`George?' she cried back.
Marlene Dietrich left the table and Dr. E waited for Arlene to join him, but instead she sat down at a corner table with
the teenage boy. Annoyed, he got up when he'd finished and went over to their table.
`Well what do you think of it so far?' he asked her.
`George, I'd like you to meet my son, John. John, this is George Fleiss, a very successful used-car salesman.'
`How do you do,' the boy said, sticking out a thin hand. `Pleased to meet you.'
`Yeah, well, look, I'm really Cassius Clay,' he said.
`Oh I am sorry,' Arlene answered.
`You've gotten out of shape,' the boy said indifferently.
Dr. E sat down with them, feeling glum. He did so want to be recognized as Jake Ecstein, psychiatrist. He tried a new
tack.
`What's your name?' he asked his wife.
`Maria,' she answered with a smile. `And this is my boy, John.'
`Where's Edgarina?'
`My daughter is at home.'
`And your husband?' Arlene frowned.
`Unfortunately, he has passed away,' she said.
`Oh great,' said Dr. E.
I beg your pardon!' said she, standing abruptly.
`Oh, ah, sorry. I was overcome with disturbance,' Dr. E said, motioning his wife to sit, `Look,' he went on, `I like you.
I like you very much. Perhaps we could stay together a while.'
`I'm sorry,' Arlene said softly, `I'm afraid people would talk.'
`People would talk? How?'
`You are a colored man and I am white,' she said.
Dr. Ecstein let his mouth hang open and for the first time in his last nineteen years experienced something which ha
realized later may have been self-pity.
Chapter Seventy-six
Being an American born and bred, it was in my bones to kill. Most of my adult life I had carried around like an
instantaneously inflatable balloon a free-floating aggression which kept an imaginative array of murders, wars and plagues parading across my mind whenever my life got difficult: a cabbie tried to overcharge me, Lil criticized me, Jake published another brilliant article. In the year before I discovered the dice, Lil was killed by a steamroller, an airplane crash, a rare virus, cancer of the throat, a flash fire in her bed, under the wheels of the Lexington Avenue Express and by an inadvertent drinking of arsenic. Jake had succumbed to driving into the East River in a taxi, a brain tumor, a stock-market-crash-induced suicide and an insane attack with a samurai's sword by one of his former cured patients. Dr. Mann succumbed to a heart attack, appendicitis, acute indigestion and a Negro rapist. The whole world itself had suffered at least a dozen full-scale nuclear wars, three plagues of unknown origin but universal effectiveness and an invasion from outer space by superior creatures who invisibleized everyone except a few geniuses. I had, of course, beaten to a bloody pulp President Nixon, six cab drivers, four pedestrians, six rival psychiatrists and several miscellaneous women. My mother had been buried in an avalanche and may still be alive there for all I know.
Being an American I had to kill. No self-respecting Dice Man could honestly write down options day after day without including a murder or a real rape. I did, in fact, begin to include as a long shot the rape of some randomly selected female, but the dice ignored it. Reluctantly, timidly, with my old friend dread reborn and moiling in my guts, I
also created a long-shot option of `murdering someone.'
I gave it only one chance in thirty-six (snake eyes) and three, four times spread out over a year the Die ignored it, but
then, one lovely Indian Summer day, with the birds twittering outside in the bushes of my newly rented Catskill
farmhouse, the autumn leaves blowing and blinding in the sun and a little beagle puppy I'd just been given wagging
his tail at my feet, the Die, given ten different options of varying probabilities dropped double ones snake eyes: `I will
try to murder someone.'
I felt acute anxiety and excitement combined, but not the doubt in the world that I would do it. Leaving Lil had been
hard (although I sneer at my anxieties now), but killing 'someone' seemed no more difficult than holding up a drugstore
or robbing a bank. There was a bit of anxiety because my life was being put in jeopardy; there was the excitement of
the chase; and there was curiosity: what person shall I kill? The great advantage of being brought up in a culture of
violence is that it doesn't really matter who you kill: Negroes, Vietnamese or your mother - as long as you can make a
reason for it, the killing will feel good. As the Dice Man, however, I felt obligated to let the Die choose the victim. I
flipped a die saying `odd' I would murder someone I knew, `even' it would be a stranger. I assumed for some reason
that the Die would prefer a stranger, but the die showed a `one'; odd - someone I knew.
I decided that in all fairness one of the people I might kill was myself and that my name should take its chances with
the rest. Although I `knew' hundreds of people, I didn't think the Die intended me to spend days trying to remember all
my friends so that I wouldn't deny any of them the option of being murdered. I created six lists each with six places for
the names of people I knew, I put Lil, Larry, Evie, Jake, my mother and myself at the top of each of the six different
lists. For second names on each list I added Arlene, Fred Boyd, Terry Tracy, Joseph Fineman, Elaine Wright (a new
friend of that period) and Dr. Mann. For number threes: Linda Reichman, Professor Boggles, Dr. Krum, Miss
Reingold, Jim Frisby (my new landlord in the Catskills) and Frank Osterflood. And so on. I won't give you the whole
thirty-six, but to show I tried my best to include everyone, I should note that for the last six on each list I made six
general categories: a business acquaintance, someone I had met first at a party, someone I knew only through letters or
through reading (e.g. famous people), someone I haven't seen in at least five years, a CETRE student or staff member
not previously listed and someone wealthy enough to justify robbing and killing.
I then casually cast a die to see from which of the six lists the die would choose a victim. The die chose list
