Great Creator Cube, help me to kill.
Choose thy victim that I may strike.
Point the way that I thy sword may enter.
He who is chosen will die smiling in the fulfillment of thy Whim.
Amen.'
I dropped a die to the floor quickly, as if it were a snake. A three: it was my duty to try to kill Frank Osterflood.
Chapter Seventy-seven
From the Bhagavad-Gita To Arjuna, who was thus overcome by pity, whose eyes were filled with tears and who was
troubled and much depressed in mind, the Lord Krishna said Whence has come to thee this dejection of spirit in this
hour of crisis? It is unknown to men of noble mind; it does not lead to heaven; on earth it causes disgrace, O Arjuna.
Yield not to this unmanliness, O Arjuna, for it does not become thee. Cast off this petty faintheartedness and arise, O
Oppressor of the foes.
Arjuna said How can I strike, O Krishna, O slayer of foes? It is better to live in this world by begging than to slay
another … My very being 'is stricken with pity. With my mind bewildered about my duty, I ask Thee to tell me that
which I should do.
Having thus addressed the Lord Krishna, the mighty Arjuna said to Krishna: `I will not kill,' and become silent.
To him thus depressed in the midst of two paths, Krishna, smiling as it were, spoke this word. The Blessed Lord said
Thou grievest for one whom thou shouldst not grieve for, and yet thou speakest words about wisdom. Wise men do not
grieve for the dead or the living.
Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor these lords of men, nor will there ever be a time hereafter when
we shall cease to be.
As the soul passes in this body through childhood, youth and age, even so it its taking on of another body. The sage is
not perplexed by this.
Of the nonexistent there is no coming to be; of the existent there is no ceasing to be. Know thou that that by which all
this is pervaded is indestructible. Of this immutable being, no one can bring about the destruction. Therefore, O
Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.
He who thinks that he slays and he who thinks that he is slain; both of them fail to perceive the truth; no one slays, nor
is one slain. Therefore, O Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.
He is never born, nor does he die at any time, nor having once come to be does he again cease to. be. He is unborn,
eternal, permanent and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. Therefore, knowing him as such, thou shouldst
not grieve and thy duty shouldst be performed. Pick up thy die, O Arjuna, and kill.
(Edited for The Book of the Die)
Chapter Seventy-eight
I hadn't heard of Frank Osterflood in close to a year, and I genuinely looked forward to seeing him again. He had
responded pretty well for a while to dice therapy first with me and then in a group with Fred Boyd. When he
experienced the need to rape someone - boy or girl - as an arbitrary decision of the dice, it freed him from the great
burden of guilt, which had normally accompanied and magnified the act. And with the elimination of the guilt he discovered he had lost much of his desire to rape. I insisted, of course, that he had to try to carry through with any dice-dictated rape even though he didn't feel like it. He succeeded, found it a disgusting experience. I praised him for following the will of the Die, and he cut back drastically on the possibility of rape among his options and then eliminated it.
He enjoyed spending his money in random ways and then, much to my surprise, he married a woman as the result of a dice decision. Marriage turned out to be an apparent disaster. I had disappeared from the world at that time, but I heard from Fred Boyd that Frank had given up both his wife and the dicelife and was drifting again from job to job. Whether he was expressing his old aggressions in his old ways we didn't know.
I had no desire to limit my dicelife by spending it all in prison so advanced planning was called for. Interrupting my work at the Catskill CETRE for a week I went on a `business trip' to New York. I discovered that Osterflood was living at his old apartment on the East Side about four blocks from where I used to live. Ah, the memories. He seemed to be working for a brokerage firm on Wall Street and was gone for nine hours each day. The first night I trailed him he went out to dinner, a movie, a discotheque and returned home alone and presumably read or watched television and then slept.
It's a rather interesting experience to spend an evening trailing a man you're planning to murder the next day; watching him yawn, become irritable when he can't find the right change for a newspaper, smile at some thought he's having. In general, Osterflood seemed rather nervous, I thought, tensed up - as if someone were trying to murder him.
I began to realize that murder is not as easy as it's cracked up to be. I couldn't loiter outside Osterflood's apartment a second consecutive night: my giant form was entirely too conspicuous. When and where to kill him? He was a big, muscular man, probably the only man on my original list of thirty-six that I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley after I'd just fired a shot at him and missed I had brought my .38 revolver I still possessed from my pre-dice, suicide-considering days, and I was pretty accurate at ten feet or less; I figured Big Frank would need a hole in the head to take him down. I also brought slang some strychnine to help along in that way should the opportunity arise.
My main problem was that if I killed him in his apartment I would have trouble escaping unnoticed. Gun shots in East Side apartments renting for four hundred dollars a month are not especially common. His apartment had a doorman, an elevator man, perhaps a hired security man, probably no stairwell. To shoot Osterflood in the street or in an alley was also dangerous since although gunshots were there much more frequent, nevertheless, people usually had enough curiosity to look over at what was happening. I was simply too big to be anonymous.
I suddenly realized that living in New York City, Frank Osterflood - and every other New Yorker - lived year after year without once, ever, being more than twenty feet from some other human being. Usually he was within ten feet of a dozen people. He had no private, isolated life in which he might be totally by himself and meditate and commune with himself and take stock and be murdered. I resented it deeply.
I couldn't afford to wait around; I wanted to hurry back to Catskill to continue developing the Catskill Dice Center, there to make people happy and joy-filled and free again.
Somehow I had to lure him away from the warren of Manhattan. But how? Was he interested in boys these days? Or girls? Or men? Or women? Or money? Or what? What was the hook that would drag him out of the cesspool of the city into the lovely, lonely autumn of the woods? How would I prevent his telling someone that he had seen me again, that he was going someplace with me? The only method that I could dimly see was to accost him as he returned from work, invite him to dinner and then lure him out of the city on some spontaneously combusted pretext and, on some isolated country road, miles from the nearest other human being communing with himself, shoot him. It seemed very messy and haphazard, and I was determined to commit a nice clean crime - without any sick emotions, without fuss, with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss. I wanted to murder in such a way that Agatha Christie would be pleased and not offended. I wanted to commit a crime so perfect that no one would suspect anything, not the murdered, not the police, not even me.
Of course, such a crime would be impossible, so I retreated to my earlier ideal-that I should murder without fuss,
emotion or violence arid with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss. It was the very least I owed the victim.
But how! The Die only knows. I certainly couldn't see how. I would have to have faith. I would have to get myself
with Osterflood and see what turned up. I'd never read of an Agatha Christie murderer proceeding in quite this way,