later I staggered away from the table engaged to begin analysis with Dr. Jacob Ecstein on Friday in our mutual office.

Jake left the table like a man handed the Sonship of God on a silver platter; his greatest triumph was about to begin.

And, by Fromm, he was right.

As for myself, when I finally ate again eighteen hours later, it killed my appetite for therapy, but, as it turned out,

going back under analysis with Jake was a stroke of genius. Never question the Way of the Die: Even when you're starving to death.

Chapter Seventeen

Eventually, it had to happen; the dice decided that Dr. Rhinehart should spread their plague - he was ordered to corrupt his innocent children into the dicelife.

He easily maneuvered his wife to a long three-day visit to her, parents in Daytona Beach, employing the horrible premise that the nursemaid Mrs. Roberts and he would take perfect care of the children. He then maneuvered Mrs. Roberts to Radio City Music Hall. Rubbing his hands together and grinning hysterically, Dr. Rhinehart began to implement his hideous plan of drawing his innocent children into his web of sickness and depravity.

`My children,' he said to them from the living room couch in a fatherly tone of voice (Oh! the cloak which evil wears!)

`I have a special game for us to-play today.'

Lawrence and little Evie clustered close to their father like innocent moths to a deadly flame. He took from his pocket

and placed on the arm of the couch two dice: those awful seeds which had already borne such bitter fruit.

The children stared at the dice wide-eyed; they had never seen evil directly before, but the shimmering green light which the dice emitted sent through each of their hearts a deep convulsive shudder. Suppressing his fear, Lawrence said bravely `What's the game, Dad?'

`Me, too,' said Evie.

`It's called the dice man game.'

`What's that?' asked Lawrence. (Only seven years old, yet so soon to be aged in evil.) `The dice man game goes like

this: we write down six things we might do and then we shake a die to see which one we do.'

`Huh?'

`Or write down six persons you might be and then shake the dice and see which one you are.'

Lawrence and Evie stared at their father, stunned with the enormity of the perversion.

`Okay,' said Lawrence.

`Me too,' said Evie.

`How do we decide what to write down?' asked Lawrence.

`Just tell me any strange thing which you think might be .fun and I'll write it down.'

Lawrence thought, unaware of the downward spiral that this first step might mean.

`Go to the zoo,' he said.

`Go to the zoo,' said Dr. Rhinehart and walked nonchalantly to his desk for paper and pencil to record this infamous

game.

`Climb to the roof and throw paper,' Lawrence said. He and Evie had joined their father at the desk and watched as he

wrote.

`Go beat up Jerry Brass,' Lawrence went on.

Dr. Rhinehart nodded and wrote.

`That's number three,' he said.

`Play horsey with you.'

`Hooray,' said Evie.

`Number four.'

There was a silence.

`I can't think of anymore.'

`How about you, Evie?'

`Eat ice cream.'

'Yeah,' said Lawrence.

`That's number five. Just one more.'

`Go for a long hike in Harlem,' shouted Lawrence, and he ran back to the couch and got the dice. `Can I throw?'

`You can throw. Just one, remember.'

He cast across the floor of his fate a single die: a four horsey. Ah gods, in what nag's clothing comes the wolf.

They played, raucously, for twenty minutes and then Lawrence, already, Reader, I lament to say, hooked, asked to

play dice man again. His father, smiling and gasping for breath, wobbled to the desk to write another page of the book

of ruin. Lawrence added some new alternatives and left some old ones and the dice chose: `Go beat up Jerry Brass.'

Lawrence stared at his father.

`What do we do now?' he asked.

`You go downstairs and ring the Brass's doorbell and ask to see Jerry and then you try to beat him up.'

Lawrence looked down at the floor, the enormity of his folly beginning to sink into his little heart.

`What if he's not home?'

`Then you try again later.'

`What'll I say when I beat him up?'

`Why don't you ask the dice?'

He looked up quickly at his father.'

'What do you mean?'

`You've got to beat up Jerry, why not give the dice six voices of what you'll say?'

'That's great. What'll they be?'

`You're God,' his father said with that same horrible smile. `You name them.'

`I'll tell him my father told me to.'

Dr. Rhinehart coughed, hesitated. `That's .., um … number one.'

`I'll tell him my mother told me to.'

`Right'

'That I'm drunk.'

`Number three.'

"That . .. that I can't stand him'

He was deep in excited concentration.

`That I'm practicing my boxing…' He laughed and hopped up and down.

`And that the dice told me to.'

That's six and very good, Larry.'

`I throw, I throw.'

'That I'm practicing my boxing…'

He laughed and the living room rung and yelled its command back to his father: 'Three!'

`Okay, Larry, you're drunk. Go get him.'

Reader, Lawrence went. Lawrence struck Jerry Brass. Struck him several times, announced he was drunk and escaped

unpunished by the absent Brass parents or present Brass maid, but pursued already by the furies which will not leave

un-avenged such senseless evil. When he returned to his own apartment, Lawrence's first words were - I record them with shame:

`Where 'are the dice, Dad?'

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never bad. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often weal cough before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety filled and diffused?

It was the goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? Or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? Indeed men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.

I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: `Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another'

- why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be.