I’m guessing that when you pass a woman laughing with a clutch of children on the sidewalk, your heart smiles-or something like that. The sun abruptly shines, and your next breath feels like a lucky pull at the slots. This is because you see people as surfaces. Not me. For me, people are always the latest instance of a history. So where you see a smile hanging in the blank blue of now, I see a smile superimposed on a snarl, shriek, laugh, sneer-you get the picture.
I never see people-I see crazed bundles. Battered suitcases, stuffed to overflowing, cinched shut with belts and frayed twine.
An old girlfriend of mine, a visual artist named Darla Blackmore, once tried to convince me that the exact opposite was the case, that given the rarity of my condition I was likely the only person on the planet who saw “people.” Everybody else, she claimed, saw only thin slices of people, which they then mistook for the whole thing. They saw types, she said, not tokens. Apparently this was a big distinction among the philosophy majors she hung out with.
Now, I should have been flattered, but instead I was irritated. Not all repetitions are equal. Some, like sex for instance, never get stale, no matter how high I stack the pile. Sex is one of those things you always do for the first time, perfect recall or not. But others grate, and when I say grate, I mean grate.
Like when people call this curse of mine a fucking gift-as if it were a superpower or something.
So I told Darla that if people were in fact tokens, they would be better off being types, because what I see is ugly beyond redemption.
To which she replied, “Is that how you see me?”
I should have seen it coming. Maybe that’s what made me so angry- angry enough to speak the truth, which is to say, too angry. I told her she was a chorus of Darlas, a cacophony of lyrics sung simultaneously, with only one sweet note to redeem her.
“And what note is that?”
Of course I had to be honest a second disastrous time. “Your-”
That was October 26, 1993. Another bad day. The Framer Compound was an old horse farm a mile or so outside of downtown-on the edge of a largely abandoned industrial park. It’s funny the way movies fuck up your imagination. You begin to see Drama everywhere you look, little particles of it waiting to be taken up in this or that narrative arc. Everything I glimpsed while driving became a crime scene. A series of concrete cylinders, beached among thronging sumac and grasses: that’s where Jennifer was assaulted, where she screamed her last breath. A collapsed outbuilding, its aluminum siding buckled like discarded clothes: that’s where he watched and waited, holding his binoculars with one hand while rubbing his cock with the other. A swath of open ground, brown and ragged, where the toxic buildup prevented everything but the hardiest weeds from taking root: that was where she ran, trying to scream past sobs of exhaustion and terror. And the dead factories themselves, bland and imperturbable save where missing panels afforded glimpses of pitch interiors: that’s where she tried to hide, tripping through the whooping dark, gasping air that smelled of rust and residual hydrocarbons.
On and on, everywhere I looked…
A million and one places to hide a Dead Jennifer.
The Compound had that well-heeled rural manse look, everything prim and oh so agricultural, only with an inward Waco air. Us against the world-you know. The iron gates stood ajar. I clattered down the lane in my old Vee-Dub, craning my head this way and that to get a sense of things. Gravel popped loud through my open window. Two monstrous willows swayed their skirts in the summer breeze-a whiff of paradise in that, I suppose. The original farmhouse towered grand over a series of white-brick additions. Despite the obvious age of the original structure, everything about it had that tight, buttoned look- like new windows nailed down. Wood chip gardens sprawled around the foundations, bright with flowers. The lane hooked around, opening onto a lot hedged on two sides by long, low barns that had been renovated to house human livestock. The place was huge, I realized. At least thirty thousand labyrinthine square feet. Maybe more.
Just another factory, I told myself.
A guy appeared from behind a sun-flashing glass door. He looked like someone out of a pharmaceutical commercial-you know, middle- class good looks and an unflinching hope-for-the-future smile, only with crooked teeth. He wore a uniform-a white suit of some kind with no collar on the jacket.
Not a good sign. A belief system with its own outfits. Fawk.
He timed his stride to reach me the instant I slammed my car door. He shook my hand in a firm, dry grip, introduced himself as Stevie. I found him instantly irritating.
I gave him my card, and while he struggled to read the print along the bottom of the giant iris and pupil I used as my logo (I fucking told Kimberley that nobody could read the print, but apparently I was the only one with vision problems), I explained that the Bonjours had sent me to investigate the disappearance of their daughter, Jennifer. Stevie nodded sagely, returned the card.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I was hoping to talk to Baars… “
“The Counsellor? He’s teaching a class.”
