R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

I don’t remember picking up the remote control-sometimes my attention wanders, as I said. I thumbed my way through the gaudy parade of channels-ShamWow! and Obama commemorative coins and sports utility vehicles-and there it was, the ticker tag line of the minute, as real as CNN…

Quickly replaced by,

And Baars’s smiling face, serene and centre-screen. From the willows slowly heaving in the breeze behind him, I knew he was standing in front of the Framer Compound. The sunlight played off his glasses in an eerie way, making them flash utterly white from time to time…

Or was it crimson?

“You said you have a message for the American people?” the off-frame reporter asked.

“Yes,” Baars replied, so much humility compressed into his smile it could only be called smug. “Yes, I do. They need to know that these are the Final Days.”

“You mean that the world is about to end?”

“Yes, but not in the way you might think.”

The unseen reporter was on him in a click. “You think the sun is about to swallow up the world. That the world is billions of years older than it appears.”

This seemed to surprise him-an informed interviewer, imagine-but a quick blink was all he needed to reclaim his Vedic composure. His smile broadened as a chorus of shouts climbed in the sunlit background. Someone close cried out loud enough to be picked up on the interviewer’s microphone.

“It’s her! Jesus! It’s really her! “ I chortled in front of the little screen. This was news?

I saw her even before the cameraman had the presence of mind to redirect his shot. Even before her granular image found its way to the centre of the nation’s perspective, I knew. Slight and beautiful even in a wheelchair. Her hands and feet bound into bloody paws. Buddha smiling and heavy-lidded. Stevie pushed her into the photo-op sweet spot fairly glowing in his white uniform…

Dead Jennifer.

A girl fucked up by a father fucked up by a bottle of bourbon-and the list goes on.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from her bandaged hands and feet. Now that was taking one for the team. Positively hardcore. They had the medical facilities at the Compound-the little episode with the dying stroke patient, Agatha, had demonstrated that. The only thing that confused me was what Nolen had said earlier: that the coroner thought the digits had been severed post mortem. And then I realized: they had been cut twice.

Remove them, leave them overnight, then cut them again closer to the knuckle.

Everything was pixilated madness on the screen. Voices shouted and battled. Only her name was intelligible, repeated over and over and over. A new tag line popped onto the bottom of the screen.

Man, they had this breaking news thing down to a science.

And the world watches-why? Because the word is watching.

So please don’t tell me the media are sane. I thought of Molly. I thought of Mandy. I wanted to weep, but all I could do was laugh. But my room, the prick, swallowed my hilarity whole. It was too shoddy not to be mean-spirited. A Holiday Inn would have joined in.

Someone-I couldn’t see who-had imposed some kind of order on the scrum. Baars had moved to Jennifer’s side. Now he spoke into at least a dozen microphones. You could just see her in the corner of the screen, gazing up with the adoration of a Republican’s wife.

“Yourwhole life,” he said in an evangelist’s tones, only sadder, wiser. “Your whole life you’ve been dogged by this feeling, this baseless faith that somehow, someway, you are more… More than a grocery clerk, line worker, tax auditor, stonemason. More than your children, your husband or your wife. More than the slapstick you watch night after night parading across your TV. At some level, you already know what I am about to tell you.”

“And what might that be?” The CNN reporter’s voice rose above the fray of questions.

But Baars had moved beyond interviews and into the realm of religious calling. He was staring into my eyes now, peering through the fog of all the intervening cameras and transmissions-through the fog that was me. “I have lived ten thousand lives ten thousand times,” he explained. “I have dreamed across the ages, and so have you. I have been emperors and I have been slaves…

“I have endured far more suffering than joy.”

A sad smile. A recognition.

“And so have you.. “

Was this some kind of trick? I turned to make sure he wasn’t sitting beside me. When I glanced back, a new tag line gleamed below his erudite image…

That was when he pulled the gun from beneath his white jacket. A Glock.

Cool. Now that was a statement.

The cameraman fell backward in his scramble to escape the gun, but to his credit he managed to capture Baars, who suddenly seemed statuesque stretched across the open summer sky. The Glad Garbage Bag Man about to reveal the truth of human existence: certainty and stupidity are one and the same.

He moved with the grace of milk-it was quite remarkable really. He stretched out his left hand to the camera, as though holding back the ethereal hordes, while swinging the automatic in his right laterally, toward Jennifer’s joyous face.

They were on something, I realized. Some kind of drug-no different than me. Drugs have a way of recognizing each other.

The cameraman managed a haphazard zoom on the gun and the girl. I saw her lips move: “Elephant sh-”

I couldn’t hear the report because screams had overloaded the mike. But I saw it all, one thumping heartbeat: the flash, the puncture, the blowback of blood, even the shock wave rippling through her lips-all of it CGI-seamless.

I saw Xenophon Baars shoot his lover in the face.

Dead Jennifer.

Baars raised the automatic to his temple.

“All of us are here because we have chosen to stay,” he said, his voice background-noise thin yet somehow dreadfully clear against the ambient shouting. Everyone hears the man holding the gun. “All of us have chosen to die with our world… “

The frame wobbled as the cameraman shimmied backward on his ass. You could hear the correspondent gasp, “You getting this? “ followed by a gravelly grunt in the affirmative.

“But some of us…” Baars said with a beatific smile. And there was nothing frantic, nothing strained about his tone. He spoke the just-the- facts way cops do when they find themselves dragged onto the witness stand yet again. “Some of us do not want to die in our s/eep.”

The weapon popped-a pathetic sound, really. The screaming came through real clear, though.

Even still, the sound guy should have been canned. The end was nigh, the eons-old machines preserving earth from its bloated sun were giving out, and Baars simply wanted to give everyone a chance to make peace with their existence. From his standpoint, he had done nothing more than take a surprise messianic turn in a video game… A first-person shooter.

A part of me wanted to slip into the morgue that night and shake his dead hand. I mean, there was the Frame and then there was the frame. Brilliant, utterly insane, Xenophon Baars had managed to turn the world into his fucking bullhorn.

It was nothing short of ingenious. A missing hottie? A cult cold war?

Rock for the great media pipe. Pure. Uncut. This was Jim Jones without the body count. Heaven’s Gate on a hundred live feeds…

I could see them plotting, Baars and a select group of his followers. I could hear Baars chastise the others for taking pleasure in the destruction of the Thirds at their enlightened hands. “They are simply exploring a different life,” he would say-some bullshit like that. I could see Jennifer cutting across the brownlands, sneaking into the Compound from the rear. And I could see that fucker Stevie, ever faithful, driving through town with his collection of little cages, a single wooden cross, and of course a zip-lock bag filled with Jennifer’s fingers and toes.