Toward the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart worked as a psychoanalyst in New York and was bored stiff. He lived in a pretty apartment, with a nice view looking onto his neighbors’ windows, and his neighbors had a nice view of his. He practiced yoga, read books on Zen, dreamed vaguely of joining a commune but didn’t dare. Instead he wore bell-bottomed pants and sported a beard that made him look a little less like a depressed shrink and a little more like an unemployed actor. As a therapist, he was resolutely nondirective. If an obese patient who still hadn’t lost his virginity was plagued by sadistic impulses and said on Luke’s couch that he’d like to rape and kill a little girl, Luke’s professional ethics obliged him to repeat with a calm voice, “You’d like to rape and kill a little girl?…” With a noncommittal question mark followed by three long dots. No judgment. But what he wanted to say was “Well, go ahead, then! If what really turns you on is raping and killing a little girl, then stop boring me with this fantasy. Do it!” He checked himself before coming out with such monstrosities, but they obsessed him more and more. Like everyone else, he stopped himself from going through with his own fantasies, although they were pretty harmless—not enough to get him sent to prison, unlike his sadistic patient’s, if he were to let himself go. What Luke would have liked, for example, was to sleep with Arlene, the sexy wife of his colleague Jake Ecstein, who lived across the landing. Luke suspected she wouldn’t say no either, but as a faithful and responsible husband he let the idea simmer away in the back of his mind.
So life plods on, calm and dreary, until one night after a dinner party when he’s had a little too much to drink. Luke sees a die lying on the carpet, a banal playing die, and gets the idea of throwing it and acting on its instructions.
“If it lands on a number from 2 to 6, I’ll do what I would have done anyway: bring the dirty glasses back to the kitchen, brush my teeth, take a double aspirin to avoid having too bad a hangover in the morning, go to bed beside my sleeping wife, and maybe masturbate discreetly thinking of Arlene. But if I roll a 1, I’ll do what I really want to do: I know Arlene’s at home alone tonight, so I’ll go across the hall, knock on her door, and sleep with her.”
The die lands on 1.
Luke hesitates, feeling vaguely that he’s standing on a threshold: if he crosses it, his life could change. But it’s not his decision, it’s the die’s, so he obeys. Arlene opens the door in a negligee; she’s surprised but not put out. When Luke comes back home two extremely pleasant hours later, he realizes that he has changed. This change may not be enormous, but it’s more than anything one might expect of psychotherapy—as he’s paid to know. He did something the normal Luke wouldn’t do. A bigger, less inhibited, more audacious Luke is breaking through the surface of the prudent, conformist Luke, and perhaps still other Lukes whose existence he doesn’t even suspect are waiting behind the door for the die to open it.
In all circumstances, from now on, Luke consults the die. Since it has six sides, he gives it six options. The first is to do what he’s always done. The five others depart more or less distinctly from this routine. Let’s say Luke and his wife had planned to go to the movies. Antonioni’s new film Blow-Up has just come out, and it’s exactly what a couple of New York intellectuals such as them should go see. But they could also go see a film that’s even more intellectual, a Hungarian or Czech film that’s even more artsy, or they could see a blockbuster of the sort they generally disdain, or even a porn flick in a skid row movie house in the Bowery, where people like them have never set foot and never would. Once it’s been subjected to the die, even the most anodyne choice, that of a film, a restaurant, what to eat at a restaurant, opens, if you watch out for it, a vast array of possibilities for putting your routine behind you. At the start, Luke takes it easy. He chooses prudent options, not too far from his habits. Small side steps that spice up his life without disrupting it, such as changing places in bed, or positions during sex. But soon his choices become more audacious. He starts thinking of everything he’s never done as a challenge to be faced. Going somewhere he’d never go, getting to know people he would otherwise never meet. Undertaking to seduce a woman whose name he found in the phone book. Borrowing ten dollars from a complete stranger. Giving ten dollars to a complete stranger. Venturing into a gay bar, flirting with men, turning on the charm, and—why not, he the affirmed hetero?—sleeping with a man. Acting pushy, impatient, and despotic with his patients. To the patient who believes he’s a piece of shit, blurting out, “And what if you really are a piece of shit?” To the writer with a block: “Instead of slogging away at your bullshit novel, why not go to the Congo and get involved with a revolutionary group? Why not go all out: sex, hunger, danger?” And to the guy who’s inhibited by his passivity: “Why don’t you do my receptionist? She’s ugly, okay, but she wants nothing better. Go ahead and kiss her when you leave. At worst she’ll slap you, what do you stand to lose?” He pushes his patients to leave their families and jobs, to change their political and sexual orientations. The results are disastrous and his reputation suffers, but Luke doesn’t care. What he likes, now, is doing the exact opposite of what he’d normally do: putting salt in his coffee, jogging in a tuxedo, going to work in shorts, pissing in the flowerpots, walking backward, sleeping under his bed … His wife finds him strange, but he says it’s a psychological experiment, and she lets herself be lulled into believing it. Until the day he gets the idea of initiating his children.