“Cool. Would it be okay for me to sit in?”
He blinked and smiled-like a Buddha listening to a child.
“Have you crossed the Lacuna?”
“Lacuna?”
The fucker knew I had no clue as to what the Lacuna was, and yet he baited me with the question anyway.
“Sorry. You’ll have to wait in the Clink.”
For a second I pondered smacking him. Everything about the guy made me bristle. I understood immediately that he was one of those smug little pricks who could only laugh to himself-you know, laugh that insipid self-congratulatory laugh, either because he thought he had said something witty or because he thought himself clever for getting something witty said by someone else. Stevie. Cult member.
What a fucking loser. All these people organizing their lives around an invisible world. I had an uncle who was a missionary, who would always probe me about my relationship with Jesus in warm, gentle tones, like I was the world’s last orphan or something. Then, late at night, I would hear him screaming at my mom, telling her I was damned to blister in hell.
So I learned early on that when you’re with people, you’re never really with people-not simply, anyway. Not only do they tow their histories around with them, they carry their ideologies with them as well. You can’t serve pork chops to just anyone, you know.
But then, this assumes it’s possible to organize your life in any other way. If you think about it, there really isn’t that much practical difference between things like Wall Street and Paradise: You believe that certain numbers in certain circuits will grant you life after labour-retirement- simply because you’ve diligently attended to these numbers. Because you’re one of the righteous.
Not knowing shit and yet acting in all ways as if you do: this is the essence of human civilization.
They’ve even invented a name for it.
Trust. Either way, I was having none of it.
The Clink, it turned out, was simply their nickname for the Compound’s waiting room. I was at once surprised and more than a little relieved that the Framers had some kind of sense of humour. Strange when you think about it, the antipathy between religion and humour, worship and ridicule. Ruthless ears on the one side, ruthless voices on the other.
The Clink ran parallel to the south end of the parking lot, a long room with tinted plate glass along one wall and floor-to-ceiling mirrors across the other. Of course Stevie-boy planted me in a seat opposite the mirrored wall. I’m pretty easy on the eyes-dark with those avian features that so many women find irresistible-so that wasn’t a problem. But being stuck with your reflection is something altogether different. There’s the whole Taxi Driver thing, the slippage between being and posturing. Otherwise, there’s just something damn creepy about watching yourself watching yourself… Something wrong about seeing the guy behind the seeing.
And confusing. I mean, really, just who was that good-looking, two- dimensional man?
We may never know.
My cell crunched out the riff to “Back in Black.” It was Kimberley, of course.
“Where are you?” she asked in a higher than usual tone. I knew instantly that something was wrong.
“At the hotel, checking in.”
“Look…” A moment of cigarette-inhaling silence.
“Look what?”
I winced at my tone, as well as at the crash of recollections that followed. I have more than a few bad habits when it comes to managing women and their fears and expectations.
“I just need to know what you meant when you said… “ Another draw on her cigarette, then a dead-air pause. “What you said.. ”
I shot a questioning look at the guy in the mirror. He shrugged.
“Said what?”
I could feel the anger balling into fists on the other end.
“You know… Love you, babe…’”
Fawk.
A head-scratching squint from the dude in the mirror.
“Just an expression, honey,” I said. “You know, ‘Love you, baby!’ My way of saying, ‘Good work!’”
“Good work,”she repeated in the voice of the undead. I’ve heard people talk about STDs with more enthusiasm.
“Yeah… you know…”
But the phone was already dead.
Shiyit.
“Mr. Manning!” someone called across the tiled foyer.
Xenophon Baars. The guy was a physically impressive specimen: tall in that angular, Honest Abe kind of way, with a slight stoop that paradoxically suggested strength rather than infirmity. His face had a boyish air that no amount of aging could dispel, one accentuated by the long-banged unruliness of his hair. His eyes looked sharp behind the reflections gliding across the lenses of his glasses. He wore a white suit identical to Stevie’s in every respect save that it sported a red collar. Nice touch, that, I thought.
Real Star Treky.
“So what do you think of our place?” he asked.
“Looks like a juvenile detention centre.”
Not very diplomatic, I suppose, but something about the guy suggested that my peculiar brand of cynical honesty would be appreciated. He was a former philosophy professor, and I have enough egghead friends to know that cynicism is their favourite way of hiding hypocrisy in plain view.
