“No way what? For him to believe his own guff?”
“Sure, there’s that. But there’s also no way for him to not be manipulating these people. It’s at least as bad as L. Ron Hubbard. Worse! “
I drove in a state of blank absorption. It made a kind of dreadful sense, to be sure.
“Hey ... about the weed,,”he said, signalling super-cool, drunk Albert’s return. “You wouldn’t happen to have a ... you know, a number I could call or anything? ”
“Try Kimmy,” I said, knowing I needed to shrink-wrap this latest twist, save it for some future lull. “She should be getting off about now ... I’ll text you her number.”
I found Molly looking smart and forlorn on the corner of an intersection that seemed surprisingly urban. Three Ruddick cruisers blocked the street at angles, bathing the bricked-in spaces with rolling lights. A thin crowd of onlookers had gathered in clutches here and there on the sidewalks. But otherwise things seemed surprisingly sedate. Only one uniform was visible.
The first words out of her lips were, “Jack shack, huh?” “I’s got needs,” I said.
“Why do you do that? Why do you always lie when people ask you where you are?”
“Keeps me sharp,” I replied, surprised that she would have anything other than this latest twist on her mind. “Reminds me I’m a captive of the facts as the world presents them.”
“Weird, you know that?” she said, shaking her head. “You gotta be the strangest man I’ve ever known.”
“We should all be so lucky,” I said. Then, intentionally shifting gears, I added, “So which fingers are we talking about?”
“The index and bird fingers,” she said.
“Bird finger?”
“Yeah. You know.” She flipped me the bird.
I sometimes have this fear that the women I’m interested in are actually psychic, that they can see the truth of me all the way down to the grimy bottom but just play along because they like the attention. The superstition struck me like a bolt right then.
Molly filled me in on the rest of the details. The first finger had been found just a couple of blocks over, in the backyard of an old amputee—a Vietnam vet or something. Apparently by sheer dint of coincidence, the second had been called in less than an hour after, found by a bunch of high school kids who had “wandered into” the abandoned warehouse looming before us, “looking for a lost dog.”
One of Nolen’s men—a guy so tired he had to have been dragged off the day shift—barred the way, and refused to even discuss the matter with us, let alone let us past. So we just stood there, every bit as tired, cooling our heels. I studied the small crowd of onlookers, knowing the chances were good that our perp would be keen to survey the social consequences of his handiwork first-hand. I described the males to Molly in a low murmur, just to be sure they would stick ...
“Skinhead dude with forehead wrinkled like scrotum ...
“Soccer coach dreaming of teenage ass ...
“Punk who should sell me whatever it is he’s smoking ...
“Guy who looks like BO ... Yeesh, that fucker is ugly.”
It didn’t take much to get Molly laughing. Always makes me feel smug, killing two birds with one stone.
When Nolen finally came out, he looked ragged and more than a little shell-shocked. Dust feathered his left shoulder, and he seemed to have lost his cap. “The fingers are bagged,” he said, holding a hand out to pre-empt our questions. “We’re sending them to Pitt to get them DNA typed—just to be sure they belong to Jennifer. We also need to know whether they were cut from her while she was, ah, you know, alive ... But the doctor ...” Something caught in his throat, something that demanded to be swallowed. “Um, he seems to think the cuts were, ah ... well, post-mortem.”
This occasioned a moment of silence. Laughter warbled from a group of kids assembled on a nearby corner.
“What about the scenes?” Molly pressed. “Could you let us check out the scenes?”
“Scenes? You mean where we found the fingers?”
“Ofcourse,” she said, with enough exasperation to earn a gentle elbow in the ribs from me. You have to be careful with people like Nolen, I had learned, not because they could be prickly, but because they were unlikely to take offence. Some people are so dispositionally agreeable that the urge to take liberties is well-nigh irresistible. The sad fact is that people primarily harass others not because the others deserve to be harassed but because they can. The easier a guy is to bully, the more likely we are to invent reasons why he needs to be bullied. Often our fuse is long or short depending on what we unconsciously think we can get away with.
