The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

became aware that I was grinding a die into the green velvet. I tried to relax.

      ‘By the way, Tim, I had my first interview with that boy you had sent to QSH for me. I found him –’

      ‘I don’t care about your patient at QSH, Luke, unless it’s going to get into print.’

      He still didn’t look at me, and the abruptness of the remark stunned me.

      ‘If you’re not writing, you’re not thinking,’ he went on, ‘and if you’re not thinking you’re dead.’

      ‘I used to feel that way.’

      ‘Yes, you did. Then you discovered Zen.’

      ‘Yes, I did.’

      ‘And now you find writing a bore.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And thinking?’

      ‘And thinking too,’ I said.

      ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with Zen,’ he said.

      ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking.’

      ‘It’s been fashionable among thinkers lately to say so, but saying, “I strongly think that thinking is nonsense,” that seems rather absurd to me.’

      ‘It is absurd; so is psychoanalysis.’

      He looked over at me; the crinkles around his left eye twitched.

      ‘Psychoanalysis has led to more new knowledge of the human soul than all the previous two million years of thinking put together. Zen has been around a long time and I haven’t noticed any great body of knowledge flowing from it.’ Without apparent irritability he let out another vigorous mushroom cloud toward the ceiling. I was fingering one of the dice, nervously pressing my fingers into the little dots; I still looked at him, he at Freud.

      ‘Tim, I’m not going to argue the merits and demerits of Zen again with you. I’ve told you that whatever I’ve gained from Zen is not something I’ve been able to articulate.’

      ‘What you’ve gained from Zen is intellectual anemia.’

      ‘Maybe I’ve gained sense. You know that eighty percent of the stuff in the psychoanalytic journals is crap. Useless crap. Including mine.’ I paused. ‘Including … yours.’

      He hesitated, and then bubbled up a chuckle.

      ‘You know the first principle of medicine: you can’t cure the patient without a sample of his crap,’ he said.

      ‘Who needs to be cured?’

      He turned his eyes lazily into mine and said:

      ‘You do.’

      ‘You analyzed me. What’s the matter?’ I shot back stare for stare.

      ‘Nothing the matter that a little reminder of what life is all about won’t cure.’

      ‘Oh, piss,’ I said.

      ‘You don’t like to push yourself, and along comes Zen and tells you to “go with the flow”.’

      He paused and, still looking at me, dropped his pipe in an ashtray on the small table beside him.

      ‘Your flow is naturally stagnant.’

      ‘Makes a good breeding ground,’ I said and tried a short laugh.

      ‘For Christ’s sake, Luke, don’t laugh,’ he said loudly. ‘You’re wasting your life these days, throwing it away.’

      ‘Aren’t we all?’

      ‘No, we’re not. Jake isn’t. I’m not. Good men in every profession aren’t. You weren’t, until a year ago.’

      ‘When I was a child. I spoke like a child –’

      ‘Luke, Luke, listen to me.’ He was an agitated old man.

      ‘Well –?’

      ‘Come back to analysis with me.’

      I rubbed the die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered:

      ‘No.’

      ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said sharply. ‘Why have you lost faith in the significance of your work? Will you please try to explain?’

      Without premeditation I surged up from my chair like a defensive tackle at the sight of a shot at the quarterback. I strode across the room in front of Dr Mann to the big window looking along the street toward Central Park.

      ‘I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m sorry but that’s about it. I’m sick of lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles –’

      ‘These are symptoms, not analysis.’

      ‘To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendships, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I’d finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now … they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.’

      ‘You sound like a disillusioned sophomore.’

      ‘The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs. The same old new philosophies. And the thing I’d really pinned my ego to, psychoanalysis, doesn’t seem to be a bit relevant to the problem.’

      ‘It’s totally relevant.’

      ‘Because analysis, were it really on the right track, should be able to change me, to change anything and anybody, to eliminate all undesired neurotic symptoms and to do it much more quickly than the two years necessary to produce most measurable changes in people.’

      ‘You’re dreaming, Luke. It can’t be done. In both theory and practice it’s impossible to rid an individual of all his undesired habits, tensions, compulsions, inhibitions, what-have-you.’

      ‘Then maybe the theory and practice are wrong.’

      ‘Undoubtedly.’

      ‘We can perfect plants, alter machines, train animals, why not men?’

      ‘For God’s sake!’ Dr Mann tapped his pipe vigorously against a bronze ashtray and glared up at me irritably. ‘You’re dreaming. There are no Utopias. There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man’s personal proverb about himself is: “Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.” The whole tendency is … the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don’t change corpses. Corpses aren’t bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.’

      ‘I absolutely agree: psychoanalysis rarely breaks this solidifying flow of personality, it has nothing to offer the man who is bored.’

      Dr Mann harrumphed or snorted or something and I moved away from the window to look up at Freud. Freud stared down seriously; he didn’t look pleased.

      ‘There must be some other … other secret [blasphemy!] some other … magic potion which would permit certain men to radically alter their lives,’ I went on.

      ‘Try astrology, the I Ching, LSD.’

      ‘Freud gave me a taste