Chapter Sixteen
Ego, my friends, ego. The more I sought to destroy it through the dice the greater it grew. Each tumble of a die chipped off another splinter of the old self to feed the growing tissues of the dice man ego. I was killing past pride in myself as analyst, as article writer, as good-looking male, as loving husband, but every corpse was fed to the cannibalistic ego of that superhuman creature I felt I was becoming. How proud I am of being the Dice Man! Whose primary purpose is supposedly to kill all sense of pride in self. The only options I never permitted were those which might challenge his power and glory. All values might be shat upon except that. Take away that identity from me and I am a trembling dread-filled clod, alone in an empty universe. With determination and dice, I am God.
Once I wrote down as an option (one chance in six) that I could (for a month) disobey any of the dice decisions if I felt like it and if I shook a subsequent odd number. I was frightened by the possibility. Only the realization that the act of `disobedience' would in fact be an act of obedience removed my panic. The dice neglected the option. Another time I thought of writing that from then on all dice decisions would be recommendations and not commands. In effect, I would be changing the-role of dice from commander-in-chief to advisory council. The threat of having `free will' again paralyzed me. I never wrote the option.
The dice continually humbled me. They ordered me to get drunk one Saturday: an act which I had found to be inconsistent with my dignity. Being drunk meant an absence of self-control which was inconsistent also with the detached, experimental creature I was becoming as the Dice Man. However, I enjoyed it. The letting go was not very different from the insanities I had been committing while sober. I spent the evening with Lil and the Ecsteins and at midnight began making paper airplanes out of the manuscript pages of my proposed book on sadism and flying them out the window onto 72nd Street. My drunken pawing of Arlene was interpreted as drunken pawing. The incident marked another piece of evidence of the slow disintegration of Lucius Rhinehart.
I provided my friends with plenty of other pieces of evidence. I rarely ate lunch with my colleagues anymore since I usually was sent by the dice to other places whenever I had free time. When I did lunch with them the dice often had dictated some eccentric role or action which seemed to unsettle them. One-day during a forty-eight hour total fast (except for water) which the die had dealt me, I felt weak and decided not to let the die send me anyplace: I would share my fast with Tim, Jake and Renata.
They talked, as they had for several months, primarily to each other. Whenever they directed a question or comment to me they did it warily, like animal trainers feeding a wounded lion. This particular afternoon they were talking about the hospital's policy of releasing patients conditionally, and I, staring hysterically at Jake's sirloin steak, was drunk with hunger. Dr. Mann was slobbering his scallops all over the table and his napkin, and Dr. Felloni was delicately escorting each separate tiny piece of lamb (Lamb!) to her mouth and I was insane. Jake as usual managed to talk and eat faster than both the others together.
`Got to keep 'em in,' he said. `Harmful to us, the hospital, society, everybody, if a patient is prematurely released. Read Bowerly.'
Silence. (Actually chewing [I heard every nibble], other restaurant voices, laughter, dishes clattering, sizzling [I heard every single bubble explosion] and a loud voice which said, `Never again.') `You're-absolutely right, Jake,' I uttered unexpectedly. They were my first words of the afternoon.
`Remember that Negro released on probation who killed his parents? We were idiots. What if he'd only wounded them?'
`He's right, Tim,' I said.
Dr. Mann didn't deign to interrupt his eating, but Jake shot me a second piercing squint.
`I'll bet,' he went on, `that two-thirds of the patients released from QSH - and the other state hospitals - are released far too early, that is, when they're still a menace to themselves and society.'
`That's true,' I said.
`I know that the professional opinion in vogue is that hospitalization is at best a necessary evil, but it's a stupid vogue. If we've got anything to offer our patients, then our hospitals do too. There are three times as many doctor-hours for a patient as he gets in the best out-patient treatment. Read Hegalson, Potter and Busch, their revised edition.'
'And they don't miss appointments, either,' I added.
'That's right,' Jake went on, `there's no home life to mess up their lives.'
'No wives or husbands or children or home-cooked meals.'
'Yeah.'
Dr. Felloni interrupted: 'Isn't adjustment to the home environment what we're striving for though?'
'Adjustment to some environment,' Jake answered. `I try to get my Negro patients in group therapy to see the sickness of the white world so that they will end their resentment and find themselves satisfied with either their lives on the ward or their necessary ghetto existence.'
'And God knows,' I said, `that the white world is sick. Look at the starving millions in East Germany.'
This slowed Jake down for a moment: he lived the rhythm of agreement but wasn't certain that my statement here was entirely satisfactory. With that brilliance which was his essence he hedged: `Our job is to shoot psychological penicillin into the whole social fabric, white and black, and we're doing it.'
'But with regard to Mrs. Lansing,' Dr. Felloni said, `you do feel she should be released.'
'She's your baby, Renata, but remember, 'When is doubt, don't let 'em out.'
'Dr. Mann sent up a belch as an apparent warning signal that he was about to speak. We all looked at him respectfully.
`Jake,' he said. `You would have been at home as commander of a concentration camp.'
Silence.
Then I said: `What a lousy thing to say. Jake wants to help his patients not exterminate them. And besides, in
concentration camps the commander sometimes … didn't give them food: Silence. Dr. Mann seemed to be chewing a cud; Dr. Felloni was moving her head from side to side and up and down very slowly, like someone watching a tennis match consisting entirely of lobs. Jake, leaning forward intently and peering without fear into Dr. Mann's bland face, said with the rapidity of a typewriter `I don't know what you mean by that, Tim. I'll stack my patient record against yours any day. My policy on patient' release is the same as the director's. I think you should apologize.'
`Quite right,' Dr. Mann wiped his mouth with his napkin (or he may have been nibbling from it). `Apologize. I'd be at home as commander too. Only one who wouldn't is Luke, he'd let everyone go - on a whim.'
Dr. Mann had not been enthusiastic about the release of Arturo Toscanini Jones.
`No, I wouldn't,' I said. `If I were commander I'd increase food allotments two hundred percent and do experiments
with the inmates which would advance psychiatry a hundred years past Freud in twelve months.'
`Are you-talking about Jewish inmates?' Jake asked.
`Damn right. Jews make the best subjects for psychological experiments.'
I paused about one and a half seconds, but as Jake started to speak, I went on. `Because they're so intelligent,' sensitive
and flexible.'
That slowed Jake down. Somehow the racial stereotype I had created with my three adjectives didn't seem to leave him
much to shoot at.
`What do you mean by flexible?' he asked.
`Not rigid - open-minded, capable of change.'
`What experiments would you perform, Luke?'
Dr. Mann asked, watching a chubby waiter quiver past with a platter of lobsters.
`I wouldn't touch the inmates physically. No brain operations, sterilizations, that stuff. All I'd do is this: Turn all the
ascetics into hedonists; all the epicureans into flagellants; nymphomaniacs into nuns; homosexuals into heterosexuals, and vice versa. I'd train them all to eat non kosher food, give up their religion, change their professions, their styles of dress, grooming, walking and so on, and train them all to be unintelligent, insensitive
