That’s when I realized: the insights or revelations that make you feel like you know are simply not to be trusted.
Epiphanies—true epiphanies—leave you sucking on the tailpipe of your own stupidity.
And I could feel it, my mental retardation, buzzing like a palpable thing. I lay there in my boxers, pinned to the mattress, my arms and legs stretched out, while I leaned back in my chair in Consultation Room 4 listening to Anson Williams say, “Sure. Who doesn’t talk about their parents? “
“You know what I mean,” I replied. “Did she ever talk about them? “
“Yuh,” he said.
Why? When he seemed relatively calm when it came to discussing Jennifer’s disappearance, why the hell was he so nervous about this?
“Why the reluctance, Anson? “
“Nah ... Just feels weird, you know. “
“She swear you to secrecy? “
“Yuh,” he said, nodding.
“The circumstances have changed, don’t you think? “
“Yuh.”
“Things couldn’t be any more radical. “
He chewed on his lower lip. “Suppose. “
Suppose? What the hell? At the time I assumed he had been filtering events through some Framer bullshit.
“Xen ...” Anson explained moments later. “He teaches us that we’re here to learn from all these ...”—a reflexive swallow—” things, you know? Sins, crimes ... What we suffer is secondary to the fact that we suffer, the meaning we take away from having endured. And because of this, he says we’re supposed to affirm, to affirm our lives in their entirety, to realize that not a moment, not a breath has been wasted... And she ... Jennifer, just... couldn’t... do this. “
Couldn’t ... That wasn’t what he had been about to say. He had hesitated because he had caught himself ... Because he had almost said can’t. Jennifer just can’t affirm what her father did to her.
Was he still holding out hope that she was alive?
“Nah ... Just feels weird, you know. “
Or did he somehow know she was alive? ... More life-after-death Framer bullshit?
I lay motionless across sex-tangled sheets, the centre of a slow-twisting pinwheel world. In the Compound courtyard I heard myself say, “She’s dead, Baars. You know that. “
“No, Mr. Manning. Quite the contrary ... What I know—know, Mr. Manning—is that mankind conquered death long, long ago. “
This time I focused on his eyes ... And there it was, the twinkling look of an inside joke.
He was playing me. He had been playing me all along. He knew all right, and not the way Three-Ball knew Jesus. He knew the way I knew my gun was at the bottom of the river ...
That was the joke.
Then it hit me. The crushing sense of failure and stupidity ...
The epiphany.
Dead Jennifer wasn’t dead. Christ, she wasn’t even fucking missing ... That was why Anson had been so reluctant to say anything about her being molested by her father: because he found himself pinched between theatrical and living obligations.
Because Jennifer Bonjour was in the next room.
The sun burned white through the curtains. The smoke from my
cigarette piled like hair toward the ceiling. A pang clawed into my throat. Even though I lay on my back, I hung there, hooked through the trachea. Then, click. The puzzle came together.
All of it. The fingers and toes. The Thirds. The papers. Even fucking CNN ...
Which was to say, Molly.
I lay in bed with a sheet sprawled across my midsection, and laughed long and hard. I laughed at my stupidity, at my heartbreak ...
I laughed at the sense of doom sponging through my veins.
He’s weak, sometimes, Disciple Manning.
He has his buttons like everyone else, triggers that get pulled now and again, by women, by failure, and by bad fucking news most of all. The clicks they make are the same, but the booms tend to be bigger.
So he has this kit stashed in the upholstery of his shitty car. Not much really. A Slurpee straw. A fold of tinfoil pouched by a few crystalline flakes. Rocks.
He sits hunched like a little boy on the corner of his bed. Kicks his Zippo with his thumb. Draws deep on the sizzling of joy and relief ... Score.
Fuck it, he tells himself, grinning as he sinks back. The mattress doesn’t seem so hard anymore.
Fuck it, he tells himself, smiling his famous sneering smile, laughing at his thoughts.
Look at Holmes...
