The Search for the Dice Man (10 page)

Agent Macavoy was doing his duty. He had followed Larry Rhinehart down Interstate 81, enjoying the lush motel Larry chose to stay in, the expense covered by the bureau, and then up and down that incredible dirt road, to the gate of Lukedom. There, however, he had encountered a setback. The guard. The password. The test questions.

Agent Macavoy did not know the password. He flunked the test. Of course the questions, like the password, had changed in the ten minutes since Larry and Honoria had passed through, and the test may have been harder. One question had been how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Macavoy had hazarded a guess of six, shrewdly thinking it was dicepeople’s favourite number (page sixteen of his briefing on dicepeople), but had been told by the guard that the answer was ‘very few.’

Agent Macavoy had been turned away from Lukedom, but he was too dedicated an agent to let this deter him for long. He drove about a half mile and then, spotting a little track leading off into the woods, pulled his car in and parked. Here he disencumbered himself of all documents that might identify him as an FBI agent, hiding them under the driver’s seat. Then, after locking the car and carrying only a small overnight bag with a single change of clothes, he marched back along the road towards Lukedom.

When the gale came distantly into view he set off through the woods. In another ten minutes he came to a low, run-down stretch of barbed wire fence with a dilapidated sign off to his right which, on closer
inspection, read simply: ‘Welcome. Abandon all ye who enter here.’

Macavoy, who felt that in leaving his FBI identification he had abandoned quite enough, entered. In half an hour he was walking down the main road into the village.

The bureau briefing file on Lukedom was not helpful. After all, only one of three agents sent to infiltrate it had ever returned. That agent’s report was described as a little hysterical and was not included. The summary by his superiors indicated that Lukedom was occupied by up to two thousand people, many of them hippies who smoked dope and were unreliable. They played games which caused confusion. They worshipped dice. Questioning any of them was an unproductive endeavour because one of their principles seemed to be always to lie. There was a police force which kept a kind of order, and normal life seemed to go on. Some respectable citizens seemed to exist. How they coped with the kooks was not clear. If Luke Rhinchart had been there when Agent F— had infiltrated, he had kept well hidden. Rumours of his presence were rife but unsubstantiated.

As Macavoy strode down the centre of the main street – a dirt road still – his strongest impression was that this community was little different from the small North Carolina town in which he’d grown up.

He decided to go into the nearest bar to get the lay of the land. Macavoy was convinced that, despite his business suit, he could blend into a bar better than most agents because of his Irish heritage. He felt he knew the lingo.

The Lucky Seven Bar was not crowded on this summer afternoon and seemed as typical a small-town bar as any Macavoy had been in. He ordered a beer, a Bud to be exact. He then announced to the skinny old bartender: ‘Hot today.’

‘Yep,’ the old guy replied.

‘Nice little village you got here,’ Macavoy added nonchalantly, looking around the bar as if it were itself the village.

‘Yep,’ said the old guy.

‘I’m in real estate.’ Macavoy said. ‘Driving around looking for a way to make a buck.’

‘Yep,’ said the old guy.

‘Got any suggestions?’ Macavoy prompted.

‘Nope.’

Macavoy wandered over to the corner where two guys were shooting pool with a young woman watching. Macavoy shot a pretty fair game himself and figured it would be a good way to break the ice. The bartender had not been a strong source of information.

He watched. The two men moved around the table with a certain awkward macho swagger and it thus took Macavoy about a minute to realize what he was seeing: the two worst pool players in the history of the world. One shooter would announce ‘six ball in the side pocket’ and not even come close to touching the six ball, much less propelling it towards the side pocket. The next shooter would study the table while letting smoke ooze up around his face from a dangling cigarette and announce ‘four ball in corner pocket’ and proceed to smash into the centre of a cluster and scatter just about everything except the four ball. At the rate they were going Macavoy would reach retirement before they ever got around to the eight ball.

‘How they falling?’ he ventured to the younger of the two players.

‘Pretty shitty,’ he answered. ‘I’m not getting good caroms.’

Shit, he could get the best caroms God made and still not sink a golf ball in the ocean from two feet up the beach.