Here he has no doubt that such an undertaking is dangerous, very dangerous even. But it’s a rule of thumb that every option you start by imagining winds up being submitted to the die and, one day or another, can end up being rolled. So one weekend when their mother isn’t there, Luke gets his little boy and girl to play this apparently innocent game: you write six things you’d like to do on a piece of paper, and the die chooses one of them. It all goes well at the start—it always does: they eat ice cream, go to the zoo, and then his son becomes bolder and says that one thing he’d like to do is go beat up a boy who bugs him at school. “Okay, write it down,” Luke says, and that’s what the die rolls. The boy thinks his father won’t make him go through with it, but his dad says, “Go ahead.” The boy goes to his friend’s place, hits him several times, and comes back to the house with his eyes shining and asks, “Where are the dice, Dad?”
That makes Luke stop and think: If his son so naturally adopts this way of being, it’s because he’s not yet completely warped by the absurd postulate put forward by his parents and society that it’s good for children to develop a coherent character. What if they were brought up differently? Giving pride of place to contradiction, multiplicity, and relentless change? Tell lies, dear children, disobey, be inconsistent, lose the bad habit of brushing your teeth before you go to bed. We’re told children need order and discipline; what if they need just the opposite? Luke seriously thinks of freeing his son of the dismal tyranny of the ego and making him the first man entirely subject to chance: a child in the spirit of Lao-Tsu.
Then the children’s mother returns and discovers what’s been going on. Not finding it funny in the least, she leaves Luke and takes the children with her.
So our hero is now without a family. That makes him sad because he loves his family, but the die is as insistent as Jesus Christ, who also demands that his followers abandon everything.
Then it’s his profession that Luke abandons, after an evening with the cream of New York psychoanalysts. The road map given to him by the die (though it must be said he’d smoked a lot of drugs while listing the options) is to change personality every ten minutes, the six roles he must alternately adopt being those of a well-mannered psychiatrist (him before the die), a mental retard, a sex maniac, a Jesus freak, a radical leftist, and a right-wing extremist spouting virulently anti-Semitic remarks. The evening was a scandal, after which Luke is interned and has to appear before a disciplinary council. He uses this unexpected tribune to announce to the world what he calls a revolutionary therapy. His colleagues are horrified: his revolutionary therapy is the programmed destruction of the identity. That’s right, Luke concedes, but isn’t that the best thing that can happen? What we call the identity is nothing but a straitjacket of boredom, frustration, and despair. All therapies aim at pulling this straitjacket tighter, whereas true freedom means bursting out of it, no longer being held prisoner by yourself and being able to be another self, dozens of selves …
“What do you really want?”
“Everything, I guess. To be everybody and to do everything.”
After this profession of faith, the visionary is chased from his professional community—just as another visionary, Timothy Leary, the apostle of LSD, was chased from his. With no family, work, or personal ties, Luke is free, and given over to the vertigo that comes with freedom. He has discovered—and experimented on himself—a technique that at first spices up his life, but whose logic of escalation calls his existence into question at every moment. At the start it was like marijuana, enjoyable and amusing, now it’s like acid, enormous and exulting, laying waste to everything in its path. To give free rein to the suppressed tendencies in his personality, he moves from transgression to transgression. His discovery becomes a form of asceticism, no longer at all hedonistic or amusing. The last safeguard to explode is the pleasure principle. Because he who starts down the path of the die at first does things that he’d never have dared to do but that, more or less secretly, he’d always dreamed of doing. Then the day comes when the die pushes him to do things that not only he’d never dared to do but he didn’t want to do, because they ran counter to his tastes, his desires, his whole personality. But that’s just it: the personality—the miserable, petty personality—is the enemy to be done away with, the conditioning that you have to free yourself from. To cease being held prisoner by yourself you have to agree to follow desires that you weren’t aware of, and even that you didn’t have.
Take sex: you start by changing your sexual routines to the satisfaction of both partners, then you change partners, then you leave your wife (or in Luke’s case, she leaves you), then you sleep with all the attractive women who cross your path, and then, to broaden your horizons and to be a little less a slave to your petty preferences, you move on to women you don’t find attractive—old women, fat women, women you’d never have even looked at in the past—and from there to men, then to boys, then to rape, and then to sadistic murder à la American Psycho, why not?
Sooner or later, no serious practitioner of the die can avoid writing murder on his list of options. It’s the supreme taboo; it would be fainthearted not to violate it. When the die orders him to do it, Luke imagines two subcategories: killing a person he knows, and killing someone he doesn’t. He’d like it to be the second option, but he rolls the first, and he’s forced to draw up a list of six potential victims, in which he courageously includes his two children. Luckily for him he’s spared that particular ordeal, like Abraham the murder of his son Isaac: the die simply demands that he kill one of his former patients.