He fucking injected that shit.
So there I sat soaking in relief and gratitude—transcendental gratitude. Renewed—I felt renewed, even if it was a drug-induced crock of shit. The biggest misconception squares have about drugs is that the highs have this poisonous taint, like the faint odour of rot in frying bacon. Not so.
Dopamine is dopamine, whether the brain has forgotten how to recycle it or not.
I studied the charcoal reflections in the television screen. A bulbous man sitting on the corner of a bed. A fish-eye motel room. Funny, I thought, all the ways reality reproduces itself. Monotonous, really.
I don’t remember picking up the remote control—sometimes my attention wanders, as I said. I thumbed my way through the gaudy parade of channels—ShamWow! and Obama commemorative coins and sports utility vehicles—and there it was, the ticker tag line of the minute, as real as CNN ...
JENNIFER BONJOUR: VICTIM OF CULT WAR?
Quickly replaced by,
LOCAL WHITE SUPREMACIST “CHURCH” IMPLICATED
And Baars’s smiling face, serene and centre-screen. From the willows slowly heaving in the breeze behind him, I knew he was standing in front of the Framer Compound. The sunlight played off his glasses in an eerie way, making them flash utterly white from time to time ...
Or was it crimson?
“You said you have a message for the American people?” the off-frame reporter asked.
“Yes,” Baars replied, so much humility compressed into his smile it could only be called smug. “Yes, I do. They need to know that these are the Final Days.”
“You mean that the world is about to end?”
“Yes, but not in the way you might think.”
The unseen reporter was on him in a click. “You think the sun is about to swallow up the world. That the world is billions of years older than it appears.”
This seemed to surprise him—an informed interviewer, imagine—but a quick blink was all he needed to reclaim his Vedic composure. His smile broadened as a chorus of shouts climbed in the sunlit background. Someone close cried out loud enough to be picked up on the interviewer’s microphone.
“It’s her! Jesus! It’s really her! “
I chortled in front of the little screen. This was news?
I saw her even before the cameraman had the presence of mind to redirect his shot. Even before her granular image found its way to the centre of the nation’s perspective, I knew. Slight and beautiful even in a wheelchair. Her hands and feet bound into bloody paws. Buddha smiling and heavy-lidded. Stevie pushed her into the photo-op sweet spot fairly glowing in his white uniform ...
Dead Jennifer.
A girl fucked up by a father fucked up by a bottle of bourbon—and the list goes on.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from her bandaged hands and feet. Now that was taking one for the team. Positively hardcore. They had the medical facilities at the Compound—the little episode with the dying stroke patient, Agatha, had demonstrated that. The only thing that confused me was what Nolen had said earlier: that the coroner thought the digits had been severed post mortem. And then I realized: they had been cut twice.
Remove them, leave them overnight, then cut them again closer to the knuckle.
Everything was pixilated madness on the screen. Voices shouted and battled. Only her name was intelligible, repeated over and over and over. A new tag line popped onto the bottom of the screen.
JENNIFER BONJOUR APPARENTLY ALIVE
Man, they had this breaking news thing down to a science.
And the world watches—why? Because the word is watching.
So please don’t tell me the media are sane.
I thought of Molly. I thought of Mandy. I wanted to weep, but all I could do was laugh. But my room, the prick, swallowed my hilarity whole. It was too shoddy not to be mean-spirited. A Holiday Inn would have joined in.
Someone—I couldn’t see who—had imposed some kind of order on the scrum. Baars had moved to Jennifer’s side. Now he spoke into at least a dozen microphones. You could just see her in the corner of the screen, gazing up with the adoration of a Republican’s wife.
“Yourwhole life,” he said in an evangelist’s tones, only sadder, wiser. “Your whole life you’ve been dogged by this feeling, this baseless faith that somehow, someway, you are more ... More than a grocery clerk, line worker, tax auditor, stonemason. More than your children, your husband or your wife. More than the slapstick you watch night after night parading across your TV. At some level, you already know what I am about to tell you.”
