The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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       Chapter Eight

      After closing the door I walked mechanically back into the living room. At the window I stared at the few lights and at the empty early-morning streets below. Dr Mann emerged from the building and moved off toward Madison Avenue; he looked, from three floors up, like a stuffed dwarf. I had an urge to pick up the easy chair he had been sitting in and throw it through the glass window after him. Distorted images swirled through my mind: Jake’s book lying darkly on the white tablecloth at lunch; the boy Eric’s black eyes staring at me warmly; Lil and Arlene wriggling toward me; blank pieces of paper on my desk; Dr Mann’s clouds of smoke mushrooming toward the ceiling; and Arlene as she had left the room a few hours earlier; an open, sensuous yawn. For some reason I felt like starting at one end of the room and running full speed to the other end and smashing right through the portrait of Freud which hung there.

      Instead I turned from the window and walked back and forth until I was looking up at the portrait. Freud stared down at me dignified, serious, productive, rational and stable: he was every thing which a reasonable man might strive to be. I reached up and, grasping the portrait carefully, turned it around so that the face was toward the wall. I stared with rising satisfaction at the brown cardboard backing and then, with a sigh, returned to the poker table and put away the cards, chips and chairs. One of the two dice was missing but when I glanced at the floor it was not to be found. Turning to go to bed, I saw on the small table next to the chair Dr Mann had been lecturing me from, a card – the queen of spades – angled as if propped up against something. I went over and stared down at the card and knew that beneath it was the die.

      I stood that way for a full minute feeling a rising, incomprehensible rage: something of what Osterflood must feel, of what Lil must have been feeling during the afternoon, but directed at nothing, thoughtless, aimless rage. I vaguely remember an electric clock humming on the mantelpiece. Then a fog-horn blast groaned into the room from the Eastriver and terror tore the arteries out of my heart and tied them in knots in my belly: if that die has a one face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs and rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene,’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror was boiled away by a pleasant excitement and my mouth swelled into a gargantuan grin: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the die?

      I picked up the queen of spades and saw staring at me a cyclopean eye: a one.

      I was shocked into immobility for perhaps five seconds, but finally made an abrupt, soldierly about-face and marched to our apartment door, opened it and took one pace outside, wheeled, and marched with mechanical precision and joyous excitement back into the apartment, down the hall to our bedroom, opened the door a crack and announced loudly: ‘I’m going for a walk, Lil.’ Turning, I marched out of the apartment a second time.

      As I walked woodenly down the two flights of stairs I noticed rust spots on the railing and an abandoned advertising circular crumpled into a corner. ‘Think Big,’ it urged. On the Ecstein floor I wheeled like a puppet, marched to the door of their apartment and rang. My next clear thought swept with dignified panic through my mind: ‘Does Arlene really take the pill?’ A smile colored my consciousness at the thought of Jack the Ripper, on his way to rape and strangle another woman, and worrying whether she was protected or not.

      After twenty seconds I rang again.

      A second smile (my face remained wooden) flowed through at the thought of someone else’s already having discovered the die and thus now busily banging away at Arlene on the floor just on the other side of the door.

      The door unlatched and opened a crack.

      ‘Jake?’ a voice said sleepily.

      ‘It’s me, Arlene,’ I said.

      ‘What do you want?’ The door stayed open only a crack.

      ‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I said.

      ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just a minute.’

      She unlatched and opened the door. She was wearing an unattractive cotton bathrobe, possibly even Jake’s, her black hair was straggling down her forehead, cold cream whitened her face, and she was squinting at me without her glasses like a blind beggar woman in a melodrama of the life of Christ.

      Closing the door behind me I turned toward her and waited, wondering passively what I was going to do next.

      ‘What did you say you wanted?’ she asked; she was groggy with sleep.

      ‘I’ve come downstairs to rape you,’ I replied and advanced toward her, she continuing to stand there with a widening and perhaps wakening look of curiosity. Feeling for the first time a faint hint of sexual desire, I put my arms around her, lowered my head and planted my mouth on her neck.

      Almost immediately I felt her hands pushing hard against my chest and soon a long-drawn-out ‘Luuuu-UUke,’ part terror, part question, part giggle. After a good solid wet arousing kissing of her upper dorsal region I released her. She stepped back a step and straightened her ugly bathrobe. We stared at each other, in our differently hypnotized states, like two drunks confronting each other, knowing they are expected to dance.

      ‘Come,’ I found myself saying after our mutual moment of awe, and I put my left arm around her waist and began СКАЧАТЬ