The Disciple of the Dog

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Hi, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. I’m going round town to take up a collection for the Bonjour family, to help pay for a private investigator to look into their daughter’s disappearance.”

  “Oh. Oh my. Yes, I saw that on the news ... Horrible.”

  And then I did what I always did: I struck up conversations.

  My version of a spring thaw.

  “What are you doing?” Molly finally cried in a shrill Enough-is-fucking- enough voice.

  She had seemed placid enough sitting there in the passenger seat, watching me empty the cash from the envelope and load up my otherwise lean wallet.

  “Read between the lines,” I said, enumerating my take: 174 bucks. Not bad for a morning’s work. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you?”

  “What?What? That doesn’t even make fucking sense!”

  “Not to you, obviously.”

  She made this face.

  Because I have this problem when it comes to forgetting, I carve the world along different joints. I literally see things you would call ephemera as objects unto themselves, so to speak. So passing expressions that you simply notice then forget have an existence all of their own for me—to the point where it sometimes seems like it’s the person who’s ephemeral.

  In Molly’s case it was Classic Feminine Disgust: a subtle yet heady blend of exasperation, frustration, and a kind of why-me outrage, as if the problem wasn’t so much men as the fact that they couldn’t stop loving them—us. As it so happened, Classic Feminine Disgust was an old friend of mine, so much so I caught myself saying, “How you doing?”

  But she was gone, replaced with Atypical Bewildered Fury—another old friend. She almost rolled her eyes back into her head, made a mouth that said Hide the knives, honey.

  “How am I doing?” she cried. “How am I doing? I’m stranded with a psychopath who’s conned me into being an accessory to fraud. How the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

  Redheads. Sheesh.

  “Fraud? This is how I work all my missing persons.”

  “I suppose you call this ‘fact-finding.’ Is that it?” The sarcasm she poured into her air quotes stung for some reason. I’m never surprised when I’m misunderstood—Christ, I’m rarely surprised period. But the resentment never seems to go away.

  “Fact-finding. Sure. Good a name as any.”

  “So where’s your tape recorder? Huh? Where are your notes?”

  I shot her a nose-crinkling look, pointed to my bean.

  “Please,” she said. She had the air of someone realizing they’ve been conned after signing the papers.

  “Seriously. I remember things.”

  “Oh yah,” she said in that Whatever-you-lying-son-of-a-bitch voice.

  I shook my head, reached back to pull a joint from my rucksack. With so many old friends dropping by, I figured we should turn it into a party. I sparked the thing while she watched in horror, took a deep and most gratifying haul.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said in that voice tokers use to keep their cough pinned to the mat. I offered her the joint, but her look was a lethal Get-that-shit-out-of-my-face. Up. Tight. Oh well, more for me. I really needed to be stoned at that instant. I mean really really ...

  “No, Disciple. I do not believe you.”

  And so, my brain soaking in sweet-leaf lubricant, I showed her. It’s remarkable when you think about it. I mean, if people can recognize a thing like a conversation, it means it has to be a// in there somewhere, doesn’t it? Which begs the question: where does it all go, our intelligence? I gave her names and addresses, then a verbatim recital of what was said. I even mimicked the way old Mrs. Toews raised a self-conscious finger to cover her old-maid-stache, or how Big John Recchi always wagged his head no as he was agreeing with you.

  I’m not sure dumbfounded is a heavy enough word to describe the expression on her face.

  I grinned my best Ubermensch grin, tapped my temple with a witty-witty finger. “Wait till you see my dick,” I told her. I wasn’t kidding.

  But she laughed anyway—laughed hard.. She kind of sounded like a horse, but it was intoxicating all the same. I decided that I liked Molly Modano.

  She had good taste in men.

  Molly had a million questions. They always do. She had this way of rolling her head as she talked, kind of like an animated holding pattern, neither a nod nor a shake, but endless prepping in the in-between. Her eyes flashed green and blue.

  There were several You-mean-absolutely-everything?s. A couple of God- my-brain-is-such-a-sieves. And of course the inevitable Too-cools.

  To which I eventually replied, “Not really.”

  Then suddenly she said, “Ohmigod. You’ve heard all this shit before, haven’t you? Like a million times—only you don’t forget, do you? It must sound so ... so stale ...”

  And there it was, another old friend staring out from her face, just as female as all the others: Pure Feminine Compassion.

  “No wonder,” she said, turning to gaze out the passenger window. “No fucking wonder.”

  I simply stared at the street, signalled and turned, signalled and turned.

  Some friends demand silence.

  I always expect most of the doors to be dead when I do this on a weekday. But the fact is, a tremendous number of people actually stay at home all day long. How they make their living is a mystery to me— one of the government’s infinite entitlements, I suppose. Disability. Unemployment. Social Security. Alimony. Cyber-crime. You would expect them to be rude, treat door-to-door cold-callers with the contempt they deserve, but a substantial proportion of them actually seem to be pleased. It gets pretty lonely scratching your balls on the couch all day, I guess.

