R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

“What do you mean by ‘extreme’?”

“They think the world is about to end,”Jonathan Bonjour said.

“And?”

“Five billion years from now…”

“You mean when the sun swallows us up?”

“Exactly. This Baars has convinced his followers that the world is more than five billion years older than it is. And that it’s about to end.”

I would have to do some research. The Bonjours’ suspicions were clear enough, and for obvious reasons. Xenophon Baars was crazy-there could be no doubt about that. But what was more, he was a liar who was wholly invested in his lies. Not only did he have the capacity for murder, he could very well possess the incentive as well. Any number of scenarios suggested themselves: jealousy run rampant in the fucked-up sexual economy of the Framers’ compound, a lunatic sacrificial offering to some great X-that-must-be-appeased, threats to go to the authorities over a glimpsed weapons cache, a sexual assault, a prior conviction… These people believed the world was five billion years older than it was- who could say what kinds of crazy acts would fit the mad puzzle of their beliefs? Who could say what they considered sinful?

Or how they punished sinners. Once, during a particularly nasty fight, an old biology undergrad girlfriend of mine, Sandra Ho, accused me of thinking I was the next phase in human evolution, something which has never been true, not then, not now. If anything, I think I’m an evolutionary throwback, proof positive that all humans have the capacity to remember most everything, a capacity that evolution has since shut down. Too many hominid suicides, perhaps. Either that or too many hominid arguments with hominid girlfriends-who knows? I told her as much. She accused me of lying to make her feel small. I accused her of accusing me of lying to make her feel small to make me feel small. And so it goes.

That was May 19, 1998, around 3 P.M. A bad day.

The relationship didn’t last. None of them do. Could you imagine trying to argue with someone who could actually remember who said what when? Or who could always remember, perhaps even especially remember, all the hard things we say on the hateful fly?

There’s no forgiveness without forgetting, trust me.

The fact is, the longer I know someone, the more difficult I find it to talk to them. Part of it has to do with distraction: it’s bloody hard to juggle a conversation with a thousand pellets of memory.

I much prefer the company of strangers.

Or the dead, like Jennifer. “How would you characterize your relationship?”

“What do you mean?” Amanda had asked. I could see now that this was simply a bid for time to formulate a response.

“Your relationship with Jennifer. Was it loving or, ah… troubled?”

“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” Jon Bonjour said to his wife. This time around I clearly heard a Remember- what-we-d,iscussed tone. And just like that, I realized how anxious he was to police his wife’s responses.

“Troubled,” Amanda said. “Troubled. ”

“Not abusive,” Jon Bonjour interjected. “There’s troubled and then there- ”

“I’m sure Mr. Manning re- ”

I paused, trying to get a fix on her expression. It would be wrong to think of these rehearsals like video replays, because they aren’t. In fact, they’re almost impossible to describe. It’s not like there’s a little me reviewing it all in a little theatre in my head-how could there be when I’m both the screen and the audience? I mean, the memories are imagistic in a sense, a very fleeting sense-but they’re more like a kind of raw knowledge, things I just know.

The voices, though, they almost seem like sounds.

“I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea!”

“And what idea would that be, Mr. Bonjour?”

“Jon slapped her,” Amanda Bonjour said in a tone meant either to demonstrate or to humiliate. “The last… fight we had. Jon slapped… her. “

Her husband snuffled. “I… ah… I… I don’t know what to say…”

My mind always plays this trick when I recollect emotionally intense moments. A reptilian coldness soaks the scene, a kind of psychic air conditioning, one that makes me think of museums for some reason. I’ve never quite figured out why.

“Jonny blames himself,”Amanda said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault. “ I had no doubt that she believed what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, nothing mattered except finding her daughter. The question was whether her husband believed what she was saying. Where her agenda came across as arrow-straight and unrelenting, his seemed decidedly bushy.

“I appreciate your honesty,” I said. Though I rarely gain any self-insight from these sessions, I am often nagged by a sense of foolishness, like hearing your voice on someone else’s answering machine. I’ve learned that no matter how thoroughly you think you’ve mastered the moment, everything is naivete in retrospect. Everything. “Mostpeople try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served ifthey come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth. “ I had leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. “You do understand that?”

A twitch across the fat of his face. Anger, deep enough to rattle the hustings. “Of course,”he said. What was this? Pride? Was he simply the kind of man who resented others for witnessing his weakness? Or was there something more?

“I have one last question, for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour. Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not?”

“I’m not sure I understand. ”I had registered his shock the first time, the squint as he tried to remember whether he had told me he was a lawyer. What I had missed was the hunted look in his eye-the apprehension. He had come to me thinking I was a nickle-and-dime hack, that much was clear. But this… this made me think he needed me to be a fool.

“Stuff like this… personal stuff with consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine… such stuff requires rust. Why wouldn’t you go to people you know?”

“This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. The fact that she was the Prime Mover would have been significant if women weren’t so often the motivating force behind these visits. Men tended to bring the same macho reluctance to my office as they did to marriage counsellors. Hunting was a man’s job. Avenging even more so.

“Even still…”

Mr. Bonjour intervened-once again to explain himself. “No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather…jaded… “ The irony was just as thick the second time. Rich.

“And?”

“Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience. ” And what kind of experience would that be? Bonjour had the pudgy look of a divorce lawyer-a soft-skinned shark. Criminal attorneys tend to have more leather in their mien. They like to lean forward when they talk. Not Bonjour. He was a slumper: I suppose sucking mortgage payments out of broken marriages could do that.

“But it’s not just that,” Amanda added nervously. “You see… Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are… well, more like you.”Why did this bug me so much, the fact that he had already pissed in the investigatory soup? You’d think I’d be used to cleaning up behind amateurs.

“Like me?”As was so often the case during these rehearsals, I felt my face take on my past expression: a rueful smile. Apparently this was what had sparked the several complaints Michelle had received over the years: a crazy man making faces at his coffee cup. “You mean socio-economically disadvantaged.”