Читать книгу The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 22

‘Jenkins,’ I said one morning to the masochist Milquetoast of Madison Avenue, ‘have you ever considered rape?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘Forced carnal knowledge.’

‘I … don’t understand how you mean that I should consider it.’

‘Have you ever daydreamed of killing someone or of raping someone?’

‘No. No, I never have. I feel almost no aggression toward anyone.’ He paused. ‘Except myself.’

‘I was afraid of that, Jenkins, that’s why we’d better give serious consideration to rape, theft or murder.’

Jenkins lay neatly and quietly on the couch through this whole interview, not once raising his voice or stirring a muscle.

‘You … you mean daydream about such actions?’ he asked.

‘I mean commit them. As it is, Jenkins, you’re becoming just another dirty old man, aren’t you?’

‘P-p-pardon?’

‘Spend most of your time lying on your crumb-filled bed reading porno and fantasizing about lovely girls who need you to save them. After they’ve narrowly missed being crushed by the landslide, or cut in two by the cultivator, or stabbed by the lunatic or burnt by the fire, you rescue them and they give you a spiritual kiss on the fingertips, right? But when do you reach a climax, Mr Jenkins?’

‘I … I don’t know what … I don’t understand?’

‘Does the final pleasure come when you’re comforting the rescued girl or when the flames are licking at her face, the knife scraping along her veins, the cultivator about to mash her potatoes …? When?’

‘But I want to help people. I feel no aggression. Ever.’

‘Look, Jenkins, I’m sated with your passivity, your daydreaming. Haven’t you ever done anything?’

‘No opportunity has ever –’

‘Have you ever hurt another human?’

‘I can’t. I don’t want to. I want to save –’

‘First you’ve got to save yourself and that you can only do by breaking your inertia. I’m giving you an assignment for our Friday session. Will you do it for me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt people. My whole soul is based on that principle.’

‘I know it is. I know it is, and your soul’s sick, remember? That’s why you’re here.’

‘Please, I don’t want to rape any –’

‘You’ve noticed I have a new receptionist. I mean a second one?’ [She was a middle-aged call girl I had hired expressly to date Mr Jenkins.]

‘Er, yes, I have.’

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘And she’s a nice person, too.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I want you to rape her.’

‘Oh no, no, I, no, it would not be a good idea.’

‘All right then, would you like to date her?’

‘But … is it ethical?’

‘What are you planning to do to her?’

‘I mean … she’s your receptionist … I thought –’

‘Not at all. Her private life is her own business. [It certainly was.] I want you to date her. Tonight. Take her to dinner and invite her back to your apartment and see what happens. If you get the urge to rape her, go ahead. Tell her it’s part of your therapy.’

‘Oh, no, no, I’d never want to do anything to hurt her. She seems such a lovely person.’

‘She is, which makes her all the more rapable. But have it your own way. Just do your best to feel aggression.’

‘Do you really think it might help if I got a little aggressive?’

‘Absolutely. Change your whole life. With hard work you might even make it to murder. But don’t brood if at first all you can do is swear under your breath at pedestrians.’ I stood up. ‘Now go. You’ll need a couple of minutes to wheedle Rita into accepting a date.’

It took him twenty, despite Rita’s trying to say ‘yes’ from the moment he told her his name. After three and a half weeks of Jenkins-style courting he finally managed to seduce her in the front seat of his Volkswagen, much to the relief of all concerned. To the further relief of the principals, they shifted to Jenkins’s apartment for further indoor work. The only evidence I was able to garner that Jenkins was trying to express aggression was that once he accidentally bumped her nose with his elbow and didn’t say he was sorry. Rita tried the old game of ‘Oh, you’re so masterful, hit me,’ but Jenkins responded by assuring her that no matter how masterful he was he would never hit anyone. She urged him to bite her breasts, but he said something about having weak gums. She tried to irritate him into anger by using her body to arouse him and then deny the desires she had aroused, but Jenkins sulked until she gave in.

