`Quite right,' Dr. Mann wiped his mouth with his napkin (or he may have been nibbling from it). `Apologize. I'd be at home as commander too. Only one who wouldn't is Luke, he'd let everyone go - on a whim.'
Dr. Mann had not been enthusiastic about the release of Arturo Toscanini Jones.
`No, I wouldn't,' I said. `If I were commander I'd increase food allotments two hundred percent and do experiments
with the inmates which would advance psychiatry a hundred years past Freud in twelve months.'
`Are you-talking about Jewish inmates?' Jake asked.
`Damn right. Jews make the best subjects for psychological experiments.'
I paused about one and a half seconds, but as Jake started to speak, I went on. `Because they're so intelligent,' sensitive
and flexible.'
That slowed Jake down. Somehow the racial stereotype I had created with my three adjectives didn't seem to leave him
much to shoot at.
`What do you mean by flexible?' he asked.
`Not rigid - open-minded, capable of change.'
`What experiments would you perform, Luke?'
Dr. Mann asked, watching a chubby waiter quiver past with a platter of lobsters.
`I wouldn't touch the inmates physically. No brain operations, sterilizations, that stuff. All I'd do is this: Turn all the
ascetics into hedonists; all the epicureans into flagellants; nymphomaniacs into nuns; homosexuals into heterosexuals, and vice versa. I'd train them all to eat non kosher food, give up their religion, change their professions, their styles of dress, grooming, walking and so on, and train them all to be unintelligent, insensitive and inflexible. I would prove that man can be changed: Dr. Felloni looked a little startled; she was nodding rather emphatically: `We're going to do this at Queensborough State, Hospital?'
`When I become director,' I answered.
`But I'm not certain it would be ethical,' she said.
`How would you do all this?' asked Dr. Mann.
`Drole therapy.'
`Drole therapy?'
Jake asked.
`Yes. Honker, Ronson and Gloop, APB Journal, August, 1958, pages sixteen to twenty-three, annotated bibliography.
It's short for drama-role therapy.'
'Dessert menu, please, waiter,' said Dr. Mann and seemed to lose interest.
'The same thing as Moreno?' Jake asked.
`No. Moreno has patients act out their fantasies in staged playlets. Drole therapy consists of forcing patients to live
their pressed latent impulses.'
'What's the APB Journal?' Jake asked.
`Jake, I agree with everything you say,' I said pleadingly. Don't challenge me. The whole thin tissue supporting our
argument will tear and collapse the whole thing on us.'
`I wasn't urging experimentation on patients.'
`Then what do you do during a typical hour?'
`Cure 'em.'
'Dr. Mann began what might have been a long rumbling laugh but was infected by food swallowed the wrong way and
ended as a fit of coughing.
But, Jake,' I said, `I thought it was our idea to gradually increase the facilities of and enrolment in mental hospitals one
percent a year until the whole nation was being cured.'
Silence.
`You'd have to be first, Luke,' Jake said quietly. ""Let me start now, today. I need help. I need food.'
`You mean analysis?'
`Yes. We all know I need it badly.'
`Dr. Mann was your analyst.'
'I've lost faith in him. He's got bad table manners. He wastes food.'
`You knew that before.'
`But I didn't know until now the importance of food:'
Silence. Then Dr. Felloni:
`I'm glad you mentioned Tim's table manners, Luke, because for some time now…'
'How about it, Tim,' Jake said. `Can I take on Luke?'
`Certainly. I only work with neurotics.'
That ambiguous remark (was I schizophrenic or mentally healthy?) essentially ended the conversation. A few minutes
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.