`Oh I know,' she said and turned smiling to Dr. Rhinehart.
`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling
automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.
`But, I haven't let the dice decide who I should say is the father.'
`I see.'
`I thought I'd give you two chances out of three of being the father.'
Ahh.
`Jake, of course, will get one chance in six.'
`Uhhuh.'
`And I thought I'd let "someone you don't know" have one chance in six.'
Silence.
`The dice will decide then who you tell Jake is the father?'
`Yes.'
'What about abortion? You're only in the second month, did you let the dice consider abortion?'
`Of, of course,' she said again smiling. `I gave abortion one chance in two hundred and sixteen.'
Ahh.
`The dice said no.'
Mm.'
Silence.
`So in seven months you're going to have a baby.'
`Yes I am. Isn't it wonderful?'
'I'm happy for you,' said Dr. Rhinehart.
`And after I find out who the father is I'll have to let the dice decide whether I should leave Jake to be true to the
father.'
`Uhh.'
`And then let the dice decide whether I'm to have more children.'
`Um, 'But before that they'll have to tell me whether I should tell Lil I'm having a baby.'
Ahh.
`And whether I should tell Lil who the father is.'
'Uh.'
`It's all so wonderfully exciting.'
Silence.
Dr. Rhinehart took from his suit-jacket pocket a die and after rubbing it between his hands dropped it on the couch between himself and Mrs. Ecstein. It was a two. Dr. Rhinehart sighed.
`I'm happy for you, Arlene,' he said and collapsed slowly back in a heap against the couch, his blank eyes swiveling automatically to the blank wall opposite, on which hung only the ancient lithograph of Queen Victoria. Smiling.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Unfortunately for normal old Luke Rhinehart and his friends and admirers, the dice kept rolling and rolling, June turned out to be National Role-Playing Month and a bit too much. I was ordered to consult the Die regularly about varying the person I was from hour to hour, or day to day or week to week. I was expected to expand my role playing, perhaps even to test the limits of the malleability of the human soul.
Could there exist a Totally Random Man? Could a single human so develop his capabilities that he might vary his soul from hour to hour at whim? Might a man be an infinitely multiple personality? Or rather, like the universe according to some theorists, a steadily expanding multiple personality, one only to be contracted at death? And then, even then, who knows? At dawn of the second day I gave the dice six optional persons, one of whom I would try to be during the whole day. I was trying to create only simple, non socially upsetting options. The six were: Molly Bloom, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller, Jake Ecstein, a child of seven and the old pre-diceman Dr. Lucius Rhinehart.
The dice first chose Freud, but by the end of the day I had come to feel that being Sigmund Freud must have been something of a bore. I was aware of many unconscious sources of motivation where I usually overlooked them, but having seen them I didn't feel I had gained too much. I tried to examine my unconscious resistances to being Freud and uncovered the sort of thing Jake was good at in analysis: rivalry with the Father, fear of unconscious aggression being revealed: but I didn't find my insights convincing, or rather I didn't find them relevant. I might have an `oral personality' but this knowledge didn't help me change myself as much as did a single flip of the die.
On the other hand, when I read of a man who killed himself by slashing his wrists I immediately noted the sexual symbolism of the cutting of the limbs. I began thinking of other modes of suicide: throwing oneself into the sea; putting a pistol in one's mouth and pulling the trigger; crawling into an oven and turning on the gas; throwing oneself under a train All seemed to have obvious sexual symbolism and be necessarily connected with the psychosexual development of the patient. I created the excellent aphorism: Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured.
The next day I scratched Freud from my list, replaced him with a `slightly psychotic, aggressively anti-Establishment hippie' and cast a die: it chose Jake Ecstein.
Jake I could do very well. He was a real part of me and his superficial mannerisms and speech patterns I could easily imitate. I wrote half an article for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology analyzing the dice man concept from an orthodox Jakeian point of view and felt marvelous. During my analytic hour with Jake I entered so completely into his way of thinking that at the end he announced that we had covered more ground in this one session than in our previous two and a half months together. In a later article he wrote about my analysis `The Case of the Six-Sided Man' - (Jake's reputation will be eternal on the basis of his titles alone), he discussed this analytical hour in detail and attributes its success to the accidental discovery of a rarely read article by Ferenczi which he stumbled upon the night before lying open to a key page under his bathroom sink and which gave him the key `which began to unlock the door to the six-sided cube.'
He was ecstatic.
The dice rolled on and rolled me from role to roll to role in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope of dramatic play. Life became like a series of bit parts in a bad movie, with no script, no director, and with actresses and actors who didn't know their lines or their roles. I did most of my role playing away from people who knew me, for reasons which are obvious.
I can remember only vaguely what I did and said in those days; images are clearer than dialogues: I as Oboko the Zen master sitting mostly mute and smiling while a young graduate student tries to question me about psychoanalysis and the meaning of life: I as a child of seven riding a bicycle through Central Park, staring at the ducks in the pond, sitting cross legged to watch an old Negro fishing, buying bubble gum and ballooning out a big one, racing another cyclist on my bike and crashing and scratching my knee and crying, much to the bewilderment of the passersby: 240-pound crybabies being a rarity.
Despite all my efforts to limit my expanding personalities to strangers and to maintain a certain amount of normality ground my friends and colleagues, I always gave the Die at least an outside chance to undo me, and the Die, being God, couldn't long resist.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Once upon a time Dr. Rhinehart dreamt he was a bumblebee, a bumblebee buzzing and flitting around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't believe he was Dr. Rhinehart. Suddenly he felt that he had awakened, and he was old Luke Rhinehart lying in bed beside the beautiful woman Lil. But he didn't know if he was Dr. Rhinehart who had dreamt he was playing the role of a bumblebee, or a bumblebee dreaming he was Dr. Rhinehart. He didn't know, and his head was buzzing. After several minutes he shrugged: `Perhaps I'm actually Hubert Humphrey dreaming I'm a bumblebee dreaming of being Dr. Rhinehart.'
He paused for several more seconds and then rolled over and snuggled up to his wife.
`In any case,' he said to himself, `in this dream of being Dr. Rhinehart I'm glad I'm in bed with a woman and not a bumblebee.'