‘What’s a guy do for action in this town?’ Macavoy asked next, purposely making his question vague.

‘What you want?’ the young guy countered.

‘Hey, just something to do,’ said Macavoy.

‘You name it, Lukedom’s got it,’ said the young man. ‘Fifteen ball in the side pocket.’

Macavoy tried the local diner next, and managed to engage a shrewd-looking man his own age in a conversation that went on for almost half an hour. Although Macavoy learned a great deal about raising chickens he still felt the essence of Lukedom was eluding him. These people seemed, well, retarded, but otherwise perfectly normal. The bill for his hamburger, french fries and a Coke seemed a little high: it was $58.99. He started to protest and then decided he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Besides, he’d bill it to the bureau.

The hotel room, on the other hand, was remarkably cheap: he got a real nice room – a little old-fashioned maybe – for only $13.50 a night, with TV and even a bed massage. He tossed his few belongings on to a chair and automatically switched on the television set as he strode into the bathroom. When he returned, he was surprised to see the President of the United States addressing the nation.

He was doubly surprised in that the President was Dwight David Eisenhower. He decided it must be some documentary, and though in theory Macavoy believed in the value of historical documentaries he began to search for a remote control so he could change the channel, when Chevy Chase began addressing the nation. Ike had been talking about some son of military-industrial complex, but Chevy was talking about his ability to chew gum and walk at the same time. Maybe this was ‘Saturday Night Live’, but Ike had sure looked like Ike. Then Adolf Hitler was addressing his nation. He seemed to be getting a lot livelier response than Ike and seemed a lot more emotionally involved in what he was saying, but Macavoy didn’t understand German and – then Oprah was addressing the nation – or at least her audience. She seemed to be concerned with transvestites who were prevented from
being mothers. Macavoy was slightly interested in this subject but before Oprah could really clarify the issues involved, Sylvester Stallone was addressing well, the camera, the audience.

Macavoy sat on the edge of the bed. What programme was this? Did this set have a built-in channel switcher? No, because everyone who appeared was just talking to the camera. Stallone was followed by Charlie Manson, who was followed by Pope John and then Phyllis Diller talking about mastectomies. Ronald Reagan told the beginning of an anecdote about a welfare mother who didn’t get a job because the government paid her to get laid and have babies, and then Bill Moyers was talking about myths and Macavoy finally switched channels.

The cavalry was coming to the rescue. It wasn’t yet clear whom they were rescuing, but the sound of the bugle, the yellow scarves trailing in the wind and the give-’em-hell look in John Wayne’s eye made it clear some Indians were in trouble and some girl’s heart would soon go pitty-pat. Canned laughter flooded over the shouts of the cavalrymen and the beating of the horses’ hooves. A two-second image of a man spraying deodorant into an armpit interrupted the action and then the cavalry was upon the redskins and sending them fleeing in disarray. An immaculately coiffured frontier woman stared teary-eyed as the cavalry came riding in, the scene interrupted by another two-second image – this one from an X-rated film showing a woman being sandwiched by two grunting studs. As an Indian went plunging head first from his horse into the dust the canned laughter came flooding across the normal soundtrack and Macavoy wondered if his set had somehow crossed two channels – or three! Had that really been two men banging that blonde? Then a cartoon cat chased Jerry the mouse across the screen for a moment followed by a cavalry man after an Indian and then one miler chasing another miler in a track meet and then a pack of wolves pursuing an elk and Elmer Fudd after Bugs Bunny
and a missile after a jet aeroplane and Macavoy simply sat on his bed and stared as one image followed another in haphazard order or ordered chaos, the sequences always seeming just on the edge of saying something but never quite being rational or articulate. It was almost as good as MTV.

An hour and a half later, when he finally turned off the TV set and went to sleep, Macavoy had determined that there were only three channels available on his TV set here in Lukedom, and none of them was like any other channel he had ever encountered. The News Channel – at least that’s what it called itself – showed a President Kennedy news conference, a sports summary from 2 January 1968 reporting mostly on the bowl games, a financial report for 3 April 1976, the weather for 3 June 1955 in the midwest, a Time newsreel from the Korean War, and a variety of other items whose sole uniformity was that they all took place in the rather distant past.

