Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

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.'

Chapter Forty

Dr. Abraham Krum, the German-American researcher, had in just five years astounded the psychiatric world with three complex sets of experiments, each of which proved something unique. He began by being the first man in world history able experimentally to induce psychosis in chickens, a creature previously considered of too low intelligence to achieve psychosis. Secondly, he .had managed to isolate the chemical agent (moratycemate) which caused or was associated with the psychosis, thus being the first man to prove conclusively that chemical change could be isolated as a crucial variable in the psychosis of chickens. Thirdly, he discovered an antidote (amoratycemate) which completely cured ninety-three percent of the chickens of their psychosis in just three days of treatment, thus becoming the first man in world history to cure a psychosis exclusively by chemical means.

There was considerable speculation about the Nobel Prize. His current work on schizophrenia in pigeons was followed, like stock market reports by large numbers of people in the psychiatric world. The drug amoratycemate was being experimentally administered to psychotic patients at several mental hospitals in Germany and the United States with interesting results. (Side effects involving blood clots and colitis had not yet been conclusively confirmed, nor had they been eliminated.) Dr. Krum was to be the guest of honor at a party given by Dr. Mann for his friends and certain luminaries of the New York psychiatric world. It was to be a major occasion, with the president of PANY (Dr. Joseph Weinburger), the director of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and two or three other extremely big deals whom I can never remember. The dice, imps of the perverse, ordered that I vary my person every ten minutes or so throughout the evening among six roles: a gentle Jesus, an honest dice man, an uninhibited sex maniac, a mute moron, a bullshit artist and a Leftist agitator.

I had created the options under the influence of marijuana, which I had smoked for half an hour as the result of an option created under the influence of alcohol, which I had drunk because the dice - ad infinitum. My dicelife was getting out of control and the party for Dr. Krum was the climax. Dr. Mann's apartment manages to resemble both a funeral home and a museum. His servant, Mr. Thornton, a cadaver, opened the door that evening with all the warmth of a mechanical skeleton, removed Lil's coat, ignored her plunging neckline, said, `Good evening, Dr. Rhinehart,' as if Dr. Mann had just died, and led us down the hall - filled with portraits of famous psychiatrists - and into the living room.

Whenever I entered the room I was always surprised to find living people there. Jake was against a wall of bookcases in one corner talking with Miss Reingold (there to take notes for Jake), Professor Boggles (there because my dice had said to invite him and his dice had said to accept) and a couple of other, men, presumably world-famous psychiatrists. On an immense oriental couch in front of a Victorian fireplace sat Arlene, Dr. Felloni (who nodded her head rapidly at my appearance) and an elderly woman, presumably somebody's mother. Arlene was dressed as briefly as Lil and with a slightly more spectacular effect: her two luscious breasts made it look as if lovely white balloons had been stuffed into her dress from above but threatened to float out at any moment. In easy chairs opposite the couch were an elderly, retired big deal I vaguely knew, a chubby woman, presumably 'somebody's wife and a small man with a tiny pointed beard, slump-shouldered yet intense: the Dr. Krum I knew from photographs.

Dr. Mann greeted us wineglass in hand, his face slightly flushed with glory, worry and booze, and led us toward the women and Dr. Krum. I shook the tiny die in a specially built watchcase in my pocket, eased it out and glanced at the result to discover which of the six roles I was now to play for ten minutes or so.

`Dr. Krum, I'd like you to meet a former student and colleague of mine, Dr. Lucius Rhinehart,' said Dr. Mann. `Luke, this is Dr. Krum.'

`Dr. Rhinehart, a pleasure, a pleasure. Your work I have not read but Dr. Mann says highly of you.'

Dr. Krum shook hands with short emphatic stabs and bared his teeth in an exaggerated grimace as he looked confidently up into my face, looming nearly a foot above him.

`Dr. Krum, I'm speechless. I never hoped to meet a man who'd done such work in my own lifetime. I'm deeply, deeply honored.'

`It's nothing, nothing. In a few years, then I will show you my dear, delighted, delighted.'

He bowed slightly to, Lil and clicked his heels as he shook her hand with two quick pumps. He looked up at her and then at me with a pleased, flushed face.