`She would have tattled on me and you wouldn't have fixed my car.'
`If she were dead how could she tattle on you?' I asked.
`Don't worry, she'd find a way.'
The crisis was simple: Larry's dice told him to steal three dollars from Lil's purse and he spent it on twenty-three comic
books (a whim of the die which he told me he resented deeply, being quite fond of bubble gum, lollipops, dart guns
and chocolate sundaes). Lil wondered where he got the money for all the comic books. He refused to tell her, insisting
that she asked Daddy. She did.
`It's very simple, Lil,' I said and while she was putting on Evie's shoes for the fifth time within the hour I consulted the die: I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.
`I was playing a dice game with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.'
She stared at me, a strand of blonde hair dangling on her forehead and her blue eyes momentarily blank with
bewilderment.
`He had to steal three dollars from my purse?'
I was seated in my easy chair puffing on a pipe and with a copy of the Times spread across my lap.
`It's a stupid little game I invented while you were gone to help Larry learn self-discipline. Certain options are created
by the player, some of them unpleasant, like stealing, and then the dice choose which one you have to do.'
'Who has to do?'
She shooed Evie off to the kitchen and advanced to the edge of the couch, where she lit a cigarette. She'd had a good
time in Daytona and we'd enjoyed a nice reunion, but she was beginning to look less tanned and more flushed.
`The player, or players.'
`I don't know what you're talking about.'
`It's simple,' I said (I love these two words: I always imagine Immanuel Kant pronouncing them before he set down the
first sentence of The Critique of Pure Reason, or an American President before launching into an explanation of
Vietnam War policy).
`To encourage Larry to branch out into new areas of this young-'
'Stealing!'
`-new areas of his young life, I invented a game whereby you make up things to do'
`But stealing, Luke, I mean-'
`Which the dice then choose from among.'
`And stealing was one of the options.'
`It's all in the family,' I said.
She stared at me from near the edge of the couch, her arms folded across her chest, a cigarette between her fingers.
She looked amazingly calm.
`Luke,' she began speaking slowly. `I don't know what you think you're doing lately; I don't know whether you're sane or insane; I don't know if you're trying to destroy me or trying to destroy your children or trying to destroy yourself, but if you if you - once more involve Larry in any of your sick games - I -I'll..'
Her amazingly calm face suddenly split like a broken mirror into dozens of cracks of tension, her eyes filled with tears and she twisted her face to the side and gasped a suppressed scream.
`Don't. Please don't,' she whispered, and she sat abruptly on the arm of the couch, her face still averted. `Go tell him no more games. Never.'
'I stood up, the Times fluttering to the floor.
`I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't realize `Never - Larry - more games.'
`I'll tell him.'
I left the room and went to his bedroom and told him, and his career as dice-boy, after only eight days, ended.
Until the Die resurrected it.
Chapter Nineteen
My childhood! My childhood! My God, I've now written over a hundred and ten pages and you don't even know whether I was bottle fed or breast fed! You don't know when I was first weaned and how; when I first discovered that girls don't have any weeny, how much I brooded because girls don't have any weeny, when I first decided to enjoy the fact that girls don't have any weeny. You don't know who my great-grandparents were, my grandparents; you don't even know about my mother and father? My siblings! My milieu! My socioeconomic background! My early traumas! My early joys!, The signs and portents surrounding my birth! Dear friends, you don't know any of that `David Copperfield kind of crap' (to quote Howard Hughes) which is the very essence of autobiography! Relax, my friends, I don't intend to tell you.
Traditional autobiographers wish to help you understand how the adult was `formed.'
I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are 'formed'- and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible justification of an autobiography is that it happened by chance to be written - like this one. Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and totally honest autobiography 'I live.'
I will acknowledge, however, that I did, in fact, have a human mother. This much I admit.
Chapter Twenty
In November I received a telephone call from Dr. Mann informing me that Eric Cannon had been acting up while I'd been away a week at a convention in Houston, that it had bees necessary to increased his medication (tranquilizers) and would I please make a special trip over as soon as possible and see him. Eric might have to be transferred to another institution. In my temporary office on the Island I read through Head Nurse Herbie Flamm's report on Eric Cannon.
It had a kind of novelistic power that Henry James sought for fifty years without finding:
It is necessary to report that Patient Eric Cannon is a troublemaker. There haven't been many patients in my lifetime that I would have to label that, but this is one. Cannon is a consciously evil troublemaker. He is disturbing the other patients. Although I have always kept this one of the quietest [sic] wards on the island, since he has been here it is noisy and a mess. Patients who haven't said a word in years now can't shut up. Patients that have stood always in the same corner now play pitch and catch with chairs. Many of the patients are now singing and laughing. This disturbs the patients who want peace and quiet to get better. Someone keeps destroying the television set. I think Mr. Cannon is schizophrenic. Sometimes he wanders around the ward nice and quiet like he was in a dreamworld and other times he sneaks around like a snake, hissing at me and the patients like he was the boss of the ward and not me.
Unfortunately he has followers. Many patients are now refusing sedation. Some do not go to the machine shop for factory therapy. Two patients confined to wheelchairs have pretended to walk. Patients are showing disrespect for the hospital food. When one man was ill to his stomach, another patient began eating the vomit, claiming it tasted much better that way. We do not have enough maximum security rooms on the ward. Also patients who are refusing or not swallowing their sedation will not stop singing and laughing when we politely ask. Disrespect is everywhere. I have sometimes had the feeling on the ward that I do not exist. I mean to say no one pays attention any more. My attendants are often tempted to treat the patients with physical force but I remind them of the Hypocratic Oath. Patients will not stay in their beds at night. Talking with each other is going on. Meetings I think. They whisper. I do not know if there is a rule against this, but I recommend that a rule is made. Whispering is worse than singing.
We have sent several of his followers to ward W [the violent ward] but patient Cannon is tricky. He never does anything himself. I think he is spreading illegal drugs on the ward but none have been found. He never does anything and everything is happening.