`Pity, stupid. You're supposed to feel pity. Can't even play a game right-'
`My Luke -'
'Brainless, chestless, assless clump of -'
`My poor sweet sick hero.'
`I'm not sweet! You bitch. I'll stick a dustmop up your-'
`Time,' she said. `It's time.'
`I don't give a fuck. I'd like to chop off your mousy head and peddle your cunt to lepers. I'd like-'
`The three minutes is up, Luke,' she said quietly.
`Oh,' I said, towering over her and slobbering.
`Oh. Sorry about that,' I added.
`It's enough for now,' she said. `And thanks.'
She then proceeded to bury her face in my belly and we went on to a fine fierce diceless fuck, such as is usually
associated with the highly charged emotions of the beginnings or ending of an affair. She'd been compassionate or
loving ever since.
Mostly. That morning when the Die chose tennis we drove afterward to a beach on the bay and swam and played keep away with Larry and Evie and sunned and swam and back at the farm house had nice stiff gin drinks and talked some more, eating soup and cheeseburgers and smoking pot and while Lil made brownies Miss Welish played her guitar and Fred and I sang a duet about Harvard and Cornell and we smoked more pot and retired to our rooms, Lil and I making a slow, languorous giggly love and she cried, and Fred wandered in naked and asked if he could join us in an orgy and after casting the Die I had to say no and he said fuck the Die and I cast again which said that he could fuck the Die but not us and Miss Welish came in, Lil not casting the Die but saying no, and we all sat around discussing poetry and
promiscuity and pot and pornography and the pill and possible positions and penises and pudenda and potency and
permissiveness and playing and pricks.
Much later I made another long, languorous, giggly love to Lil who was all honeyed up from all the talk and before we
fell asleep she said to me dreamily `Now the dice man has a home' and I said `mmmm' and we slept.
Chapter Fifty-two
`I want you to help me to escape,' Eric said quietly, holding the tuna-fish-salad sandwich in his hands lightly, as if it
were delicate. We were in the Ward W cafeteria crowded in amongst other patients and their visitors. I was dressed
casually in an old black suit and a black turtleneck shirt, he was in stiff gray mental-hospital fatigues.
`Why?' I asked, leaning toward him so I could hear better over the surrounding din of voices.
`I've got to get out; I'm not doing anything here anymore.'
He was looking past my shoulder at the chaos of men in line behind my back.
`But why me? You know you can't trust me,' I said.
`I can't trust you, they can't trust you, no one can trust you.'
`Thanks'
`But you're the only untrustworthy one on their side who knows enough to help us.'
`I'm honored. 'I smiled, leaning back in my chair and self-consciously taking a sip from the straw leading into my
paper carton of chocolate milk. I missed the beginning of his next sentence.
`. . . will leave. I know that. Somehow it will come to pass.'
`What?' I said leaning forward again.
`I want you to help me to escape.'
`Oh, that,' I said. `When?'
'Tonight.'
`Ahhhh,' I said, like a doctor being given an especially interesting set of symptoms.
`Tonight at 8 P.M.'
`Not eight fifteen?'
`You will charter a bus to take a group of patients to see Hair in Manhattan. The bus will arrive at 7.45 P.M. You will
come in and lead us out.'
`Why do you want to see Hair?'
His dark eyes darted at me briefly, then back to chaos beyond my shoulder.
`We're not going to see Hair. We're escaping,' he went on quietly. `You'll let us all off on the other side of the bridge.'
`But no one can leave the hospital like that without a written order signed by Dr. Mann or one of the other directors of
the hospital.'
'You will forge the order. If a doctor gives it to the nurse in charge no one will suspect a forgery.'
`After you're free, what happens to me?'