If you believe his autobiography, he went through with it. Certain commentators doubt it, and almost fifty years later the facts seem impossible to verify. By contrast what does seem certain is that having totally ruined his career, his family life, and his reputation, Luke was ready to become a prophet, and that’s what he did. In these remote years when the most paradoxical therapies flourished from one side of America to the other, a guru with a die had every chance of attracting followers. That’s how the celebrated and scandalous Center for Experiments in Totally Random Environments—where you enroll of your own free will but undertake not to leave until the experiment is over—saw the light in a peaceful New England village. The novices start off with emotional roulette: you choose six strong emotions, which you express as dramatically as you can for ten minutes. The more advanced students move on to role plays of varying durations: you list six personality types—let’s say philanthropic and cynical, hardworking and lazy, normopathic and psychotic; these potentialities exist in each of us—and for ten minutes, an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year (also according to the verdict of the die), adopt the one that comes up. For someone who’s not a psychotic, living for a year as if you were one is quite trying. At the end of the course, the most daring attempt total submission, also for a variable duration, depending on the will of someone else who not only throws the die but also selects the options. In this way Luke became the slave of a completely neurotic woman who was imaginative enough to have him live a month of sadomasochistic delirium, during which time he believes he learned more about himself and life than he did in the forty years before that.
Some of the followers of dice therapy went crazy. Others died or wound up in prison. Some, it seems, reached a state of awareness and joy similar to the nirvana of the Buddhists. In the year or two of its existence, Luke’s center became as scandalous as Timothy Leary’s communities: a school of chaos posing as serious a threat to civilization as communism or the satanism of Charles Manson, as the conservative newspapers had it. The end of the adventure is shrouded in obscurity. It’s said that Luke was arrested by the FBI, that he spent twenty years in a psychiatric hospital. Or that he died. Or that he never existed at all.
Everything I’ve just told comes from a book, The Dice Man, published in the United States in 1971 and translated into French the following year. I was sixteen when I discovered it, along with the nutty, paranoid works of Philip K. Dick, and it made almost as big an impression on me. I was a terribly timid adolescent with long hair, an afghan vest, and little round glasses, and for a while I walked around with a die in my pocket, counting on it to give me the self-confidence I lacked with girls. That worked more or less well—actually less rather than more—but notwithstanding that, The Dice Man was the kind of book that not only pleases readers but also gives them a set of rules for life: a manual of subversion of the kind they could dream of following. It wasn’t clear whether it was fiction or autobiographical, but its author, Luke Rhinehart, had the same name as his hero, and like him he was a psychiatrist. According to the back cover he lived in Majorca. And at the time I’m describing, Majorca and Formentera—where Barbet Schroeder filmed More, his movie on drugs featuring the marvelous Mimsy Farmer and the heady music of Pink Floyd—were the ideal refuge for a prophet at the end of his tether, who’s just managed to escape from his shipwrecked community of maniacs. The years passed, The Dice Man remained a buzzword, the object of a minor but persistent cult, and each time I met someone who’d read it (almost always a pothead, and often a follower of the I Ching), the same questions came up: What was true in the book? Who was Luke Rhinehart? What had become of him?
Later on I started to write books of my own, many of which dealt with the temptation held out by multiple lives. All of us are prisoners of our personality, terribly confined by our own small way of thinking and acting. We’d like to know what it’s like to be someone else, at least I would, and to a large extent I became a writer to imagine just that. It’s what inspired me to tell the story of Jean-Claude Romand, who spent eighteen years pretending he was someone other than himself, and that of Eduard Limonov, who lived ten lives at least. A couple of months ago I discussed this subject with a friend, who countered the temptation of multiplicity with the Stoic tradition, for which accomplishment is the fruit of coherence, faithfulness to oneself: patiently sculpting a personality that’s as stable as can be. As you can never take all the paths in life, wisdom is following one’s own, he said, and the narrower this path is, the fewer forks it has, the further it will take you. I agreed: with age I’ve also come to see things that way. But then I thought of Luke Rhinehart, the apostle of dispersion, the prophet of the kaleidoscopic life, the man who said that you have to take all paths at once, no matter if they lead nowhere: a phantom of the bold and dangerous 1960s, when people believed they could experience everything, try everything. And once again I started to wonder what had become of this phantom, and if he was still alive.
In the past, people were pretty much dependent on their own imagination regarding such questions. But today there’s the Internet, and in an hour on the Internet I learned more about Luke Rhinehart than I had in thirty years of idle conjecture.
His real name is George Cockcroft; though no longer young, he’s alive. He’s written other books, but none was as successful as The Dice Man, which more than forty years after it came out is just as much of a cult classic as ever. Dozens of sites are dedicated to it, and just as many legends circulate about it. Ten times it was almost adapted for the cinema. The biggest stars in Hollywood, Jack Nicholson, Nicolas Cage, fought to play the role of Luke, but mysteriously the project never came about. Communities of followers of the die still exist all over the world. As for the mythical author, he lives as a recluse on a remote farm in Upstate New York. No one has seen him for three decades. A single photo of him makes the rounds: it shows under a Stetson a sarcastic, gaunt face that bears a striking resemblance to another magnificent phantom: Dennis Hopper in The American Friend by Wim Wenders. It strikes me that there’s a story here, and I pitch it to Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, editor in chief of XXI, as if Luke Rhinehart were Carlos Castaneda, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon rolled into one: an icon of the most radical subversion transformed into an invisible man.
