R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

I was left with that humbling feeling of having witnessed something heroic…

Or at least something beyond my mangy capabilities. Track Three

After the Bonjours left, I had sex with Kimberley in the copy room-or, as I had devilishly dubbed it, the copy-feely room. Kim put in about twenty or so hours a week, three hours here, four hours there, usually between 10 A.M. and 2 EM., after which she left for her real job at a peeler joint called the Zinger Klub. She was a good kid, something of a smartass, and beautiful in that haggard, too-dolled-up way common to strippers.

The cool thing about frequenting strip bars as a small businessman is that you never need worry about employee turnover-in either sense of the term. Most strippers leap at the job, that is, until they realize a) I’m something of a prick, b) there’s nothing glamorous about day planners and spreadsheets, and c) the money is for shit. But despite this, and despite the fact that I had let her dental coverage lapse, Kimberley had been game for over six months now-long enough for me to worry she might be falling in love.

Afterward we shared a reflective smoke next to the open window.

“Cancel my appointments for this afternoon,” I said.

“You don’t have any appointments.”

Kimberley, you should know, had long ceased taking me seriously. One more happy consequence of banging your employees: they know what you look like naked. For whatever reason, it’s hard to take naked men seriously. Personally, I blame the balls.

“What do you do around here, again?”

She sucked her cigarette to the nub then flicked it out the window. “The grunt work,” she said, exhaling. “You know, Ungh. Ungh.’”

“Har-har,” I replied, tossing my butt after hers onto the gravel and cracked asphalt outside. “Into the crowd,” Kimberley called it, because of the thousands of other butts out there. I stood.

“Going to Jitters?” she asked. I tried not to notice how beautiful her profile looked in the alley-choked sunlight.

“Ungh.”

She gave me her trademark lopsided snort. She knew the drill. I had to start working on Dead Jennifer.

Jitters was the name of my favourite coffee shop. It was a haunt of mine, the place where I would be whacked if the mob ever deemed me important enough to merit a hit. It was just around the corner, the kind of shop that soaked in the idle and the hurried alike, from the local bums to the professionals-on-the-run to the maternity- leave moms. Like all the businesses on the street, it had its cycles, its consumer ebb and flow. Sometimes it would be packed and stuffy, an outrage to air conditioning. Other times it would be as empty and cool as a hockey arena on a Monday morning. I was lucky enough to catch an ebb.

I complimented Ashlan on her hair on my way in, placed my order with the owner, Michelle.

“Working a case, Diss?” Ashlan asked in her hectic yet affectionate way.

The girls regarded me with the wary affection people reserve for apparently dangerous animals that have been defanged and declawed. The worst I could do was gnaw on them. “About to…” I said.

“What is it this time?” Michelle asked, squinting at me over the rims of her glasses. “Another hooker with six toes?”

“No-no,” Ashlan exclaimed. “My favourite was the guy with the… the-what did you call it?-pustule on his thingy! Did he ever tell you-”

“Oh yah,” Michelle laughed. “The Case of the Nine Itches…”

From time to time I liked to scandalize the girls with stories about the more sordid cases I worked. I would give them names just to crack them up. Sir Conan Doyle meets porno.

“Nah,” I said. “Gotta real one this time, girls. Respectable, like.”

“And what’s it called?” Ashlan asked.

After pausing a moment to consider, I said, “How about The Girl Who Died at the End of the World?”

“Hmm…” Michelle said, frowning. “Sounds… serious.”

One of the perils of constantly playing the comedian, I’ve found, is that when the laugh track finally pops its spool-and it always does- people don’t know how to take you.

“Like I said, I got a real one this time.”

All, you know, respectable like. I retreated with my coffee to the place’s most obscure corner, more than a little gooned by Michelle’s comment. Truth is, as much as I despise all the penny-ante cases I usually work, they tend to have very little karmic overhead. I once followed this guy for two weeks because his wife had caught the distinct whiff of feces on his dick. So I take all these photos of him leaving gay clubs, show them to her, and she starts crying-get this-with relief. Apparently she had always suspected he was gay, had always felt proud he had stayed with her against the grain of his sexual inclinations. Her real fear was that he was pounding chocolate with another woman! So tell me, what are the consequences of fucking up a case like that? A better question might be, is it even possible to fuck up a case like that?

No consequences means no responsibilities. And that’s the way I like to ride.

I mean, look at me. I’m what you would call a fuck-up, and if there’s one thing fuck-ups know, it’s that real people-you know, people who, like, read and shit-generally mean real trouble. Fuck-ups fuck up. That’s what they do. If you fuck things up for another fuck-up, you can be damn sure that they’ll fuck up as well-that, thanks to the almighty law of averages, everything will come out in the wash. This is why fuck- ups prefer hanging with other fuck-ups. Puking in Billy’s car ain’t so bad when Billy’s already shat in your boot.

But the Bonjours, they were real No car-puking. No boot-shitting. Just a wayward daughter having trouble finding her way home…

Fawk.

I mean, I date strippers for Christ’s sake.

So, for the first time in my oh so sketchy career, I made what my first shrink, Martin, used to call an “implementation intention.”

“Youcan change, Disciple,” he once chirped. “As easily as you change your underwear.” He was one of those perky fuckers who continually cooked up apologies for people then called it therapy.

“But they all have skid marks, doc. Every pair.”

“Well, then, you go commando!”

“What? And get shit on my jeans?”

I’m not a big believer in change, as you might imagine. Even so, I sat at my table, took a deep breath, and resolved not to fuck this one up. That meant doing things by the numbers. Ever been in a car accident? If so, then you know: life is quick-too quick.

The thing to realize is that every moment is a car accident; it only seems otherwise because the apparent regularity of things fools us into thinking we can intervene and take some measure of control. We have this abiding I-could-if-I-really-wanted-to feeling. And since we’re out- and-out addicted to this feeling, the true brevity of things tends to drop out of the stories we like to tell. It doesn’t matter if it’s the action hero’s slo-mo or the anti-hero’s angst-ridden reflection, everywhere you turn you see people having a hell of a lot more time than they actually have, able to scoop the gun from the gutter before the other guy squeezes the trigger, or to ponder the early days of Czech Communism between ironic barbs.

Exact same flattering conceit.

If you think about it, either we’re just gabbing away on automatic or we’re perpetually one step behind, fencing with the vague bewilderment of receiving change in a foreign country. The reason we think we have so much time, I’m convinced, has to do with the way we blur our after-the- fact reflections on given events into the events themselves. As soon as we zip-lock something in memory, it becomes static, something that we can run circles around. Considered from this standpoint, it really does seem that everything we do is fraught with decisions, as if every moment was a window onto thousands of future possibilities, instead of automatic and obscure.