The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

everyone.’ He began eating again. ‘It’ll pass.’

      ‘Do you think I’m joking about this feeling, Jake?’

      He looked away, his eyes jumping from object to object around the room like trapped sparrows.

      ‘Can’t tell, Luke. You’ve been acting strangely lately. Might be a game, might be sincere. Maybe you ought to get back in analysis, talk it up with Tim there. I can’t judge you here as a friend.’

      ‘All right, Jake. But I want you to know that I love you and I don’t think it has anything at all to do with object cathexis or the anal stage.’

      He blinked at me nervously, not eating.

      ‘It’s a Christeean love, or rather, a Judaic-Christeean love, of course,’ I added.

      He was looking more and more terrified. I began to be afraid of him.

      ‘I’m only referring to warm, passionate brotherly love, Jake, it’s nothing to worry about.’

      He smiled nervously, snuck in a quick squint and asked: ‘Have these attacks very often, Luke?’

      ‘Please don’t worry about it. Tell me more about that patient. Have you finished your article about it?’

      Jake was soon back on the main line, throttle wide open, his colleague, love-filled Lucius Rhinehart, successfully side-tracked at Podunk Junction, there to be stationed hopefully until it was possible to write an article about him.

      ‘Sit down, my son,’ I said to Eric Cannon when he entered my little green room at QSH that afternoon. I had been feeling very warm and Jesusy before buzzing for him to be brought in and, standing behind the desk, I looked at him now with love. He looked back at me as though he believed he could see into my soul, his large black eyes glimmering with apparent amusement. Despite his gray khakis and torn T-shirt he was serene and dignified, a lithe, long-haired Christ who looked as though he did gymnastics every day and had fucked every girl on the block.

      He dragged a chair over near the window as he always did and flopped down with casual unconcern, his legs stretched out in front of him, a hole staring mutely at me from the bottom of his left sneaker.

      Bowing my head, I said: ‘Let us pray.’

      He stopped open-mouthed in mid-yawn, his arms clasped behind his head, and stared. Then he drew in his legs, leaned forward and lowered his head.

      ‘Dear God,’ I said aloud. ‘Help us this hour to serve Thy will, be in tune with Thy soul and breathe each breath to Thy glory. Amen.’

      I sat down with my eyes still lowered, wondering where I went from here. In most of my early sessions with Eric, I had been my usual non-directive self and, much to my discomfiture, he became the first patient in recorded psychiatric history who, through his first three consecutive therapy sessions, was able to sit silent and thoroughly relaxed. In the fourth he talked nonstop the entire hour on the state of the ward and world. In subsequent sessions he had alternated between silence and soliloquy. In the previous three weeks I had tried only a couple of dice-dictated experiments and had assigned Eric to try feeling love for all figures of authority but he had met all my ploys with silence. When I raised my head now, he was looking at me alertly. Black eyes pinning me where I sat, he reached into his pocket, leaned forward and wordlessly offered me a Winston.