Meanwhile he was trying every trick in the masochist’s trade to try to make Rita break off with him. He stood her up on two occasions (Rita sent a bill for her time), accidentally broke her wristwatch (I got the bill) and as a lover usually had his orgasm when she was least expecting it and in the middle of a yawn. Nevertheless, Rita clung lovingly – three hundred dollars a week – on.

At the end of a month of solid success with her, Jenkins was definitely more comfortable with women; he even flirted for five minutes with Miss Reingold. But he was also perilously close to a total nervous breakdown. Being unable to contract a venereal disease, make Rita pregnant, infuriate her, cause her to leave him or fail in any other obvious way, he was desperate. Of course, he’d compensated by accelerating the rate of failure in all other areas of his life. Twice he lost his wallet. He left the water in the bathtub running while he was out and flooded his apartment. Finally, one day he told me he’d lost so much money on the stock market since taking over his own investing, that he’d have to drop therapy.

I urged him to continue, but that afternoon he managed to get hit by a bulldozer while watching some construction and was hospitalized for six weeks. A few months later the dice told me to send him a bill for Rita’s services and, I regret to report, he promptly paid it. I’ve tentatively listed his case as a failure.

Other cases didn’t work out too well either. With a woman plagued by compulsive promiscuity I tried the William James method number three for breaking habits: oversatiation. I convinced her to work at a busy Brooklyn brothel for a week, figuring that would be enough to drive anyone to chastity, but she stayed a month. With the money she earned she hired one of her male customers to accompany her on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta. I haven’t seen her since, but have tentatively listed her case as a failure also.

My analytic sessions became role-playing sessions without the dice. But instead of restricting such role playing to drama and play as in Moreno-like drama therapy, I restricted it to real life. Everything had to be done with real people in real life.

In most cases over the next five months I assigned my patients to quit their jobs, leave their spouses, give up their hobbies, habits and homes, alter their religions, upset their sleeping, eating, copulation, thinking habits: in brief, to rediscover their unexpressed desires; to achieve their unfulfilled potential. But all this without telling them about the dice.

Without introducing the patients to the use of the dice as in my later dice therapy, the results, as you have begun to see, were generally disastrous. In addition to two lawsuits, one patient committed suicide (thirty-five dollars an hour out of the window), one was arrested for leading to the delinquency of a minor, and a last disappeared at sea in a sailing canoe on his way to Tahiti. On the other hand, I had a few distinct successes.

One man, a highly paid advertising executive, gave up his job and family and joined the Peace Corps, spent two years in Peru, wrote a book on faking land reform in underdeveloped countries, a book highly praised by everyone except the governments of Peru and the United States, and is now living in a cabin in Tennessee writing a book on the effects of advertising on underdeveloped minds. Whenever he’s in New York he drops in to suggest I write a book about the underdeveloped psyches of psychiatrists.

My other successes were less obvious and immediate.

There was Linda Reichman, for example. She was a slender, young rich girl who had spent her last four years living in Greenwich Village doing all the things rich, emancipated girls think they’re expected to do in Greenwich Village. In four weeks of treatment prior to my own emancipation, I had learned that this was her third analysis, that she loved to talk about herself, particularly her promiscuity, with indifference to and cruelty toward men, and their stupid ineffectual efforts to hurt her. Her monologues were occasionally flooded by literary, philosophical and Freudian allusions and as abruptly empty of them. Each session she usually managed to say something intended to shock my bourgeois respectability.

It was only three weeks after letting the dice dictate anarchy that I had a rather remarkable session with her. She’d come in even more keyed up than usual, swivel-hipped her rather swivelable hips across the room and flopped aggressively onto the couch. Much to my surprise she didn’t say a thing for three minutes; for her, an all-time record. Finally, with an edge to her voice, she said: ‘I get so sick and tired of this … shit. [Pause] I don’t know why I come here. [Pause] You’re about as much help as a chiropractor. Christ, what I’d give to meet a MAN someday. I meet nothing but … ball-less masturbators. [Pause] What a … stupid world it is. How do people get through their crumby lives? I’ve got money, brains, sex – I’m bored stiff. What keeps all those little clods without anything, what keeps all those little clods going? [Pause] I’d like to blast the whole thing … fucking city to pieces. [Long pause.]

