Читать книгу The Book of the Die - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 19

‘Come on, Whim, you can do it. Say something positive and definitive which isn’t mocking either me or itself or yourself or anything.’

‘Do I have to?’ Whim said grimly.

‘Yes, just this once you have to say something positive and unmocking.’

Whim thought for a moment.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘I got it: I love myselves.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘I would have said “I love God” but you might have thought I was being religious.’

‘I see.’

‘“God loves Whim” says it too, but I didn’t want to give God a bad reputation.’

DICE HOUSE, A PLAY IN TWO ACTS, BY PAUL LUCAS

Act One

Scene 1. Dr Drabble’s Practice

[Drabble pacing about, swigging from a half-empty whiskey bottle. Mathew listening politely.]

DRABBLE:	The anti-depressants seemed to work at first but soon I found I was taking more and more of them and feeling worse and worse …
MATHEW:	What do you mean when you say you started feeling worse?
DRABBLE:	Well, no sleep, haven’t slept in days, and these sudden sweats, sudden panic attacks, my heart’ll just go bo-bo-bo-boom like it’s going to pop out of my mouth on to the floor and get covered in all the hairs and the vile things that are down there, the dust.
MATHEW:	And does anything seem to trigger these attacks?
DRABBLE:	Nothing, they just come out of the blue. And I’ve started to hear voices now. Little voices, my God, I really think I’m going to end up doing something stupid and …

[He looks around to check no one’s listening.]

DRABBLE:	… the walls in this place are very badly behaved.
MATHEW:	The walls?
DRABBLE:	Yes. They keep closing in. Naughty.

[The phone rings.]

MATHEW:	I’m afraid that’ll be Tina telling us that the hour is up.
DRABBLE:	Yes. Excuse me a minute.

[Drabble answers the phone.]

DRABBLE:

Doctor Drabble speaking. (Listens) Yes I know the hour’s up, Tina, but I’m at a crucial point with Mr Day. Can you cancel my next two patients, please? Thank you.

[Puts phone down. Sits, exhausted.]

DRABBLE:	So that’s me, and how have you been, Mathew? Long time no see.
MATHEW:	I feel fine, it’s over a year since I last did anything I shouldn’t do with ribbons. After our final session together I went and lived in a hut by the sea and these days I mostly just take myself off for walks along the beach, collecting mussels sometimes and I find the walking takes my mind off ribbons, even the pretty yellow ones.
DRABBLE:	Good.
MATHEW:	The pale, lovely, yellow ones.
DRABBLE:	That’s just what I wanted to hear. You’ve made remarkable progress, Mathew, and I think the time has come for us to close your file and let you put your past indiscretions behind you.
MATHEW:	It’s all thanks to you, Doctor Drabble.
DRABBLE:	Yes, it is, yes. Solid technique I use, tried and trusted methods from the wise minds of Freud and Jung and co. And it works, you’re living proof of that. But just before I sign all the necessary paperwork, there is one last thing I’d like you to do.
MATHEW:	What’s that?
DRABBLE:	I’d like you to kidnap my wife.

[Silence.]

MATHEW:	(quietly) … I sell the mussels I collect to a man in a toupee …
DRABBLE:	Won’t take long, couple of hours at most.
MATHEW:	I don’t think I want to.
DRABBLE:	No, I can understand that, and I wouldn’t normally ask, but – I’m a desperate man, Mathew. Look at me.

[Mathew does look at him.]

DRABBLE:	No, don’t! Don’t, actually, I’m too horrible to behold. And all because … all of this because … Dice! I mean, dice!
MATHEW:	Dice?
DRABBLE:	Dice! (Shakes head) Dice.
MATHEW:	Why do you keep saying ‘dice’?
DRABBLE:	Why? Why? (Laughs bitterly) Why.
MATHEW:	Now you keep saying –
DRABBLE:	Do you enjoy sex, Mathew?
MATHEW:	I think I left the door of my hut open, I’d better –
DRABBLE:	I enjoy sex. God, I enjoy it. So when my wife suddenly wanted it at all times of the day and night and in all sorts of exotic locations I wasn’t the kind of man to complain. I was happy to oblige. Barely able to stand with fatigue, but happy too.
MATHEW:	My hour’s up, I think, so –
DRABBLE:	When she made me sleep in the spare room a week later I put it down to the enigma of womanhood. Even when she cleaned out our joint savings account to purchase a silver Harley Davidson I remained I think fairly stoical and understanding. No, it was the evening I got home to find her sharing the marital bed with two tramps from the local park that things came to a head. My wife explained she was undergoing something called Dice Therapy, that all her behaviour was deliberately patternless, random. I can’t describe my horror. For it was I who delivered her into the hands of The Diceman.
MATHEW:	The Diceman?
DRABBLE:	Charles E. Ratner, my former colleague and a leading expert in the treatment of phobias. I referred Polly to him to try and cure her fear of flying. Little did I know he was about to throw away every tenet of his training and cook up this … Dice Therapy. God knows, in this game you meet your share of freaks and lunatics but Ratner’s odd even for a psychiatrist. There are some people saying behind closed doors that he should be taken out into a lonely field and clanged on the head with a shovel.
MATHEW:	Those sorts of ideas upset me.

