Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

he asked.

Dr. E looked over the list: 'You wish to be loved slavishly by a . `You-wish to love slavishly a ' `You wish to be courted sweetly by a . . : 'You wish to court sweetly…' `'You wish to be raped by a . . : 'You wish to rape a : . : 'You wish to watch pornographic films,' 'You wish to watch

other people's sexual activities,' 'You wish to striptease,' `To watch a striptease,' 'You wish to be someone's mistress, a

prostitute, a stud, a call girl, a male prostitute, happily married to Most of the options gave the choice of alternatives

for performing the sexual role with: a young woman, an older woman, a young man, an older man, a man and a

woman, two men or two women.

`What's all this?' Dr. Ecstein asked.

`Simply choose those you are willing to play, make a list and let the dice choose one for you to play.'

`Better scratch the "rape" and the "be raped." Had enough of those in the marriage room.'

`All right. Any others, Phil?'

`Stop calling me names.'

`Sorry, Roger.'

`Better throw out the homosexual stuff. Might hurt my reputation outside.'

`But no one in here knows who you are or ever will know.'

`I'm Jake Ecstein, damn it! I've said that six times.'

`I know that, Elijah, but there are five other Jake Ecsteins in here this week as well, so I don't see what difference it

makes.

'Five others!' `Certainly. Would you like to meet some before you try your first random sex experience?'

`You're Goddam-right.'

The teacher took Dr. E into a room named Cocktail Party where a crowd milled and drinks were served. The teacher

took a portly gentleman by the elbow and said to him `Jake, I'd like you to meet Roger. Roger, Jake Ecstein.'

'Goddam it,' Dr. Ecstein said, `I'm Jake Ecstein!'

`Oh are you really?' the portly gentleman said. `I am too. How nice. I'm very pleased to meet you, Jake.'

Dr. E permitted himself to shake hands.

`Have you met the tall thin Jake Ecstein yet?' the portly one asked. `Awfully pleasant chap.'

`No, I haven't. And I don't want to.'

`Well, he is a bit dull, but not a young-man-with-the-muscles Jake. Him you must meet, Jake.'

`Yeah, maybe. But I'm the real Jake Ecstein.'

`How extraordinary. I am too.'

`I mean in the outside world.'

`But that's what I mean too. And so does the tall thin Jake and the young muscled Jake and the lovely young girl Jakie

Ecstein. All of them.'

'But I'm really the real Jake Ecstein.'

`How extraordinary! I too am really…'

Jake passed up a love experience and got rid of his teacher and decided he needed to have a good dinner. He had read

the center's Game Rules and knew as he ate in the cafeteria that the waiters might not be real waiters, that the guy

slinging hash behind the counter might be a bank president, that the cashier might be a famous actress, that the woman

sitting opposite him might be a writer of children's stories although she was apparently pretending, despite weighing

close to two hundred founds, to be Marlene Dietrich.

`You bore me, dahling,' she was saying, her chubby mouth manhandling a cigarette.

`You're not exactly dynamite yourself, baby,' he replied eating rapidly.

`Where are all the men in this place,' she drawled. `I seem to meet only fruits.'

`And I meet only vegetables. So?' Jake answered.

`I beg your pardon. Who are you?'

`I'm Cassius Clay and I'll slug you in the teeth if you don't let me eat in peace.'

Marlene Dietrich relapsed into silence and Jake ate on, enjoying himself for the first time since his arrival. Suddenly he

saw his wife enter the cafeteria, followed by a teenage boy.

'Arlene!' he cried, half-standing.

`George?' she cried back.

Marlene Dietrich left the table and Dr. E waited for Arlene to join him, but instead she sat down at a corner table with

the teenage boy. Annoyed, he got up when he'd finished and went over to their table.

`Well what do you think of it so far?' he asked her.

`George, I'd like you to meet my son, John. John, this is George Fleiss, a very successful used-car salesman.'

`How do you do,' the boy said, sticking out a thin hand. `Pleased to meet you.'

`Yeah, well, look, I'm really Cassius Clay,' he said.

`Oh I am sorry,' Arlene answered.

`You've gotten out of shape,' the boy said indifferently.

Dr. E sat down with them, feeling glum. He did so want to be recognized as Jake Ecstein, psychiatrist. He tried a new

tack.

`What's your name?' he asked his wife.

`Maria,' she answered with a smile. `And this is my boy, John.'

`Where's Edgarina?'

`My daughter is at home.'

`And your husband?' Arlene frowned.

`Unfortunately, he has passed away,' she said.

`Oh great,' said Dr. E.

I beg your pardon!' said she, standing abruptly.

`Oh, ah, sorry. I was overcome with disturbance,' Dr. E said, motioning his wife to sit, `Look,' he went on, `I like you.

I like you very much. Perhaps we could stay together a while.'

`I'm sorry,' Arlene said softly, `I'm afraid people would talk.'

`People would talk? How?'

`You are a colored man and I am white,' she said.

Dr. Ecstein let his mouth hang open and for the first time in his last nineteen years experienced something which ha

realized later may have been self-pity.

Chapter Seventy-six

Being an American born and bred, it was in my bones to kill. Most of my adult life I had carried around like an

instantaneously inflatable balloon a free-floating aggression which kept an imaginative array of murders, wars and plagues parading across my mind whenever my life got difficult: a cabbie tried to overcharge me, Lil criticized me, Jake published another brilliant article. In the year before I discovered the dice, Lil was killed by a steamroller, an airplane crash, a rare virus, cancer of the throat, a flash fire in her bed, under the wheels of the Lexington Avenue Express and by an inadvertent drinking of arsenic. Jake had succumbed to driving into the East River in a taxi, a brain tumor, a stock-market-crash-induced suicide and an insane attack with a samurai's sword by one of his former cured patients. Dr. Mann succumbed to a heart attack, appendicitis, acute indigestion and a Negro rapist. The whole world itself had suffered at least a dozen full-scale nuclear wars, three plagues of unknown origin but universal effectiveness and an invasion from outer space by superior creatures who invisibleized everyone except a few geniuses. I had, of course, beaten to a bloody pulp President Nixon, six cab drivers, four pedestrians, six rival psychiatrists and several miscellaneous women. My mother had been buried in an avalanche and may still be alive there for all I know.

Being an American I had to kill. No self-respecting Dice Man could honestly write down options day after day without including a murder or a real rape. I did, in fact, begin to include as a long shot the rape of some randomly selected female, but the dice ignored it. Reluctantly, timidly, with my old friend dread reborn and moiling in my guts, I

also created a long-shot option of `murdering someone.'

I gave it only one chance in thirty-six (snake eyes) and three, four times spread out over a year the Die ignored it, but

then, one lovely Indian Summer day, with the birds twittering outside in the bushes of my newly rented Catskill

farmhouse, the autumn leaves blowing and blinding in the sun and a little beagle puppy I'd just been given wagging

his tail at my feet, the Die, given ten different options of varying probabilities dropped double ones snake eyes: `I will

try to murder someone.'

I felt acute anxiety and excitement combined, but not the doubt in the world that I would do it. Leaving Lil had been