Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

The fear of Chance is clean, enduring forever:

The judgments of Chance are true and righteous altogether.

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Fifty-eight

Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus and dictators throughout the world continually tell us. I spent many days that August thinking about what I would do with my life, oscillating hour to hour from joy to gloom, madness to boredom.

I was lonely. There was no one to whom I could go and say: `Aren't I wonderful; I left Lil and my job in order to toss dice and become a totally random man. If you're lucky the dice may let me finish this conversation.'

I had not given, a last kiss to Lil and the children. I hadn't left a note. I had gathered up a few personal notebooks, a checkbook, two or three books (chosen by a Die at random), several pairs of green dice and left the apartment. I returned two minutes later and left the only message in the world I felt Lil might understand and believe: on the floor in front of the easy chair I had placed two dice, their upturned faces showing a two and a one.

I had thought at first that nothing should be impossible to the Dice Man at any given moment. It was an elevating aspiration. I might not be more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but in terms of being free at any given moment to do whatever the dice or the spontaneous `I' might dictate, I would be, compared to all known past human beings, a superman.

But I was lonely. Superman at least had a regular job and Lois Lane. But being a real superbeing, one capable of marvels and miracles compared to the mechanical and repetitious acrobatics of Superman and Batman, was lonely, I'm sorry, fans, but that's how I felt.

I had gone to a dingy hotel in the East Village that made the geriatrics ward at QSH seem like a plush retirement villa. I sweated and sulked and wandered out to play a few dice roles and dice games and sometimes I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but those nights alone in that hotel room were not among the high points of my life.

The problem of boredom which the Die had so successfully solved seemed, now that I was approaching the totally free state, to be reappearing. My own family and friends had been boring enough, but I began to feel that the average humans I was encountering on the streets and bars and hotels of Fun City were far worse. The dice had introduced me already to such variety that I was- beginning to find, like Solomon, that it was difficult to find anything new under the sun.

As a wealthy southern aristocrat I had seduced a young, reasonably presentable typist and kept her two nights (`Y'all shore do have a nice boahdy') before the dice reincarnated me as a Bowery bum. I stored all my cash and some new clothes I had bought in a locker, stopped shaving and for two days and nights panhandled and got drunk on the lower East Side. I didn't get much sleep and felt lonelier than ever, my only friends being an occasional stray derelict who would hang around until he was sure I was really broke. I got so hungry that I finally straightened up my clothes as best I could and stole a box of crackers and two cans of tuna fish from a small supermarket. A young `clerk looked very suspicious but after I'd finished my `browsing' I asked him if they sold amoratycemate and that shut him up while I left.

As a life-insurance salesman looking for a fresh lay, I failed to get anywhere and spent another lonely night.

The dice permitted me to phone the police three times: once to say in a thick Negro accent that the Black Panthers had sprung Arturo Jones from the hospital; once as Dr. Rhinehart to inform that I had left my wife but if they wanted to question me about anything I'd make myself available; and once as an anonymous hippie informer, telling them that Eric Cannon had been permitted to escape by an act of God.

I spent two days playing with a thousand dollars in a Wall Street brokerage house, letting the Die buy and sell or hold at its discretion and I only lost two hundred dollars but I was still bored.

About nine o'clock one hot August evening, sitting crowded and lonely at one end of a packed Village bar and having crumpled up in the course of the previous two days at least four separate lists of options, I had to face the fact that now that I was free to be absolutely anything, I was rapidly becoming interested in absolutely nothing: a somewhat distressing development. It was such an original experience, however, that I began to laugh happily to myself, my big belly shaking like an old engine warming up. I would obviously have to give the dice a brief vacation and see what happened. I would grow for a few weeks organically instead of randomly.

Having thus decisively decided not to decide, I felt vaguely better, even with a tart, rather evil-tasting beer awash in

my tummy and unfinished in my glass. I wanted rest. I'd left Lil: a great triumph (I felt tired). Let me drift in peace. Trying to feel serenity I left the noisy bar and, after a half hour's organic wandering, entered another just like it. The beer tasted the same too. I thought of telephoning Jake and pretending to be Erich Fromm calling from Mexico City. I dismissed it as a symptom of loneliness. I thought of yelling, `Drinks on me!' but my organic frugality vetoed the impulse. I daydreamed about buying a yacht and circling the globe.

`Well, if it isn't old coitus-interruptus himself.'

The voice, sharp and feminine, was followed by the fact, soft and feminine, and the recognition, hard and masculine, of the half-smiling face of Linda Reichman. 'Er, hello, Linda,' I said, not to suavely. I found myself instinctively trying to remember what role I was supposed to be

playing.

`What brings you here?' she asked.

`Oh. I .. don't know. I sort of drifted here.'

She edged between my neighbor and me and placed her drink on the bar. Her eyes were heavily made up, her hair a

more deeply bleached blonde than I remembered it, her body no need to speculate about her measurements; her breasts swayed bralessly against a tight-fitting multicolored T-shirt. She looked very sexy in a debauched sort of way and she eyed me with curiosity.

`Drifted? The Great Psychiatrist drifted? I had the impression that you never even picked your nose without writing a

treatise proving its value.'

'That was the old days. I've changed, Linda.'

`Ever managed an orgasm?' I laughed and she smiled.

`How about yourself?'

I asked. 'What've you been doing?'

`Disintegrating,' she said and gracefully swallowed the last of her drink. `You ought to try it, it's fun.'

`I think I'd like to.'

A man appeared next to her, a small frail man with glasses who looked like a graduate student in organic chemistry,

and after glancing once at me, he said to Linda: `Come on, let's go.'

Linda slowly turned her eyes to the man and, with a look that made all previous looks I'd seen on her face seem like

idolatrous administration, announced: `I'm staying awhile.'

Organic chemistry blinked at her, looked at my impressive bulk nervously and took her by the elbow.

`Come on,' he said.

She lifted the dregs of her drink carefully off the bar past my face and poured it slowly down organic chemistry's back

inside his shirt, ice cubes and all.

`Go change your shirt first,' she said.

He never batted an eye. With a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders he merged back into the surrounding mob.

`You think you'd like to disintegrate, huh?' she said to me and then signaled to a bartender for another drink.

`Yes, but it seems an awfully hard thing to do. I've been trying it for over a year now and it takes tremendous effort.'

`A year! You don't look it. You look like a middle-class insurance salesman who comes once every four months to the