[Drabble mimes swinging a shovel.]

DRABBLE:	Wham, like that, bust his cranium open, he’s asking for it. Some people are saying. B-behind closed doors. Ratner’s solution to the human condition is that we should all throw dice to decide what to do. List a set of options on a piece of paper and then let chance determine which path to take. The idea being that we are all trapped within the narrow parameters of our personalities which he contends are artificial constructs that do not reflect the essence of our selves – a view I have some sympathy with. But Ratner’s therapy involves ignoring every social, legal and moral boundary there is. Did I mention that some people think he should be clobbered senseless with a big knotty log?
MATHEW:	Clanged with a shovel, you said.
DRABBLE:	Well there’s some debate about the … details …
MATHEW:	Why are you saying all these things?
DRABBLE:	My wife’s actions while playing the dice resulted in a variety of lawsuits and financial ruin. When finally we had to sell the house I gave her an ultimatum: give up playing the dice or she would not be welcome at the bedsit I’d rented. After rolling a seven she packed a bag and moved into Doctor Ratner’s newly opened Centre for Research into Randomized Living – referred to by the tabloids as the Dice House. You’ve probably read about it.

[Mathew looks blankly, shakes his head.]

DRABBLE:

Delapidated gothic mansion in the middle of a lake, it’s been in all the papers.

[Takes a newspaper from his desk and taps front page.]

MATHEW:	I live in a hut.
DRABBLE:	Oh, yes. Yes, you said. Well, Ratner’s patients all live there together to practise ‘pure dicing’ in a mutually supportive environment. The police are powerless to help me since Polly is there of her own free will. Desperate measures are called for.
MATHEW:	I don’t want to kidnap your wife, Doctor Drabble.
DRABBLE:	Call me Anthony.
MATHEW:	No, I think I’ll call you Doctor Drabble. Doctor Drabble Who’s Always Helped Me So Much.
DRABBLE:	Come on now, Mathew, show me how good you are at abduction.
MATHEW:	Er, no.
DRABBLE:	You’ll be my favourite abductor.
MATHEW:	I’d like to go now please, my hour’s up.
DRABBLE:	I’m prepared to offer you a hundred pounds in cash for your trouble.

[He produces a wad of notes from his pocket.]

MATHEW:

I make enough money selling mussels, thank you, Doctor. Goodbye.

[Mathew stands.]

DRABBLE:	Mathew, now – now, Mathew. I am a psychiatrist. We both know that. I only ever have your best interests at heart. And in my professional opinion what is in your best interests at this moment is to rescue my little sweet pea of a spouse.
MATHEW:	I don’t really see how that can be true, though.
DRABBLE:	Because if you don’t I’ll have you sectioned.

[Silence.]

MATHEW:	Par-pardon, Doctor Drabble Who’s Always Been So Kind?
DRABBLE:	Damn my black heart to hell, I’ll have you sectioned, Mathew. I’ll sign a few forms and they’ll lock you up in some anachronistic institution with dark high towers up on top of a spooky hill. Full of noisy misfits who jabber and throw poo at each other. I’ll toss you down one of the many cracks in our fragile society to fester out of sight of all but the rats and the unblinking schizoids. I really am most terribly sorry.
MATHEW:	That’s in some ways blackmail.

[Drabble goes and places his hand on Mathew’s shoulder.]

DRABBLE:

I will never be able to truly look myself in the mirror again after doing this to you. But there we are.

[Takes his hand off Mathew’s shoulder.]

