The Search for the Dice Man (18 page)

‘We shouldn’t be doing this, you know,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said, glowing.

Returning her grin, I struggled up to begin climbing the last of the narrow scree. The worst was over. Though we were both gasping for breath as we walked the final fifty feet up the bare rounded top of this part of the mountain, I was feeling better than I had in months – since a wonderful spring sail in a friend’s catamaran when we’d almost capsized and given up on ever getting the boat back before
dark. Mindless physical exertion with a touch of danger was a tonic. I felt like shouting, but settled for impulsively grabbing Kim’s hand and squeezing it.

‘Goddamn it, beats washing dishes at Joe’s, doesn’t it?’ I said.

‘Or listening to another lecture about self,’ Kim agreed, as we continued hand in hand to the top shelf of rock.

From there we could look back down at Lukedom, some of which was now hidden by tall trees halfway down the mountain. The village looked tiny and insignificant. When we turned and looked down the opposite hillside, there didn’t seem to be a town or house In sight, only a ranger’s tower on the mountain across the valley, and in the valley a meandering stream and trees.

When I turned to Kim she was in the act of turning to me. We looked at each other and then were in each other’s arms and kissing.

We were kissing. I had the tiniest memory of the hunger and desire in her eyes just before we embraced, but that memory was buried in the avalanche of passion and fulfilment I felt in crushing her against me and in our kissing. My whole being seemed to be saying ‘It’s about time!’

The roar was incredible; the whole universe seemed to be vibrating and screaming in unison, the air rushing around us as if we were hurtling through space. I had an image of being plunged into a Hemingway novel, but then began to be almost frightened at the power of what was happening – when Kim broke our kiss.

The roaring and rushing continued for a moment and then receded. As I looked at her in surprised adoration I became dimly aware that she was looking off to the left, and that the roaring was an aeroplane I now saw soaring just over the last of the south end of the mountain, the aeroplane that must have roared over us in the middle of our kiss.

Still holding each other, we briefly watched the plane
recede into the sky. It was a strange moment: I felt like a man who in the midst of receiving the Nobel Prize finds the ceremony visited by a UFO; I was interested in getting on with the ceremony, but felt a UFO probably had to be commented on.

‘What the hell was that?’ I asked.

An awfully nice kiss,’ answered Kim, turning to smile up at me.

‘I know, but where did that plane come from?’

We broke our embrace to move across the flat peak to the edge of the cliff on the west side of the mountain from which the plane had come. When we got as close to the edge as we dared, we looked directly down.

At first what I was seeing didn’t register. There were no buildings, no cars, no people – just a long flat terrace cut into the side of the mountain, cut by man into this side of the mountain. Fifty yards in width, not a tree or boulder broke the neat flat terrace that ran for at least a half mile. I stared at it and stared at it and finally saw it. A small airstrip.

‘Things get interestinger by the minute.’ said Kim from

‘But where’s the airport?’ I asked, still trying to absorb what I was seeing.

‘In the mountain,’ said Kim.

A small airfield. On a mountainside miles from any town or, as far as we could see, from any road. An airfield on which small planes could land and take off, leaving off passengers to do nothing in nowheresville.

Looking down on this strange strip of modern technology in the middle of wilderness, I knew that the people landing there weren’t doing nothing in nowheresville.

‘I bet if we hiked down there,’ I said as we gazed down at the airstrip, ‘we’d find another abandoned mine entrance with a rusty padlock and a sign saying “Danger. Keep Out.”’

Kim nodded.

‘And I doubt that people enter one mineshaft just to hike through the mountain to exit on the other side,’ she said.

She was right. Under where we were standing, between the mine entrance on the Lukedom side and the airstrip on the other, were people. People doing something that they didn’t want other people to know about.

Kim took my hand and we turned away back towards Lukedom.

‘It figures,’ she said. ‘Lukedom is far too sophisticated a place to be run by those few people in administration and orientation.’

‘But why hide things in a mountain?’

‘Beats me,’ said Kim.

It was almost six in the afternoon and getting dark. Though we agreed it was possible we could hike down to the airstrip and look around and then climb back over the mountain to Lukedom before dark, we decided not to. Our climbing the mountain was explainable, but not our nosing around the airstrip. Although I don’t think either of us was afraid, we figured that the people who were keeping secrets might not take kindly to strangers wandering about on their airstrip.

