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.’