‘I spent the weekend with Curt Rollins. For your info, he’s just published a novel that the Partisan Review calls – and I quote – “as stunningly poetic a piece of fiction as has appeared in years.” Unquote. [Pause] He’s got talent. His prose is like lightning: cutting, darting, brilliant; he’s a Joyce with the energy of Henry Miller. [Pause] He’s working on a new novel about fifteen minutes in the life of a young boy who’s just lost his father. Fifteen minutes – a whole novel. Curt’s cute, too. Most girls throw themselves at him. [Pause] He needs money. [Pause] It’s funny, he doesn’t seem to like sex much. Wham-bam, back to the old writing board. Wham-bam. [Pause] He liked the way I sucked him off though. But …

‘I’d like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don’t think it would bother him much. I think he’d consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] “Stunning novel” – Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that’s teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. “Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?” [Pause] He’s another ball-less masturbator. [Pause]

‘You sure are quiet today. Can’t you even throw in a few uh-huhs or yesses? I’m paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.’

‘I don’t feel like it today.’

‘You don’t feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on, Dr Rhinehart, you’ve gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste. Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let’s hear that faithful echo.’

‘Today I’d like to hear what you’d like to do if you could recreate the world to suit your own … highest dreams.’

‘Cut the crap. I’d turn it into a great big testicle, what else?’

[Pause] [Longer pause]

‘I’d … I’d eliminate all the human beings first … except … eh … maybe for a few. I’d destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I’d put – all the animals would still be there – No. No, they wouldn’t. I’d eliminate all of them too. There’d be grass though, and flowers. [Pause]

‘I can’t picture the humans. [Pause] I can’t even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of an empty world. Boy, that’s something. The little lays at Remo’s would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They’re gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.’

‘Can you imagine a human being that you would like?’

‘Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I’m in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I’ve got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phoney. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Your phoney code of ethics. You hide behind it. I’ve sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I’ve twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don’t know what I’m doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I’d like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, “You say you’d like to feel my prick,” and I’ll say, “Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father …” and you’ll say, “You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back … ” and we’ll both go right on acting as if the words didn’t count.’

Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.

‘I don’t blame you. I’ve been acting like an automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.’

Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned from the waist to stare at me.

‘What did you say?’

‘You feel you don’t know what I said?’ But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.

‘Holy shit, there’s a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I’ve never heard you say anything before.’

‘Well, Linda, I’d say it was time to end non-directive therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?’

‘That’s what I just said.’

‘First, I think we’d better acknowledge that you’re outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much less than many women, since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he’s got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly, that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breadth of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you’ve slept with and who’ve proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.’

Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished, her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.

‘Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concrete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are sounding off about me? You don’t know me at all. I haven’t told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.’

‘Do you want to show me your breasts?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?’

‘You can’t judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don’t forget it. They know they’ve had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you’ll hide behind your precious ethics and feel superior because all you see is the surface.’

‘What other good qualities do you have?’

‘I call a spade a spade. I know. I’m not perfect and I say so, and I’ve learned that you psychiatrists are priggish little voyeurs and I tell you, and that’s why you all end up attacking me. You can’t stand the truth.’

‘My ethics kept me from making love to you?’

‘Yes, unless you’re a fairy, like another headshrinker I knew.’

‘Let me then formally announce that in my future relations with you I will not seek to maintain the traditional patient-doctor relationship and I will not abide by the standard of ethics set down in the code of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. From now on I shall respond to you as human to human. As psychiatrist human I will advise you, but no more. How’s that?’

Linda shifted her feet to the floor and looked over at me with a slow smile, meant to suggest sexiness? She was, in fact, reasonably sexy. She was slender, clear-complexioned, full-lipped. As long as she had been my patient, however, I had not responded to her sexually one millimeter, or to any other female patient in five years, despite writhings, declarations, propositions, strippings and attempted rapes – all of which had occurred during one session or another. But the doctor-patient relationship froze my sexual awareness as completely as doing fifty push-ups under a cold shower. Looking at Linda Reichman smile and perceptibly arch her back and project her (true or false?) bosom, I felt my loins, for the first time in my analytic history, respond.