So, in a subdued mood, we headed back down the mountain towards the village. I felt I was closer to finding my father than I’d ever been before. One of Lukedom’s mottos was ‘This truth above all: fake it’. In Lukedom a door that wasn’t a door and a wall that wasn’t a wall and a wilderness that wasn’t a wilderness seemed just about par for the course.

An hour and a half later I sat in a comer of the Do Die Inn bar and waited for Kim. We had separated soon after getting back to the village to go to our respective rooms to bathe and change clothes. Being alone with a drink had reminded me that reality was getting a little complex and contradictory – just the way the prophets here in Lukedom said it was. I was in an outrageous community that apparently had something even more outrageous to hide. I was engaged to a woman I wanted to marry, and mightily tempted by a woman to whom I wasn’t engaged and didn’t want to marry. I thought my father was here in Lukedom, but hadn’t yet a shred of clear evidence that this was so.

I knew that I would continue my investigations tomorrow and not return to New York until I had some answers to the questions that had arisen. Although I dreaded it, I realized I had to phone Honoria. In all this chaos a part of me knew where the solid land of my life lay and it wasn’t in any of the people here in Lukedom.

As I sat in the safety of my little booth, I thought of the prospect of talking to Honoria with the wariness of an amateur exploring the subtleties of an electric switch-breaker box – live wires everywhere. It took me twenty minutes and two more drinks before I was befuddled enough to dare try it.

Unfortunately – I’d somehow imagined it would be otherwise – Honoria was at home; she even answered the phone. After the usual preliminary verbal sparring, I blurted out the awful truth.

‘I’m on to something here, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Something big. Got to stay. Least another day. Maybe Thursday.’

‘Fine,’ said Honoria. ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’

‘You know how much I’d like to be back –’

But with her usual brisk efficiency Honoria had hung up. Indecisiveness was not one of her flaws.

I remained in the stuffy phone booth for another half minute listening to the dial tone.

Well. So. I was still in the doghouse.

As I walked back through the restaurant towards the bar I suddenly became aware that I was grinning!

How sick! A hundred thousand dollars a year had just hung up on me! A woman who stood to inherit most or all of twenty or thirty million dollars! The woman my boss was willing to let me marry if I could only manage to keep my father squelched! The boss responsible for determining my annual Christmas bonus, a bonus due in little more than six weeks!

I felt a wave of fear: I was stepping into no man’s land. My future, that grand reliable railroad line across the country to riches, had suddenly gotten sidetracked, and where this new line went was anybody’s guess, but it certainly wasn’t aimed at the same glittering city on a hill.

Seeing Kim had arrived and was sitting enticingly in my booth awaiting me, I became, the healthy male on the make and wondered how I should play it. Cool? Angry? Hurt? Hurt, I remembered vaguely, always played best with women. But Kim was wearing a lovely tight-fitting dress and had her hair looking almost under control. She was dazzling. But I must look hurt, hurt.

I walked slowly back to the booth and slid into the bench opposite her. For a moment I stared at the melting ice cubes in the dregs of my drink and tried to look melancholy.

‘What are you looking so happy about?’ asked Kim.

‘Uh, what?’

‘You came back looking like you just won the lottery. What happened?’

Somehow this conversation wasn’t going quite the way
I’d figured. I looked up at her trying to maintain what I had thought was my tragic expression.

Kim returned my gaze for a moment and then burst out laughing.

I thought I ought to try to look offended but then realized that I’d probably be no more successful with offended than I’d been with melancholy.

‘I guess I’m not as upset as I thought that Honoria just hung up on me,’ I said.

‘Not upset! I knew you and Honoria had your little troubles, but I never guessed you were
suffering.
’

‘We
aren’t
suffering,’ I protested. ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel worse.’

Kim shook her head, still smiling.

‘Worse,’ she echoed sceptically. ‘When you came back here I thought you were having an orgasm.’

I tried for a moment to look offended but finally gave up and laughed.

‘I think you’re being a little hard on me,’ I said.

‘I’m not being hard. I’m just trying to figure you out. And besides,’ she went on, ‘maybe I’m laughing because I’m feeling pretty good about things too, ever think of that?’

Hey, that’s right!

‘You don’t want Honoria to marry me?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. You two’d just make life miserable for each other.’

‘I see,’ I said, stalling, as usual, for time.

‘Your heart knows it, your body knows it, but your mind doesn’t know itself from a hole in the ground.’

‘Thanks.’

‘If you were truly in love with Nori,’ Kim went gaily on, ‘you wouldn’t be so attracted to me. But since messing around with your fiancée’s cousin is against the rules, you’ve been sitting on it.’ She paused. ‘Not literally, I hope,’ she added with a smile.