“And what might that be?” The CNN reporter’s voice rose above the fray of questions.
But Baars had moved beyond interviews and into the realm of religious calling. He was staring into my eyes now, peering through the fog of all the intervening cameras and transmissions—through the fog that was me. “I have lived ten thousand lives ten thousand times,” he explained. “I have dreamed across the ages, and so have you. I have been emperors and I have been slaves ...
“I have endured far more suffering than joy.”
A sad smile. A recognition.
“And so have you.. “
Was this some kind of trick? I turned to make sure he wasn’t sitting beside me. When I glanced back, a new tag line gleamed below his erudite image ...
XENOPHON BAARS MAKES STATEMENT
That was when he pulled the gun from beneath his white jacket. A Glock.
Cool.
Now that was a statement.
The cameraman fell backward in his scramble to escape the gun, but to his credit he managed to capture Baars, who suddenly seemed statuesque stretched across the open summer sky. The Glad Garbage Bag Man about to reveal the truth of human existence: certainty and stupidity are one and the same.
He moved with the grace of milk—it was quite remarkable really. He stretched out his left hand to the camera, as though holding back the ethereal hordes, while swinging the automatic in his right laterally, toward Jennifer’s joyous face.
They were on something, I realized. Some kind of drug—no different than me. Drugs have a way of recognizing each other.
The cameraman managed a haphazard zoom on the gun and the girl. I saw her lips move: “Elephant sh—”
I couldn’t hear the report because screams had overloaded the mike. But I saw it all, one thumping heartbeat: the flash, the puncture, the blowback of blood, even the shock wave rippling through her lips—all of it CGI-seamless.
I saw Xenophon Baars shoot his lover in the face.
Dead Jennifer.
Baars raised the automatic to his temple.
“All of us are here because we have chosen to stay,” he said, his voice background-noise thin yet somehow dreadfully clear against the ambient shouting. Everyone hears the man holding the gun. “All of us have chosen to die with our world ... “
The frame wobbled as the cameraman shimmied backward on his ass. You could hear the correspondent gasp, “You getting this? “ followed by a gravelly grunt in the affirmative.
“But some of us ...” Baars said with a beatific smile. And there was nothing frantic, nothing strained about his tone. He spoke the just-the- facts way cops do when they find themselves dragged onto the witness stand yet again. “Some of us do not want to die in our s/eep.”
The weapon popped—a pathetic sound, really. The screaming came through real clear, though.
Even still, the sound guy should have been canned.
The end was nigh, the eons-old machines preserving earth from its bloated sun were giving out, and Baars simply wanted to give everyone a chance to make peace with their existence. From his standpoint, he had done nothing more than take a surprise messianic turn in a video game ... A first-person shooter.
A part of me wanted to slip into the morgue that night and shake his dead hand. I mean, there was the Frame and then there was the frame. Brilliant, utterly insane, Xenophon Baars had managed to turn the world into his fucking bullhorn.
It was nothing short of ingenious. A missing hottie? A cult cold war?
Rock for the great media pipe. Pure. Uncut. This was Jim Jones without the body count. Heaven’s Gate on a hundred live feeds ...
I could see them plotting, Baars and a select group of his followers. I could hear Baars chastise the others for taking pleasure in the destruction of the Thirds at their enlightened hands. “They are simply exploring a different life,” he would say—some bullshit like that. I could see Jennifer cutting across the brownlands, sneaking into the Compound from the rear. And I could see that fucker Stevie, ever faithful, driving through town with his collection of little cages, a single wooden cross, and of course a zip-lock bag filled with Jennifer’s fingers and toes.
With material this sexy, all Baars needed was to catch the attention of a single editor to start his conflagration. All he needed was Molly Modano ...
“At the very least,” I had said, Amanda Bonjour needs to know her husband is a scumbag, don’t you think? “
She said nothing at first. Managing the truth required consideration.
