R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“But, you know, people…” he added uncomfortably.

“No one much likes them.”

“This is God-fearing country, Disciple.”

He spoke my name as though warming to it, as though realizing it would spike the tedium of his coffee-shop stories.

“And the Framers?” I prompted.

A curious shrug. A guilty shrug. “Well, you know. I don’t want to, you know, stereotype… “

Of course not. That would contradict the police code of honour.

Fawk.

“Not decent folk, huh?”

Nolen grimaced. “Well… Not to sound, ah, er… bigoted or anything, but they are a cult. They have a way of making you forget as much when you’re up there and all… but still…”

I couldn’t resist a winning grin. “They gotta be crazy somehow.”

Another thoughtful pause. “You tell me.” I never did. Nor would I ever. What Albert had told me less than an hour previously about irrational belief had simply confirmed something I had suspected all along. “Crazy” is simply a numbers game. If there were only twenty-seven Roman Catholics in the world, they would be the crazy-ass cult, and people would be wagging their heads about how their symbol is simply an ancient electric chair, or how they pretend to be cannibal vampires once a week, washing down their Maker’s flesh with a gulp of his blood.

Nolen escorted me to the front door, pausing at an office to introduce me to his deputy chief, a dour old law enforcement lifer named Jeff Hamilton. He had the kind of face you see on banknotes from some obscure European country. Shrewd eyes. Buzzed grey hair. Flapjack jowls. He stood, nodded, smiled, and shook my hand with a banker’s choreographed cheer. But something in his look, a kind of Slavic intensity, told me that he disapproved-of me, of Nolen, of his subordinates-that pretty much everything except his wife’s lasagna fell short of his expectations. His office even reeked of cheese.

I would have bet my expenses that he had some kind of contemptuous nickname for Nolen.

I sparked a joint while still parked in the station lot, sat back, and began to review this latest conversation. One statement in particular kept floating back to the harried centre of my attention: “Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…” Something about the way Nolen had said “anyone”-a kind of grimace in an otherwise avid, even eager expression…

Was it fear? Had the Framers got to him somehow?

Truth was, earnest people had been freaking me out since at least the second grade, when I announced to the entire class that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, that it was all another social control mechanism. Little Phil Barnes told me-with a conviction that would have made a suicide bomber blush-that not believing in Santa was naughty, and that everyone knew what that meant.

He had this list, you see.

I was out-and-out bawling by the time I got home, convinced I had been blacklisted by the fucking fatman. I’ve suffered an irrational fear of Santa ever since. And a deep distrust of honesty.

Decent folk like Phil.

As a cynic, the problem you face with earnest people is pretty much the same problem the British faced with Gandhi. All of our schemes are corrupt in some manner; gaming the system is inked in our DN-fucking-A. And a certain ability to ignore the disconnect between our rhetoric and our actions is all it takes to keep the show running, an instinctive tolerance of ambient hypocrisy. One honest idiot is all it takes to bring it all crashing down-which is why so many honest idiots end up at the bottom of the river, metaphorically or otherwise. Finding strength in your convictions may be good when it comes to independence from colonial rule, but when it comes to the weave of interpersonal schemes that holds offices and families together, it’s nothing short of disastrous.

In a world of funhouse mirrors, it’s the straight reflection that deforms.

“Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community…”

Nolen was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones.

I peered across the world beyond my windshield, the world of Ruddick, PA, my thoughts crusting about the rim of innumerable memories. The sun was still high, so that the people I could see had only shadows beneath their brows-no eyes that could be seen. Something about them and the surrounding collection of little buildings, scrubby trees, and cracked sidewalks made me smile.

Fucking small towns, man. You gotta love them. Big enough to pretend. Too small to be.

I cranked the key, listened to my poor old Vee-Dub rattle to diesel life. As I pulled onto Kane Street, one last fragment of my conversation came floating back to awareness.

“No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”

“A gas mask, huh.”

Gas mask, indeed. It was time to meet the Framers. Track Five

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.