`But now … lately … I got to admit it … I seem to be losing my interest in little girls.'
`Walking backwards a solution, of course, but only a temporary one. After that and crawling and running backward
and hopping on one foot, I'll feel confined, limited, repetitious, a robot'
`And that's good, I know it is. I mean I hate little girls and now that I'm less interested in fucking them I feel that's …
definitely an advance.'
He looked down at me sincerely and I looked sincerely back.
`Conversations too are a problem,' I said. `Our syntax is habitual, our diction, our coherence. I have a habit of logical
thought which clearly must be broken. And vocabulary. Why do I accept the limits of our habitual words. I'm a clod! A clod!'
`But … but … lately … I'm afraid … I've sensed … I'm almost afraid to say it…'
`Umpwillis. Art fodder. Wishmonger. Gladsull. Parminkson. Jombie. Blit. Why not? Man has limited himself
artificially to the past. I feel myself breaking free.'
`. . that I'm, I feel I'm beginning to want, to be like . . . little boys.'
`A breakthrough. A definite breakthrough if I can continue to contradict my habitual patterns as I have this morning.
And sex. Sexual patterns must be broken too . .
`I mean really like them,' he said emphatically; `Not want to rape them or hurt them or anything like that, just bugger
them and have them suck me off.'
`Possibly this experiment could get me into dangerous ground. I suppose since I've habitually not been interested in
raping little girls that theoretically I ought to try it.'
`And boys … little boys are easier to get at. They're more trusting, less suspicious.'
`But really hurting someone frightens me. I suppose - No! It is a limitation. A limitation I must overcome. To be free
from habitual inhibitions I will have to rape and kill: His chair squeaked, and I heard one of his feet hit the ground.
`No,' he said firmly. `No, Dr. Rhinehart. I'm trying to tell you, raping and killing aren't necessary anymore. Even
hitting may be out.'
`Raping, or at least killing, is absolutely necessary to the Random Man. To shirk that would be to shirk a clear duty.'
`Boys, little boys, even teen-age boys, will do just as good, I'm sure. It's dangerous with little girls, Doc, I warn you.'
`Danger is necessary. The whole concept of the Random Man is the most dangerous and revolutionary ever conceived
by man. If total victory demands blood then blood it must be.'
`No, Dr. Rhinehart, no. You must find another way to work it out. A less dangerous way. These are human beings
you're talking about.'
`Only according to our habitual perceptive patterns. It may well be that little girls are actually fiends from another
world sent to destroy us.
He didn't reply but I heard the chair give one small squeak.
`It's quite clear,' I went on, `that without little girls we wouldn't have women, and women - snorfu buck clisting rinnschauer.'
`No, no, Doc, you're tempting me. I know it, I see it now. Woman are human beings, they must be.'
`Call them what you will, they differ from us, Osterflood, and you can't deny it' `I know, I know, and boys don't. Boys are us. Boys are good.
I think I could learn to love boys and not to have to worry so much about the police anymore.'
`Candy and kindness to girls, O., and a stiff prick to boys you may be right. It would, for you, definitely be a habit breaker.'
`Yes, yes.'
Someone knocked on the door. The hour was, up. As I dazedly rolled my feet onto the floor I felt Mr. Osterflood pumping my hand vigorously: his eyes were blazing with joy.
'This has been the greatest therapeutic hour of my life. You're . . . you're … you're a boy, Dr. Rhinehart, a genuine boy.'
`Thank you, O. I hope you're right.'
Chapter Twenty-four
Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and be my `natural self I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, `I'm Batman,' at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann - all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.
I would break into laughter for no reason at all, I would overreact to situations, becoming angry, fearful or compassionate far in excess of that normally demanded. I wasn't consistent. Sometimes I'd be gay, at others sad; sometimes I'd be articulate, serious, brilliant; at others, absurd, abstracted, dumb. Only my being in the process of analysis with Jake kept me free to walk the streets. As long as I did nothing violent, people could still feel relatively at ease: `Poor Dr. Rhinehart, but Dr. Ecstein is helping him: Lil was becoming increasingly worried about me, but since the die always rejected the option that I tell her the truth, I kept making semi-rational excuses for my absurdities. She talked with Jake and Arlene and Dr. Mann, and they all had perfectly rational and usually brilliant explanations of what was happening, but unfortunately no suggestions as to how to end it.
`In a year or two…' said Dr. Mann benevolently to Lil, who told me she almost started screaming.
I assured her that I'd try harder to control my whims.
National Habit-Breaking Month certainly didn't help matters. How upset people become when confronting the breakdown of patterns, how upset or how joy-filled. My jogging into the office, my absurd speeches, my blasphemous efforts to seduce the sexless and incorruptible Miss Reingold, my drunkenness, my nonsensical behavior with my patients - all brought to those who witnessed them shock and dismay, but also, I began to notice, pleasure.
How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd: Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.
By the end of that month I was thinking if only Nixon would get drunk and say to someone, `Fuck you, buddy: If only William Buckley or Billy Graham would say, `Some of my best friends are Communists'; if only a sportscaster would just once say `Sure is a boring game, folks.'
But they don't. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experience.
But in most ways National Habit-Breaking Month turned out to be impractical; I ended up at one point letting the die decide when I would go to bed and for haw, long I would sleep. My sleeping a random number of hours at