“Disciple ... You can’t say anything. “
Because Jennifer was more than her “big break.” Jennifer was her friend. Her fellow Framer. And you don’t screw with the personal lives of your friends, do you? Not even at the end of the world.
“What if we don’t have time? What if...”
And me?
Well, Judge, you see, it was like this ...
I was framed.
I retrieved the photograph that Mandy had given me that day in my office: young Jennifer, innocent and sun-smiling, thumbs and fingers spread wide in a ta-da pose. I wedged it in the corner of the television screen, my own boxed insert—the only headline that mattered. I hit the mute button, listened to the traffic shivering through the walls. We stared at each other for a while. She did not blink.
“Dead,” I whispered, saying the word the way kids say “bad” to household pets.
Dead Jennifer.
Track Fourteen
ONE MORE ATROCITY TALE
The thing to remember about me is that I don’t forget ...
Anything.
Ever.
It all comes back, endlessly repeating, circumstances soaked in passion.
Love. Terror. Disgust. A life crushed in the wheels of perpetual reliving.
Write about it, my therapist says. Writing gives you “distance.”
Distance. Fawk.
A great thing, not forgetting. Makes writing real easy.
Almost as easy as going crazy.
I get this sense sometimes, typically when things get real weird, that I remember the future as vividly as I remember the past. In Iraq I swear I once dove before the mortar round landed. Good for me. Bad for two other absent-minded fools. Either way, I know that I looked at my cellphone where it sat artfully poised in relation to spilled change and crumpled receipts the instant before it began buzzing.
I’m sure Baars would have had an explanation.
“Disciple! Where are you? “
It was Molly, sounding as shrill as her skin had been smooth.
“Already at the airport, baby. Getting as far away from you crazy fuckers as I can.”
A strange noise, a kind of coughing, sobbing ... A sharp intake of breath.
“Disciple! Disciple, please! I know you’re lying. I know you’re still at the motel. Puh-pleaase! It—it’s horrible! I didn’t know! I swear I didn’t know! There—there’s no way I
would’ve... there’s just no fucking way! This is crazy! Please, Disciple. You have to tell me what’s going on. What’s going on?
I believed her, instantly and utterly. Baars had only told her enough, nothing more, nothing less. “A media hoax,” he called it. A way to wring enlightenment out of the instruments of mass delusion. Molly had been a conspirator, sure, but she had also been the biggest dupe of all.
It was a genuine moment of wonder for me. How long had it been since my ears had been so simple?
“Sorry, Molly. Big security guy, telling me to shut down my phone. You know how they are when it comes to security.”
“No! Disciple! Dis—”
I snapped my cell shut, set it across the loose change and coffee mug rings. I’m really not sure why I hung up. Just seemed safer that way.
Besides, back in my day, when you burned your ass, you sat on the blister.
I left the door slightly ajar so that it would simply swing open when she came knocking.
“I’ve been there,” she said, sobbing. “You have to believe me, Disciple! I’ve been there!”
The Occluded Frame.
“There’s no such thing, Molly.”
Her eyes are swollen and so am I.
“No. No. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
Rather than speak, I encircled her in my arms, brought her in from the summer cold. We made love because that was the basis of our relationship, our HQ, the place you retreat to when the mission goes wrong. I will relive this, I thought as she dipped and heaved above me, searching for a bliss that was long in coming. I will relive this a thousand times.
“You have to believe me, Disciple.”
She whispered this to me, as though armed patrols scoured the streets, as if floodlights streamed through the room’s windows.
“Baars,” I said. “He made you into a blank tablet. You know how hypnosis works ... “
But I knew my words were useless. She believed, just like you—like everybody.
It’s an instinct. Like fucking.
Afterward, we simply lay breathing, me on my back, her on her stomach. There was this sense that we had done all that could be done, here, in the shadow of a setting world. I imagined this was what critters do when their habitat collapses around them. Indulge and impregnate. Another litter to pick through the trash.
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