The commercials on all three channels were a hodgepodge of segments of various commercials yoked together with the same random relativity of the programmes. They were utterly fascinating and utterly bewildering, especially since several were for products that Macavoy knew no longer existed.

As he fell asleep Macavoy was vaguely deciding to phone his cable company in Alexandria and see if they could sell him any of the three channels, especially the one that kept slipping X-rated scenes into ‘All in the Family’ and ‘Cheers.’

After breakfast the next morning Honoria and I were both in better frames of mind. It helped that the Mercedes was back in the parking lot and had been washed and waxed since its little spin. On the front seat was a fifty-cent mint patty and a little note, which read simply: ‘Thanks. She drives great! Rick.’

I carefully locked the car this time, but as I moved away the same chubby man commented simply: ‘Won’t do no good.’

‘Well then, what say I hire you to keep an eye on it for me today?’

The man pulled something out of his pocket, squinted into the sky a moment, looked at his hand – it was a die he held – and shook his head.

‘Nope,’ he said.

Despite this irritating setback, Honoria and I agreed to spend the morning investigating. Although we hoped to find out something about Luke, we ended up finding out mostly about Lukedom.

We got most of our information from the local orientation centre. There we read that the town had been bought by the Dicelife Foundation back in 1975 and undergone various incarnations since. It had begun as an anarchic dice centre in which everyone was supposed to be letting chance influence most of their decisions. Chaos and anarchy followed, and the centre closed down in little more than two years. A total failure, I concluded smugly. After that the site had apparently remained abandoned for most of the next decade.

In 1987 it was reoccupied by some of Luke’s followers,
and in ’88 Lukedom’s present incarnation had begun as a highly structured community of people living mostly unstructured lives. Since the five thousand acres of Lukedom were owned by the company that created the community, Lukedom was theoretically private land and mostly self-governing. As far as I could tell, those who lived in Lukedom rarely interacted with anyone outside the cormmunity.

There were about two thousand people of all ages now staying in Lukedom. A tiny few had been here almost sixteen years, others only weeks or months. There were a few working farms, a school, a health centre – most of the ingredients of a small self-sufficient community. Some members had paid large fees to enter and/or paid large monthly fees to remain, while others paid little or nothing. I was surprised to learn that some people here hadn’t used the dice to make decisions in years: it apparently wasn’t required. Others were being trained in expanding role-playing possibilities through chance, and a few nuts were running wild with the dice. After an orientation period of from a week to a month everyone was free to run their own lives, with or without the personal use of the dice.

The basic principle of the community seemed to be flexibility. Most members had to let the dice choose what job they took, for a given afternoon or day or week or month, from among the jobs listed as available by Orientation’s daily computer printout. Living quarters, although more permanent than jobs, might be periodically changed by chance. The laws and rules of Lukedom were also changed sporadically by chance, as if the community itself were a personality in danger of becoming stodgy and stuck.

Although everyone had a great deal of freedom to experiment with their lives, there were societal limits on this experimentation. If you stole a car – there were actually only a few cars in Lukedom and few roads to drive on – you had to return it within twelve hours – thank God.
If you robbed someone of anything else you had to return it within twenty-four hours. No physical violence of any kind was allowed – on penalty of being exiled. You could be sexually promiscuous, but the male had always to use a condom. There were frequent ‘special’ days or hours in which everyone was expected to bring in a harvest or build a house or be their normal selves or live the life of another person for the special time. Controlled chaos, I concluded – as if chaos could ever be controlled.

Still, although I grunted and grimaced as I absorbed all this, I was impressed. Individual diceliving was one thing, but Lukedom seemed to be trying to create a home where people could be more flexible and various than in normal societies. In theory it was interesting. I was almost proud of dear old Dad. In practice I was sure it was as ridiculous and destructive as everything else he’d done.

After our stint in the orientation centre and another at the local library, notable for having half the books placed on shelves at random, Honoria and I agreed to split up. I wanted to try to get into Jake’s office to find something there that might hint at Luke’s whereabouts. Honoria decided she would make a foray to the main administration offices next to the orientation building. We agreed to meet for lunch at two o’clock at the Hazard Inn, an impressive hotel we’d passed on the way to the library.

