R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

Which is what they are-pretty much. You can sooner fish water back out of a flushing toilet.

This is why I do so much of my work downstream, so to speak. As a kid, I was too cool for school-I mean this quite literally.

We had this biology teacher whom everyone seemed to love and who seemed to love everybody: Mr. Marcus. If Mr. Marcus didn’t like you, it meant that there was something wrong with you-as a matter of biblical certainty. Of course, I couldn’t stand him. That’s me in a nutshell. The guy who hates your favourite teacher.

Marcus was prattling on about photosynthesis, and Rosie Juarez, who was a total hottie, asked him about mushrooms: “Aren’t they a plant that grows without sunlight, Meester Marcoos?” The whole time, Tommy Bridgeman was wheezing and coughing in the back of the room, hacking mucus that seemed to snap like elastics in the back of his throat. I think everyone knows at least one Tommy Bridgeman. You know the type: fungal complexion, coat hangers for bones, a sheepish grin for most anything you say.

Marcus graced her with one of his eye-twinkling smiles. That was another strike against him: there’s nothing I hate quite so much as twinkling eyes. Save it for the cartoons, motherfucker.

“Well, Rose,” he said, “consider Bridgeman over there. He’s proof positive that some forms of life flourish in the absence of sunlight. Well, maybe not flourish…” And then he had to say it: “Coming to class doesn’t make you classy.”

Everyone roared with studio-audience clarity. Bridgeman just slouched his head low, wiped his nose, and grinned in a monkey-embarrassed way. Me? I was disgusted. I felt everything go smooth, the way it always does when something gets me really pissed. Suddenly, snotty little Tommy Bridgeman seemed like my kind of people, and Mr. Marcus’s joke became an outrage to the Geek Nation.

“Yes, Mr. Manning?”

Without even realizing it, my hand had shot up.

“Um, Mr. Marcus, why do you think that was so funny?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Manning.”

“Well, you’ve said that same thing now, like, twenty-three times so far this semester.”

I grit my teeth in joy sometimes, remembering the things I’ve said.

“I admit it’s an old trick of mine,” Mr. Marcus said-he was too cash to be anything but puzzled at this point. “But I hardly imagine I’ve said it twenty-three times. Please, Mr. Manning.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you think you’ve used it twenty-three times?”

“Because…”-he paused ominously-”that would make me rather dull and unoriginal, don’t you think?”

“That’s exactly what I think,” I replied cheerfully.

“Excuse me?”

And that’s when I started, working my way backward from snotty little Tommy Bridgeman. I just hit replay in my psyche and it all came out, down to the cadences of the voices and the looks on the faces. Twenty- three of them in a row. He never interrupted me, not once, just stood there like someone mesmerized-believe me, the truth can be a big scary stick. I imagine it must have been as spooky as all hell listening to me, watching me, but the way I did it-I tell you, I had them. Not one of my classmates could have recalled even a fraction of what I replayed, but their other brain, their unconscious one, remembered it well enough: everyone in the class recognized each of the incidents I was recreating. People nodded, brandished their fists when they recognized themselves. Others shouted out the count. “Twenty-ONE!” The whole class roared and roared. A hundred laughs for Mr. Marcus turned into a thousand laughs against him.

I broke the poor bastard over my knee.

And of course got myself expelled. Apparently the administrators loved Mr. Marcus too.

That was February 22, 1982. A bad day.

But still, pretty cool. Time. It all comes down to time. If you have a memory like a court stenographer, like I have, then you have all the time in the world to deliberate. This is probably why my romantic life reads like cover copy for a splatterpunk novel: I sit in perpetual judgment.

Not something that chicks dig particularly.

According to the doctors, I suffer from something called “hyperthymestic syndrome.” You can pretty much ignore the “hyperthymestic” part-the real word to pay attention to is “syndrome.” It means the doctors have no bloody clue what the hell they’re talking about. Take “irritable bowel syndrome,” which my father suffers from (though he always insisted that Mom and I refer to it as the more palatable “IBS”). For some unknown reason, he bloats and cramps up, then farts and shits all day long-the most wretched-smelling things, too. Demonic.

Hyperthymestic syndrome is simply irritable bowel syndrome of the head: where my dad can’t dump his dumps properly, me, I can’t dump my memories properly.

I retain all the crap. Usually I grab the USA Today when I work at Jitters, more for appearance’s sake than to read, but the paper rack was empty. So I stared into my coffee like a knob-for some reason the shining black circle ringed in white porcelain calmed and centred me. Like my dingy version of a seaside horizon.

I stared, and it all came back to me with the ease of a daydream.

“She’s not a runaway,” I had said, looking up to meet the Bonjours’ gaze. “What is she? Nineteen? Twenty in this photo?”

“Nineteen,” Amanda replied in a small voice.

“And that would make her?”

“Twenty-one. She’s twenty-one now. “

I paused to take a sip. I noticed the deliberate way her voice walked around “would be” language when she talked about her daughter. Amanda Bonjour was a woman sustaining herself through resolution, and resolution alone. She had seized hope by the throat and wrestled it to the wall.

But this struck me as obvious. If there were nuances to be drawn out, they lay elsewhere.

“They call themselves the Framers,” she said.

“Never heard ofthem. What do they believe?”

The funny thing is that I rarely, if ever, catch the deeper nuances of my own words. I like to think that this is because I understand myself to the very bottom, but I know that this is what everybody thinks. After all, how can people mean things they don’t mean? It sounds paradoxical, I know, and yet we do it all the bloody time: these rehearsals would be exercises in futility if this weren’t the case.

“That the world,” Amanda replied, “this world, isn’t really… real.” Something in her tone suggested the eternal coincidence of stupid beliefs and stupid people.

Which was probably why my subsequent question, “Isn’t that religion in general?” touched a raw nerve.

“You explain it,” she said crossly to her husband. “Jon has a philosophy degree…”

Amanda Bonjour was religious. Even more, she had spent many an infuriating evening suffering her philosopher-husband’s bemused contempt. Jonathan Bonjour was not a believer. Could this have been a factor in their daughter’s subsequent defection? A mother fretting over her eternal soul, a father calling her stupid in a dozen indirect ways… Had Dead Jennifer simply been seeking the subversive in-between, the point guaranteed to maximally dismay both her parents?

“They’re one of those New Age, human potential things,” Jon Bonjour said. “What’s called a charismatic cult.”

His contemptuous incredulity seemed clear enough now.

“The leader’s name,” he continued, “is Xenophon Baars. “ Was there a note of personal hatred here? Had he met him on the trip to Ruddick his wife mentioned? If so, why wouldn’t he say as much? Most people put a premium on personal impressions.

That’s the thing about my business: everyone, but everyone, thinks they can do it themselves-until they try, that is. This isn’t to say that private investigating is brain surgery, but it’s more involved than your average home renovation project, if not in terms of the skills you need, then in terms of the consequences of your mistakes. Sure, most people are capable of foundation work, but if they get it wrong, the problems are nothing short of monstrous.