Sold, of course.
One detail should have warned me: my invisible man has his own website, through which I was able to contact him. He answered my message in less than an hour, with surprising good grace for a recluse. I wanted to come from France to interview him? What a good idea! When I filled him in on the reason for my visit, he told me nicely that he hoped he wasn’t going to disappoint me: on my search for Luke Rhinehart I was going to meet George Cockcroft, and George Cockcroft, in his own words, was an old fart. I took this warning as false modesty.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been in contact with some followers of the die on the Internet, and on my way through New York I invite one to dinner. Ron is thirty, introduces himself as a conceptual artist and urban pirate, and heads a community of dice people who meet every month for what, under all the new age jargon, seems to be good old group sex, where the die above all decides who’ll be on top, who on bottom, and who’ll be doing what in which hole. No such thing is planned for the days when I’ll be there, I learn a little to my regret, but the urban pirate appears impressed by my boldness: Knocking on Luke Rhinehart’s door! Pulling on the tiger’s whiskers! That’s really venturing into the dark side of the Force. I answer that to judge by the author’s messages, he seems like a nice old guy. Ron looks at me pensively, with a touch of pity:
“A nice old guy … Sure, why not? Maybe the die ordered him to play that role for you. But don’t forget that a die has six sides. He’s showing you one, you don’t know what’s behind the other five, or when he’ll decide to reveal them…”
It’s a two-hour train trip from Pennsylvania Station to Hudson in Upstate New York, through an enchanting countryside. The man waiting for me when I arrive is wearing the same Stetson as he is in his only photograph, he has the same jagged features, the same faded blue eyes, and the same slightly sardonic smile. He’s tall and has a bit of a slouch; you could even find him sinister, but when I hold out my hand, he gives me a big hug, kisses me on both cheeks as if I were his son, and introduces me to his wife, Ann, who is just as warm and welcoming as he is. We all pile into their old station wagon and drive through the sleepy town. White wooden houses, verandas, lawns: it’s not the suburban America of series such as Desperate Housewives, but a far older, more remote, more rural America. Don’t be fooled, Ann tells me: it’s charming in spring, but four months out of twelve it’s covered in snow, the roads are often blocked, and to live here year-round you need inner strength. As we drive past the orchards and through the woods, I realize that the winter version of this decor is that of one of my favorite novels: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton—one of the saddest novels in the world, which makes Wuthering Heights seem like The Sound of Music. When I say that, my hosts are enchanted: it’s one of their favorite novels as well, George has often taught it to his students.
To his students? He’s not a psychiatrist, or a psychoanalyst?
“Psychiatrist? Psychoanalyst?” George repeats, as surprised as if I’d said cosmonaut. No, he was never a psychiatrist, he’s been a college English teacher all his life.
Really? But on the cover of his book …
George shrugs as if to say, Editors, journalists, you know, there’s almost nothing they won’t write …
From Hudson we drive for about an hour; he handles the wheel with an abruptness that contrasts with his good humor and makes his wife laugh—with the affectionate, teasing laugh that underscores the little quirks of those we hold dear. It’s moving to see how the two love each other: not a look or gesture passes between them that’s not tender, caring, brightened by a life of complicity: they’re Baucis and Philemon reincarnated, and when Ann tells me in passing that they’ve been married for fifty years, I’m not surprised. But that image doesn’t square at all with the Luke Rhinehart whom I’d imagined on the basis of his book.
They live in an old farmhouse that’s been renovated to withstand the harsh winters, with a yard that slopes down to a duck pond. It would cost a fortune today, but they were lucky to have bought it forty years ago when it was within their means, and they haven’t left it since. They have three grown boys, two of whom live nearby. One’s a carpenter and the other’s a housepainter; the third still lives at home. He’s schizophrenic, Ann tells me matter-of-factly; he’s doing fine at the moment, he’s not having any crises, but I shouldn’t worry if I hear him speaking a bit loudly in his room, which is right beside the guest room where I’ll be staying for the weekend. (I invited myself for the weekend, but I get the feeling that if I wanted to settle in for a week or a month, it wouldn’t be a problem.)
Ann serves us tea, and George and I take our mugs out onto the terrace for the interview. He’s swapped his Stetson for a baseball cap, and since I ask him to tell me about his life, he starts from the beginning.
