The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

tell you. I’ve told you about the fuckin’ women I’ve fucked and how they make me want to puke with their snaky wet orgasms, but I guess I’ll keep this to myself.’

      [Pause]

      ‘You feel that although I’d like to know, you’ve already told me about your relations with women and so you won’t tell me.’

      ‘Actually, it’s sodomy. When I get tense – it might be right after I’ve fucked some white-satin slut, I get … I need … I want to ram the Goddam insides out of some woman … some girl … young … the younger the better.’

      ‘When you’re very keyed up you want to ram the insides out of some woman.’

      ‘The Goddam insides. I want to sink my prick up that intestine into that belly through the esophagus up that throat and come right out the Goddam top of her head.’

      [Pause]

      ‘You’d like to penetrate through her whole body.’

      ‘Yeah, but up her ass. I want her to scream, to bleed, to be horrified.’

      [Pause. Long pause]

      ‘You’d like to penetrate her anus and make her bleed, scream and be horrified.’

      ‘Yeah, but the whores I tried it with chewed gum and picked their nose.’

      [Pause]

      ‘The whores you tried it with were neither hurt nor horrified.’

      ‘Shit, they took their seventy-five bucks, shot their ass into the air and chewed gum or read a comic book. If I tried to get rough some guy six inches taller than me would appear in the doorway with a sledgehammer or something. [Pause] I found sodomy, per se [he smiled awkwardly], didn’t end my tenseness.’

      ‘You were unable to release your tension by relations with prostitutes when the women seemed to experience no pain or humiliation.’

      ‘So I knew I had to find someone who would scream.’

      [Pause]

      [Long pause]

      ‘You sought other alternatives to relieve your tensions.’

      ‘Yeah. Fact is I began raping and killing young girls.’

      [Pause]

      [Long pause]

      [Longer pause]

      ‘In an effort to relieve these tense feelings you began raping and killing young girls.’

      ‘Yeah. You’re not allowed to tell, are you? I mean you told me professional ethics forbid your telling anything I say, right?’

      ‘Yes.’

      [Pause]

      ‘I find the raping and killing of girls helps relieve the tension quite a bit and makes me feel better again.’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘My problem is that I’m beginning to get a little nervous about getting caught. I sort of hoped maybe analysis might help me find a little more normal way to reduce my tensions.’

      ‘You’d like to find a different way to reduce tensions other than raping and killing girls.’

      ‘Yeah. Either that or help me to stop worrying about getting caught …’

      The alert reader may now be feeling that this stuff is slightly too sensational for a typical day at the office, but Mr Osterflood really exists. Or rather existed – more of that later on. The fact is that I was writing a book entitled The Sado-Masochistic Personality in Transition, a work which was to describe cases in which the sadistic personality developed into a masochistic one and vice versa. For this reason my colleagues always sent me patients with a markedly strong sadistic or masochistic bent. Osterflood was admittedly the most professionally active sadist I’d treated, but the wards of mental hospitals have many like him.

      What is remarkable, I suppose, is Osterflood’s walking around loose. Although after his confession I urged him to enter an institution, he refused and I couldn’t order his being committed without breaking professional confidence; moreover no one else apparently suspected that he was an ‘enemy of society.’ All I could do was warn my friends to keep their little girls away from Harlem playgrounds (where Osterflood obtained his victims) and try hard for a cure. Since my friends all kept their children out of Harlem playgrounds because of the danger of Negro rapists even my warnings were unnecessary.

      After Osterflood left that morning I brooded a little on my helplessness with him, made a few notes, and then decided I ought to work on my book.

      I dragged myself to it with the enthusiasm of a man with diarrhea moving toward the toilet: I had a compulsive need to get it out but had some months earlier come to the conclusion that all I was producing was shit.

      My book had become a bore: it was a pretentious failure. I had tried a few months before to get Random House to agree to publish it when it was finished, imagining that with extensive advertising the book would achieve national and then international fame, driving Jake Ecstein to fury, women and reckless losses in the stock market. Random House had hedged, hawed, considered and reconsidered … Random House wasn’t interested. This morning, as on most recent mornings, neither was I.

      The flaw in the book was small but significant: it had nothing to say. The bulk of it was to be empirical descriptions of patients who had changed from primarily sadistic behavior patterns to masochistic ones. My dream had been to discover a technique to lock the behavior of the patient at that precise point when he had passed away from sadism but had not become masochistic. If there were such a point. I had much dramatic evidence of complete crossovers; none of ‘frozen freedom,’ a phrase describing the ideal mean state that came to me in an explosion of enlightenment one morning while echoing Mr Jenkins.

      The problem was that Jake Ecstein, car-salesman front and all, had written two of the most rational and honest books about psychoanalytic therapy that I’d ever read, and their import essentially demonstrated that none of us knew or had any likelihood of knowing what we were doing. Jake cured patients as well as the next fellow and then published clear, brilliant accounts demonstrating that the key to his success was accident, that frequently it was his failure to follow his own theoretical structure which led to a ‘breakthrough’ and the patient’s improvement. When I ended my early-morning dialogue with Miss Reingold joking that Jake’s reading the 1967 budget record sheets might lead to a breakthrough I was partly serious. Jake had shown again and again the significance of chance in therapeutic development, perhaps best dramatized in his famous ‘pencil-sharpening cure.’

      A female patient he’d had under treatment for fifteen months with so little success in changing her neurotic aplomb that even Jake was bored, achieved total and complete transformation when Jake, absentmindedly confusing her with his secretary, ordered her to sharpen his pencils. The patient, a wealthy housewife, went into the outer office to obey and suddenly, when about to insert a pencil into the sharpener, began to shriek, tear her hair and defecate. Three weeks later, ‘Mrs P.’ (Jake’s choice of pseudonyms is only one of his unerring talents) was cured.

      I, then, was coming to feel that my elaborate writing efforts were only idle, pretentious playing with words for publication.

      I thus spent the hour before lunch: (a) reading the financial section of The New York Times; (b) writing a page-and-a-half case report of Mr Osterflood in the form of a financial and budget report (‘bearish outlook for prostitutes’; ‘bull market in Harlem playground girls’), and (c) drawing a picture on my book manuscript of an elaborate Victorian house being bombed by motorcycle planes piloted by Hell’s Angels.

       Chapter Four

      I lunched that day with my three closest colleagues: Dr Ecstein, whom I mock because he’s so intelligent and successful; Dr Renata Felloni, the only female Italian-born practicing analyst in recent New