The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

and opened a crack.

      ‘Jake?’ a voice said sleepily.

      ‘It’s me, Arlene,’ I said.

      ‘What do you want?’ The door stayed open only a crack.

      ‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I said.

      ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just a minute.’

      She unlatched and opened the door. She was wearing an unattractive cotton bathrobe, possibly even Jake’s, her black hair was straggling down her forehead, cold cream whitened her face, and she was squinting at me without her glasses like a blind beggar woman in a melodrama of the life of Christ.

      Closing the door behind me I turned toward her and waited, wondering passively what I was going to do next.

      ‘What did you say you wanted?’ she asked; she was groggy with sleep.

      ‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I replied and advanced toward her, she continuing to stand there with a widening and perhaps wakening look of curiosity. Feeling for the first time a faint hint of sexual desire, I put my arms around her, lowered my head and planted my mouth on her neck.

      Almost immediately I felt her hands pushing hard against my chest and soon a long-drawn-out ‘Luuuu-UUke,’ part terror, part question, part giggle. After a good solid wet arousing kissing of her upper dorsal region I released her. She stepped back a step and straightened her ugly bathrobe. We stared at each other, in our differently hypnotized states, like two drunks confronting each other, knowing they are expected to dance.

      ‘Come,’ I found myself saying after our mutual moment of awe, and I put my left arm around her waist and began drawing her toward the bedroom.

      ‘Let go of me,’ she said sharply and pushed my arm away.

      With the mechanical swiftness of a superbly driven puppet my right hand slammed across her face. She was terror-stricken. So was I. A second time we faced each other, her face now showing a blotch of red on the left side. I mechanically wiped some cold cream off my fingers onto my trousers, then I reached out and took hold of the front of her robe and pulled her to me.

      ‘Come,’ I said again.

      ‘Get your hands off Jake’s bathrobe,’ she hissed uncertainly.

      I released her and said: ‘I want to rape you, Arlene. Now, this moment. Let’s go.’

      Like a frightened kitten she hunched down away from me with her hands tugging her robe at the throat. Then she straightened.

      ‘All right,’ she said, and with a look which I can only describe as righteous indignation, began to move past me down the hall toward the bedroom, adding, ‘But you leave Jake’s bathrobe alone.’

      The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination, passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene’s. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounting her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.

      ‘Why did you do it, Luke?’

      ‘I had to, Arlene, I was driven to it.’

      ‘Jake won’t like it.’

      ‘Ah … Jake?’

      ‘I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.’

      ‘But … this … have you been … raped before?’

      ‘No. Not since getting married. Jake’s the only one and he never rapes me.’

      ‘Are you sure you have to tell him?’

      ‘Oh yes. He’d want to know.’

      ‘But won’t he be tremendously upset?’

      ‘Jake? No. He’ll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we’d committed sodomy that would be even more interesting.’

      ‘Arlene, stop being bitter.’

      ‘I’m not bitter. Jake’s a scientist.’

      ‘Well, maybe you’re right but –’

      ‘Of course, there was that once …’

      ‘What once?’

      ‘That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull with a bottle of … bottle of … was it Cognac?’

      ‘Split his skull?’

      ‘Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy –’

      ‘I’m remembering – so look, Arlene, don’t be silly, don’t tell Jake about tonight.’

      She considered this.

      ‘But if I don’t tell him, it will imply I’ve done something wrong.’

      ‘No. I’ve done something wrong, Arlene. And I don’t want to lose Jake’s friendship and trust just because I’ve raped you.’

      ‘I understand.’

      ‘He’d be hurt.’

      ‘Yes, he would. He wouldn’t be objective. If he’d been drinking …’

      ‘Yes, he would …’

      ‘I won’t tell him.’

      We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.

      For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly:

      ’Luke, baby, you’re just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He’s cured. I did it. I’m famous.’

       Chapter Nine

      Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods – the die – rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die’s being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape was obviously dictated by fate. Not guilty.

      Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located spittoon in front of my jury.

      But on the whole it seemed a pretty weak defense, and I began vaguely hunting for a new one when I became ablaze at the thought: I am right: I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die!

      Excited and proud, I stood for a moment on my own personal Rubicon. And then I stepped across. I established in my mind at that moment and for