He was born in 1932 in Albany, just a few miles from where he now lives and in all likelihood where he’ll die. Semirural middle-class, hard hit by the Depression, in spite of which he looks back on a more or less happy childhood and youth. Good in math, a bit of an egghead, and not adventurous in the least, he reached age twenty without having felt the slightest creative urge. But when he went to college (to study civil engineering like his father), he got bored and forked off into psychology. At the start of the 1950s, psychology as it’s taught in college isn’t Freud or Jung, Erich Fromm or Wilhelm Reich, it’s tedious experiments on rats, and George decided it was better to read novels—something that had never so much as occurred to him until then. While working night shifts as an intern in a hospital on Long Island, he devours Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. He starts working on a novel that takes place in a psychiatric hospital (well, well). The hero is a young man who’s been interned because he thinks he’s Jesus, and among the hospital staff is a doctor named Luke Rhinehart, who practices dice therapy (well, well, well). The character’s first name was chosen in honor of Luke the Evangelist, which delights me all the more because I’ve just written a long book about that same Luke—which delights George, too, when I tell him. As for the die, it’s a quirk the young George picked up in college with a group of friends. They used it on Saturdays to decide what they were going to do that night—there wasn’t a lot of choice, anyway, between eating a hamburger and going to the drive-in … Sometimes, they dared each other to do stuff: hop around the block on one foot, go ring a neighbor’s doorbell, nothing too mischievous, and when I ask hopefully whether he pushed these experiences further as an adult, he shrugs his shoulders and smiles apologetically because he can tell that I’d like something a little spicier.
“No,” he admits, “all I asked the die was, for example, if I’d had enough of working: Do I stay at my desk for another hour? Or two hours? Or do I go for a walk right away?”
“What are you talking about?” says Ann, who’s come onto the terrace to offer us some blueberry crumble, which she’s just taken from the oven. “Don’t you remember at least one important decision that the die made you take?”
He laughs, so does she, they’re as touching as ever, and he tells me that he’d noticed an attractive nurse at the hospital, but was shy and didn’t dare talk to her. The die made him do it: he drove her home, took her to church, but the church was closed, so he invited her to play tennis. Of course, the attractive nurse was Ann.
Ten years later they have three little boys, and George, who’s become an English teacher, applies for a job at the American school in Majorca. This expatriation is the big adventure of their lives. Majorca in 1965 was enchanting, but they experienced none of what fascinated me in More. George doesn’t take drugs, he’s faithful to his wife, he hangs around with other teachers like himself. Still, he doesn’t completely escape the zeitgeist because he’s started to read books on psychoanalysis, antipsychiatry, oriental mysticism, Zen—all of 1960s counterculture, whose grand idea, to cut to the chase, is that we’re conditioned, and that we must free ourselves from this conditioning. Influenced by this reading, he suddenly becomes aware of the revolutionary potential of something that he’d thought of as no more than a simple game, and that he’d more or less given up since his adolescence. Although since his marriage he’d also given up on the idea of writing books, he now gets fired up about what will become The Dice Man. He spends four years writing it, supported faithfully by his wife, and that, too, surprises me. Because while they’re both open and tolerant, they’re basically very much on the up-and-up, very family, and no matter what you say about it, the book is monstrously transgressive—even today it remains shocking.
I ask Ann, “Didn’t it bother you to read it? To discover that your husband, the father of your children, had all these horrible things in his head?”
A touched smile. “No, it didn’t bother me. I trust George. I thought it was a good thing; I was proud of him.”
In her candor, she was right: right to be proud of him, right to trust him. Much to their surprise, an editor paid good money for the book, and the rights were sold to Paramount. Then The Dice Man started to live its erratic, unpredictable life: success in Europe but not in the States—in line with the malediction that seems to be the lot of the great bizarre writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Philip K. Dick—regular new editions, and finally a cult status given a new kick ten years ago by the Internet. There were disappointments: for one obscure reason or another the film was never made; Paramount sat on the rights although dozens of independent filmmakers would have loved to do it; none of his other books had the same success; and he remains forever the author of an unclassifiable classic. But that’s already a lot, and life hasn’t been too cruel to him, or to them. The rights from The Dice Man allowed them to buy this beautiful house in the land of their fathers and to age with dignity, he writing, she painting, both of them caring for their big sick son, their only worry being that they could die before he does.
That day was Mother’s Day, and the two other boys came over to celebrate it with their parents. They’re good American kids: Bud drinkers, trout fishers, who wear checkered shirts and have their feet firmly on the ground. Their schizophrenic brother came out of his room for a short while, and despite being a little slow he didn’t cut a bad figure. All three told Ann she was “a terrific mom,” and I’m sure it’s true. After dinner, we finished the evening at the house of one of their sons, also in the middle of the countryside. He has an outdoor Jacuzzi, in which George and I continued to drink while looking up at the stars, with the result that I don’t quite remember how I made it back to my room.
I woke with a start around three in the morning. My throat was dry; all you could see from the window was the dark, oppressive mass of trees that surround the house; while a couple of yards away a monotone, throaty voice was intoning sentences I couldn’t understand. A ray of light shone under the door that separated the schizophrenic son’s room and mine. I was distraught and took a moment to calm down. As so often, literature assuaged my fear. I thought of all the stories that deal with visits to a reclusive old writer in a wooden house in the hills—the classic of classics being The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, in which the young Nathan Zuckerman discovers that the enigmatic secretary is none other than Anne Frank, who has survived. I said to myself: It’s strange how much you can project onto a photograph. The one of Luke Rhinehart made me imagine a whole novel: a dangerous, sulfurous life filled with excesses, transgressions, ruptures. Numerous women, femmes fatales, some of whom are on drugs and at least one or two of whom committed suicide. Bordellos in Mexico, communities of madmen in the Nevada desert, delirious, mind-expanding experiences. And this face, the same face with strong bones and eyes of steel, is in fact that of an adorable old man who is approaching the end of a sweet, comfortable life together with his adorable wife, a man whose only departure from the norm was to have written this alarming book, and who in his old age must softly, gently explain to people who come to see him that you mustn’t confuse it with him, and that he’s simply a novelist.
