The Search for the Dice Man (16 page)

I spent a restless night, not helped any by wondering where Kim was spending her night. And where Honoria was spending hers, though Nori wasn’t chaos like Kim. My sleep wasn’t helped any by someone in a room nearby singing all four stanzas of The ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, possibly to get into the
Guinness Book of Records
as the first person ever to do so. The singing was punctuated with the sporadic motif of voices shouting ‘shut up!’ and ‘pipe down’ and ‘please stop it’, a motif I was tempted to join but resisted.

In the morning I was hung over and depressed. If the Mercedes had finally gotten back from the airport I would leave. As I wobbled down the steps from my room – again wondering where Kim had spent the night – I pictured that pompous bastard Way having his way with her. The place was utterly corrupt.

With the Mercedes still nowhere in sight I actually felt a little relieved: since it would be hard to get out of here without my car, I had a good excuse to keep trying to dig into some of my unanswered questions. Where were those TV programmes coming from? Who created them? Who paid for them? How could Lukedom be so nonchalant about money? Could this complex community really be administered from that little warehouse administration building with only two computers? Was Jake really dealing with me based on age-old instructions from Luke or was he in daily contact with him?

I wandered along the street looking for a reasonably normal-looking café and settled for ‘Joe’s’, which I felt I was beginning to know inside and out after doing the dishes and mopping up there.

I had barely sat down at the counter and taken the first sip from a cup of coffee when an attractive woman took the seat next to me and leaned around to look into my face.

‘You’re Larry Rhinehart.’ she said, staring at me with large brown eyes, reminding me vaguely of Susan Sarandon.

‘Sometimes,’ I answered coyly. The place was contagious.

‘I know your father,’ she said simply. Aha!

I lifted the cup of coffee to my mouth and took another sip.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘He’s here, you know,’ she said.

‘I … uh … know,’ I said, searching her face for signs of sanity.

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Have you seen him?’ she asked, suddenly swinging her head quickly to glance at the door to the café.

‘No. Matter of fact he seems to be avoiding me.’

She leaned her face in closer.

‘He’s watching you,’ she announced.

‘Oh?’

‘He’s never the same one day to the next,’ she went on in a fierce whisper. ‘But he’s always watching us.’

‘Watching everyone? Not just me?’

‘Everyone. But especially you … and me.’

I shook my head, then tried a smile.

‘And how do you know all this?’ I asked her.

She straightened away from me.

‘I know,’ she answered. ‘I see him every day.’

‘Have you seen him today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

She leaned back and gave me a sweet mad smile.

‘He’s in this room right now.”

I held her mad look a second and then peered around
the room: ten people, not one of whom contained the six-foot-four bulk that had been my father.

‘I don’t see him,’ I said.

‘Of course not – that’s his way.’

My omelette arrived and I turned to it.

‘He keeps himself invisible,’ the woman continued.

‘Goody-goody gumdrop for him,’ I said, and at last began my breakfast.

As I walked slowly back along the street towards the orientation centre I decided that the woman was mad, she must be, but somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that some core element of truth lay in what she said. How did she even know who I was? Had someone sent her to talk to me? Three days ago, why had the guard let me in after he’d made that phone call – without even checking for ID to confirm I was who I said I was? Someone had the power to let Larry Rhinehart in when the guard had decided to keep him out. Was it Jake? Or was it someone even more powerful than Jake?

Goddamn it! I was going to stay here in Lukedom even if Rick brought my car back.

When I saw Kim among the dozen students already in the classroom when I arrived I felt some sort of anticipatory excitement – my life seemed to be opening up. She was paired off with Ray, doing some sort of emotion-expressing game which had Kim looking at Ray with wide watery eyes and licking her lips – whether it was supposed to be love or a stomach upset I couldn’t tell, but was annoyed with her for seeming, like everyone else in Lukedom, not to know I existed. She was dressed casually in jeans and a flowery sweatshirt. Her sneakers looked as if they might actually have been bought in the last year.

I sat in the back until the class finished the exercise – Kim at last turned and waved at me and smiled – and then
we all listened to Kathy give a brief introduction to our next exercise: confrontational roulette.

It turned out that in confrontational roulette you let chance choose whom you have to confront – wife, husband, father, mother, God, devil, President, priest and so on. Then a person is randomly selected from volunteers to play the person confronted, playing the role after being given a brief background by the one doing the confronting. Kathy began pairing people off from dice throws with her class list, and I was annoyed to see Kim paired off with Ray, while I got a tall, bald-headed guy who gave his name as Abe Lister and looked like a retired funeral director.