We spent a couple of minutes commiserating about Jennifer before he led me deeper into the Compound. She was well loved and sorely missed and all that ya-ya crap. I got the sense that her room, wherever it was in this labyrinth, had already been “repurposed.” Baars himself, at least, didn’t seem all that sentimental. I found myself thinking of Amanda Bonjour crying while she tied her shoes. The inaudible tap-tap of tears across cracked and raised lineoleum.
“I suppose,” he said, his manner as brisk as his pace, “that you want to ask all the usual questions. Who sleeps with who. Who despi-”
“To be honest, this whole cult thing is kind of a curveball. I like to start from the outside and work my way in. I think I need to understand you first.”
He turned to me with an appreciative look. “Perhaps we should begin with a tour-you think?”
“Sure,” I replied.
Obviously the guy had a script he wanted to follow.
So we toured the Compound, my eyes darting this way and that as he described the history of the Framers from their beginnings in southern California to the purchase and renovation of the buildings around me. The place was a veritable maze, possessing, in addition to the seminar rooms and the dormitories, a small gym, a library, a games room that he called the “activity centre,” and even an indoor garden. Despite the thoroughness of the renovations, a kind of spiritual lurch and jar haunted the structure, inexplicable steps, zigzag halls, the ceilings claustrophobic one moment, agoraphobic the next-what you typically find when an architect imposes drastic new uses across ancient floor plans, only writ large.
Bad as the human brain.
“At first we considered buying one of the abandoned factories you passed on your way out here,” Baars explained, “but we ran into considerable… resistance, you might say, from city council.”
“Hard to zone silly,” I replied.
He smiled as if I were the kind of asshole he could appreciate.
We had come to a corridor with doors set at hotel intervals. Without warning or explanation, Baars pressed one open, gestured for me to join him. Several seconds passed before I realized I was looking into Jennifer’s room.
“The police have already been through-as you can see.”
Tossed or ransacked would have better described it. Either that or Jennifer Bonjour was a pathological slob.
The room was larger than I expected, with a double bed and night table crowded in one corner, and a small sectional arranged opposite an entertainment centre in the other. Despite the mess-strewn books and magazines, cushions piled like rubble, blankets balled like cabbage- it all seemed so suburban in a consumer credit kind of way. I guess I was expecting something more monastic. Say what you will about the Framers, self-denial was certainly not part of their creed.
I had rooted through the rooms of several missing persons by this time, so I was accustomed to the sense of spookiness. But her room troubled me more than usual for some reason. It was almost as if Jennifer’s sheer normalcy-down to the bloody Twilight books and DVDs-made her disappearance all the more tragic.
But in investigative terms, this was little more than a sneak preview- for me, anyway. In the movies, the dick always roots around and finds a decisive clue. Either a bona fide lead, like a pack of matches with a water- damaged phone number. Or a cipher, something that initially makes no sense whatsoever, like a gob of chewing gum in a condom, say, but eventually unlocks the entire case. But these are just narrative conceits. In reality, everything can mean anything-abject ambiguity is the rule, and if you go in blind, you will sure as shit read things wrong.
Jennifer’s room was what you would call a primary text, and I was just getting started on the secondary sources. Going in now would be like deciphering hieroglyphics using a tourist phrase book.
I needed to learn the grammar of the situation.
At least that was what I told myself at the time.
I turned from the entrance into his quizzical gaze. “Is there someplace we can talk?”
Baars smiled and nodded as if I had slipped the noose of one pet theory only to confirm a second. He led me back into the maze, yapping the whole way.
His tale was a familiar one: boy meets New Age revelation; boy builds end-of-the-world bunker. I could tell he had told it many times before, and that he never tired of repeating it. And why not, when it made him the Moses of the Modern Age? Conviction, whether religious or otherwise, requires a certain hunger for repetition. And flattery makes everything taste sweeter.
“It’s taken a lot of commitment,” he said, “and even more hard work, but the Framers are here to stay…”
“Until the world blows up.”
A patient smile. “Do you really think we’re that simple, Mr. Manning?”
“Define ‘simple.’”
Baars laughed like a teacher finding evidence of his genius reflected in a pupil. “‘Simple,’” he said, “is to follow the path of least social resistance, to go with the flow and believe what most everyone believes. In that sense, Mr. Manning, we Framers believe against the law of social gravitation.”
After so many smartass girlfriends, I knew this game. “But what if gravity is simply belief in general instead of this or that dogma? What if real courage consists in resisting belief altogether?”