Really? But what did I know about the reality? I remembered the warning of Ron, the urban pirate. What you see, the adorable old man, is just one side of the die. It’s the side that the die ordered him to show you, but at least five others are in reserve, and maybe tonight he’s due to change them. Perhaps the Stephen King option will surface tonight. The lovely farm with white shingles, the tender old companion with her blueberry crumble, Mother’s Day, the idle chitchat in the Jacuzzi, all of that will revert into the shadows. The tall, slouched silhouette—the silhouette of an ogre when you think about it—is already heading to the barn to fetch the scythe …
At breakfast I could see that George was worried he’d disappointed me. At that moment he wasn’t wrong: I had no idea what I could write. So he took me kayaking on a lake, and as our kayaks skimmed slowly over the calm water, he told me the stories of some of his disciples. Because what he was content merely to imagine, others did for real. Take the extravagant tycoon Richard Branson—the guy who created the Virgin Group and got huge media coverage with his attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon, or by dressing as a stewardess and serving passengers on one of his airliners after losing a bet. He told anyone who wanted to hear it that all of his choices in business and in life had been taken thanks to the die, influenced by Luke Rhinehart. He quotes Rhinehart the way others quote Lao-Tsu, Nietzsche, or Thoreau: an emancipator, a liberator. The readers of Loaded, a trendy London magazine, agree: in a referendum they voted The Dice Man the most influential novel of the twentieth century. That gave the editor in chief an idea for a story, which he gave to his most gonzo journalist. The assignment: Follow Luke Rhinehart’s example for three months. Let all of your decisions be taken by the die, and tell what happens. The funding was, if not unlimited, then at least sufficiently large for him to satisfy almost any whim: take a plane to the remotest destination, shack up in a fisherman’s hut, rent out the top floor of a palace, hire a killer, pay a huge bail … The journalist, a certain Ben Marshall, took the assignment seriously enough, it seems, to trash his love life and his professional life, and to disappear without a trace for several months.
“A funny guy, that Ben,” George tells me. “You can see him in Diceworld, a documentary made by an English TV channel in 1999.”
I’d never heard of this documentary and ask if he has a DVD we can watch. All of a sudden he looks embarrassed. He says it’s not great, and he’s not sure he even has it. But I insist so much that in no time we’re sitting on the living room couch in front of the big TV, zapper in hand, and the film starts. It’s true, it’s not great. The editing is choppy, the clip effects wear on you, but it does show Ben Marshall, who volunteered to gamble his life on the die. He’s young, fidgety, with a shaved head and a fixed stare, who explains convincingly how he stopped before he went mad, because the die can drive you mad; it’s the most exciting thing in the world, but it’ll drive you mad, you have to know that. He’s like someone who’s returned from somewhere far away, a little bit of paradise and a lot of hell. And lo and behold, whom do we see next? His inspirer, our friend George, or rather our friend Luke, as he was fifteen years ago: the Stetson, the gaunt face, the steely eyes, handsome, but not at all like the doting grandfather I know. In a low, insinuating, hypnotic voice, he says into the camera, “You lead a dull life, a life of slavery, a life that doesn’t satisfy you, but there’s a way to get out of it. This way is the die. Let yourself go, submit yourself to it, and you’ll see, your life will change, you’ll become someone you can’t even imagine. Submitting to the die will make you free. You’ll no longer be someone, you’ll be everyone. You’ll no longer be you, you’ll finally be you.”
Saying this, he looks like a televangelist, a mad preacher in a novel by Flannery O’Connor, the head of a sect filmed just before his followers commit mass suicide. He’s frightening. I turn to look at the person beside me on the couch, the nice pensioner in slippers holding his mug of herbal tea. He gives me an embarrassed, apologetic smile, you’d believe him on the spot, and says that the Luke in this film isn’t him: it’s a role the director asked him to play. He, George, wasn’t so keen on it, but the director insisted, and since he doesn’t like to hurt people …
Ann, who can hear us from the kitchen, laughs gaily. “You’re watching the film where you play the spook?”
He laughs, too, beside me on the couch. Nevertheless when I see him on the screen, I find him awfully convincing.
I met other followers of the die over the Internet: one in Salt Lake City, one in Munich, one in Madrid. All men: I don’t have an explanation for it, but the die’s a guy’s thing, like westerns or science fiction. The guy in Munich said, “To write an article on the dice life that’s worth its salt, you have to become a dice man.” Strangely, that frightened me. So much that I didn’t even dare to let the die decide as minor a question as which city I’d visit: once I’d eliminated Salt Lake City, I chose Madrid over Munich for the wimpy reason that I like it more. Oscar Cuadrado, who came to meet me at the airport, is young, a bit pudgy, and nice. On the way to his place in his 4 × 4, he made what was by now a familiar joke: “I may look nice, but you never know what the die’s got in store for tonight: maybe I’m a serial killer and you’ll find yourself chained to my basement wall.”
