R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

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

She stepped into the restaurant and I saw the whole porno.

Her name was Molly, Molly Modano, and she did not belong. California girl-immediately and obviously, even in an age when geographical identity claims have been pretty much scrambled into white noise. I would have bet my Volkswagen on it.