R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

Her breathing was growing thick, so I asked before it was too late.

“When is it supposed to happen? The end, I mean.”

Just for curiosity’s sake.

“Friday,” she said numbly, her lips moving behind a violet netting of hair. Her eyes did not open. “The world always ends on Friday.”

Fawk. Vegas is so much more fun on the weekend. I wake up in the middle of the night. There’s a young woman beside me, red hair askew, pale and naked in tangled sheets. Her breath is deep and crisp and even.

A crimson glow taints the windows. I get up, walk nude to the curtains, which I pull wide with hands that have ended lives. Red paints me, but for once it’s not blood. I shiver despite the heat.

I stand motionless with patience. I so rarely see the sunrise, what with the weed and the women and the good times. I want to meet this goof they call the Dawn. I want to greet him with a knowing grin and an enigmatic wink. Say, “Some forms oflife flourish in the absence ofsunlight… “

But even as I dream these thoughts, I know something’s wrong. The frequency. The geometry, maybe.

The sun’s arc burns through the paper horizon, an incandescent wire that grows and grows, swelling with ruby brilliance, becoming a scimitar, a crescent smouldering with retina-burning wavelengths. It scores the horizon from end to end, drawing the sky away like a curtain, burning higher and higher above a mountain range of atmospheric processors, a heaven-wide holocaust that would have boiled away the atmosphere, made slush of the continental plates, had the earth not been transformed into a machine.

A sky that was a sun. A sun that was a sky. Like staring up at a beach ball perched on the tip of your nose.

And it seemed so obvious, standing there, cooking in my illusory skin. It seemed so obvious why so many of us would stay here, die here, rather than flee to the stars with the others. The Gods were long dead. All we had was emptiness, twisted into Mobius convolutions. And monotony.

In the absence of any destination, why not worship our origins?

Simulate the twenty-first century. Make a flag of our skin. She was gone when I awoke. I’m not sure what bummed me out more: the fact of her escape or the fact of my slumbering through it. Usually I’m such a twitchy sleeper. Makes me feel safe, the belief that I can be unconscious and alert.

I sat naked on the corner of the bed and smoked a Winston, reflected on the difference between quiet and lonely. Smoke one hundred thousand and one, I realized with no little dismay. I hate missing milestones.

I shaved to the image of my face floating behind SORRY scrawled in cherry red lipstick. I pondered my age, wondered how many more Mollys would love and leave me. The only things wrinkles flatter are poets and their plots. I packed up my shit and loaded my Golf. I could already feel the buzz building on the horizon, the scramble of souls ducking for cover beneath the sweep of the National Spotlight. The media clowns would be out in force, cramming Ruddick into as many small-town cliches as they could think of, and searching for inside angles, for material witnesses they could lionize or implicate.

Either way, me and my bag of weed were no longer welcome in this town.

There’s a profound peace in the monotony of a road already travelled, a been-there-done-that security that lets the mind wander paths not quite of its own making. Novelty, I had decided, forces you to fucking think, and I had had enough of that. The summer roared hot through my open windows. I daydreamed to the rattle of my diesel, pondered taking the first exit to Atlantic City and to the inexhaustible allure of dice, booze, and poon.

Instead, I found myself popping open my cell and calling Kimberley.

“Hi, babe,” I said with phony cheer.

“Where are you? “

“Arrivals at JFK.”

“You don’t say. Where did the crime take you this time? “

“Tahiti, baby.”

A snort, packed with amusement and exasperation, as only a woman is capable. “I watch TV, you know, Disciple. Every once in a while my thumb slips and oops! there’s CNN. “

“Yeah, well, you know me. Plugging the toilet no matter where I go.”

Something in my tone must have tagged her, because she paused. “Is everything okay, Disciple? “

No.

“Sure. But I was thinking… “

“Uh-oh.”

“I was thinking I haven’t been so… good… to you. You know?”

That wasn’t entirely true. At the strip club where I first met her, I was the guy holding twenties in my teeth when everyone else chewed dollars or fives. But still, true enough.

“Something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice. “

“No. Not at all. I just… ah… thought it might be nice if we went out on a… you know, date or something.”

“Date?” She fairly barked with laughter. I could almost see the smoke blowing out her nose. “Weed’s pretty good in Ruddick, huh? “

“No. Seriously, Kim. I want to take you out. Seriously.”

A long and wary pause. Strippers tend to be at once cautious and confident when dealing with men-kind of like animal trainers that way. “Okay… “she said with a heavy What-the-hellsigh. “Iactually have Friday night off for a fucking change. You know, I tod Jimmy. I sa-”

“Make it Saturday,” I interrupted, savouring the sluice of hot air over my face and scalp. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, driving a car without an air conditioner.

That was Tuesday, August 18, 2009. Good. Bad. Another day to be remembered…

Whether I wanted to or not.