He hesitated and then nodded.
`And part of you thinks I'm the most honest one here.'
`You're damn right,' he answered abruptly.
`Which one is the real you?'
He frowned and seemed to be concentrating on self-analysis. `I guess the real me is the one-'
`Oh shit, Hank. You're not being honest.'
`I'm not? I didn't even tell you which one'
`But is one any more real than the next?'
`You sophist whore!' I blurted out.
`What's with you, Big Daddy?' Linda asked.
`You're a sick sophist hypocritical Communist nihilist slut.'
'You're a big handsome brainless nobody.'
`Just because you're pretty, you seduce poor Hopper into liking you. But the real Hopper knows you for what you are a
cheap, neurotic two-bit sophist anti-American divorcee.'
`Now just a minute' Scott interrupted, leaning toward me.
`But I know her type, Scott,' I went on. `Stage struck since she first grew pubic hair, subverting her way into good
men's pants with cheap, five-and-dime-store sophist sex techniques, and ruining the lives of one hundred percent
American men. We all know her: nothing but a diseased anarchist hippie uptight sophist bitch.'
Linda's mouth twisted grotesquely, tears formed again in her eyes and she finally burst into tears, rolling onto her
stomach and flexing her buttock muscles impressively in grief. She sobbed and sobbed.
`Oh I know, I know,' she said finally between gasps. `I am a slut, I am. You've seen the real me. Take my body and do
what you will.'
`Jesus, the dame is nuts,' said the burly tax lawyer.
`Should we comfort her?' asked Mr. Hopper.
`Stop pretending!' snapped Scott. `We know you don't really feel guilty.'
But Linda, still crying, was getting back into her clothes. When dressed again, she curled up in a corner in the fetal
position. The room was very quiet.
`I know that type,' I said confidently. `A hot, slimy, ball breaking one-time sophist feminist lay, but nervous as a
vibrator.'
'But which is the real Linda?' Mr. Hopper said dreamily to no one in particular.
`Who cares?' I sneered.
`Who cares?' echoed Linda, sitting up again and yawning. Then she leaned toward Mr. Hopper.
`What are your true feelings now, Hank?' she asked him.
For a moment the question caught him off guard; then he smiled.
`Happy confusion,' he said loudly.
`And how do you feel now, Linda?' asked Marya, but the question was met by six or seven groans from group
members seated around the room.
Linda flipped a pair of green dice out onto the middle of the rug and, after looking mischievously at each of us in turn, asked quietly `Anyone want to play some games?'
Linda was marvelous. What people needed in these groups was someone to let himself go so completely that inhibitions were knocked away. Linda could strip, simulate all kinds of love, could rage, cry, could argue convincingly, all in such rapid succession that she soon made everyone experience existence inside the group as a game; nothing seemed to matter. After we'd gotten most of the members of an encounter group to splinter off the original leader and meet only with us (as happened on Fire Island that weekend), they came to see that with us truth and honesty were irrelevant; we approved good acting and bad, role playing and out-of-role playing, baddie roles and goodie roles, truth and lies.
When one individual would try to pretend to be his `real' self and call the others back to `reality,' we would try to encourage our dice players to ignore him and go right on playing their dice-dictated roles. When someone else, as the result of playing out some role dammed up inside him for years, broke down and cried, the group would at first rally round the bawler to reassure him, as they'd gotten used to doing in traditional encounter groups. We tried to show them that this was the worst thing they could do; the crier should be ignored or be responded to solely within the roles that were already being played.
We wanted them to come to realize that neither `immorality' nor `emotional breakdowns' earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group dice play they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one - least of all us, the leaders - is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves - as the dice dictate. In those cases when the other group members respond conventionally to someone's breakdown, our work is undone: the sufferer feels frightened and ashamed. He believes that the `real world' and its conventional attitudes exist even in group dice play.
And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him. His `reality,' his `reason,' his 'society': these are what must be destroyed.
All that fall Linda and I did our very best.
In addition to our work with various groups, Linda went to work on H. J. Wipple, a philanthropist whom I'd gotten interested in building a Dice Center for us in Southern California, and construction soon speeded up considerably. Work even began in renovating a boys' camp in the Catskills for a second Center. The world was getting ready for dicepeople.
Chapter Sixty-two
Naturally Dr. Rhinehart felt a little guilty about leaving his wife and children without the slightest hint of when he'd return, but he consulted the Die, which advised him to forget about it. Then four months after he'd left home, a random Whim chose one of his random whims and ordered him to return to his apartment and try to seduce his wife.
Mrs. Rhinehart greeted him at two o'clock in the afternoon in a stylish new pants suit he'd never seen before and a cocktail in her hand.
`I've got a visitor now, Luke,' she said quietly. `If you want to see me come back about four.'
It was not precisely the greeting Dr. Rhinehart had expected after four months of mysterious disappearance, and while he was rallying his mental faculties for a suitable riposte he discovered the door had gently been closed in his face.
Two hours later he tried again.
`Oh, it's you,' said Mrs. Rhinehart as she might have greeted a plumber just back with a fresh tool. `Come on in.'
`Thank you,' said Dr. Rhinehart with dignity.
His wife walked ahead of him into the living room and offered him a seat, herself leaning against a new desk covered
with papers and books. Dr. Rhinehart stood dramatically in the middle of the room and looked intently at his wife.
`Where you been?' she asked, with a tone of bored interest discouragingly close to what she might have used asking
her son Larry the same question after he'd been out of the house for twenty minutes.
