R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

“We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language. ”

This struck me as a solid enough rationale, but there was something that nagged me-something too pat. It was as crisp as a legal brief. Even the delivery struck me as premeditated-I could almost see Bonjour coaching his wife as they circled the block looking for a place to park.

“Remember, if he asks…

“You don’t know these people like I…

“You have to manage them, Mandy. Jesus! Stop being so fucking naive!

“Do you want to find Jennifer? Huh?

“Do you want to find our girl or not? Our baby girl.!” See, for you it’s all a mush, the past. It all fades into soup. This is why you wake up every morning feeling renewed. Not me, ever. Waking up is more like a clerical exercise. This is why other people come to you as a haze of implicit associations, some good, some bad-we humans tend to be a mixed bag. For me, others arrive like half-unravelled balls of chronological yarn. People are never simply… themselves.

Either that or they’re more themselves than they know.

If I knew you well, I quite literally would know you better than you know yourself. I could go on for days telling you stuff that you had forgotten about yourself. And I could make you cry with my observations.

And this is the thing: where you see acts, I see repetitions, and where you see people-yourself included-I see repeaters. You really have no idea how much we repeat. Even when we manage to defy expectations, we’re like children: unpredictable in unsurprising ways. Those repetitions you’re aware of you call habits or routines, very human-sounding terms, connoting warmth and security, and in no way, shape, or form contradicting agency, the possibility of breaking free. But this is simply a trick of your limited perspective. Everything looks like insects if you pan back far enough-people included.

And you wonder why I’m cynical. I’ve literally “seen it all before.” The truth is we all have, every single one of us past the age of, say, twenty-five. The only difference is that I remember.

This is probably why the hook set so deep-why I fell in love with Dead Jennifer. This case was unlike anything I had seen.

And like all addictive drugs, it promised something more profound than bliss…

Forgetfulness. I found myself staring across Jitters in a blinking stupor. Somehow ebb had become flow without me even noticing: the place was buzzing with patrons. Four old ladies next to me were laughing so hard that two of them were pawing their purses for tissue. Something sly and embarrassed in their expressions shouted dirty joke. I stood, squeezed past three young men who had to be Mormons-they were too squeaky clean otherwise. I felt like asking them what the trick was, believing in things that made archaeologists sigh and look to heaven.

I paused outside the entrance, imagined what the sky would look like if all you could see was bloated sun. I grabbed my Zippo, lit a cigarette. I savoured the smoke: blue slipping in, grey piling out. I wondered at that, the change in colour. I thought of the blue soaking into my lungs, swirling into my bloodstream, saturating my brain.

Beautiful blue. Like a second lens, it always had a way of drawing things into sharper focus.

Something was up. There was something slippery about Jonathan Bonjour, something that utterly eluded his wife.

I know it sounds implausible. Memory tricks aside, how could I detect something in a single sitting that Amanda Bonjour had never glimpsed in years of marriage?

It’s just the way. It’s not simply that familiarity blinds-and it does, catastrophically-it’s a Mars-Venus thing as well. The bulk of the male and female bandwidths may overlap, but there’s always a small range of gender-specific frequencies, things that only men can pick up in other men, and that only women are sensitive to in other women.

Jonathan Bonjour had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. I was almost certain of it.

Or maybe it was just an excuse to light another smoke. I slipped on my shades and began walking. It made me feel smart, wringing the blue out of the smoke.

I was just a few packs away from one hundred thousand cigarettes. Happy times. Track Four

Tuesday… Some prick driving one of those big-ass SUVs cut me off about an hour or so outside of Ruddick. I had just answered a call from Kimberley, so I apologized to her and rolled down the window-one of those manual cocksuckers. The wind dragged hot and oily across my face. I leaned on the horn to secure the guy’s attention-he was little more than a forehead over the rim of his passenger door-then shouted a friendly, “Dirty-mother-fucker!”

Now in the good old days, he would have rolled down his window and shouted back, something about my after-tax income, perhaps. Instead, he welded his eyes forward and gunned his behemoth. Anyone crazy enough to pick a road fight while driving an ancient Volkswagen Golf, he probably reasoned, had to have a gun in his glove compartment.

Which I did: an illegal Colt.45 automatic taped beneath a false bottom-a government model, no less. But still I found myself resenting the assumption.

“You’re driving?” Kimberley said when I picked the cell back up. “I thought you said you had stopped at a diner. ” Despite the roar of the road, I heard her draw on a cigarette.

“Are you smoking in the office?”

“No. I’m in the copy room. ”

“There’s no phone in the copy room.”

Another draw-nothing communicates impatience quite like a cigarette. “I’m. In. The copy room,”she repeated with Don’t-you-dare- start-with-me obstinacy.

I didn’t. I wanted to-I had told her precisely eleven times how alienating non-smokers found the smell of cigarettes, how she was literally driving away business. Each time she just shrugged and said, “I don’t smell anything.” Amazing really, when you think about it, how much you’ll put up with for a piece of ass.

So instead I asked, “What do you want?”

Another puffing pause. “That Chiefthing-a-ma-jingi called for you.”

“Nolen called?”

“Yup.”

“What did he want?”

“You. He wants you to come to his office as soon as you get into town.”

The Bonjours must have gotten busy with that list I gave them. Real people are like that.

“Cool… Love you, babe.”

I tossed the cell onto the passenger seat, rubbed the bridge of my nose beneath my shades. In my mind’s eye I could see the frustration in Kimberley’s look, the anger and the hurt as she sat all alone in the office. Solitude weighs heavier on strippers than most. I shook away the image simply because I breeze past things I don’t like. I make like everything is popcorn, knowing that few things are more powerful than a relentless good nature. I hurt people, knowing they will hide that hurt simply because the gag must go on.

Still, I knew I had to do something-and soon. She was in love with me. Like, totally. The drive into Ruddick was interesting. The first curious thing I noticed was that the speed limit dropped about a mile or so before you would think it should. Cracked sidewalks trimmed either side of the road, and side streets divided it at intervals you would expect in a circa-1950s subdivision, but there were no houses, only overgrown lots staked here and there by the odd lonely tree. The place was starting to remind me of Detroit.

I saw a dead squirrel, a shiny yellow toy knotted in weeds, a kid pounding dirt with a hammer. I even saw some small-town graffiti, FUCK UP NOT DOWN, scrawled across a houseless foundation. Things I needed to forget yet would always remember. You have to be prepared for the sudden onslaught of physics while driving-I know this better than most people-and yet my eyes perpetually flick this way and that, scoping out ass and other oddities.