Baars simply laughed harder. “Spoken like a true ironist!” He turned and fixed me with a look I found far too canny. “I imagine cynicism is a hazard of your trade-yes? The crazy parade of crazy people, everyone bent on justifying this or that petty transgression. It would be difficult not to take a dim view of people and their beliefs.”
“Ironist…” I said. The fucker was trying to turn the verbal tables. “Huh?”
“You think you wander a world filled with self-righteous morons, don’t you? Conceit. Vanity. Envy. Greed. You’ve seen it all, so now that’s all you see. But don’t you worry, Mr. Manning? I mean, ‘moron’ is simply a version of ‘sinner,’ isn’t it? A word we use to make ourselves feel superior. What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing?”
Condescending prick. This is generally what I think of people who say things that fly over my head.
“But I do wander a world filled with self-righteous morons.”
Exactly, the man’s smile replied.
Usually, I feel sorry for ultra-self-conscious people-people like Xen Baars. They just spend so much of their time pretending. They sit in coffee shops forcing the kinds of conversations they think people like them should have. They laugh from the top of their lungs. And in the seams of their patchwork timing, you can always glimpse panic, like drummers too sober to keep the beat. Living is work for these people. An endless tour of performances with no spectacular failures to redeem them.
But this guy had taken the pantomime to an entirely different level. Inventing worlds behind worlds to redeem the artificiality of his existence. What could be more spectacular than that?
Without explanation, Baars turned to press open a heavy oak door to our right. He ushered me from the sun-bright hall into a low, dim room that reeked of bedpans and astringent. I grinned as my eyes sorted shapes in the gloom: because I remember everything people say, I have a bad habit of cracking myself up while others are talking. Obnoxious, I know.
But what I saw slapped the grin off my face. A hospital bed, illuminated by a single reading light, set in a semicircle of gleaming devices and spectral readouts. And a woman, impossibly frail, swaddled by blankets, wired into so many tubes that it seemed she would hang suspended if the bed were kicked away. She was more than old, she was ancient, withered not only by time but by some deep, internal trauma. Her mouth hung half open, as if her lower jaw were slowly shrinking into her neck. Her eyes were little more than black perforations at the bottoms of her sockets.
Then the reek hit me. Indescribable, really, like death in diapers.
“Her name is Agatha,” Baars said from beside me. “She suffered a mid-cerebral arterial stroke some five weeks ago. Since she’s one of ours, we decided to let her die here, among us.”
I tried not to breathe, swallowed out of some reflex. Fawk. It seemed I could actually taste her dying.
“Hello… uh, Agatha.”
What was he up to?
“Something wrong, Mr. Manning?”
“No…” I lied, knowing (without knowing) that this was exactly what Baars hoped I would do. The scene reeked of unwelcome object lessons.
“Troubling, isn’t it? To turn a corner and find all your concerns breaking about some fact of tragedy.”
I shot him a hard look. “ Your concerns seem pretty intact.”
“Yes,” he said, glancing down to his shining toes then out to Agatha dying in her pale pool of light. “But then that’s the point.”
This was when the disgust hit me. Unlike you, I remember all the little ways in which I’ve been manipulated, verbally or otherwise. I simply gazed at him in my flat-faced way.
“I’m sure the Bonjours told you that we seemed… relatively… unconcerned with Jennifer’s fate.”
“On the contrary. They said you had been very co-operative. They hate you, of course. They think all of this… is, well… some kind of monstrous con, but… ”
I let my voice trail into the sound of Agatha drawing a mechanical breath. I felt vaguely nauseous.
“You need to understand us, Mr. Manning, really understand us, because if you don’t, you will suspect us. And if you suspect us, you will waste time and resources investigating us, time and resources that I fear Jennifer Bonjour desperately needs.”
I wasn’t buying any of it. Rule one of all private investigating is that everyone, but everyone, is full of shit. You know that niggling instinct you have to nip and tuck your reality when describing this or that aspect of your life? Add an inch to your dick here, shave a year off your Corolla there? That temptation pretty much rules the roost when you have something real to hide.
I grinned as best I could manage. Shrugged. “Blame the weirdo, huh? Is that what you think I’ll do?”
“Why not? People can’t help themselves, Mr. Manning.”
“Don’t I know it.”
A canny look and smile. “This is why I wanted to introduce you to Agatha… to help you understand how something so obviously tragic from your frame of reference could be cause for celebration from ours.”
