`I'll be waiting, sweetheart,' she said, and with an unintended swinging of the more desirable parts of her anatomy, she
moved to her bed and climbed in.
`Goodnight, Lil,' Dr. Rhinehart said.
`Mmmm,' she said. `Check the kids 'fore you come.'
Dr. Rhinehart, still holding in his left hand the paper, pen and two dice, walked quickly to the children's bedroom and
tiptoed in to look at Larry and Evie. They were sound asleep, Larry with his mouth open like a child drunk and Evie
with her face so buried by the sheet that he could only make out the top of her head.
`Have good dreams,' he said and silently left the room and returned to the living room.
He placed the paper, pencil and dice on the floor in front of the easy chair and then, with a sudden lunge, took four
strides toward his bedroom and stopped. Sighing, he returned to kneel on the rug beside the tools of his trade. To relax
himself and prepare for what he had to do, he performed a series of random dice exercises; four random physical
exercises, two one-minute spurts of the sinner-saint game, and one three minute period of emotional roulette - the Die
choosing self pity, an emotion he found himself expressing with enthusiasm. Then he placed the two green dice on the
easy chair in front of him and, kneeling on the rug, intoned a prayer:
Great God blob Die, I worship thee;
Awaken me this morn With thy green gaze,
Quicken my dead life With thy plastic breath,
Spill into the arid spaces of my soul Thy green vinegar.
A hundred hungry birds scatter my seed,
You roll them into cubes and plant me.
The people I fear are
Puppets poking puppets,
Playthings costumed by my mind.
When you fall,
O Die,
The strings collapse and I walk free.
I am thy grateful urn, O Die, Fill me.
Dr. Rhinehart felt a serene joy such as always came to him when he surrendered his will to the Die: the peace which
passeth understanding. He wrote upon the white, blank paper the options for his life for the next year.
If the dice total two, three or twelve: he would leave his wife and children forever. He recorded this option with dread.
He'd given it once chance in nine.
He gave one chance in five (dice total of four or five) that he would completely abandon the use of his dice for at least
three months. He desired this option as a dying man the wonder drug to end his ills and feared it as a healthy man does
a threat to his balls.
Dice total six (one chance in seven): be would begin revolutionary activity against the injustice of the established
order. He didn't know what he had in mind by the option, but it gave him pleasure to think of thwarting the police,
who were making him so uncomfortable. He began daydreaming about joining forces with Arturo or Eric until a police
siren on the street outside his apartment building so frightened him that he thought of erasing the option (the mere
writing of it might be a crime) and then decided to go quickly on to the others.
Dice total of seven (one chance in six): he would devote the entire next year to the development of dice theory and
therapy. Recording this brought such pleasant excitement that he considered giving it the totals of eight and nine as
well, but fought back such human weakness and went on.
Dice total of eight (one chance in seven): he would write an autobiographical account of this adventures.
Dice total nine, ten or eleven (one chance in four): he would leave the profession of psychiatry, including dice therapy,
for one year, letting the dice choose a new profession. He recorded this with pride; he would not be the prisoner of his
fascination for his beloved dice therapy.
Examining his six options, Dr. Rhinehart was pleased; they showed imagination and daring. Each of them represented
both threat and treat, both the danger of disaster and the possibility of new power.
He placed the paper by his side and the two green dice in front of him on the floor.