R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

He blinked those wild, freaky eyes.

“Ten,” he replied. “In the A.M.” Molly started crying on the drive back to the motel. I apologized-for real for a change. Told her some nonsense about provocation, the perfect balance of aggression and intelligence.

I sometimes forget what it’s like…

Being normal.

She should have been furious with me for putting her in a situation like that. Instead, she was embarrassed. She was young, eager to hammer pitons into the sheer cliffs of print fame and fortune. Her head was stuffed with almost as many ideals as romantic notions. Everyone knows that investigative journalists are fearless hard-asses, capable of staring down civil wars in illiterate nations, and here she was, getting all weepy about a little jiu-jitsu at a church picnic. She kept her face averted, pretended to stare at the setting sun through the passenger window. From time to time she wiped her eyes with fluttering fingers.

I could even hear her curse herself as she marched to her room.

“They were Nazis.!” I cried out in encouragement.

That was something, wasn’t it?

Once in my room, I called Albert, left a message on his machine or wherever the hell it is you leave messages nowadays-the nowhere of the Web probably. I needed to find out as much as I could about the Church of the Third Resurrection as soon as possible. There was piss all about them on the Web.

Say you were in a bind, a really, really tight bind, like the mob was out to hit you or something. Now, most men pretend they’ve stepped out of a movie, make believe they’re ready, willing, even eager to do what it takes, no matter what that involves. Most men pretend to be capable of calculated murder. But press them, and when the time comes I guarantee you they’ll find some bullshit way of backing out. Everyone postures in a vacuum, but when circumstances take hold, the sorting happens real quick.

Now, you can call this cowardice if you want. But let’s face it, murder is stupid, particularly if you have any personal connection to the dude you intend to murder. So I’m more inclined to call this intelligence rather than cowardice-the brave ones are the ones who shatter lives and go to prison.

Reverend Nill understood this all too well. He knew what it took to get people to kill for him.

The key is to get them young, when peer group pressures are well- nigh irresistible. Then you start small: graffiti, other kinds of petty vandalism. Then you do something for them, something low-risk but illegal all the same. Like so many things human, trust is the foundation of co-operative crime, and few things inspire trust like someone breaking the law for you-actually risking his neck. Then you ask them to commit some crime in return-to reciprocate. Once their cherry is popped, once they get away with something bad, it becomes oh so easy, even addictive for some types.

You don’t need to be a chromosomal mutant to enjoy hurting people. You just need to believe that your victims deserve their pain. And we’re wired to think that already.

No. Reverend Nill was no fool.

This was the realization I kept in mind as I lay on my bed, boots and all: that I was dealing with a sociopath in the full manipulative sense of the term. If Reverend Nill was behind Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance, then he was “behind the scenes” in every sense of the word. Not only would he have a herd of complimentary character witnesses, he would have an ironclad alibi.

Which meant the place to start would be his tools.

The moment came to me as it always does, the one most pertinent to my questions and concerns. Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie cohorts, sitting at the crooked picnic table. They were both as skinny as marathon runners, but the one was older, sporting a grey mullet, while the other, the younger, had short-cropped hair dyed an artificial black. They were having a long conversation without jokes, eyes fixed then wandering. Looking down and bored, then matching gazes.

A single nod from Johnny, eyes closing as the mouth said, “Okay. I see.”

The older junkie sucked in his lips. “Sheesh. Too much. “

Fists clenched to mime blows given and received.

A face raised to offer bruised evidence. The younger one had a shiner.

Laughter, but reserved, as if they talked on the corner of a major thoroughfare.

Johnny shot them a look over his shades. His eyes darted up and out, then down again. A knuckle glanced his nose. Weight shifted from foot to foot. A string of inaudible, unreadable words. From beneath his sunglasses his lips said, “Give me a fucking break.”

An impassive look from the younger one. “So? “

A sour stretch of Johnny’s lips.

And the sentence I swear that I saw. “She’s dead.. “

Johnny shrugged and spat. The old junkie turned to me and grinned.

A hard knock at the door startled me from my reverie. It was a wet-haired Molly, her freckled face scrubbed of makeup, staring up at me with wide and hungry eyes. Suddenly I understood what it was she wanted from me. She wanted my cynicism, my numbness… She wanted my disease.

Because she thought they would make her strong. Stupid twit.

“I know…” she began, breaking eye contact and hesitating. “I know you said you wanted to… work… or whatever the hell it is you do.”

“Recollect. Remember. I kick back, sort and sift and interpret.”

“If you say so.”

I say so.

I breathed deep. Gawd, how I love the smell of a woman fresh out of the shower.

“Well, I just wanted to thank you, you know, for what happened back there.”

“No thanks necessary. Getting hot young stringers into life-threatening situations is just what I do.”

She laughed, looked at the finger she had raised to pick at her hair. “Yeah? What were you thinking?” she asked, cross-eyed.

“Just doing what I do best, Molls.”

“Which is?”

A strange pang accompanied the question. Hard to explain, actually, like doing a somersault without moving, a kind of figure-field inversion of the soul. I could tell from her eyes that she could see it on my face, all that past crashing in. I reached for her hand, retreated with her into the orange of my room’s tacky light.

“Screwing with people.” Oh, I got laid that night.

Ladies, you can deny it all you want, talk about how violence makes you ill-whatever. Weird as it is, a good number of you like it, not as a spectator sport-more like an Olympic demonstration. For whatever reason, a man’s hands tingle all that much more when they’re scabbed with another man’s blood.

You see, we’re savages together, you and I.

Children of Reverend Nill. Track Ten

Saturday night… One man’s dog is another woman’s pig. I get that. But I like to think that I’m a dog in a deeper sense.

Did you know that the word cynic comes from the ancient Greek for dog?

Apparently the Roman Cynics were actually evangelical-some to the point of burning themselves alive to make their point. They went around preaching virtue and screaming hypocrite everywhere they went-kind of like Jesus. Fuck that. No, give me the ancient Greek version. Give me good old Diogenes, living in a stone tub, tossing the odd load in the agora, and searching, endlessly searching, for a single honest man. The dude that Alexander the Great said he wanted to be were he not Alexander. The guy that Plato called Socrates gone mad.

Even better, give me Diogenes as he should have been. Doglike in every sense of the word. Gnawing on his leash. Chewing up his master’s shoes. Crapping on the neighbour’s putting-green lawn.

And, of course, humping everything that moved.

Rules, brother. That’s the real difference between you and me. Every-fucking-where you turn: admonishments, tickets, citations, not to mention out-and-out convictions. Judgments, endless condemnations, raised on the clay brick of half-baked belief. You can’t see them because you can’t remember, because the million ways you repeat continually topple into the bottomless abyss of five minutes ago. Over and over, the same way, the same time. Even your flaws and foibles-even your sins-follow ironclad commandments. Again and again.