`I know that type,' I said confidently. `A hot, slimy, ball breaking one-time sophist feminist lay, but nervous as a
vibrator.'
'But which is the real Linda?' Mr. Hopper said dreamily to no one in particular.
`Who cares?' I sneered.
`Who cares?' echoed Linda, sitting up again and yawning. Then she leaned toward Mr. Hopper.
`What are your true feelings now, Hank?' she asked him.
For a moment the question caught him off guard; then he smiled.
`Happy confusion,' he said loudly.
`And how do you feel now, Linda?' asked Marya, but the question was met by six or seven groans from group
members seated around the room.
Linda flipped a pair of green dice out onto the middle of the rug and, after looking mischievously at each of us in turn, asked quietly `Anyone want to play some games?'
Linda was marvelous. What people needed in these groups was someone to let himself go so completely that inhibitions were knocked away. Linda could strip, simulate all kinds of love, could rage, cry, could argue convincingly, all in such rapid succession that she soon made everyone experience existence inside the group as a game; nothing seemed to matter. After we'd gotten most of the members of an encounter group to splinter off the original leader and meet only with us (as happened on Fire Island that weekend), they came to see that with us truth and honesty were irrelevant; we approved good acting and bad, role playing and out-of-role playing, baddie roles and goodie roles, truth and lies.
When one individual would try to pretend to be his `real' self and call the others back to `reality,' we would try to encourage our dice players to ignore him and go right on playing their dice-dictated roles. When someone else, as the result of playing out some role dammed up inside him for years, broke down and cried, the group would at first rally round the bawler to reassure him, as they'd gotten used to doing in traditional encounter groups. We tried to show them that this was the worst thing they could do; the crier should be ignored or be responded to solely within the roles that were already being played.
We wanted them to come to realize that neither `immorality' nor `emotional breakdowns' earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group dice play they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one - least of all us, the leaders - is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves - as the dice dictate. In those cases when the other group members respond conventionally to someone's breakdown, our work is undone: the sufferer feels frightened and ashamed. He believes that the `real world' and its conventional attitudes exist even in group dice play.
And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him. His `reality,' his `reason,' his 'society': these are what must be destroyed.
All that fall Linda and I did our very best.
In addition to our work with various groups, Linda went to work on H. J. Wipple, a philanthropist whom I'd gotten interested in building a Dice Center for us in Southern California, and construction soon speeded up considerably. Work even began in renovating a boys' camp in the Catskills for a second Center. The world was getting ready for dicepeople.
Chapter Sixty-two
Naturally Dr. Rhinehart felt a little guilty about leaving his wife and children without the slightest hint of when he'd return, but he consulted the Die, which advised him to forget about it. Then four months after he'd left home, a random Whim chose one of his random whims and ordered him to return to his apartment and try to seduce his wife.
Mrs. Rhinehart greeted him at two o'clock in the afternoon in a stylish new pants suit he'd never seen before and a cocktail in her hand.
`I've got a visitor now, Luke,' she said quietly. `If you want to see me come back about four.'
It was not precisely the greeting Dr. Rhinehart had expected after four months of mysterious disappearance, and while he was rallying his mental faculties for a suitable riposte he discovered the door had gently been closed in his face.
Two hours later he tried again.
`Oh, it's you,' said Mrs. Rhinehart as she might have greeted a plumber just back with a fresh tool. `Come on in.'
`Thank you,' said Dr. Rhinehart with dignity.
His wife walked ahead of him into the living room and offered him a seat, herself leaning against a new desk covered
with papers and books. Dr. Rhinehart stood dramatically in the middle of the room and looked intently at his wife.
`Where you been?' she asked, with a tone of bored interest discouragingly close to what she might have used asking
her son Larry the same question after he'd been out of the house for twenty minutes.
`The dice told me to leave you, Lil, and . . . well, I left.'
`Yes. I figured as much. What are you doing these days?'
Speechless for a few seconds, Dr. Rhinehart nevertheless managed to look intently at his wife.
`I'm doing a lot of work these days with group dice therapy.'
'How nice,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. She moved away from the desk over in front of a new painting Dr. Rhinehart had
never seen before and glanced at some mail which was lying on a table beneath the painting. Then she turned back to
him.
`Part of me has missed you, Luke.' She smiled warmly at him. `And part of me hasn't.'
`Yeah, me too.'
`Part of me was mad mad mad,' she went on, frowning. `And part of me, she smiled again, `was glad glad glad.'
`Really?'
`Yes. Fred Boyd helped me let go of the mad mad mad business and that's just left me with . . . the other.'
`How'd Fred do it?'
`After I'd cried and complained and raged for an hour or so two days after you'd left, he said to me: "You ought to
consider suicide, Lil."
'Lil paused to smile at the memory. 'That sort of caught my attention so to speak, and he went on to say: "Shake the
dice also to see whether you should try to kill Luke."
'Good friend, old Fred,' Dr. Rhinehart interjected, and began pacing nervously back and forth in front of his wife.
`Another option he suggested was that I divorce you and try to marry him.'
`One of my real pals.'