R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

Once in my office, Jonathan Bonjour shook my hand with the inky ease of people who habitually press the flesh. His face was tanned and handsome above his jowls, and his blue eyes possessed a canniness that I immediately recognized. I’ve yet to meet a lawyer who wasn’t a cynic of some description. You spend your life pretending to believe assholes and you’re bound to start seeing shit everywhere you look. Just another hazard of the trade.

I could tell that he recognized something in my eyes as well. Weird, all these little moments that pass between people. For most everybody, they slip into oblivion, but me, I catch them like flies.

Amanda Bonjour was an entirely different story. To her, I was something out of a bad movie, yet another symptom that her life had gone from badness to madness. When I reached out to shake her hand, she almost flinched, as though instinctively loath to confirm what the greater part of her refused to believe. Everyone knows that touching something makes it real.

To spare her any embarrassment, I turned my outstretched hand into a Please-take-a-seat gesture. What can I say? She was a customer, and I was wearing a name tag.

She kind of plumped into the seat next to her husband’s then immediately started crying. I hate to admit it, but that was the precise moment I decided to charge them my highest rate. Ugly, I know, but the doctor said this whole storytelling thing would be, and I quote, “little more than a self-aggrandizing exercise in futility” unless I’m brutally honest.

After fumbling through the introductions, Jonathan Bonjour got to the point.

“It’s our daughter, Mr. Manning. She’s missing.”

Even though I expected he would say as much, I found myself slightly winded. I really don’t know why, given that I had heard the words “She’s missing” more times than somebody like you would care to remember. It’s like the planes hitting the World Trade Center: you see it over and over and over, until it carries about as much punch as a movie trailer, and then one night you see it and wham! it steals your breath, and you sweat horror, as though part of your soul had been on that plane, and had only now remembered.

She’s missing…

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Jennifer,” Mrs. Bonjour said, a wisp of reverence in her tone. She snuffled.

“Jenni,” her husband added. “That’s, ah… what, ah… what everyone calls her.”

I’m not what you would call the sympathetic sort-I remember too much of my own pain to concern myself with hurts that others will eventually forget-but something cracked through Mr. Bonjour’s modulated voice, something primal, and something within me answered in an empathetic rush. For an instant I could literally feel the teetering possibilities. I could see the empty bedroom down the hall, the door neither opened nor closed, the bar of accusing light gleaming across the hardwood floor. I could hear the silence emanating from the girlish running shoes abandoned next to the door jamb…

The Bonjour house, I knew, was becoming a museum to “last times.”

“Do you have a picture?” I asked, my voice rough enough to be embarrassing.

Amanda Bonjour immediately leaned forward, a four-by-six glossy in her hand. She stared at me intently as I lifted it.

And I could feel it, the magic of names humming up out of the photo. She would have been just another generic, beautiful face otherwise, something to focus the momentary lust of consumers. Long blond hair, straight enough to summon memories of Marcia Brady. Full lips. Straight teeth. Happiness almost shining in her sparkling blue eyes.

I knew instantly that she hadn’t run away-she was too attractive. Runaways are almost always plain or downright ugly, as intent to escape the damnation of photos like these as to flee the judgment of peers, parents, what have you. Beautiful people generally lack the motive required to stage their own disappearance. On the contrary, beautiful people tend to be about appearances.

I should know.

“She’s not a runaway,” I said, looking up to meet the Bonjours’ gaze. “What is she? Nineteen? Twenty in this photo?”

“Nineteen,” Mrs. Bonjour said in a small voice.

“And that would make her?”

“Twenty-one.” Her breath was tight, deep-sea-diver deliberate. “She’s twenty-one now.”

I set the photo against the base of my desk lamp so that I could reference her face and her parents with a single glance. I graced them with a sage nod, then leaned back in my chair with an open-handed gesture. “So… what happened?”

The story they told me sounded like something cribbed from the Biography Channel. Flattering and negativity-free. You see, people always make cases. Always. Rather than simply describe things, they pitch them this way and that. So when the Bonjours said that Jennifer was a curious girl, an overachiever, and so on, they were literally offering evidence of the adequacy of their parenting skills, while at the same time saying, “She wasn’t the kind of girl who…” They wanted me to know that whatever it was that had happened to their precious daughter had precious little to do with them. And when they mentioned her “weakness for musicians,” they were saying that, as perfectly as she had been raised, she exhibited a dispositional vulnerability to untoward influences-so to speak.

If I was surprised when they mentioned the cult, it was because I had expected drugs to be the culprit-simply because they almost always are when beautiful kids take roads not marked in their parents’ road atlas. According to Mrs. Bonjour, she had found Them online as a high school student, first becoming, without the knowledge of Mom and Dad, a “long-distance associate,” then graduating to become a “text messenger” in her first year of college. At some point she began attending weekend retreats, which cut ever more deeply into her visits home, until she dropped out of her nursing program altogether and moved into the Compound-a place just outside a Rust Belt town called Ruddick in southeastern Pennsylvania.

“What do they call themselves?” I asked. So far the Bonjours had only referred to the cult as either “They” or “Them,” spoken in tones of stone-age superstition.

Both faces became pensive and sour. I half expected one of them to whisper “Voldemort” or “Sauron” or something.

“They call themselves the Framers,” Amanda said.

“Never heard of them. What do they believe?”

She pulled a face. “That the world, this world, isn’t really… real.”

“Isn’t that religion in general?” I cracked before I could stop myself.

“You explain it,” she said crossly to her husband. “Jon has a philosophy degree,” she explained, saying “philosophy degree” the way others say “drinking problem.”

“They’re one of those New Age, human potential things,” Jonathan said. “What’s called a charismatic cult.”

As I subsequently learned on the Web, this meant they had organized themselves around the revelations of a single, power-monopolizing individual-apparently a very bad sign as far as cults go.

“The leader’s name,” he continued, “is Xenophon Baars. He’s a former philosophy professor out of Berkeley, believe it or not…”

“You make it sound as if he should know better.”

“He should know better.”

“Maybe he does… “

“Of course he does!” Mrs. Bonjour cried. “The whole thing is a murderous con!”

Whether it was the savagery of her interruption or the implications of that word “murderous,” the outburst left an embarrassing chill in its wake.

“What my wife means,” Mr. Bonjour said stiffly, “is that the cult’s beliefs are too… extreme for anyone with Baars’s education to seriously entertain. We think he’s simply duping these people for money and, ah… sex.”