He lives in a stylish house in the suburbs, together with his wife and his little girl, and without further ado we sat at a lawn table and consulted the die: Do we have a drink right away, or do we wait until we’ve done the interview? Three sides for a drink, three against: we could just as well have tossed a coin. The answer: right away. Now, do we drink beer, table wine, or the bottle that Oscar’s saving for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday? Two sides for the beer, three for the table wine, and just one for the special bottle, because although he’d open it willingly—you don’t refuse the die—still … Finally, it’s over a glass of table wine—not bad at all—that he explains to me how he uses the die.
Oscar’s no fan of philosophical or perverse flights of fancy. Like everyone, he’s heard of people who’ve ruined their lives by setting extreme conditions such as leaving their families from one day to the next, going halfway around the world and never coming back, having sex with animals, or stabbing someone at random in a crowded train station in India. Stories like that circulate on all the sites dedicated to the die—including the one he’s been managing for the past ten years—but they don’t interest him. Lacan said that psychoanalysis isn’t for idiots or crooks; Oscar believes the die isn’t for nutcases or people with a death wish. He recommends a hedonist use, one that makes life more fun and surprising.
For that to be the case, he has three rules. The first is to always obey, to always apply the decision of the die. But obeying the die is ultimately obeying yourself, since you set your options. Hence the second rule, concerning the decisive moment when you list the six possibilities. Coming up with six ways of reacting to each of life’s challenges takes imagination, and to do it you have to examine yourself and try to find out what you want. It’s a spiritual exercise, aimed both at getting to know yourself, and getting a better grasp of the infinite possibilities offered by the real. The options you select have to be pleasant, but at least one—the third rule—has to be a little difficult, it has to make you overcome resistance and break with habit. It’s got to make you do something you wouldn’t normally do. You’ve got to surprise yourself and even be hard on yourself—but gently, with tact, knowing yourself and not going too far. When you throw the die, your desire has to be tinged with fear. Ever since he discovered the Spanish translation of The Dice Man when he was seventeen, this sort of small challenge has been second nature to Oscar. Like his father, he’s a tax lawyer, but since it’s not fun to be a tax lawyer, thanks to the die he’s also become a wine importer, a webmaster, a Go teacher, a fan of Iceland, and the publisher of the Mauritian poet Malcolm de Chazal. Uh, how’s that? Well, first he thought it’d be good to get to know a foreign country, a distant one if possible. Six continents, six options. The die fell on Europe, then, narrowing the choices, on Iceland. Fine. Now, how should he visit it: on foot, by car, hitchhiking, by boat, by bike, or on a skateboard? He was afraid he might chicken out if the die fell on skateboard, but it landed on bike and he went through with it. The only problem: he’d never ridden a bike. So he learned, toured Iceland by bike, and even went back with the young woman who would become his wife. On this trip the die got him to make the proposal, which was accepted. For their honeymoon, the young couple traveled to Mauritius—a present from his parents-in-law, not the die. But once there, Oscar made up for it. He looked around for something to read, an author with something to do with Mauritius, either someone who came from there or had written about it. The list included Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, and the poet Malcolm de Chazal. Bingo: Oscar fell completely in love with de Chazal, a creole surrealist whom such people as André Breton, Jean Paulhan, and Jean Dubuffet had all been crazy about. Seeing that Malcolm de Chazal hadn’t been translated into Spanish, when Oscar got back from his honeymoon, he founded a publishing company to change that. He knew nothing about publishing, no more than he’d known about bike riding. But when he pulls the books from his bookshelf, I can understand why he’s proud: they’re magnificent. He sums up, “It’s through Luke that I discovered Malcolm, and now it’s thanks to him that I’ve met you. Funny, isn’t it?”
With the help of a bottle that’s considerably less average than the first, we’re now good buddies, Oscar and I, and I’m ready to admit to him how uneasy I felt when his Bavarian counterpart said that to write about the dice life, you have to be a dice man. I’m not a dice man. Because I like my life the way it is? Out of a philosophical conviction? Or simply because I don’t have the balls? Whatever the reason, for the past two months that I’ve been working on this story, I haven’t once dared to take the plunge.
“Try it,” says Oscar, taking a die from his pocket and placing it between us on the table. I panic, as if in five minutes, without knowing what happened to me, I’ll be obliged to massacre my family with a machete or—the light version—climb Mount Everest in flip-flops. Nothing doing: Oscar says I can simply let the die decide where we eat. I’d planned on inviting him to a good restaurant downtown. “Fine, write it down: that’s the first option.” The next is that he’ll invite me. The third, we’ll go to the most expensive restaurant in Madrid and toss the die again when the bill comes. The fourth, we’ll stay home. I grow more daring: the fifth, we’ll stay home and I’ll prepare dinner. Oscar smiles, seeing that I’m taking to the game. I rack my brains, trying to come up with a last, more radical option. I say, “The sixth is that we’ll take the car and go to eat, say, in Seville.”
