Читать книгу The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 24

I was Christ for a day. As a pattern-breaking event, being a loving Jesus certainly qualified, and I was surprised how humble and loving and compassionate I began to feel. The dice had ordered me to ‘Be as Jesus’ and to be constantly filled with a Christian (pronounced ‘Chr-eye-steean’) love for everybody I met. I voluntarily walked the children to school that morning, holding their little hands and feeling paternal, benevolent and loving. Larry’s asking me, ‘What’s wrong, Daddy, why are you coming with us?’ didn’t faze me in the least. Back in my apartment study I re-read the Sermon on the Mount and most of the gospel of Mark, and when I said goodbye to Lil prior to her leaving on a shopping spree, I blessed her and showed her such tenderness that she assumed something was wrong. For a horrible instant I was about to confess my affair with Arlene and beg forgiveness, but instead I decided that that was another man – and another world. When I saw Lil again that evening she confessed that my love had helped her to spend three times more than she usually did.

I had a rendezvous scheduled with Arlene for late that very afternoon, but I knew then I would urge both her and myself to cease our sinning and pray for forgiveness. I tried to be especially compassionate with Frank Osterflood and Linda Reichman, my morning patients, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. I got a slight stir out of Mr Osterflood when I mentioned that perhaps raping little girls was a sin: he exploded that they deserved everything he did to them. When I read to him the Sermon on the Mount he became more and more agitated until I reached a part about if the right eye offend thee pluck it out and if the hand offend thee … He lunged off the couch across my desk and had me by the throat before I’d even stopped reading. After Jake and Miss Reingold and Jake’s patient for that hour had finally succeeded in parting us, Osterflood and I were both rather embarrassed and admitted very shyly that we had been discussing the Sermon on the Mount.

Linda Reichman seemed put off when, after she had stripped to the waist, I suggested that we pray together. When she began kissing my ear I talked to her about the necessity of spiritual love. When she got angry, I begged her forgiveness, but when she unzipped my fly I began reading from the Sermon on the Mount again.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you today?’ she sneered. ‘You’re even worse than you were last time.’

‘I’m trying to show you that there’s a spiritual love far more enriching than the most perfect of physical experiences.’

‘You really believe that crap?’ she asked.

‘I believe that all men are lost until they become filled with a great warm love for all men, a spiritual love, the love of Jesus.’

‘You really believe that crap?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want my money back.’

I almost cried that day when I met Jake for lunch. I so wanted to help him, trapped by that relentless overcharged engine of his, zooming through life missing everything, and especially missing the great love that filled me. He was forking down great gobs of beef stew and lima beans and telling me about a patient of his who had committed suicide by mistake. I was searching for some way to break down the seemingly impenetrable wall of his armored self and finding none. As the meal progressed I became sadder and sadder. I felt tears forming in my eyes. I irritably stopped the sentimentality and searched again for some way to his heart.

‘Some way to his heart,’ was the very phrase I thought in that day. A certain vocabulary and style go with every personality and every religion; under the influence of being Jesus Christ I found I loved people, and the experience expressed itself in unfamiliar actions and in unfamiliar language.

‘Jake,’ I finally said. ‘Do you ever feel great warmth and love toward people?’

He stopped with fork at mouth and gaped at me for a second.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Do you ever, have you ever felt a great rush of warmth and love toward some person or toward all humanity?’

He stared a moment more, then said:

‘No. Freud associated such feelings with pantheism and the stage of development of two-year-olds. I’d say the irrational flooding of love was regression.’

‘And you’ve never felt it?’

‘Nope. Why?’

‘But what if such feelings are … wonderful? What if they seem better, more desirable than any other state? Would its being a regressive mode of feeling still make it undesirable?’

‘Sure. Who’s the patient? That Cannon kid you were telling me about?’

‘What if I were to tell you that I feel such a surge of love and warmth for everyone?’

This stopped the steam-shovel machine.

‘And especially love for you,’ I added.

Jake blinked behind his glasses and looked – it’s only my interpretation of a facial expression I’d never seen on his face before – frightened.

‘I’d say you were regressing,’ he said nervously. ‘You’re blocked in some line of development and to escape responsibility and to find help you feel this great childish love for everyone.’ He began eating again. ‘It’ll pass.’

‘Do you think I’m joking about this feeling, Jake?’

He looked away, his eyes jumping from object to object around the room like trapped sparrows.

‘Can’t tell, Luke. You’ve been acting strangely lately. Might be a game, might be sincere. Maybe you ought to get back in analysis, talk it up with Tim there. I can’t judge you here as a friend.’

‘All right, Jake. But I want you to know that I love you and I don’t think it has anything at all to do with object cathexis or the anal stage.’

He blinked at me nervously, not eating.

‘It’s a Christeean love, or rather, a Judaic-Christeean love, of course,’ I added.

He was looking more and more terrified. I began to be afraid of him.

‘I’m only referring to warm, passionate brotherly love, Jake, it’s nothing to worry about.’

He smiled nervously, snuck in a quick squint and asked: ‘Have these attacks very often, Luke?’

‘Please don’t worry about it. Tell me more about that patient. Have you finished your article about it?’

Jake was soon back on the main line, throttle wide open, his colleague, love-filled Lucius Rhinehart, successfully side-tracked at Podunk Junction, there to be stationed hopefully until it was possible to write an article about him.

‘Sit down, my son,’ I said to Eric Cannon when he entered my little green room at QSH that afternoon. I had been feeling very warm and Jesusy before buzzing for him to be brought in and, standing behind the desk, I looked at him now with love. He looked back at me as though he believed he could see into my soul, his large black eyes glimmering with apparent amusement. Despite his gray khakis and torn T-shirt he was serene and dignified, a lithe, long-haired Christ who looked as though he did gymnastics every day and had fucked every girl on the block.

He dragged a chair over near the window as he always did and flopped down with casual unconcern, his legs stretched out in front of him, a hole staring mutely at me from the bottom of his left sneaker.

Bowing my head, I said: ‘Let us pray.’

He stopped open-mouthed in mid-yawn, his arms clasped behind his head, and stared. Then he drew in his legs, leaned forward and lowered his head.

‘Dear God,’ I said aloud. ‘Help us this hour to serve Thy will, be in tune with Thy soul and breathe each breath to Thy glory. Amen.’

I sat down with my eyes still lowered, wondering where I went from here. In most of my early sessions with Eric, I had been my usual non-directive self and, much to my discomfiture, he became the first patient in recorded psychiatric history who, through his first three consecutive therapy sessions, was able to sit silent and thoroughly relaxed. In the fourth he talked nonstop the entire hour on the state of the ward and world. In subsequent sessions he had alternated between silence and soliloquy. In the previous three weeks I had tried only a couple of dice-dictated experiments and had assigned Eric to try feeling love for all figures of authority but he had met all my ploys with silence. When I raised my head now, he was looking at me alertly. Black eyes pinning me where I sat, he reached into his pocket, leaned forward and wordlessly offered me a Winston.