Since it was Sunday there were religious services taking place in the Church of the Die. Outside was a neat little bulletin board listing the weekend services: Saturday morning Temple Meeting; 8.00
A.M
. Sunday, Catholic Mass; 9.00
A.M
. Jehovah’s Witnesses; 10.00
A.M
. Sufi Dancing; 11.00
A.M
. Worship of Chance; noon: Random Rites; 1.00
P.M
. Native American Rites; 2.00
P.M
. Dionysian Rites. I wondered why they left out poor Zoroaster and Odin.

When I arrived at a little before eleven, the church was filling with people apparently intent on ‘worshipping
chance’ – whatever horror that meant. I snuck around to the back of the building and found an entrance there. I wandered along a hall behind the raised altar part of the church, opening doors off the hallway and finding nothing interesting until I came to ‘Master Ecstein’s Office’

Inside were books, tapes, computers and file cabinets – exactly what I was looking for. I quickly examined the correspondence on Jake’s desk but found nothing of help – several fan letters praising Jake or Lukedom, letters of inquiry about Lukedom, and a letter from some Psychiatrists’ Association reminding Jake to pay his dues. One letter was from someone wanting to write to Luke Rhinehart, could Jake help? At first I was excited by this discovery but then realized there was no way Jake would tell a stranger where Luke was.

The first filing cabinet seemed to be filled with case histories of people’s use of chance in their lives and some of Jake’s articles on the cases. The second contained a collection of more articles about the dicelife, dice therapies, theories of chance and chaos and multiplicity, some by Jake, some by others. The bottom one, labelled business and finance, was locked.

I wondered whether a locked file cabinet in an office and building and town that seemed lax about locking anything might be significant. In addition, financial information might give me the names and addresses of dozens of other people or entities associated with Jake or Lukedom.

I spent another few minutes going through the desk drawers and even began scrounging through the waste-paper basket. There I noticed some strange stamps on one envelope and saw that it was postmarked ‘Tokyo’ – and without any return address. I thought no more about it until at the very bottom I came across a second such envelope, similarly postmarked, dated only two days earlier. Yet I hadn’t seen any correspondence from anyone or anything from Tokyo.

Tokyo? The Japanese were the most sensible and orderly people on earth. Why would anyone there have anything to do with something as inefficient, unprofitable and totally American as Jake Ecstein and Lukedom? Or my father?

I poured the contents of the basket on to the floor and began searching for the letters that had been in the envelopes, but found nothing, nor on Jake’s desk either. I then tried to force open the third drawer of the file cabinet, but couldn’t. But in it might be the answer. I’d have to return better prepared. Reluctantly I left.

Out in the hall, I was surprised to hear through the wall the whole congregation belting out something that sounded like a Negro spiritual, having a jazzy tempo and high spirit foreign to more traditional Christian music. I decided to make my way around to the front of the church and sit in for a few moments.

As I slipped inside I was disappointed that the lively music came to an end. As they seated themselves the congregation, filling only about a third of the church – perhaps a hundred in all – seemed to be glowing from banging out the spiritual. They were of all ages and in all manner of dress, and scattered throughout the pews. I walked unobstrusively down a side aisle just as a tall good-looking man rose from beside Jake and went to the altar. He was dressed incongruously in a smart grey business suit and blue tie.

I guessed that it was just my luck to arrive for the passing of the plate, but it was worse. As people around me began the ritual preliminary coughing, I realized I’d arrived just in time for the weekly sermon.

‘All ways of liberation start with slavery,’ the big man began, speaking without notes and staring benevolently out over the congregation. He had a clipped, snobbish-sounding English accent.

‘Convents and monasteries are the Catholic way of destroying the self so that the spirit may live. They exist
with a rigid hierarchy and rigid rules and discipline. Their first principle is the total submission of the nun and monk – to God and to the religious order.’

‘That’s right.’ a man in the front row commented.