‘The die says I have to confront an imaginary you!’ Kim said to me gaily as she and Ray were leaving the classroom. That was just what I needed: knowing Kim would be attacking me for my various flaws and doing it with another good-looking diceguide. How did she do it?!

The die picked from three options I gave it that I confront my father. It seemed such an appropriate choice I wondered if dear old Dad had supernatural powers and could influence the fall of dice. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect and Kathy had to stand over me prodding to get me to give the bald-headed Abe Lister a basic background on my relations – or rather lack thereof – with Luke. Then she suggested that we have our confrontation outside while going for a walk in the woods.

‘Well, Son,’ said Baldy (as I thought of this guy). ‘What’s on your mind? You wanted to talk to me?’

I didn’t have the slightest interest in the world in talking to the man, whether he were Baldy or Dad. I was angrily resentful that the whole charade was a waste of time.

‘Yeah,’ I said sarcastically as we entered a trail leading into the woods. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for years.’

‘That’s fine. Son,’ said Baldy. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to you too.’

‘Bullshit!’ I said. ‘If you’d wanted to talk to me all you had to do was pick up a phone and call.’

‘Ah … yes.’

‘You’re so wrapped up in yourself you don’t even know I exist.’

‘Oh, I do, Larry, I do.’ protested Baldy. ‘It’s –’

‘You don’t! All you care about is your stupid theory about developing multiple personalities. Everything gets sacrificed to that – especially your family.

‘I have a career, just like any man. I admit that –’

Career! You call throwing dice to decide who you are a career!?’

Baldy stopped on the path and glared at me.

‘I had a calling!’ he said. ‘I did something unique with my life, something no man had ever done before. You should be proud of me!’

‘You deserted me!’ I protested. ‘You sacrificed me and my mother and Evie for your fucking Dice Man calling!’

‘I did! I admit it! But what would you have me do, stay around and ruin your lives with my experiments in randomness? Which is worse, a faithless fanatic who tortures those who love him by remaining in their lives, or a dead man, one who kills himself and disappears?’

My anger was slowly being melted down into depression. My father was eluding me now even as he had all my life.

‘I’d have had you stay,’ I said as we moved further along into the woods. ‘I used to love the dice games you played with me. You know I did. I could have been diceboy to your Dice Man – Robin to your Batman. But you let Mom put a stop to it. You decided to go your own way and leave me behind.’

‘The dice told me to stop urging you to play with the dice. It was –’

‘The dice! Where was your heart!? Where was the father I loved?’

My bald-headed dad moved on, hands clasped behind his back like a pondering professor or a grieving funeral director.

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he finally said in his gravelly voice. ‘My calling was to subject my soul to all the disparate forces within it, including the heartless forces. My calling took precedence over my heart. Where it called, I followed.’

‘Out of my life …’ I said, my hands too clasped behind my back.

‘Out of your life,’ echoed my bald father. ‘But not you out of mine.’

We walked on a while in silence.

‘What does that mean?’ I finally asked.

‘I never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting to see you.’

‘Liar! You could have seen me whenever you wanted.’

‘When your mother died I wanted to come and take you to live with me, but you told me to go to hell.’

I stopped and, remembering that awful day ten years earlier after my mother had been killed, began trembling.

‘You … bastard,’ I said.

‘But why!?’ he protested. ‘I wanted to come for you!’

‘But how could I say yes!? Not a word from you for almost five years and then a disembodied voice on the phone. I hated you! You were all that was false and selfish in the world. My mother had just died – alone and deserted like me. How could I betray everything I had thought and felt for years by saying yes to a disembodied devil pretending love after years of indifference?’

We were facing each other now, tears in our eyes.

‘You … couldn’t, of course,’ he said huskily.

I looked at him through tear-distorted vision and took a deep sigh.

‘But I wanted to …’ I finally whispered.

Agent Macavoy had been on the job. He had followed Larry faithfully for two days, getting yelled at and grieved over and yogied into a pretzel and fucked over by all sorts of weirdos who seemed to find him a nice object to act on.

