`I see.'
`Why didn't we begin this therapy a long time ago?' Mrs. Ecstein asked. She was rapidly undressing.
`You understand,' the doctor said, slowly preparing himself for the operation, `that after we have made love once, we
must consult the die again.'
`Sure, sure, come here,' said Mrs. Ecstein and she was soon hard at work with Dr. Rhinehart in concentrated dice therapy. At 11 A.M. Dr. Rhinehart buzzed his secretary to announce that because he was probing particularly deeply that morning and because his work might bear long-range fruit, it would be necessary to cancel the hour with Mr. Jenkins so that he and Mrs. Ecstein might continue.
At noon, Mrs. Ecstein, glowing, left the doctor's office. The history of dice therapy had begun.
Chapter Thirty-one
Professor Orville Boggles of Yale tried it; Arlene Ecstein found it productive; Terry Tracy rediscovered God through it; patient Joseph Spezio of QSH thought it was a plot to drive him insane: dice therapy slowly but surely, and unbeknownst to my wife and colleagues, grew; but the Great Columbia Copulation Caper climaxed and was spent.
Two Bernard College girls who had been instructed separately to enter into Lesbian relations with each other complained to their dean of women, who promptly began investigating. Although I assured her that Dr. Felloni and I were bona fide professionals, members of the American Medical Association, registered Republicans and in only moderato opposition to the war is Vietnam, she still fund the experiment to be `suspiciously outrageous' and I ended it.
Actually all our scheduled appointments had already been completed. Less than sixty percent had taken place as set up, and two graduate students and I were busy for weeks afterward flying to collect the manila folders with the completed questionnaires and trying to interview our lab assistants; but the experiment was finished. When I published an article on our work in the fall (Dr. Felloni. declined to be associated with the article or the experiment), it created a mild stir and was one of the pieces of evidence used by my enemies to have me exiled from the AMA.
Although most of our subjects seem to have derived pleasure from their participation in the study, a few were traumatized. About ten days after my own pas de trots my office received a request that I treat one of Dr. Felloni's subjects in our joint experiment. This Miss Vigliota maintained that she had become neurotic because of her participation in our experiment and she was requesting therapy. The appointment was set up and the next day I was seated in my office at the scheduled hour elaborating in writing upon new dice exercises I had been creating. My office door opened and closed, a small girl entered, and when I looked at her, she staggered forward and collapsed on the couch.
It was Terry `Tracy' Vigliota. It took me twenty minutes to assure her that I was really Dr. Rhinehart, a psychiatrist, and that nay participation with her in the experiment had been a perfectly natural extension of my data-gathering role. When she had become calm, she told me why she had come requesting therapy. She sat on the edge of the couch with her short legs dangling many inches from the floor. Dressed in a conservative grayish suit with short skirt, she seemed, as she discussed her problems, more slight, nervous and intense than she had less than two weeks before. I noticed as she talked and in subsequent sessions that she found it difficult to look at me and always entered or left the office with her soft brown eyes on the floor, as if absorbed in thought.
Terry had apparently undergone an identity crisis as a result of her unusual evening with me and George. Her conversation with the professor of history and with Father Fortes had given her new insights into her Catholic faith, but her sexual experience had not been related, she began to think, to the `greater glory of God.'
She found herself increasingly indifferent to the glory of God and increasingly interested in men. But lust and sex were evil, or so her whole previous life had told her. But Father Fortes had indicated that the Church enjoyed sex. But Father Fortes had turned out to be a psychiatrist, a scientist, a doctor; but they also enjoyed sex. She had felt fulfilled in relieving the loneliness of George X, but after Father Fortes had left it seems George permitted her to relieve his loneliness one more time and then began berating her as a whore and a slut. She found as a result of all this that she could no longer believe in anything. All of her desires and beliefs had been shattered by the emotions of her experimental evening: nothing new was taking its place. All seemed unreliable and meaningless.
Although anxious to begin dice therapy with her, I had to let her pour out her troubles uninterrupted over the first two analytic hours. In the third session - she was still sitting, her legs dangling, staring at the floor - she finally ran out of misery and began repeating that most human of refrains: `I don't know what to do.'
`You keep coming back to the same basic feeling,' I said. 'That all of your desires and beliefs are illusory and meaningless.'
`Yes. I asked for therapy because I can't stand the feeling of emptiness. After that evening I didn't know who I was. When I got you as my therapist last week I thought I must be going insane. Even my emptiness seemed empty.'
She smiled a sad, soft Natalie Wood smile, her eyes-down.
`What if you're right?' I said.
`Pardon?'
`What if your feeling that all desires are unreliable and all beliefs illusions is right, is the mature, valid vision of reality,
and the rest of men are living under illusions which your experience has permitted you to shed?'
`Of course, that's what I think,' she said.
`Then why not act upon your belief?'
The smile left her face and she frowned, still not looking at, me.
`What do you mean?'
`Treat all of your desires as if they had equal value and each of your beliefs as if it were as much an illusion as the
next.'
`How?'
`Stop trying to create a pattern, a personality; just do whatever you feel like.'
`But I don't feel like doing anything; that's the trouble.'
'That's because you're letting one desire, the desire to believe strongly and be a clearly defined person, inhibit the rest
of your various desires.'
'Maybe, but I don't see how I can change it.'
`Become a dice person.'
She lifted her head and looked up into my eyes slowly and without emotion.
`What?'
`Become a dice person,' I repeated.'
`What do you mean?'
`I,' I leaned forward with appropriate gravity, `am the Dice Man.'
She smiled slightly and looked away and to the side.
`I don't know what you're talking about.'
`You believe that each of your desires is as arbitrary, meaningless and trivial as the next?'
`Yes.'
`In some sense it makes absolutely no difference what you do or don't do?'
'That's exactly it.'
`Then why not let the flip of dice - chance - decide what you do?'
She looked up again.
Is that why you keep changing roles and acting so strangely?'