This was where I got that sinking feeling… like finding a crack pipe in your nephew’s rucksack.
“Cause for celebration, huh.”
“I know how it sounds,” Baars said, gesturing for me to leave the room. “But I suspect you, Mr. Manning, know precisely what I’m talking about… ”
“And what would that be, Professor?”
“Not feeling what others think you should.”
Owich. I was beginning to appreciate the fucker’s power, I give you that. If he could give me the itch, cynical cocksucker that I am, then his followers need not be the morons I had assumed they would be. Albert had told me as much already, I suppose.
“Imagine,” Baars said, leading me down the hall. “Imagine a society that has evolved beyond things like meaning and purpose, where nothing matters because anything can be done. Imagine a society that treats the modalities of human experience, everything from the extremes of rape and murder to the tedious mainstays of snoozing and shitting, the same way a gourmand regards items on a restaurant menu…” He pressed open a glass door that led onto a small terrace with a single table. “As things to be consumed.”
“Consumed?”
I took the seat he offered-an iron-and-wicker thing. We were in another small courtyard, this one completely shaded save for an oblong of brilliance across the spikes and hostas. The air smelled of mint and earth cooling in the evening. Gleaming porcelain crowded the table: apparently we were about to have some tea-or as I like to call it, coffee with the balls cut off.
“Did you ever read Dick and Jane in public school?” Baars asked as he poured out two dainty cups of tea.
“Nah. For me it was Mr. Mugs.”
Another enigmatic smile. “Do you ever go back to reread Mr. Mugs?”
“Of course not,” I replied.
“Why?”
More games. “Because it’s stupid. Only retards and little kids can appreciate it.”
“Exactly!” Baars exclaimed.
The guy was baiting me. Usually this makes me ornery, toxic even, but like I said earlier, these people had organized their lives around an invisible world. At the moment, Baars was my only flashlight.
“I’m not following you… ”
He smiled. “Some forms of understanding require ignorance.”
“I’m still not following you.”
“Our lives, Mr. Manning. Our lives are like Mr. Mugs or Dick and Jane. They can only be appreciated from the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing… ”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
“That this, all of this, is… not quite real.”
“You mean like the Matrix?”
I must have used my here-we-go tone, because Baars roared with laughter. “No, not a simulation. Not quite. More like theatre, where the world is a prop, and the actors forget their identities to better inhabit their roles. We all have roles to play, Mr. Manning. Even you.”
I grinned in a heroic effort to twist hilarity into oh-ya admiration. “Like method acting taken to the absolute… ”
“Trust me, Mr. Manning, I know full well how mad I sound.”
This seemed as good a moment as any to sip my tea. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing and appreciating it.”
He grinned in eye-twinkling admission. “But really, if you think about it, I’m not actually saying anything new: only that there’s a world beyond what our eyes can see, a world more fundamental. So you tell me, honestly, what’s the difference between what I’m saying and what Christians or Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists say? If I sound mad, it’s simply because the beyond I describe has no tradition, no mass consensus, and therefore no social sanction.”
Fucking philosophy professors. There oughta be a law…
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Indeed. The ‘Occluded Frame’ is simply the name we give our more fundamental world.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re just another religious nut.”
Even as I said this, I knew it couldn’t be the case. He was saying that life-the very existence you and I are enduring this very moment-was wall to wall, top to bottom, a kind of ride at Disney World, only one where we had our memories wiped so that we wouldn’t know it was a ride.
Not all that religious when you think about it.
“Yes!” Baars cackled. I was really starting to hate the man’s laughter: it made me feel like a developmentally challenged kid hamming it up in life skills class. “Exactly!”
“So then what makes you special?”
That knocked some seriousness into him. “Because I’ve been there, Mr. Manning. I’ve crossed the Lacuna. I have literally walked the Frame.”
Is that where he got his slogans? Johnny Cash tunes?
“Like I said, what makes you special?”
A long, appraising stare. No matter how much noise a man makes about being open-minded, a part of him will always out-and-out despise contradiction. “Nothing,” he admitted with a shrug. “I could be insane, like you think. I admit that possibility. I’ve even visited neurologists to investigate the possibility.” He tapped his temple, grinning. “No tumours, I assure you. So when it comes to your judgment and my experience, Mr. Manning, I will err on the side of my experience every time. Wouldn’t you?”