‘In the East, total obedience to the guru is also the first principle of discipleship. The seeker surrenders his will to his teacher, knowing that his own will is the very heart of his enslavement. Giving up one’s freedom is, paradoxically, the
sine qua non
of proceeding on the path to liberation.’

‘Bullshit,’ a voice countered from the back of the room, and a few heads turned to look at the man – but without much surprise.

‘The reason this overt enslavement is necessary,’ the big Englishman went on, speaking as if he hadn’t been interrupted, ‘is that as men normally live, their enslavement is hidden. They are enslaved by their past, by their sense of self, by their need for certainty and consistency, by their illusions. The purpose of our enslavement is to free you from your hidden masters so that when we end our overt mastery over you, you will be, for the first time in your lives, free.’

‘That’s all very nice,’ said the loud voice from the back, ‘but I bet you never let us go free.’

I was surprised that there was so little concern about the heckling on the part of either the speaker or of the congregation; both seemed to take it as normal.

‘Oh, we do, we do,’ the Englishman said with a smile. ‘We give you periods of freedom even here in your training, periods that permit both us and you to see how much you have become aware of, and free from, the enslavement to traditional thinking and traditional selfhood. We call such periods “recess” – the spiritual equivalent of what you call here a bar’s “Happy Hour” – and they are much loved by us all.’

‘Amen, amen,’ said a chorus of voices.

‘Enslavement is in reality just another word for discipline,
for training, for education,’ the speaker went on, now pacing back and forth at the edge of the raised stage and in front of the altar. ‘Instead of teaching you certain skills that let you work at a high level within the established society, here we try to free you from the domination of society so that you can play with the established norms and values rather than be run by them. Normal education teaches conformity and accommodation; ours teaches detachment and flexibility. With the normal diploma one can become a successful business executive. With ours one can become a business executive – or not become one – and change the system – or not change it – succeed in the system – or not succeed – succeed in undoing the system, or in not undoing it. With the normal diploma you remain limited to the norms and values that society offers. With the second you are free to create new norms and values and thus create a new society.’

A second chorus of ‘Amens’ met this little bit.

‘In traditional education you are limited to the dominant values of the society and to lives consistent with conforming to or rebelling against these values. With our education you become free to create new values and new lives unrestricted by the dominant norms. We aim not at making a “better” person or “better” society, at least in traditional terms. Our values are limited to three: playfulness, flexibility and multiplicity. We honour the playful over the serious, the many over the one, and the flexible over the rigid. But that is only to say that we value freedom.

‘The dice and chance are simply a method for creating a variety of yeses and a variety of nos; for creating flexibility where rigidity is the norm, for creating play where seriousness is the norm.’

More ‘Amens’

‘All happy and fulfilled people have one secret in common: they have all learned to surrender. The only happy and fulfilled Christians are those who have learned
to surrender to the spirit of Christ or to the will of God. Their lives are a joyful yea-saying to whatever befalls them because they have faith in God – they surrender to whatever He does, no matter how it may seem evil on the level of their personal values. They may fight the evil or lament it, but they will accept it as the Will of God – and that is the source of their happiness.

‘The unhappy man is he who refuses to surrender to something or someone, even to himself! A total egotist may be a happy man: he has surrendered totally to the will of himself – who is infallible.’

‘I bet that means you,’ commented the heckler in the rear, and someone in the front row snickered. The speaker only smiled.

‘So too there are those who find happiness by surrender to institutions – to the army or the church or the family. Such surrenders are confusing because some might say such people crave
order,
but we say that what they crave is surrender. Our “institution” here does not offer order – quite the contrary – but it does demand surrender, and we find that this is the secret of our success because it is the secret of human happiness.

‘Of course, we will take you beyond surrender to freedom, where your surrender is of a different nature. In the early stages you surrender to our will or to the will of the die – a specific force which you experience as outside of yourselves. Later, there will be no surrender because there will be no individual separate from the society in which you play. The child at play is not in a state of surrender but rather in a state of unity. Surrender can only exist in a state of duality. As long as the dualities exist just so long will surrender be the secret of human happiness. But once the dual world is broken down in an individual, then there is no one left to surrender and no one or nothing to surrender to.’