He had been appalled at what a dismal amateur Larry was at trying to find out something about his father. He had seen Larry’s initial reconnaissance trip to the church and then the trip there with the hacksaw and crowbar. My God, the man knew nothing about breaking and entering!! Macavoy himself had easily jemmied the lock to enter Jake’s office and used one of his two dozen keys to get into the locked file cabinet. There was nothing there of use. But Larry!! The guy might just as well have used a hand grenade to get into the office and dynamite to get into the file cabinet! And then to get caught in the act!! Why, breaking and entering was kindergarten level stuff for the FBI, and Macavoy could feel nothing but contempt for Larry’s ineptitude.

This Tuesday he had followed Larry and the tall bald-headed man out of the orientation building, across the street, up a narrow dirt road and into the woods. He hadn’t been able to hear much of the early parts of the conversation because he was forced to keep his distance, but when they stopped at one point to confront each other angrily he had managed to sneak within thirty feet, hiding behind the trunk of a large fir tree. What he had heard had stunned him.

‘Your fucking Dice Man calling I could have been diceboy to your Dice Man, Robin to your Batman.’

Although Macavoy hadn’t got all of the next parts of their conversation he’d heard enough to realize that the tall older man was none other than Luke Rhinehart himself, snuck into Lukedom to see his long-lost son.

If Larry and Baldy had been trembling with their emotions there in the woods, Agent Macavoy was trembling with his. After dozens of agents had failed, he, James Macpherson Macavoy, had located the illusive, dissembling Luke Rhinehart.

When the two of them ended their talk and split up, Macavoy chose to follow Luke back to the orientation
building. He waited an hour until the bald bastard had come out again. He then tailed him through the village to a house up a sidestreet: number six Boxcars Street, a modest two-family clapboard house perched up on cement blocks. The guy knew enough to live low key. Then he rushed to the nearest pay phone to call Putt at the Bureau.

‘No, don’t try to arrest him yourself,’ Putt said after being filled in. ‘I can be there with backups tomorrow – maybe even this evening. By two tomorrow afternoon we’ll be ready to make the arrest.’

‘Should I keep close to the father?’

‘If you can,’ said Putt after a pause. ‘No, wait. I don’t want to risk his getting wise to someone following him and have him take off. Let him go for now. You know where he’s staying and what he looks like. We’ll be able to locate him again after I get there with backups.’

‘Right.’

‘Meanwhile, contact the local authorities. See if they can provide some bodies for us. Don’t tell them who we’re after or exactly when you’ll need them. Act as if it’s a minor matter.’

‘Right. Got it, chief.’

By the middle of her second day in Lukedom Kim realized that though she was excited by some of Lukedom’s experiments, she was also disappointed at what she finally thought of as its ‘institutionalized spontaneity.’ Spontaneity should be spontaneous, and she wasn’t sure it really worked when it was contrived by the dice or some diceguide. On the other hand, how else could you get unspontaneous people to be spontaneous?

She was flattered that Michael Way seemed to single her out for special attention, though after listening to him for hours she concluded that for all his attacks on the folly of ego and self, he had at least the trace of one of the biggest egos she’d ever known. Of course it could just be his high-toned English accent. Although he could make fun of himself, his ‘spontaneity’ sometimes seemed as controlled as most people’s rationality.

The previous evening he’d taken her to the church, where she’d met Dr Ecstein. She couldn’t help comparing him with the man she’d read about in
The Dice Man,
a copy of which she’d been reading since she arrived. All the fierce ambition he’d had twenty years before seemed gone; he was now more like a benevolent rabbi.

Then Michael had taken her on a moonlit jaunt along a stream that skirted the centre of town. If he was making a pass his technique seemed to be to show how wise he was.

The philosophy of ego-destruction was familiar to her from her interest in Eastern mysticisms. She saw that diceliving was a way to humiliate and break down the socialized self – a goal of several Eastern traditions. But it seemed more akin to LSD and the other powerful
psychedelics that seekers had used two decades earlier – useful for some, dangerous for most.

So she argued with him a bit, made sure he noticed how intelligent and well read she was on these matters.

‘But what brought you to all this?’ she asked. ‘Making a fool of yourself – as diceliving necessitates – seems awfully un-English.’

‘Well, exactly,’ he said easily. ‘We English are much more tightly hammered into our square boxes by society than you Americans. So we need all the explosives we can find to break free.’

‘Are there any places like this in England?’

He smiled – almost to himself.

‘Oh, yes,’ he answered. ‘Actually more than here.’

‘How come we don’t read about them?’ asked Kim.

‘Ah, well, that’s a question now, isn’t it?’