“Not much anything to see,” he said, scratching the back of his head.
“So no notes?” Molly asked.
“Notes?”
“Yeah.” Again the telltale impatience. “You know, like ransom demands or anything.”
“‘Fraid not. Just fingers in these queer little cages.”
“Cages?” Molly asked in a ragged voice. Things were just beginning to sink in for her, I could tell.
Nolen shrugged. “Yeah. You know, like to keep them from getting snatched by wildlife or something.”
“To make sure they would be found,” I said.
Fawk.
Guitars crunched from my pants pocket. Another call. Kimberley this time, probably calling to bitch me out for telling Albert she could hook him up. I didn’t answer. As it was, Molly was all over me about leaning on Nolen to let us check out the two places—as bad as an ex-wife carping about child support.
“Get used to it,” I said. “This is the way it works for people like you and me. Most of the time you’re stuck on the outside looking in.”
“But what if there’s any, you know, clues ?”
The thing about popular misconceptions, I’ve found, is that they typically involve people knowing more rather than less. We always know less than we think. We always control less than we hope. Even forensics is so hit-and-miss that there’s a real question as to whether it should be called a science.
“You were watching CSI again tonight, weren’t you?”
I took the fact that she said nothing as a big fat yes.
A moment of silence passed between us, one that seemed to cement the fact that we were stranded on a cracked sidewalk, walled in by dead brick buildings. Funny, the way you can just sense things, like how late it is by how cool the cement is ... I felt a distinct absence of daytime heat.
“What are the chances?” she asked in a numb voice I had never heard before. My second therapist once told me that this was why I womanized—not because I was carrying out some ancient evolutionary program to spread the sperm, but because I could only love women when they were new.
I found myself gazing at Molly, arrested by her profile in the oscillation of red and blue lights. “Chances?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” she said, blinking tears before turning to me. “You know ... that the fingers belong to Jennifer.”
“You’re serious?” I asked. I managed a sombre shrug even though I wanted to laugh. “A town this size? ... Things ain’t looking so good, Molls.”
“So she’s ... shes ...”
“Of course she is.”
We were dog-tired by the time we got back to the motel. Call me weird, but I found the act of driving with her in separate cars powerfully erotic—like road rage turned on its head. Road lust. My heart muscled through the seconds we spent saying nothing while standing in the gap between our motel room doors. I couldn’t resist grinning yippee! when she followed me ...
She made an act of it, as though she were just too goddamned tired to resist my relentless advances. But the fact was, she wanted it, maybe even needed it. Who’s to say? Most of the time I’m just stumped when it comes to the reasons women—especially beautiful ones like Molly— condescend to sleep with me. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t have any staying power.
We kissed, in that long way that makes magic of fumbling hands and fi
ngers. There’s glory in feminine yielding, in the shyness of a woman still unnerved by her desire. We flopped like two tangled ropes across the bed. I pressed her onto her back, snuggled my pelvis between her legs, and without warning she gasped, “Wait-wait! What’s your favourite band?”
“Um ... huh?”
“You can tell a lot about a man,” she sighed.
Believe it or not, I was utterly unsurprised. It could have been the exhaustion, I suppose, but the fact was I had been asked plenty of things by plenty of women the moment before first contact. Loopy things.
“Monster Magnet,” I said.
“Never heard of them. What’s their thing?”
“I dunno. Comic books and metaphysics ...”
She frowned in a This-feels-too-too-good way. “I’m ... I’m not sure ... What’s your second favourite band?” “Tool.”
“Tool? Eew. I ... ah ... hate ... “
I was grinding against her now, slow and languorous. “But Tool loves you,” I said, grinning like a cat pinning a budgie. “Tool loves you long time, baby.”
She laughed, groaned. “You idiot ... How can you ...” She exhaled, like I was a birthday candle or something. Score.
