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Towards the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart was practicing psychoanalysis in New York, and was sick and tired of it He lived in a nice apartment, with windows facing his neighbours, through which everyone had nice views of each other He did yoga, read books on Zen Buddhism, and toyed with the idea of joining a hippie commune, but didn’t dare Failing that, he wore bell-bottoms and a beard, which made him look less like a depressed bourgeois than an out-of-work actor As a therapist, he was resolutely nondirective If an obese, virginal and compulsively sadistic patient told him whilst on the couch that he’d like to rape and murder a little girl, his professional ethics compelled him to repeat in a calm voice, ‘You’d like to rape and murder a little girl?’ An elusive question mark disappearing into ellipses Long silence The absence of judgement But, in reality, how he really wanted to reply was: ‘Go on, then! If what really turns you on is to rape and murder a little girl, stop boring me with your fantasy: do it!’ He held himself back, obviously, from saying such terrible things, but they obsessed him more and more Like everyone else, he forbade himself from living out his fantasies even though they were more or less harmless – not the sort of thing that got you sent to prison, like his sadistic patient would be if he ever let himself go What he would have liked, for example, was to sleep with Arlene, his colleague Jake Epstein’s wife with the sumptuous breasts, who lived on the same floor in his apartment building He had the feeling she wouldn’t be opposed to the idea, but as a faithful, married man, a responsible adult, he left the thought to bubble away in the backwater of his daydreams   So his life passed, calm and dull, until the day when, after a particularly boozy evening, Luke spotted a die, a boring old die for playing games, lying on the carpet and suddenly the idea came to him to roll it, and to do