Their wandering had brought them back towards the remaining lights of the village.

‘Well, is there an answer?’ asked Kim, suddenly aware of how tired she’d become.

‘Yes, but I’m afraid it’s hardly appropriate to give to casual Lukedom visitors – no offence intended.’

‘Classified stuff, huh?’ said Kim, and then added: ‘Say, I just realized I need a place to stay tonight. Is there a dorm or something for newcomers, or a cheap motel?’

‘Actually there are both,’ said Way. ‘There are cots at the orientation centre and rooms at two hotels in town. But you’re welcome to stay at my place. I’ve two spare bedrooms.’

‘No, thanks,’ she found herself replying easily. ‘I want to sample this place the way most people do. I’ll try the dorm.’

She was happy to see him appear disappointed at her decision, and so wheeled away into the dorm before he could respond.

The next morning she’d gone to orientation and been
‘trained’ by a guide named Ray and another named Kathy. It had seemed like a cross between boot camp and an encounter session from the seventies. Again, she thought she saw what they were up to, but thought it was pretty strong medicine for most people. After the lunch break she’d cut her afternoon session and taken a short hike out of town. She visited the teepee village and met people she might well have met at some of the ashrams she’d visited. Many were indifferent to the dice business and were in Lukedom mainly because it was cheap. She felt a little uneasy thinking that living simply and cheaply and purposelessly in a teepee was probably where her life was heading.

When she returned to orientation she was randomly selected to man the cash register at the orientation restaurant for an hour. As she went through the motions of receiving the money and returning the change – it came to her much more easily than she had assumed it would – she thought about her feelings. She was surprised that despite all her listening to Michael and the other diceguides, she still had a strong resistance to using the dice. She could use them in silly little trivial ways or to show off, but when it came to doing something that might be really different for her, she drew back.

She tried to convince herself that she was already free and flexible and multiple without the dice, and that her resistance was reasonable. Nevertheless she sensed that she was strongly attached to her free-wheeling spirit and resisted appearing otherwise – options which the dice sometimes chose.

The main thing that disappointed her about Lukedom was that it didn’t seem as much fun as Luke himself. She had finished Luke’s
The Dice Man
and thought that though Luke sounded a little sick at times, he was fun! He was playful, a man who really did seem to have gotten rid of his ego, who didn’t care what people thought of him or where the dice took him. But Lukedom seemed a rather
serious place, more like many of the ashrams she had visited or lived in briefly over the years. Where could there ever be any spontaneous warmth or communication if everyone was on stage all the time trying on new roles? It was exhausting.

After her stint at the cash register, she grabbed a bite to eat, sitting with a young woman her age who had been in Lukedom for eight months. The woman seemed to be utterly serious about the need to free herself from feminine stereotypical role-playing and argued that Lukedom was offering the solution to the oppression of women. Kim could see that the breaking down of society’s normal attitudes might be liberating for any of those oppressed by those attitudes, but she wondered what would emerge in its place. In Lukedom jobs and roles were so randomized that women were as likely to be carpenters, plumbers or bank presidents as men, and men cooks, housekeepers or babysitters. From a woman’s point of view it was a clear improvement over most societies, although the plumbing must sometimes suffer. Susan, it turned out, was working for the next two months as crew boss of a gang of men and women renovating houses on the south edge of town and claimed she was better than any of them at her job.

After that talk, Kim sat down alone on a bench in the sun and finished off her iced tea from lunch.

She realized she was glad that Larry still seemed so uneasy in her presence. Despite all his earnest efforts, he was hooked on her. And she was glad. One of her not-completely-hidden motives for coming to Lukedom, especially after Honoria gave him back his ring, was to be with Larry, to ‘see what developed.’ Despite his seeming to be the sort of man she usually made fun of, she liked Larry – probably more than ‘liked.’

She felt a little guilty that she enjoyed seeing him struggling with his need for control against her, struggling to convince himself marrying Honoria was what he wanted. But depressing too. He had a lot of things in him
waiting to break free, but she doubted they would ever make it. The reason she hadn’t let herself get involved with him was not only Honoria, but because she feared Larry would make of their affair something melodramatic. He would be passionate and brooding, loving her for their physical connecting and haling her for taking him away from the straight and narrow path to fame and fortune he had set out for himself. She knew that being loved by a neurotic was a sure formula for misery. Larry would have to be miserable without her. Although she had to admit she was sorely tempted.