R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

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.