“Fawk, no. Are you kidding me? I know that I’m an idiot.”
Baars smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that says, Liar, not as an accusation but as a bemused observation. A classic not-so-different- than-me smile.
“Like a good skeptic, huh?”
I shook my head with mock seriousness. “Not at all. A skeptic suspends judgment. A cynic just doesn’t care.”
“A perilously fine distinction, wouldn’t you say?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever.”
Once again, Xenophon Baars roared with laughter, a minute-long ho-ho-he-fucking-he-he that forced him to take off his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes. Say what you will about the guy, he definitely dug my brand of humour. “The story is absurd, I admit, Mr. Manning. Claiming that the world is five billion years older than it appears, that our lives are a kind of spectator sport for an inhuman generation. Madness! It has to be. But if you think, if you really honestly consider, you’ll see that we’re not saying anything surprising at all. Only that we’re the ignorant children of ourselves, Mr. Manning.”
I couldn’t resist. “Cool name for a band.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ignorant Children of Ourselves.”
I could even see the album cover: I-C-O in giant golden letters across the top. Three angels smoking a joint below. A bag of weed leaning against a sandalled toe. Because of the link between memory and sleep, my memory shrink sent me to this sleep researcher, Philip Ryle, who wanted to see whether there were any significant differences in the way you and I dream. Apparently not. But the guy was definitely one of the more interesting eggheads ever to stick pasties to my head.
You see, the thing about dreams is that they pretty much prove that the outside world is all in our heads. We have a “world generator” in our brain, which, when we’re both awake and sane, is anchored to the world-world through our senses. But when you fall asleep, your brain draws anchor, and your world generator drifts through time, place, and possibility. You dream the crazy-ass shit you’re afraid to tell your wife in the morning.
Ryle was always going on about how this meant dreams and waking life were of a piece-two versions of the same thing. He was a big fan of something called lucid dreaming-you know, where you wake up in your dream, realize that your dream is a dream, then take control. One of his grad students told me Ryle had this Playboy Mansion dream that he was able to replay at will. The kid could have been joking, but I was inclined to believe him. I’ve never met anyone who loved his sleep quite as much as Ryle.
But Ryle was also a believer in what he called lucid living. In the same way you could develop “metacognitive awareness” of your dreams and take control of them, you could also develop metacognitive awareness of your waking life-and so take control of it. This, he liked to say, was pretty much what meditation and “enlightenment” were all about. Unlike dreams, you couldn’t control what happens, but you could control how things happen, and, more importantly, whom they happen to.
He liked to claim that he could dissolve his “self” at will, and simply become the “raw space of existence.” Sometimes he would say crazy things like, “Yeah, sorry, Diss, I’m not here right now.”
I always wondered what it was like for all those dream Bunnies screwing a “raw space of existence.” I suspected it felt an awful lot like banging a dirty old man.
What Baars was saying was that the world generators in our heads had been hijacked to make it appear as though we were living in the early twenty-first century, when in fact we were living in some absurdly distant future. And in a curious sense, he was advocating a kind of lucid living not so different from the one recommended by crazy old Philip Ryle. Like the song said, we needed to party like it was 1999-give or take five billion years.
Either way, I could give a flying fuck. Here and now, baby. Dream or not, this is where the bad stuff happens. This is where beautiful young women like Jennifer Bonjour vanish, and this is where they are found.
Besides, I got the feeling my paycheque would bounce in the Frame.
I drained the last of my tea. “I gotta ask… You don’t think that Jennifer, you know, has… crossed over, or something… do you?”
“That depends,” Baars replied, his eyes troubled beneath the glare of his glasses.
“Depends?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about my favourite brand of diapers.
“On whether she’s dead, Mr. Manning.” Thanks to Baars’s little explanation, I now knew the Framers were every bit as crazy as they seemed. But thanks to Albert and his phone call, I knew this meant jack shit, simply because everybody believed in some kind of madness. Except me, of course.
Convinced I had a handle on the kooky dogma, I walked the Professor through the wonky events the night Jennifer vanished. He claimed he knew something was wrong the instant Stevie told him that Anson had called to check on Jennifer.
“I never approved of their forays,” he said. “The dancing I understood. She was… young. Very young. But they insisted on walking for some reason. I always told them it wasn’t safe… “
I could hear it in his voice, the let’s-move-on hesitancy. Even though Baars wielded absolute authority, he was still accountable to his past. He couldn’t make it up as he went along-at least not the way I did. Power turns on legitimacy, and legitimacy-to the chagrin of more than a few tyrants-turns on consistency.
