R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“Oh. Oh my. Yes, I saw that on the news… Horrible.”

And then I did what I always did: I struck up conversations.

My version of a spring thaw. “What are you doing?” Molly finally cried in a shrill Enough-is-fucking- enough voice.

She had seemed placid enough sitting there in the passenger seat, watching me empty the cash from the envelope and load up my otherwise lean wallet.

“Read between the lines,” I said, enumerating my take: 174 bucks. Not bad for a morning’s work. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you?”

“What?What? That doesn’t even make fucking sense!”

“Not to you, obviously.”

She made this face.

Because I have this problem when it comes to forgetting, I carve the world along different joints. I literally see things you would call ephemera as objects unto themselves, so to speak. So passing expressions that you simply notice then forget have an existence all of their own for me-to the point where it sometimes seems like it’s the person who’s ephemeral.

In Molly’s case it was Classic Feminine Disgust: a subtle yet heady blend of exasperation, frustration, and a kind of why-me outrage, as if the problem wasn’t so much men as the fact that they couldn’t stop loving them-us. As it so happened, Classic Feminine Disgust was an old friend of mine, so much so I caught myself saying, “How you doing?”

But she was gone, replaced with Atypical Bewildered Fury-another old friend. She almost rolled her eyes back into her head, made a mouth that said Hide the knives, honey.

“How am I doing?” she cried. “How am I doing? I’m stranded with a psychopath who’s conned me into being an accessory to fraud. How the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

Redheads. Sheesh.

“Fraud? This is how I work all my missing persons.”

“I suppose you call this ‘fact-finding.’ Is that it?” The sarcasm she poured into her air quotes stung for some reason. I’m never surprised when I’m misunderstood-Christ, I’m rarely surprised period. But the resentment never seems to go away.

“Fact-finding. Sure. Good a name as any.”

“So where’s your tape recorder? Huh? Where are your notes?”

I shot her a nose-crinkling look, pointed to my bean.

“Please,” she said. She had the air of someone realizing they’ve been conned after signing the papers.

“Seriously. I remember things.”

“Oh yah,” she said in that Whatever-you-lying-son-of-a-bitch voice.

I shook my head, reached back to pull a joint from my rucksack. With so many old friends dropping by, I figured we should turn it into a party. I sparked the thing while she watched in horror, took a deep and most gratifying haul.

“You don’t believe me,” I said in that voice tokers use to keep their cough pinned to the mat. I offered her the joint, but her look was a lethal Get-that-shit-out-of-my-face. Up. Tight. Oh well, more for me. I really needed to be stoned at that instant. I mean really really…

“No, Disciple. I do not believe you.”

And so, my brain soaking in sweet-leaf lubricant, I showed her. It’s remarkable when you think about it. I mean, if people can recognize a thing like a conversation, it means it has to be a// in there somewhere, doesn’t it? Which begs the question: where does it all go, our intelligence? I gave her names and addresses, then a verbatim recital of what was said. I even mimicked the way old Mrs. Toews raised a self-conscious finger to cover her old-maid-stache, or how Big John Recchi always wagged his head no as he was agreeing with you.

I’m not sure dumbfounded is a heavy enough word to describe the expression on her face.

I grinned my best Ubermensch grin, tapped my temple with a witty-witty finger. “Wait till you see my dick,” I told her. I wasn’t kidding.

But she laughed anyway-laughed hard.. She kind of sounded like a horse, but it was intoxicating all the same. I decided that I liked Molly Modano.

She had good taste in men.

Molly had a million questions. They always do. She had this way of rolling her head as she talked, kind of like an animated holding pattern, neither a nod nor a shake, but endless prepping in the in-between. Her eyes flashed green and blue.

There were several You-mean-absolutely-everything?s. A couple of God- my-brain-is-such-a-sieves. And of course the inevitable Too-cools.

To which I eventually replied, “Not really.”

Then suddenly she said, “Ohmigod. You’ve heard all this shit before, haven’t you? Like a million times-only you don’t forget, do you? It must sound so… so stale…”

And there it was, another old friend staring out from her face, just as female as all the others: Pure Feminine Compassion.

“No wonder,” she said, turning to gaze out the passenger window. “No fucking wonder.”

I simply stared at the street, signalled and turned, signalled and turned.

Some friends demand silence. I always expect most of the doors to be dead when I do this on a weekday. But the fact is, a tremendous number of people actually stay at home all day long. How they make their living is a mystery to me- one of the government’s infinite entitlements, I suppose. Disability. Unemployment. Social Security. Alimony. Cyber-crime. You would expect them to be rude, treat door-to-door cold-callers with the contempt they deserve, but a substantial proportion of them actually seem to be pleased. It gets pretty lonely scratching your balls on the couch all day, I guess.

They all squint: this is universal. Almost all of them clear their throats-the sludge of not talking. Most are wearing something comfy and informal, though you would be surprised how many people get dolled up to do nothing. Lots of stubble on lots of chins. A couple of hairy female armpits. The odd whiff of reefer. The glimpse of Nintendo on pause in the living room. Some are pleasant. Some are gruff. Some are indifferent, while others are actively hostile. One guy actually had his rifle hugged to his chest, which was alarming in its own right. When combined with his Are-you-an-earthling? peer, it was nothing short of terrifying.

The next time you drive through your neighbourhood, take a look around, remind yourself of all the fucking lunatics living in your midst. Seriously. Unlike that cocksucker Baars, I have no clue whatsoever what we humans are up to as a species. I only know what we aren’t.

Like healthy, for instance.

Molly was particularly surprised by how many people had heard nothing whatsoever about Jennifer Bonjour. I had expected it. I’d learned from earlier expeditions-different people missing in different ways- that a good proportion of the population pay no attention whatsoever to what happens locally. If they crawl out of their video-game-soap-opera- horror-movie world at all, they typically sit vegging to Fox or CNN, soaking up abstract enormities to the exclusion of the struggles next door.

Same as me, actually.

She seemed scandalized, whereas I was torn-well, not torn (I would have to give a shit for that), but “of two minds,” let’s say. Speaking to them was a waste of time, of course, but they did tend to make larger than average “contributions,” and I had expenses to cover, like the ten skins I had lost in Atlantic City a couple of weeks previously, not to mention my long-standing massage parlour addiction. Fucking vampires.

Tragic news is kind of like Twinkies that way: better fresh.

I imagine someone like Molly would say that you “meet all types” or some such after doing this for a while. Not me. The thing that always strikes me is just how alike people are-variations on a theme, no different than their yards and their houses. I know there seems to be an enormous difference between a morbidly obese housewife, her jowls caked with cover-up, and a string-bean teenager with a fading hard-on, but only if you can conveniently forget all the transitional species in between-which I cannot. I tend to see people with the eye I imagine a dog breeder must take to canines: sharp enough to discriminate the fine- grain differences, broad enough to see them as expressions of the same basic set of genes.