Her smile slowly curled into a sneer.

‘It’s better than you were, but that’s not saying much.’

‘I thought you wanted to feel my prick.’

‘I can’t be bothered.’

‘In that case, let’s get back to you. Lie down again and let your mind go.’

‘What do you mean, lie down again. You just said you were going to be human. Humans don’t talk to each other with their backs to each other.’

‘True. So go ahead, we’ll talk … eyeball to eyeball.’

She looked at me again and her eyes narrowed slightly and her upper lip twitched twice. She stood up and faced me. The light from my desk picked up a light perspiration on her face, which revealed this time no suggestive smile – although one may have been intended – but rather a tense grimace. She roved slightly toward me, unbuttoning her skirt at the side as she approached.

‘I think maybe it would be good for both of us – if we got to know each other physically. Don’t you?’

She came to the chair and let her skirt fall to the floor. Her half-slip must have gone with it. She had on white silk bikini-panties but no stockings. Sitting down in my lap (the chair tipped back another three inches with an undignified squeak), her eyes half-closed, she looked up into my face and said drowsily, ‘Don’t you?’

Frankly, the answer was yes. I had a fine erection, my pulse was forty percent, my loins were being activated by all the requisite hormones and my mind, as nature intended it in such cases, was functioning vaguely and without energy. Her lips and tongue came wetly against and into my mouth, her fingers along my neck and into my hair. She was role-playing Brigitte Bardot and I was responding accordingly. After a prolonged, satisfactory kiss, she stood up, and with a set, drowsy, mechanical half-smile removed, item by item, her blouse, bra (she hadn’t needed falsies), bracelet, wristwatch and panties.

Since I continued to sit with a blissfully unplanned and idiotic expression, she hesitated, and sensed that somewhere about now was my cue to embrace her passionately, carry her to the couch and consummate our union. I decided to miss the cue. After this brief hesitation (her now wet upper lip twitched once), she knelt down beside me and fingered my fly. She undid the belt, a hook and lowered the zipper. Since I didn’t move one millimeter (voluntarily) she had trouble extricating her desired object from my boxer undershorts. When she had succeeded in freeing him from his cage, he stood with dignified stiffness, trembling slightly, like a young scholar about to have a doctoral hood lowered over his head. (The rest of me was cold and immobile as the code of ethics of AAPP encourages us.) She leaned forward to put her mouth over it.

‘Did you ever see the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre?’ I asked.

She stopped, startled, then closing her eyes completely, drew my penis into her mouth.

She did what intelligent women do in such cases. Although the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her tongue produced predictable feelings of euphoria, I found I was not much mentally excited by what was happening. That mad scientist dice man was looking at everything too hard.

After what began to seem like an embarrassingly long time (I sat mute, dignified, professional through it all), she rose up and whispered, ‘Take off your clothes and come.’ She moved nicely to the couch and lay down on her stomach with her face to the wall.

I felt that if I sat immobile any longer she would snap out of it and become angry, get dressed and demand her money back. I had seen her in two roles, sex kitten and intellectual bitch. Was there some sort of third Linda? I walked over (my left hand pants clutching) to the couch and sat down. Linda’s white, nude body looked cold and babyish against the formal brown leather. Her face was turned away but my weight on the side of the couch let her know I had arrived.

Whatever limitations Linda might have as a human being seemed adequately compensated for by a round and apparently firm posterior. Her instinct – or probably her well-learned habit – of stuffing her buttocks at an obviously aroused man seemed correct. My hand actually arrived within two and one-quarter inches of that flesh before the mad scientist in the London fog got the message through.

‘Roll over,’ I said. (Get her best weapon aimed elsewhere.)

She rolled slowly over, reached up two white arms and pulled my neck down until our mouths met. She began to groan authoritatively. She pressed first her mouth hard against mine and then, somehow getting me to lift my legs up on the couch beside hers, pressed her abdomen hard into mine. She tongued, writhed, groaned and clutched with intelligent abandon. I just lay, wondering not too acutely what to do.

Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.

‘Linda,’ I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) ‘Linda,’ I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dante and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dante back. ‘Linda,’ I said a third time.

‘Put it in,’ she said.

‘Linda, wait a minute.’

‘What’s the matter, put it in.’ She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.

‘Linda, I’ve got my period.’

Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.

Linda either hadn’t read Freud or didn’t care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.

She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half-closed her eyes again, groaned and said, ‘Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.’

Although her hands weren’t pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one-eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.

‘Linda, there’s something I’d like you to do, first,’ I said. (What? What? For God’s sake, what?) This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn’t tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Lie here just as you are without moving, and close your eyes.’

She looked at me – our bodies were separated by only three or four inches and one of her hands was still pulling me toward the great melting pot – and again she was neither Bardot nor bitch. When she sighed, let go of me and closed her eyes, I eased myself to a seat on the edge of the couch again.

‘Try to relax,’ I said.

Her eyes shot open and her head jerked up like a doll’s.

‘What the hell do I want to relax for?’

‘Please, for me, do this … one thing. Lie there in your full beauty and let your arms, legs, face, everything relax. Please.’

‘What for? You’re not relaxed.’ And she laughed coldly at my denied, deprived, but still unbending middle leg.

‘Please, Linda, I want you. I want to make love to you, but first I want to caress you and kiss you and I want you to receive my love without – with complete relaxation. I know it’s impossible, so I’ll suggest a way you might do it. I want you to think of a little girl picking flowers in a field. Can you do that?’

Bitch glared up at me.

‘Why?’

‘If you do it, you may – if you follow my instructions you may be in for a surprise. If I come into you now, neither of us will learn anything.’ I brought my face dramatically down to within a few inches of hers. ‘A little girl picking flowers in a totally lush, green, beautiful but deserted field. Do you see that?’

She glared a moment longer, then lowered her head to the couch and closed her legs together. Two or three minutes passed. Very distantly I could hear Miss Reingold’s typewriter tit-tatting away.

‘I see a little kid picking tiger lilies near a swamp.’

‘Is the little girl a pretty girl?’

[Pause]

‘Yeah, she’s pretty.’

‘Parents – what are this little girl’s parents like?’

‘There are little field daisies too, and lilac bushes.’

[Pause]

‘The parents are bastards. They beat the kid … the little girl. They buy long necklaces and they whip her with them. They tie her up with linked bracelets. They give her poison candy which makes her sick, and then they force her to drink her own vomit. They never let the girl be alone. Whenever she goes to the fields, where she is now, they beat her when she comes home.’

(I didn’t say a word, but the impulse to say ‘and they beat her when she comes home’ had the strength of Hercules.) There was a long pause.

‘They beat her with books. They hit her on the head again and again with books. They stick pins and pencils in her. And tacks. When they’re done with her they throw her in the cellar.’

Linda was not relaxed; she wasn’t crying; she seemed her bitchy self essentially, complaining against the parents but not able to feel sorry for the little girl. She felt only bitterness.

‘Look very closely at the little girl in the fields, Linda. Look very closely at her. [Pause] The little girl –?’ [Pause]

‘The little girl … is crying.’

‘Why is the little … does she have … does the girl have any flowers?’

‘Yes, she has … It’s a rose, a white rose. I don’t know where …’

[Pause]

‘What is she … how does she feel toward the white rose?’

‘… The white rose is the only … thing in the world which she can talk to, the only thing that … loves her … She holds the flower in front of her eyes by the stem and she talks to it and … no … she doesn’t even hold it. It floats to her … like magic, but she never, not once ever, touches it, and she never kisses it. She looks at it and it sees her and in those moments … in those moments … the little girl … is happy. The white rose, with the white rose … she is happy.’

After another minute Linda’s eyes blinked open. She looked over at me, at my wilted penis, at the walls, the ceiling. At the ceiling. A buzzer sounded for what I now realized may have been the third or fourth time and I started.

‘The hour’s up.’ she said dazedly and then added: ‘What a funny, stupid story,’ but without bitterness, dreamily.

Except for the silent restoration of our clothing, the session was over.