I woke up in the middle of the night, the way I always seem to do. Molly lay tangled in the sheets, splayed like her parachute had failed to open. I clicked on the TV with the volume muted, scrounged my bag of weed. I sat upright in the surgical light, watching the drip of soundless images across the screen while rolling a fat one. Her voice startled me. “What’s it like?”
Her face was still squashed into her pillow. For all the world I had thought she was sleeping.
“Sticky,” I said, spinning the doob into a perfect cylinder. “Skunky ... Everything weed should be.”
The pillow scrunched her smile into her cheek. “No ...” she said, rolling onto her back. She brushed her hair from her face with a groggy hand. “What’s it like being you?”
I inhaled. Like cigarettes, joints buy you several seconds to cook something up when a chick asks you a hard question. Time I squandered for some reason.
“Hard ... sometimes.”
“Why?” she asked, staring at the ceiling. Televised colours danced across the cheap stucco swirls.
I exhaled a ghostly horn of smoke across our legs, shrugged. “You know the radio, how they play the same hit parade over and over?”
“Sure. That’s why I got satellite in my rental.”
“Well, I have a hit parade all my own.”
She turned to gaze at my profile. “Memories,” she said. “You mean memories.”
“The thing is, it’s the bad ones that stick. And I don’t mean like a hazy flash of images, but moments of ... of reliving, I guess. With the smells, the surge of emotion ... like a miniature dream or something.”
“Can you give me an example?”
I was afraid she was going to ask that.
“Like ... well ... your eyes, they remind me of my mother, so sometimes when I look at you, I’m also sitting in my folks’ kitchen, and my mom, she’s at the sink grabbing me some tea. And there’s this fly walking across the window’s reflection in the counter, you know, like it’s pacing out a treasure map in fast motion, fifteen paces this way, stop, twenty paces that way, stop. And Mom,, she’s smiling—she always had a sunny disposition, my mom, always giving me the gears about being negative—well, she’s smiling and looking out the window, and I notice there’s tears in her eyes. So I say, ‘Whazzup, Mom?’ and she turns to me, blinks a couple of diamonds, grins her best You’re-such-a-good-boy grin, and says, ‘I have cancer, Disciple. They say I have only a few months.’”
“Oh gawd ...” Molly whispered.
“And that’s one of the love songs.”
Track Eight
SHRINKAGE
Friday...
Breakfast was tasty and numb. Circumstances have caught me being glib or flip too many times for this latest twist to rattle me all that much. A go-figure attitude was about as chastised as I could get.
Besides, like I told you, I already knew that Jennifer Bonjour was dead.
But Molly seemed about a pubic hair away from devastation. That’s the thing about youth: your hopes fly high when you lack the ballast of experience. Life has a way of stuffing our pockets with sand. Of course she had her catechism of low expectations like the rest of us, that sense of superstitious doom that prevents people from celebrating the purchase of lottery tickets. But at some profound level she had thought that everything ruly-truly would unfold according to fantastic plan. That Jennifer Bonjour would be found bruised and dehydrated, that some unassuming villain would be apprehended, and that her hair-raising story would vault Molly Modano into the heights of print celebrity. Yet one more Barbie-doll Ordeal welded into the public imagination.
Now here she was: ambition meets the mortician.
“How could the doctor tell?” she asked.
“Tell what?”
“That her fingers had been cut from her after she was dead.”
“Not sure. Something to do with the way the tissue sheers? I know that blood settles in the body when the heart stops ... Maybe the cut was blood free.”
She frowned at her bacon. “We don’t know it was her, though ... Not for sure.”
“Molls ...”
She continued eating in silence. I thought about all the things I could say, all the pearls of cynical wisdom I could shuck from my brain. But I could tell she was hurting for real, and not simply because of this latest macabre turn. Last night she had sought comfort in my arms, and my fear was that she had caught a whiff of the reaper. They always do, sooner or later. If it wasn’t my wrists, it was my look. I was a man with one too many scars.