What could he say, really? It was all a simulation, wasn’t it? Dead factories. Abductions. Rapes. How could the almighty Xenophon Baars tell anyone to be afraid of “worldly” things?
Perhaps this was the motive for her recklessness. Perhaps she had resented Baars’s domination even as she surrendered to it. Perhaps making him worry was one among a dozen ways to get even…
Perhaps Baars had had enough.
When I asked him whether she was sexually involved with anybody in the Compound, he said, “Yes,” without missing a beat. “Jennifer and I were lovers.”
A clipped response, and the one I expected. Perhaps Jennifer’s dancing- and not the walking-had been his real concern all along. A cult leader is one thing. But a jealous cult leader? The first thing this business teaches you is that there’s nothing more murderous than ambitious genes.
“Another undergrad infatuation, huh?”
“On the contrary,” he said. For the first time he looked almost offended, which was amazing considering the number of zingers I’d laid on him so far. “I’m quite convinced that… that this level of me, at least, is in love with her… Yes. Quite in love.”
Fawk… This level of me?
Mad as a fucking hatter. What would it be like to be at once in love and to look at that love as a kind of gift shop curiosity-like a snow bubble from Montreal or something?
I have to admit, I was getting excited, not in the woody way, though given who I am and what I suffer, it would have been more than understandable. This was utterly-almost over-the-top-new. Totally unlike any case I had ever worked. So even though I was shocked, even bewildered, by what Baars had said, I sat there smiling my fucking- bootiful smile. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried!
“Tell me, Dr. Baars. Does anyone get… you know, impatient?”
“I don’t follow.”
“You know. Like the Jains in India. Or the Cathars in medieval France. When you make death a virtue, when you make this world some kind of perversion, moral or whatever, you have an incentive to die, don’t you? Take you guys. For the Framers, death is a kind of waking, a supreme form of enlightenment, isn’t it?”
A hard look. “Are you suggesting she committed suicide?”
I wagged my head in a big naw. “Look. I’m big on circumstances, on the ways they warp the stakes of things. I don’t think about bad apples so much as bruising bushels. The fact is, Dr. Baars, at a basic level there’s precious little that distinguishes your lot from the rest of the planet. You guys are at least as fucked up as the rest of us-at least. Add to that the fact that death doesn’t carry the same cold water for you as it does for someone like, say”-I shot him a big cheesy grin-”me.”
A long sour look, followed by a quick glance at his gold watch. I think I’m kind of like Lenny Bruce that way: my routine tends to wear down even the most expansive sense of humour.
“Sorry, Mr. Manning,” he said, recovering something of his original charm. “I have another seminar coming up in a few minutes.” A glum, c’est dommage smile. “I’m certain we’ll find time to speak again…” He stood in that way that suggested I should stand and follow him-crazy, when you think about it, the haze of monkey-see imperatives that surrounds even our simplest actions. “But in the meantime, when you find yourself thinking that it’s always the crazy lover behind these sorts of things, please keep in mind that Ruddick is a… complicated town.” What do you make of a conversation like that? I mean, fucking really.
The guy simply had to be crazy. And the creepy thing was that he seemed to know it. I’ve known quite a few genuinely crazy motherfuckers in my day-I’ve even been told what it feels like to have wings crack and snap out of the bones of your arms. And almost without exception, crazy motherfuckers are convinced they are as sane as sane can be, as well adjusted as the First Lady. But Baars. He seemed to know he was crazy- worse, he seemed to revel in it, as if it were another stage on his quest to blow the great spirit load.
The more I thought about him, the scarier he became.
And if that wasn’t enough, he seemed happy. Happy people make me sick, especially when their lovers have gone missing.
He escorted me back to my car, careful to fill the silence with more observations on their recent renovations. Oak banisters and all that bourgeois bullshit. Everything was local artisan this and local artisan that-leading me to remark that Ruddick must have quite a cool flea market scene.
Even though he said nothing, his smile was pure fuck-you.
Once in my car, I cranked back my seat and sparked another joint-a pinner this time. Though I remember the transcript perfectly, I find that the circumstantial details don’t… decompose, you might say, at the same rate if I run through a conversation immediately after having it.
I gazed out the windshield, saw poor Agatha crumpled in her hospital bed.