DRABBLE:	The fact is a psychiatrist has the power to abuse his position of trust and I find that idea just too tempting. I’ll render you a right old cabbage-job with drugs better suited to the placation of elephants. Mathew, forgive me.
MATHEW:	I think then, I think –
DRABBLE:	I’ve helped you in the past, haven’t I? With the ribbons problem? Is it too much to expect a bit of help in return?
MATHEW:	I think, Doctor Drabble, that you must love your wife very much to do this, to degrade yourself like this. How much you must love her.
DRABBLE:	God help us both, I’m the last of the romantics.
MATHEW:	There must be an ombudsman I can report you to.
DRABBLE:	My behaviour’s too outrageous for anyone to believe you. I’m a respected psychiatrist and you’re mentally ill. Capable of anything, and a clear danger to children.
MATHEW:	I’m not a danger to children.
DRABBLE:	It’s not for you to decide who you’re a danger to, Mathew. It’s for me to decide, that’s what makes this world of ours so unfair.
MATHEW:	Then I’m a helpless pawn with a touch of the puppet in me?
DRABBLE:	I have you by the balls, God it’s dreadful. Only a madman would rather spend his life in an asylum than abduct a psychiatrist’s wife. I might allow myself an ironic smile at that when this tragic aberration is over.
MATHEW:	It’s over a year since I last did that silly thing with the ribbons.
DRABBLE:	I know. You’re cured. That’s why I know I can trust you with my wife’s well-being. The rest of my patients are no less insane than when I first saw them. In fact, the majority are a good deal worse. You’re a sensitive, intelligent man over whom I have complete control. Take the money, Mathew, and abduct my little lamb gently.

[Mathew reaches for the cash.]

DRABBLE:

I can promise you at least that the job is quite straightforward: I’ll get you referred to Ratner as a patient I can do nothing for. It’s a common enough scenario. I’ll bring you to his Dice House where you’ll secretly be carrying this … banana.

[Drabble produces a banana from his desk.]

DRABBLE:	Polly can’t resist bananas, I try and avoid contemplating the Freudian implications of that. This particular banana will knock her out for three or four hours.
MATHEW:	(pause) So … what, I just hit her on the head with it?
DRABBLE:	No. No, I’ve injected the banana with sedatives, Mathew. You just get her to eat the banana. Then once she’s gone droopy, you’ll wrap her in a blanket and ring me with this mobile phone.

[Hands Mathew a mobile phone.]

DRABBLE:

We’ll rendezvous at my car. Then I’ll take her to a traditional mental hospital where a quiet room with a one-foot-thick steel door has been reserved for her. With time and support she’ll soon see sense, and we’ll both be able to return to our normal lives. I will once more be a rising star of the world of psychiatry, and you can go back to your idyllic life of collecting bi-valves from the beach. Albeit with an understandable mistrust of therapists.

OPTIONS

Before casting a die, read through the six options below. Throw out one or two (or, better still, all six) and create some of your own to replace those you toss out. Then cast a die.

1 Burp or fart during your boss’s next talk. Look at him or her with intense seriousness, as if the burp or fart never existed.

2 At your next group meeting – at work, at church, at a bar with buddies, at a coffee klatch, in the locker room – consider some far-out and seemingly irrational idea that has some some of appeal; for example, that the whole group repair to a new meeting ground: a bar, lake, nightclub, etc. Or that the group dispense with its usual bullshit and talk today only about ‘X’, something you sense people might like to talk about but never do. Or suggest that whoever is leading the meeting be replaced by someone else. Present your suggestion seriously (but don’t you yourself take it seriously). Note the results.

3 Enter the next group meeting you attend – at work, church, bar, kitchen, living room, bowling alley, wherever – with the assumption that you are attending not a meeting but a party, and that the purpose of a party is to have fun. Have fun. We’d advise you try to encourage others to have fun, but fear that then you’d become a party pooper.

4 Lecture someone about how seriousness is sickness and ruins people’s lives. Notice immediately how your serious lecture dulls both your life and that of the person who has to listen to you.

5 With children, play. Encourage them to be inconsistent. Encourage them to pretend. Encourage them to make up stories (to lie). Encourage them to pretend to be someone different from their normal selves. Encourage yourself to join them in their games. Unless you become as a little child you shall not see God.

6 The next time you pay a bill, send at least 10 per cent more than the total amount of the bill. Tell the recipient that they are doing such great work (no matter what you really think of them) you wanted to send them extra. Note if their computer system faints.