R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“You were watching CSI again tonight, weren’t you?”

I took the fact that she said nothing as a big fat yes.

A moment of silence passed between us, one that seemed to cement the fact that we were stranded on a cracked sidewalk, walled in by dead brick buildings. Funny, the way you can just sense things, like how late it is by how cool the cement is… I felt a distinct absence of daytime heat.

“What are the chances?” she asked in a numb voice I had never heard before. My second therapist once told me that this was why I womanized-not because I was carrying out some ancient evolutionary program to spread the sperm, but because I could only love women when they were new.

I found myself gazing at Molly, arrested by her profile in the oscillation of red and blue lights. “Chances?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said, blinking tears before turning to me. “You know… that the fingers belong to Jennifer.”

“You’re serious?” I asked. I managed a sombre shrug even though I wanted to laugh. “A town this size?… Things ain’t looking so good, Molls.”

“So she’s… shes…”

“Of course she is.” We were dog-tired by the time we got back to the motel. Call me weird, but I found the act of driving with her in separate cars powerfully erotic-like road rage turned on its head. Road lust. My heart muscled through the seconds we spent saying nothing while standing in the gap between our motel room doors. I couldn’t resist grinning yippee! when she followed me…

She made an act of it, as though she were just too goddamned tired to resist my relentless advances. But the fact was, she wanted it, maybe even needed it. Who’s to say? Most of the time I’m just stumped when it comes to the reasons women-especially beautiful ones like Molly- condescend to sleep with me. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t have any staying power.

We kissed, in that long way that makes magic of fumbling hands and fingers. There’s glory in feminine yielding, in the shyness of a woman still unnerved by her desire. We flopped like two tangled ropes across the bed. I pressed her onto her back, snuggled my pelvis between her legs, and without warning she gasped, “Wait-wait! What’s your favourite band?”

“Um… huh?”

“You can tell a lot about a man,” she sighed.

Believe it or not, I was utterly unsurprised. It could have been the exhaustion, I suppose, but the fact was I had been asked plenty of things by plenty of women the moment before first contact. Loopy things.

“Monster Magnet,” I said.

“Never heard of them. What’s their thing?”

“I dunno. Comic books and metaphysics…”

She frowned in a This-feels-too-too-good way. “I’m… I’m not sure… What’s your second favourite band?” “Tool.”

“Tool? Eew. I… ah… hate… “

I was grinding against her now, slow and languorous. “But Tool loves you,” I said, grinning like a cat pinning a budgie. “Tool loves you long time, baby.”

She laughed, groaned. “You idiot… How can you…” She exhaled, like I was a birthday candle or something. Score. I woke up in the middle of the night, the way I always seem to do. Molly lay tangled in the sheets, splayed like her parachute had failed to open. I clicked on the TV with the volume muted, scrounged my bag of weed. I sat upright in the surgical light, watching the drip of soundless images across the screen while rolling a fat one. Her voice startled me. “What’s it like?”

Her face was still squashed into her pillow. For all the world I had thought she was sleeping.

“Sticky,” I said, spinning the doob into a perfect cylinder. “Skunky… Everything weed should be.”

The pillow scrunched her smile into her cheek. “No…” she said, rolling onto her back. She brushed her hair from her face with a groggy hand. “What’s it like being you?”

I inhaled. Like cigarettes, joints buy you several seconds to cook something up when a chick asks you a hard question. Time I squandered for some reason.

“Hard… sometimes.”

“Why?” she asked, staring at the ceiling. Televised colours danced across the cheap stucco swirls.

I exhaled a ghostly horn of smoke across our legs, shrugged. “You know the radio, how they play the same hit parade over and over?”

“Sure. That’s why I got satellite in my rental.”

“Well, I have a hit parade all my own.”

She turned to gaze at my profile. “Memories,” she said. “You mean memories.”

“The thing is, it’s the bad ones that stick. And I don’t mean like a hazy flash of images, but moments of… of reliving, I guess. With the smells, the surge of emotion… like a miniature dream or something.”

“Can you give me an example?”

I was afraid she was going to ask that.

“Like… well… your eyes, they remind me of my mother, so sometimes when I look at you, I’m also sitting in my folks’ kitchen, and my mom, she’s at the sink grabbing me some tea. And there’s this fly walking across the window’s reflection in the counter, you know, like it’s pacing out a treasure map in fast motion, fifteen paces this way, stop, twenty paces that way, stop. And Mom,, she’s smiling-she always had a sunny disposition, my mom, always giving me the gears about being negative-well, she’s smiling and looking out the window, and I notice there’s tears in her eyes. So I say, ‘Whazzup, Mom?’ and she turns to me, blinks a couple of diamonds, grins her best You’re-such-a-good-boy grin, and says, ‘I have cancer, Disciple. They say I have only a few months.’”

“Oh gawd…” Molly whispered.

“And that’s one of the love songs.” Track Eight

Friday… Breakfast was tasty and numb. Circumstances have caught me being glib or flip too many times for this latest twist to rattle me all that much. A go-figure attitude was about as chastised as I could get.

Besides, like I told you, I already knew that Jennifer Bonjour was dead.

But Molly seemed about a pubic hair away from devastation. That’s the thing about youth: your hopes fly high when you lack the ballast of experience. Life has a way of stuffing our pockets with sand. Of course she had her catechism of low expectations like the rest of us, that sense of superstitious doom that prevents people from celebrating the purchase of lottery tickets. But at some profound level she had thought that everything ruly-truly would unfold according to fantastic plan. That Jennifer Bonjour would be found bruised and dehydrated, that some unassuming villain would be apprehended, and that her hair-raising story would vault Molly Modano into the heights of print celebrity. Yet one more Barbie-doll Ordeal welded into the public imagination.

Now here she was: ambition meets the mortician.

“How could the doctor tell?” she asked.

“Tell what?”

“That her fingers had been cut from her after she was dead.”

“Not sure. Something to do with the way the tissue sheers? I know that blood settles in the body when the heart stops… Maybe the cut was blood free.”

She frowned at her bacon. “We don’t know it was her, though… Not for sure.”

“Molls…”

She continued eating in silence. I thought about all the things I could say, all the pearls of cynical wisdom I could shuck from my brain. But I could tell she was hurting for real, and not simply because of this latest macabre turn. Last night she had sought comfort in my arms, and my fear was that she had caught a whiff of the reaper. They always do, sooner or later. If it wasn’t my wrists, it was my look. I was a man with one too many scars.

So, I waited until she finished her eggs, then tossed the folder I had brought. It whisked to a stop before her.