden passion for awkward sexual positions, although when the dice ordered me to penetrate her from thirteen distinctly different positions before reaching my climax,