R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

With material this sexy, all Baars needed was to catch the attention of a single editor to start his conflagration. All he needed was Molly Modano…

“At the very least,” I had said, Amanda Bonjour needs to know her husband is a scumbag, don’t you think? “

She said nothing at first. Managing the truth required consideration.

“Disciple… You can’t say anything. “

Because Jennifer was more than her “big break.” Jennifer was her friend. Her fellow Framer. And you don’t screw with the personal lives of your friends, do you? Not even at the end of the world.

“What if we don’t have time? What if…”

And me?

Well, Judge, you see, it was like this…

I was framed. I retrieved the photograph that Mandy had given me that day in my office: young Jennifer, innocent and sun-smiling, thumbs and fingers spread wide in a ta-da pose. I wedged it in the corner of the television screen, my own boxed insert-the only headline that mattered. I hit the mute button, listened to the traffic shivering through the walls. We stared at each other for a while. She did not blink.

“Dead,” I whispered, saying the word the way kids say “bad” to household pets.

Dead Jennifer. Track Fourteen

The thing to remember about me is that I don’t forget…

Anything.

Ever.

It all comes back, endlessly repeating, circumstances soaked in passion. Love. Terror. Disgust. A life crushed in the wheels of perpetual reliving.

Write about it, my therapist says. Writing gives you “distance.”

Distance. Fawk.

A great thing, not forgetting. Makes writing real easy.

Almost as easy as going crazy. I get this sense sometimes, typically when things get real weird, that I remember the future as vividly as I remember the past. In Iraq I swear I once dove before the mortar round landed. Good for me. Bad for two other absent-minded fools. Either way, I know that I looked at my cellphone where it sat artfully poised in relation to spilled change and crumpled receipts the instant before it began buzzing.

I’m sure Baars would have had an explanation.

“Disciple! Where are you? “

It was Molly, sounding as shrill as her skin had been smooth.

“Already at the airport, baby. Getting as far away from you crazy fuckers as I can.”

A strange noise, a kind of coughing, sobbing… A sharp intake of breath.

“Disciple! Disciple, please! I know you’re lying. I know you’re still at the motel. Puh-pleaase! It-it’s horrible! I didn’t know! I swear I didn’t know! There-there’s no way I would’ve… there’s just no fucking way! This is crazy! Please, Disciple. You have to tell me what’s going on. What’s going on?

I believed her, instantly and utterly. Baars had only told her enough, nothing more, nothing less. “A media hoax,” he called it. A way to wring enlightenment out of the instruments of mass delusion. Molly had been a conspirator, sure, but she had also been the biggest dupe of all.

It was a genuine moment of wonder for me. How long had it been since my ears had been so simple?

“Sorry, Molly. Big security guy, telling me to shut down my phone. You know how they are when it comes to security.”

“No! Disciple! Dis-”

I snapped my cell shut, set it across the loose change and coffee mug rings. I’m really not sure why I hung up. Just seemed safer that way.

Besides, back in my day, when you burned your ass, you sat on the blister. I left the door slightly ajar so that it would simply swing open when she came knocking.

“I’ve been there,” she said, sobbing. “You have to believe me, Disciple! I’ve been there!”

The Occluded Frame.

“There’s no such thing, Molly.”

Her eyes are swollen and so am I.

“No. No. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”

Rather than speak, I encircled her in my arms, brought her in from the summer cold. We made love because that was the basis of our relationship, our HQ, the place you retreat to when the mission goes wrong. I will relive this, I thought as she dipped and heaved above me, searching for a bliss that was long in coming. I will relive this a thousand times.

“You have to believe me, Disciple.”

She whispered this to me, as though armed patrols scoured the streets, as if floodlights streamed through the room’s windows.

“Baars,” I said. “He made you into a blank tablet. You know how hypnosis works… “

But I knew my words were useless. She believed, just like you-like everybody.

It’s an instinct. Like fucking.

Afterward, we simply lay breathing, me on my back, her on her stomach. There was this sense that we had done all that could be done, here, in the shadow of a setting world. I imagined this was what critters do when their habitat collapses around them. Indulge and impregnate. Another litter to pick through the trash.

She wept.

And somehow I understood that I had become a memory for her, a trigger for that clutch in her stomach, that cold wave of horror that stopped her halfway through whatever. Somehow I knew she was already in the process of forgetting…

Healing.

We talked for a couple of hours in that naked, languorous way. There was a heaviness between us, and a sorrow, as if we were a divorced couple who had wavered in our resolution to seek different genitals.

She had been recruited out of Berkeley. Like Anson had, she went on and on about her initial skepticism. She had laughed out loud at first, but her Outreacher, Mohammed Kadri, had been so nice and so persistent. She really had no choice but to listen, and the more she listened…

It’s like we have this hand within us, a hundred million neurons shaped like a palm and clutching fingers. Something, it cries. Give me something to grasp. You mean nothing until my palm is full.

Any old bullshit will do.

She was first hypnotized, and first experienced the Frame, on November 27, 2006. Apparently they celebrated the date like a second birthday.

“You have no idea, Disciple. No idea what it’s like. To have no body. To think at the speed of light. To remember everything…”

Like being an angel, she said.

Apparently Baars himself had called her about a month ago. The Framers had been on red alert for quite some time, preparing for the earth’s imminent demise, so when the call came, she had dropped everything. He told her that they were planning to stage Jennifer’s disappearance, but that he could say no more because it was imperative that no one know Molly was one of them. It would compromise her credibility, he said. All she was supposed to do was keep working the story. The hook would catch soon enough. He said the media had a fetish for cults, that they packaged them into something called “atrocity tales,” stories that all cultures use to define themselves against outsiders.

He should know: he used to teach the shit.

“He told me not to waver,” she said, wiping her eyes with the bedsheets. “He said everything that happened, no matter how shocking or how bizarre, was simply part of the plan.”

But believers always waver. Crisis is inevitable, which is why belief systems squander so much energy defining doubt-the hard road, and certainly the one less travelled-as a kind of weakness. God’s greatest trick was convincing the world that belief was hard. For Molly, the crisis came in the form of Jennifer’s fingers. That was when she caught her first real whiff of madman.

“I almost told you, Disciple. I should have told you!”

“But I thought you said the Frame was real.”

She cried for a time. I talked the stupid talk I always rely on when I don’t know what to say. Gambling stories, mostly. A couple run-ins with the law.