“Something wrong, Mr. Manning.?”
“No…”
The Agatha stuff, I decided, was far more than the object lesson Baars made it out to be. He wanted me to understand him and his beliefs, sure, how they might lead outsiders to mistake their complacency for guilt. Baars knew that he would have to fess up to a sexual relationship with Jennifer, knew that this would automatically make him the primary suspect-especially once you factored in his bizarre, detached attitude. Agatha was his way of throwing a towel over the alarm bell just before the fire drill.
But it was also an example of how Baars went about recruiting: confront emotionally vulnerable people with troubling things, disturbing things; get them telling small lies to conceal their discomfort-like I had-then use this as a way to pry them open to his ideological freak show. This guy didn’t simply believe the world was five billion years older than it was, he had managed to convince a group of otherwise intelligent people of the same thing. Something to remember…
He was, like, an evil mastermind or something.
I leaned back, puffing my joint, savoured the oily burn across my tongue. I closed my eyes to better allow my subconscious to present its case. You notice so many things without noticing-you have no idea. I saw steaming tea and sun-sharp porcelain across the backs of my eyelids.
“Do you ever go back to reread Mr. Mugs?” Baars asked.
“Ofcourse not:,” I replied.
“Why?”
“Because it’s stupid. Because only retards and little kids can appreciate it. “
“Exactly!” Baars cried.
This was his primary tactic, I decided: leading you by the nose to answers only he understood. I wondered whether this was a charismatic cult leader thing or whether it was peculiar to Baars.
“I’m not following you, Mr. Baars…”
He smiled-of course, given that this confession was what he had been fishing for all along. “Some forms ofappreciation require ignorance.”
“I’m still not following you.. “
“Our lives, Mr. Manning. Our lives are like Mr. Mugs or Dick and Jane. They can only be appreciated fom the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing… “
“So what are you saying?”
“That this, all of this, is… not quite real. “
Fawk.
I pinched the joint between thumb and index finger, sucked smoke through kissy lips. At the same time, I sat on a wrought iron chair in the Compound courtyard, fixing Baars with a bemused stare.
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
There was something wary about his nod, I decided. Up to this point I had come across as merely clever, a good practice partner for the verbal sparring he so obviously loved…
Anything but a threat.
“Indeed,,” he replied. “The ‘Occluded Frame’ is simply the name we give to our more fundamental world. “
There it was. The shift in intonations. The narrowing of his gaze.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re just another religious nut. “
“Yes! “ Baars cackled. But the laughter was forced. I was certain of it. “Exactly!”
“So then what makes you special?”
“Because I’ve been there, Mr. Manning. I’ve crossed the Lacuna. I have literally walked the Frame. “
“Like I said… “
So I worried him. It could mean he was involved in Jennifer’s disappearance, but it could also mean that I had tweaked him with my snide remarks-I have this way of snapping people’s elastics. In the Compound, he was both king and pope, and here I come waltzing in, challenging, questioning, dismissing…
And most importantly, reminding. That the borders of his fiefdom were small-small-small. That he was just another me-me-me dope like the rest of us.
I leaned back in my seat, blinked while soaking in the stone. At the same time I strolled with Baars down a hardwood hall, Agatha and her humming apparatus behind me.
“Imagine,” Baars was saying. “Imagine a society that has evolved beyond things like meaning and purpose, where nothing matters because anything can be done. Imagine a society that treats the modalities ofhuman experience, everything from the exremes of rape and murder to the tedious mainstays of snoozing and shitting, the same way a gourmand regards items on a restaurant menu… As things to be consumed. “
Of all his monologues, only this one really tingled… but for reasons that had precious little to do with the case. I replayed it in my imagination again and again, mooned over it like a kid with a nudie picture.
A number of questions to ask during the follow-up interview occurred to me. I was especially interested in the details of this Crossing the Lacuna thing. Just what did they use to induce their hallucinations? Did it involve drugs of some kind? Baars had some kind of Timothy Leary thing going-like, totally.
A cloud passed over the sun, and in the momentary gloom I suddenly glimpsed the room-an office of some kind-beyond the plate glass window opposite my car. I saw Stevie sitting behind a grand and paperless desk, leaning back in ergonomic repose, watching me with the intensity of a starving owl.
The evil henchman.
Matching his gaze, I sucked my roach to the nub then flicked it out the window. I started the Golf, then, grinning, shot the guy a quick finger.
Prick. Track Six