R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“The truth, huh?”

“Thetruth of all truths!”

Did I forget to mention that Anson was as fucking crazy as the rest of them?

Thoroughly creeped out, I asked him to recount what happened the night of Jennifer’s disappearance. Nobody tells the same story twice.

One of the many memory researchers I’ve endured, a guy called Robert Kunitz, told me about a study where subjects were asked to write accounts of where they were and what they were doing when the space shuttle Challenger fizzled into smoke and debris. When they tracked these people down years later and asked them the same question, apparently a sizable minority of them had completely changed their stories. Some even went so far as to accuse the researchers of falsifying their previous accounts, right down to forging their handwriting.

“Unbelievable, huh?” Kunitz said in the strange-but-true tone that psychologists-perpetually tickled by the fact that they know people better than they know themselves-are prone to take. “It’s really that bad.”

I disagreed, told him that I knew, with utter certainty, that things were actually worse.

I could almost see the grant money reflected in his eyes.

See, unlike me, you reconstitute the events you “remember.” Your whole life is quite literally a dramatization. You may be based on a true story, but you are not, by any sensible measure, true. You may earn an Oscar or two, but you will never snag a Pulitzer.

So when I say that inconsistency in a suspect’s story is not necessarily a red flag for deception, understand that I speak from the standpoint of the sighted speaking to the blind. The sad fact is that variance between accounts doesn’t necessarily tell you anything. Your suspect could be a premeditated liar-or fuckhead, to use the industry term of art-but odds are he’s just another asshole.

The biggest complication I faced was that Anson’s statement was paraphrased through the lens of Chief Nolen, whose skills at taking informal dictation were neither here nor there compared with the 161 other statements I’ve seen. The situation was even trickier because the statement was so recent. This meant Anson had two sets of coordinates to read from: his memory of the event itself and his memory of his official recounting of the event. The devil, if it were to be found anywhere, would be in the consistencies. This was the real reason I had asked Molly to read Anson’s statement in the first place: to find evidence of rote and rehearsal, stuff that innocent people generally do not do, simply because they believe they don’t have to, sweet fools that they are. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the truth will just as soon see you hanged as set you free.

Justice is just a fluke that occasions way too much art and backslapping.

He started with a discrepancy, a small one to be sure, in the time he and Jennifer had left the Compound to walk into Ruddick: 8:25, a number specific enough to prick my interest but round enough to preclude outright suspicion, had become 8:30 or so, which was far more in line with the haphazard way people keep time-gulps and swallows, not sips. This suggested not only the absence of rehearsal but the absence of guilt as well. Had Anson been involved in Jennifer’s disappearance, he would have obsessed over the details of his story, since it was pretty much the only way for him to influence the outcome of events.

But the rest of his story followed Nolen’s paraphrasing to the letter. Well, the imagined letter, to be more precise, since it takes more than a little imaginative reconstruction to see the actual phrasing through the paraphrasing. Either way, the problem was that I could see Nolen composing precisely the same statement given what Anson was telling me. But what did that mean?

Fucking hints and innuendoes, man. There’s nothing to do but to file them and move on.

Besides, what could a kid like this, one who by all reports was Jennifer’s dearest friend at the Compound, have to do with something that resulted in severed fingers?

I decided to press things in a different direction.

“What about Jennifer’s parents?”

A hesitant pause. “What about them?”

I rubbed the back of my neck with a hooked paw. That motel bed was taking its toll. And here I thought the entire hospitality business had embraced the pillow-top mattress. Fawk.

“Did she ever talk about them?”

Anson shrugged. “Sure. Who doesn’t talk about their parents?”

“You know what I mean. Did she ever talk about them?”

“Yuh.”

By now my curiosity was piqued. “Why the reluctance, Anson?”

“Nah… Just feels weird, you know.”

“She swear you to secrecy?”

A stiff nod followed by, “Yuh.”

“The circumstances have changed, don’t you think?”

“Yuh.”

“Things couldn’t be any more radical.”

He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then said, “Suppose.”

“So?”

He just gave me a blank, helpless look. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how high you pile the reasons. To be honest, I already had that gnawing sense of doom that always accompanies moments like this… moments of stumbling upon the Uglies, as I call them. The truths that no one wants to know.

“Anson, look. We have two different angles on this situation, you and I. The puzzles you see and the puzzles I see are completely different. You have a piece, a fact, that fits a certain way into a certain set of moral obligations. But here’s the thing: when people swear you to secrecy-that’s almost as real as it gets. The puzzle I’m working on…” I watched him watch me.

“Is real,” Anson said, nodding.

“As real as it gets. Frame real.” I wince at recalling this because it was so stupid.. In the course of impressing the tragic stakes of the situation on him, I had essentially reminded him it was all a video game.

Even still, he told me about a morning-light confession, about how Jennifer worried that she was failing Xen, failing the Framers, because she simply could not let go of this one night when she was thirteen, the night she could not sleep and happened upon her well-fed father in the basement-drinking and watching porno.

“Come here, sweetie… It’s nothing to be fightened of… It’s completely natural.”

Anson talked, alternately staring at his palms and at the walls to either side of me. I watched him without expression because this is what I do: collect and interpret all the little atrocities we suffer and commit.

Then shelve them in the mad library that is my mind.

“You said she thought she was failing because of this?”

“Xen…” Anson explained with an apologetic hitch of his shoulders. “He teaches us that we’re here to learn from all these…”-he swallowed- “things, you know? Sins, crimes… What we suffer is secondary to the fact that we suffer, the meaning we take away from having endured. And because of this, he says we’re supposed to affirm, to affirm our lives in their entirety, to realize that not a moment, not a breath, has been wasted… And she… Jennifer, just… couldn’t… do this.”

His long-lashed eyes finally fixed mine.

“Not with her fucking father, anyway.” Incest-the plugged toilet of the investigative world. Christ, I thought as Stevie led me away from the consultation room, Christ Almighty.

I sometimes think people have the same basic electrical service when it comes to their morals, that the real thing that distinguishes them is the way they use that power. Some people fritter away their moral amperage on all the little night lights and clock radios life offers: personal hygiene, sexual orientation, dinner table innuendo. You know, the Who-does-that- bitch-think-she-is? kind of bullshit. Others, the kind that join the Peace Corps or volunteer at their local women’s shelter, channel their juice into big-ticket items, the stoves and central airs of the ethical universe. And me? Yeah, sure, my breaker box is all fucked up…