R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

The last place Jennifer was seen alive.

And the perfect place to get drunk, I decided. Normally, when you get drunk alone, you want your surroundings to be noisy enough that you can at least pretend to be “partying.” Put enough losers in a pile and soon you have a heap of winners-such is the human contradiction. But the pathetic ambience of the place resonated with my hard-done-by mood. Legends had become Exhibit A, if not in the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour then in how the world was out to get me.

I ambled toward a stool at the bar. I’m something of a talker, if you haven’t noticed, and I had an overriding need to pepper someone (I didn’t really care who, though a sense of humour would help) with various cynical observations, mostly about how everyone is so full of shit. You know, play the Philosopher Dick.

Of course, the whole time I would tell myself that I was working the bartender or whoever it was for information. But really, deep down, I was just trying to look smart-distinguish myself from the run-of-the- mill losers who get drunk alone on weeknights.

Then I heard: “Disciple! Hey! How’s it hanging, man?”

It was Tim Dutchysen, or, as he liked to be called, Dutchie. I had walked by his table without even noticing him.

“Same as always,” I said. “Nine parts bullshit, one part air freshener.”

Maybe I would accomplish something after all.

I joined him at his table, where he’d been sitting alone. He claimed to be waiting for some friends-just finished his shift at the Kwik-Pik, he said-but I didn’t believe him. Unlike me, he hadn’t come here to get drunk alone, he had come hoping to bump into somebody, anybody to fill the verbal void of another night alone. He would keep an eye out for chicks, of course, but I could tell he had encountered too much rejection to take search-and-inseminate missions all that seriously anymore. Besides, my guess was he had learned to make do with internet porn. The chicks were hotter.

He asked me about the fundraising and the state of the investigation. I quizzed him about the Framers, using a What-the-fuck-is-up-with-that tone to cover the systematic nature of my questions. He did little more than parrot several of their more outrageous claims-refracted through the lens of rumour-in the funny singsong voice people use to report the other, offending half of an argument: you know, the “and then she said, ‘mew-mew-mew-mew-mew’” bullshit, where people use mocking tones to make others look stupid.

“We laugh at them, sure,” he said. “Hard not to. The Reverend says they’re a sign.”

“Sign? Like for handicap parking?”

He had a strange laugh, like his sense of humour had never developed past the age of five. In a bizarre way it actually made me feel, well… protective.

“No-no! A sign, you know, for the end of days-Armageddon.”

I found this boggling. A religion using an end-of-the-world cult as proof the world was about to end? The World Court really needed to start prosecuting crimes against irony.

“Has anyone from your church tried to convert them?”

I had a hard time keeping a straight face asking that one. Baars may have been crazy as a shithouse rat, but I could see him giving Tim’s reverend the intellectual equivalent of a body-cavity search. Then saying something like, “So sorry, my friend, but there’s nothing up your ass but more ass.”

Tim shrugged. “Not us. No use talking to crazies. But they used to recruit all the time, handing out flyers and whatnot. Apparently there were quite a few arguments…” He trailed off to take a long drink. He had that look people get when talking about something they’re not sure they should be talking about, not because they’ve been told to keep it quiet, but because they’ve suddenly realized they’ve never heard anyone else discussing the matter. Nothing quite so spontaneous as small-town conspiracies. “Then the Reverend went out to visit that Baars guy and they agreed to, you know, split the difference. They agreed to leave us alone, Ruddick alone, and we agreed not to burn their Compound to the fucking ground… ”

I took a moment to absorb what he had said. He was still young enough to marble his talk with kick-ass bravado, so I chalked the burning comment up to that. The idea of a gang war between a cult and a church was just too rich.

“I was still in high school back then,” Tim nervously added. “So this is all, you know, hear-talk… or whatever it’s called.”

“Hearsay,” I said. I drank three beers, all the while pining for whisky. I really didn’t think that hard about what was said, knowing that I could sift through it all afterward anyway. Wasn’t in the mood.

Besides, the kid was starting to reek of dead ends. I meet a lot of mouthpieces in my line of work, people who desperately want to contribute and yet have nothing whatsoever to add. It pays to be able to identify them early, otherwise they suck the time right out of you.

“You should come out to the barbecue day after tomorrow,” he said. “Really.”

“Church, huh?”

He grinned, as if unconsciously sensing my rekindled interest. “Yeah. Our annual pig roast.”

I crinkled my nose.

“Not a church guy, huh?”

This is always a touchy question, no matter who happens to be asking it. It could be a little old lady with a baby’s daft smile and you could find yourself wiping spit off your face in seconds flat. One wrong word is all it takes. So all I said was, “Nope.”

“C’mon. You gotta believe in something.” The implication being, of course, that everybody believed in something, which meant that most everybody believed wrong, given that everybody believed so many contradictory things. But I wasn’t about to say as much. I said something worse instead…

“Too easy to be fooled.”

“How do you mean?”

I shrugged, took a long draw on my Bud. “A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store,” I said. “What is he?”

Tim jerked his head back like a turkey. “What?”

“Play along with me for a sec. A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store. What is he?”

A big, gum-revealing grin. Tim was one of those kids who was so gratified to be included in whatever that he was pretty much game for whatever.

“A robber,” he said. “What else?”

“Yeah, but he’s got a badge.”

Tim laughed as if he had suddenly seized the entire point. “Okay. So he’s a cop.”

“There’s a Brinks truck parked out front.”

Now he frowned. “So he’s a security guard?”

“Yeah, but there’s two men in their underwear bound and gagged in the back of the Brinks truck.”

He rolled his eyes in what I had already pegged as a characteristic Tim expression. “He is a robber, then! Like I said.”

I raised my shoulders, shot him a look of heavy-lidded skepticism. “Yeah, but there’s a camera crew next to the canned goods, filming him.”

Now the kid was thoroughly perplexed. “So he’s an actor?”

“But what about the News 7 van parked behind the Brinks truck?”

“Then I was right in the first place! He’s a robber!”

“Yeah, but he has a beard, and he’s wearing a vest stuffed with explosives.”

“You mean he’s a terrorist?”

I let him hang for a moment-watching people intellectually squirm is one of the few genuine pleasures life offers me. The fact that I never finished high school makes it particularly gratifying. “Do you get my point, Tim? This isn’t about what the guy ‘really is,’ it’s about you- about the traps everybody falls into when hearing or reading language. At each stage it seemed pretty clear, didn’t it-what the gunman was? But each time I complicated the background, he suddenly became something different.”