Oscar nods. “Bueno. Now throw the die.”
All of a sudden I’m afraid it’ll land on 6. Because if it does, I know that we’ll really get up, get in the car, and drive to Seville, which is more than three hundred miles away; it’s almost 10:00 p.m., and we’ve already drunk two bottles of strong red wine. I throw the die, and—phew!—it lands on 5.
Now, I won’t try to sell you the hours that followed as a major transgression or a complete breakdown of the senses; nevertheless, tottering back and forth in the kitchen of a complete stranger with a glass in your hand, opening cupboards, and mixing just about everything you can find into a casserole with a wooden spoon is quite amusing. My beef miroton was ten times too spicy, and when I emerged from the kitchen carrying the steaming dish, the whole family was waiting at the table. I was congratulated for my cooking talent, and we agreed that such role plays can be a good way of breaking the ice in somewhat tense situations. It would be interesting to use them to resolve international conflicts, we said. In Ukraine, for example. Once again that evening I noted how relaxed dice men’s wives tend to be about their husband’s foible. Susana Cuadrado doesn’t seem any more worried than Ann Cockcroft that an addiction to chance will lead her family from one peril to the next. No doubt they’re both right to be so trusting. But I continue to think I’m right to be wary.
Dear Friend,
It is our pleasure to inform you that Luke Rhinehart is dead. He very much wanted us to tell you this as soon as possible so that you wouldn’t be annoyed that he wasn’t replying to your e-mails. In recent years he had gotten great satisfaction out of his interaction with friends on the web, and he told us he had tried to avoid dying so he could continue these dialogues. Unfortunately, Chance had other ideas.
Luke didn’t fear death, although he confessed to being a bit nervous. Death to him was just another one of life’s unknowns, like traveling to a new land, starting a new book, trusting a new friend. Luke liked to laugh at death, but then again he liked to laugh at everything. He felt confident that death wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He promised to report back as soon as he could and let us know what he had found. He was confident we would all get a good chuckle out of it. However, at this point we still haven’t heard word.
Some of you have asked about Luke’s last days. They were no different from days from any week over the last several decades. For a man who believed in chance and change, Luke was discouragingly consistent. In fact, many of us who knew him were disappointed in his willingness to roll along on his familiar patterns. People who came to see him on the basis of his books were sometimes discouraged to discover how attached he was to his habits. Even when he threw the die, it was always to do more or less the same things.
“It’s not rolling along in the same old patterns that is bad in itself,” he said, “but rather if you’re enjoying the rolling. If you’re comfortable in the selves you’re rolling along with, then roll on. Most people aren’t. They don’t like who they are. It’s with them in mind that I wrote all those things about the die. But I’m fine as I am.”
Luke’s wife, Ann, was with him to the end.
“I’m dying,” he said to her at one point early in the last week.
“Big deal,” she said, straightening his pillow.
“It’s just that I find it interesting. I’ve never died before.”
“Well, a lot of people have.”
“Right. And that’s a quite comforting thought. All those people waiting to greet me on the other side.”
“Or ignore you.”
Luke stared at the ceiling. “That would be boring,” he finally said.
“Typical Luke—always worried about being bored.”
“Are you going to miss me when I’m gone?”
“Oh, come off it. You’ve been underfoot for more than fifty years. Instead of tripping over you as I have been I’ll probably trip because you’re not where I always assume you are.”
“That’s comforting, too.”
“Of course I’ll miss you.”
When I received this e-mail, I was surprised, then sad, then moved. I’d only spent two days with George and his wife, but I liked them. So, since I had their number, I called Ann to express my condolences. When she picked up the phone, she was as cordial as ever and happy to hear from me, but she sounded a bit hurried and said she’d pass me on to George. I wondered if she’d lost her mind, or if I had, and I stuttered something about the e-mail I’d just received, and she answered like someone who was used to this sort of little misunderstanding: “Oh, the e-mail! Of course … But don’t worry: it’s not George who died, it’s Luke.”
When he got on the line, George confirmed, “Yeah, I was getting a little tired of Luke. I’m getting older, you know. I still love life: seeing what the weather’s like when I look out the window in the morning, doing the gardening, making love, going kayaking, but I’m less interested in my career, and my career was basically Luke. I wrote that letter for Ann to send it to my correspondents when I died. I kept it in a file for two years, and one day I decided to send it…”
Ah, okay, I get it.
I asked him two more questions. The first: Before sending this e-mail, which is after all quite unusual, did he throw the die? Was it the die, finally, that decided Luke’s death?
George seemed sincerely surprised: “Oh, no, that didn’t even occur to me. The die can be useful when you don’t know what you want. But when you know, what use is it?”
Second question: Apart from me, how did his correspondents take the news?
He gave his mischievous little laugh, like an old prankster. “Well, a few thought it was in bad taste. Aside from them, some thought: ‘That’s George!’ And others: ‘That’s Luke!’
“And you, what do you think?”
Published in XXI, fall 2015