So, I waited until she finished her eggs, then tossed the folder I had brought. It whisked to a stop before her.
“What’s this?”
“I want you to read to me.” Truth is, I would have asked her to read it to me no matter what, but since she so obviously required some kind of distraction, I told myself this was the reason all along.
“Huh?”
“A copy of Anson Williams’s statement to Nolen.”
The Framer Compound looked like a Star Trek convention. About two dozen people milled about and beneath the giant willows out front, all of them dressed in variations of the same uniforms I had seen on my first visit. The women outnumbered the men by about two to one, which made me wonder whether Jennifer might have found herself on the wrong point of a love triangle. The ages were almost uniformly young, but the ethnic and racial diversity would have put an after-school special to shame.
I must have arrived between classes.
I cranked my stereo to garner attention—some vintage Iron Maiden. Most everyone paused mid-polite-conversation to glance at me as I rattled by. Smiling beneath my shades, I shot them the live-long-and- prosper hand sign.
I had called in advance, and had been greeted with the same air of formal, almost corporate compliance as on my last visit. Stevie stood waiting as I climbed out of my Golf into a haze of summer dust.
“Like the new suit,” I called out as I approached the glass door. He was wearing the identical white uniform of course. He scowled but said nothing as I ducked past him into the air-conditioned interior.
“What’s with the crowd out front?”
“Sometimes Xen likes to teach out of doors ...” He glanced at me with those cold, superior eyes of his. “Beneath the sun ... the real sun.”
“Huh,” I replied. “Tell me, can you get an invisible sunburn from an invisible sun?”
Stevie ignored the question. Rude prick.
“I suppose you have invisible sunscreen for that ... “
This time he led me around a bend and then down a long hallway that sported windows with melancholy glimpses of the far, shadowed side of the Compound, and a series of doors labelled Consultation Room 1 and so on. Expressionless, Stevie asked me to take a seat in Consultation Room 4.
“So the SPF must be, like, a million or something,” I said.
He left, teeth clamped tight behind a phony smile. I sat humming a Whitesnake tune I heard on the drive, wondering where Baars found all his money ...
What’s the overhead on New Age cults these days?
Anson Williams wasn’t long in arriving.
“Is it true, what they say? That they’ve found one ... one of her fingers?”
Like pretty much everyone I had met so far, Anson defied my expectations. His face was broad, his gaze at once direct and friendly. He was tall, though somewhat pudgy through the middle, nerdy despite the cropped dreads twigging his head. After five minutes of listening to his meek and smoky voice I knew he had nothing to do with Jennifer’s disappearance. He was the kind of guy who felt guilty cleaning out his friends in poker. One of those good-looking putzes.
“They’ve found a severed human finger,” I replied, “most likely female. Otherwise, nothing’s for sure.”
“But ...” He trailed off, fixed me with a look I had seen twenty-seven times before, one peculiar to the bereaved: a kind of horrified-sorting- through-sensations look, as though trying to locate a bullet wound with your hands tied.
“Look, Anson, I’ve done this before. Sometimes things are straightforward. Sometimes they go sideways. The best way to move forward is to simply stay on course. Wait until the facts come in.”
He bit his lip and nodded. I started with my questions, sensitivities be damned.
Like Jennifer, Anson had come to the Framers by way of the internet. At first he had laughed at the claims, but after listening to Baars’s podcasts he became more and more intrigued. At any given point in time, he explained, some six or seven full members toured the country, meeting with longdistance associates, giving seminars to potential recruits, and offering, via hypnosis, a glimpse into the Frame—the world as it really was five billion years from the present. Outreachers, they called them. Evidently the Compound was more than a retreat; it was a base of operations as well.
Anson was hypnotized by an Outreacher named Cassie Guerin on January 11, 2005. Three days later he withdrew from all his courses at TSU and, to the enduring dismay of his parents (both of whom worked for NASA down in Huntsville, Alabama), moved into the Framer Compound to study with Baars.
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