‘I don’t believe I’m having this conversation,’ I said.

‘You’re not,’ said Kim, I’m having it and you’re trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do about it.’

‘I see,’ I said, but was fairly sure I was, as usual, seeing very little.

Later, we ate dinner together and discussed what we’d found out about Lukedom. Like most men, I was more comfortable with subjects I was the expert on, so steered clear of talking about the possibilities of something happening between me and Kim. As I kept up what I hope was a witty (if superficial) conversation I had the feeling my life was reeling just a trifle out of control. My engagement was in danger, and primarily from a girl who represented precisety the chaos and spontaneity I’d structured my life to avoid.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Kim announced much later, when we were the last two customers in the restaurant. She was toying with the last of some rather awful cake she’d ordered for dessert and looking at me with less mischievousness than usual.

‘I think we’re in Rome,’ she went on.

I was wise enough not to challenge this statement, despite its seeming to have a certain inaccuracy to it.

‘And thus should do as the Romans do.’ she conducted.

I pulled my eyes away from her breasts, where they had inadvertently wandered, and tried to return her gaze with equal intellectual seriousness.

‘This community.’ she continued, ‘is populated by people who play roles and games and use dice. Dr Ecstein insists you get into diceliving before he’ll give you the information you came for. I think you should do it.’

‘No,’ I said.

To begin with,’ Kim went on, ‘I must admit I find the idea of using dice to make decisions rather irrelevant.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But fun,’ she added. ‘… Serious fun.’

‘No, I’m not going to let the dice decide anything of any importance.’

‘Because it seems to me,’ Kim said easily, as if my interjection had been of no more significance than a sneeze, ‘that if you’re going to overcome your father you must prove – to him and to yourself – that you can play his games but choose not to.’

‘If I want to do something, I do it,’ I said. ‘If I don’t want to do something I don’t do it. Although I may pretend to diddle with the dice to play along with Jake Ecstein, I’ll never really let them affect my life.’

‘Chicken,’ she said.

This was a new tack.

‘You’re afraid,’ she went on quietly. The man I’m falling in love with, the great risk-taker, the man who likes to sail out into gales for the fun of it, who risks millions of dollars every day, is afraid to let a single six-sided cube move him even a single inch.’

This was going too far. To be called chicken by the woman who had just admitted she was falling in love with me and whose pants I wanted passionately to get into was too much to let pass. I tried to feel anger, but Kim was silting across from me in the dim light, looking lovely, loving and lovable, and smiling at me with her infuriatingly mischievous smile. She was a mean teasing slut.

‘I’m not afraid of the dice,’ I said. I’m at war with them.’

Then beat them!’ she shot back. ‘As it is, you’re running away!’

‘I’m not running away!’

‘You are! If you’re at war with your father and the dice, then let’s see you fight! Beat Luke at his own game! Show him you reject his ways not because they’re beyond you, but because you’ve tried them and know your way is better!’

Well. Kim’s outburst, made with dramatic inflections from her fork, stopped me cold.

‘… Use the dice …’ I mused aloud, ‘just to show I can use the dice …’

‘Exactly,’ said Kim.

‘It’s as if my father is reaching back through time and space to taunt me with his ways.’

‘Beat him!’ Kim urged again. ‘You think you’re the best at whatever you undertake. Well then, be the best at dicing!’

‘I could, you know,’ I said softly. ‘I’m no uptight stuck-in-the-mud. If I stick to the straight and narrow it’s out of strength, not weakness.’

‘That’s right!’ said Kim, suddenly leaning across the open space between us and taking hold of my right hand with hers. ‘You can stay here, beat the dicepeople at dicing, find your father, and still be the best trader east of Kansas.’

‘East of Guam,’ I corrected. We smiled at each other.

‘So,’ said Kim. Still smiling, she leaned back and wiped her mouth and flopped her napkin on to the table. Then she reached into the small bag she had brought with her, scrounged around in it and brought out two dice.

‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda for tonight,’ she said.

FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

Accident provides the growing power of all life. Men have always liked to think that life evolved because Someone Up There had control and purpose and directed change. The sage sees that life evolves from a much more admirable force: Chance. Control and purpose inherently limited the direction of change to the limits of the mind doing the controlling. Imagine, if you dare, that the creator of the universe was actually rational! Were God rational, 99 per cent of the universe would not have been created – certainly not human beings. No, no, no, it is quite clear that the only Creator who can lay claim to the absurdity and richness of life is Accident, is Chance.