`I suppose so.'
'They've ruined your marriage.'
`Naturally.'
`They make it impossible for me or anyone else to rely on anything you say or do from now on.'
'True.'
'They mean that anything you begin may be abandoned right at the point of fruition by a whim of a die.'
`Yes.'
`Including the investigations of the dice man.'
`Ah, Jake, you understand perfectly.'
`I think I do.'
`Why don't you try it too?' I asked warmly. `It's possible.'
`We could become the Dynamic Dice Duo, dealing dreams and destruction to the pattern-plagued world of modern
man.'
`Yes, that's interesting.'
`You're about the only one I know intelligent enough to understand what the Dice Man is really all about.'
`I suppose I am.'
`Well?'
`Have to think it over, Luke. It's a big step.'
`Sure, I understand.'
`It's got to be Oedipal; that damn father of yours.'
`Wha - what?'
'That time when you were three and your mother-'
`Jake! What are you talking about?' I asked loudly and with irritation. `I've just unfolded the most imaginative new life
system in the history of man and you start talking old Freudian mythology.'
'Huh? Oh, I'm sorry,' he said, smiling his professional smile. `Go ahead.'
But I laughed, bitterly I'm afraid. `No, never mind. I'm tired of talking today,' I said. Jake leaned forward and stared at
me intently.
'I'll cure you,' he said. I'll tie you back into the old Luke or my name isn't Jake Ecstein. Don't you worry.'
I sighed and felt sad. 'Yeah,' I said dully. I won't worry.'
Chapter Forty-five
The pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart created by the dice for the week of June 22 appeared so conventional, so rational, so
ambitious and so interested in psychology that Doctors Ecstein and Mann decided to take a chance and permit me to defend myself at the meeting of the executive committee of PANY on June 30. Jake, while not yet convinced of the soundness of my theory, was increasingly enjoying certain dice exercises to which Arlene was introducing him and wished to be generous. Dr. Mann, not having been informed of the radical nature of my dicelife, was vaguely hopeful that the rational, conventional, ambitious man he talked to during the week of June 22 would still exist on the thirtieth. The executive committee had agreed to my presence because they could find nothing in their bylaws which forbade it.
The charges against me were simple - my theories and practice of dice therapy were incompetent, ridiculous, unethical
and of no `lasting medical value.' Consequently, I should be expelled from PANY and a letter should be sent to the president of the AMA urging that I be forbidden to practice medicine anywhere in the United States or Canada (the southern part of the hemisphere being considered beyond salvation). I looked forward to the meeting as a welcome break from the confinement of the Kolb Clinic. Then occurred one of those unfortunate accidents which flaw even the most well-ordered dicelife: I absentmindedly gave the dice a foolish option and the Die chose it. When considering what to do about the PANY indictment - to which my residual self was indifferent the old Luke Rhinehart I was being that week created as an option that if the committee voted to expel me I would cease dice therapy and dice living for one year. I gaily toppled a die onto my hospital bed and lost my gaiety: the Die chose that option.
In so far as anything is certain in this Die-dictated universe, it was certain that the executive committee would find me guilty. Not one of the five members of the committee was likely to be sympathetic. Dr. Weinburger, the chairman, was an ambitious, successful, conventional genius who hated everything that took time away from his glory-producing activities at his Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying.
He had never heard of me before his brief brush with me at the Krum party and it was clear he would hope never to hear of me again.
Old Dr. Cobblestone was a fair, rational, open-minded and just man who would thus naturally vote against me. Although Dr. Mann had been trying to get the fellow members of the committee to agree to force me to resign quietly from PANY, after he failed in this effort he would naturally vote to condemn everything he detested. Namely me.
The fourth member of the committee was Dr. Peerman, who had initiated the proceedings against me when two of his brightest young psychiatrist interns - Joe Fineman and Fuigi Arishi - had suddenly deserted him and begun practicing dice therapy under my random tutelage. He was a slight, pale, middle-aged man with a high-pitched voice, whose fame rested securely on his widely acclaimed research demonstrating that teenagers who smoked marijuana were more likely to try LSD than teenagers who did not. His vote in my favor seemed doubtful. Finally there was Dr. Moon, an ancient body in the heavens of New York psychoanalysis, a personal friend of Freud, the creator, in the early 1920s, of the widely discussed theory of the natural, irreversible depravity of children and a member of the executive committee of PANY since its origin in 1923. Although he was seventy-seven years old and one of the leading subjects in Dr. Weinburger's Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the Dying, he still tried to take vigorous part in the proceedings. Unfortunately, his behavior was sometimes so erratic that from what I had heard it seemed he might be a secret diceperson, although his colleagues attributed his `slight eccentricities' to `incipient senility.'
Although he was reputed to be the most reactionary member in all of PANY, his was the only vote that - because of his unreliability - didn't seem certain to go against me.
Hang considered the likely attitudes of my judges, I gave the Die a one-in-thirty-six chance that I kill myself. Unfortunately, it spurned the offer.
But the fact remained that if the committee expelled me the Die had ordered me to abandon the dicelife for one year, and this thought depressed me beyond all my previous experience. It so terrified me that for the three days before the scheduled meeting I worked every hour to prepare what seemed to me a reasonable case for my dice theory and therapy. I took notes, wrote articles, practiced speeches and considered what roles would best permit me somehow to sway Doctors Cobblestone and Mann to vote against my expulsion. Then my only hope would lie in some accident permitting the erratic old Dr. Moon to also be on my side.
Such dedicated work was possible since I was still in The Old Luke Rhinehart Week, but on June 29 it would end and the Die would have to choose a new role or roles for the last two days. Would the Die choose that I switch roles rapidly as at the Krum party? Would it permit me to be my most rational and articulate? Would it tell me to blow the whole thing? I wouldn't know until the die was cast.
Chapter Forty-six
On June 28, 1969, at approximately 2.30 in the afternoon in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where Jake had permitted me to go with a bodyguard attendant, I discovered the laughing men in the sky.
I was sitting a trifle despondent at an isolated table alongside row upon row of stacks doing research on my defense. To my right was a small table with two men and a teen-age boy. There was no one at my table except an old woman opposite me with bushy eyebrows and hairy arms reading behind a pile of books. My attendant was standing in the corner near the window reading a comic. I had been sitting there for perhaps forty minutes, running my big fingers over the uneven grained surface of the table and daydreaming about what some of my options might be for my mode of defense and finding that my mind seemed drawn to such cheerful ones as strangling Dr. Peerman, sitting wordlessly throughout the proceedings but maintaining a continually low giggle, or peeing ostentatiously on any papers they might bring. With an effort I decided that I must force my mind back to its defense and I asked again, almost in an audible whisper: `What, then, can I do to save myself?'
As I was repeating this question to myself and doodling with a wooden pencil in one of the cracks in the table, there came above the street noises the sound of bubbling human laughter.
The sound made me smile; then I realized its un-likelihood in the New York Public Library. I looked around. The old lady opposite me was looking with knitted bush brows at one of her pile of books; the three males at the other table seemed neither amused nor offended; my attendant was scowling as if stuck with some tough words. Yet the bubbling laughter continued, even growing louder.
Then, surprise, the laughter must be my hallucination.
I sat back in my chair and tried briefly to block it out, but the laughter continued to flow. When I looked up, I saw very far away and high up a fat man shaking with laughter and pointing a finger at me. He seemed to think that my effort to find the right defense was the play of a, silly fool. He also found amusing my effort to smile at the realization that I was a fool. He thought my seeing his laughter at my smiling at his laughing was also funny. When I finally frowned, he laughed even harder. `Enough,' I said loudly, but began to laugh myself.