  They all squint: this is universal. Almost all of them clear their throats—the sludge of not talking. Most are wearing something comfy and informal, though you would be surprised how many people get dolled up to do nothing. Lots of stubble on lots of chins. A couple of hairy female armpits. The odd whiff of reefer. The glimpse of Nintendo on pause in the living room. Some are pleasant. Some are gruff. Some are indifferent, while others are actively hostile. One guy actually had his rifle hugged to his chest, which was alarming in its own right. When combined with his Are-you-an-earthling? peer, it was nothing short of terrifying.

  The next time you drive through your neighbourhood, take a look around, remind yourself of all the fucking lunatics living in your midst. Seriously. Unlike that cocksucker Baars, I have no clue whatsoever what we humans are up to as a species. I only know what we aren’t.

  Like healthy, for instance.

  Molly was particularly surprised by how many people had heard nothing whatsoever about Jennifer Bonjour. I had expected it. I’d learned from earlier expeditions—different people missing in different ways— that a good proportion of the population pay no attention whatsoever to what happens locally. If they crawl out of their video-game-soap-opera- horror-movie world at all, they typically sit vegging to Fox or CNN, soaking up abstract enormities to the exclusion of the struggles next door.

  Same as me, actually.

  She seemed scandalized, whereas I was torn—well, not torn (I would have to give a shit for that), but “of two minds,” let’s say. Speaking to them was a waste of time, of course, but they did tend to make larger than average “contributions,” and I had expenses to cover, like the ten skins I had lost in Atlantic City a couple of weeks previously, not to mention my long-standing massage parlour addiction. Fucking vampires.

  Tragic news is kind of like Twinkies that way: better fresh.

  I imagine someone like Molly would say that you “meet all types” or some such after doing this for a while. Not me. The thing that always strikes me is just how alike people are—variations on a theme, no different than their yards and their houses. I know there seems to be an enormous difference between a morbidly obese housewife, her jowls caked with cover-up, and a string-bean teenager with a fading hard-on, but only if you can conveniently forget all the trans
itional species in between—which I cannot. I tend to see people with the eye I imagine a dog breeder must take to canines: sharp enough to discriminate the fine- grain differences, broad enough to see them as expressions of the same basic set of genes.

  Humans. Fawk. Whether it’s the environment or a hand-washing OCD, their concerns pretty much all amount to the same thing: saving their asses.

  The only people I spent any length of time talking to were those who claimed to have seen Dead Jennifer before she went missing. There was this cashier at the local Kroger who checked her groceries several times when the Framers came in for their once-a-week communal shop. “To be honest, I always thought she had, you know, airs about her.” There was the rickety old Jehovah’s Witness who had tried to save her soul one morning at the Waffle House. “You know what she told me?” the stingy old bitch said, handing me a quarter that gleamed a sinister digestive-tract green. “She told me man had outgrown salvation. OutgrownP There was the war vet who used to ogle her at the wheelchair-accessible library. “I like to think if I had a daughter ...” Several of them in all, and no matter how much they tsk-tsked, you couldn’t shake the feeling that they were secretly thrilled to have landed a glancing blow on a real honest-to-God mystery.

  Small towns. You gotta love them.

  Just about everyone asked me about the investigation. I uniformly lied through my teeth, told them I knew next to nothing except that everyone seemed to suspect the Framers. The responses were predictable, ranging from “Yeah ... What is it they believe again?” indifference to bald-faced declarations of bigotry. This one guy, Phil “the Pill” Conroy of 93 Inkerman Street, asked me if I had heard of pogroms before. “I tell ya,” he pronounced in a liquored grunt, “that’s what we need—what this country needs. Some kinda reckoning.”

  The prick didn’t give me a dime, of course.

  The consensus seemed to be that the Framers were a symptom of things gone wrong, a disease of the body social, as if America had rolled out of bed one morning to find boils marring its clear white skin. Where was the ideological Clearasil? Fawk. There was also the implication that we had lost our nerve more than our way. Of course, not one of them could tell me what the Framers actually believed—only that they believed wrong. And even though I knew that these kinds of judgments were simply the brain’s version of the gag reflex, something compulsive and inevitable, I found myself nodding and then nodding some more.

  Siding with the simple and the confused.

  Suddenly I understood why Baars had taken me to see old Agatha. He knew full well what he was up against. He knew he would be swimming against the tribal tide.

  Heretics are doomed to be burned. In the fires of the imagination, if not otherwise.

  Molly fairly radiated disapproval: she was put off by all fraud, apparently, even when as petty and as ingenious as mine. But I could tell she had been chastised by my earlier demonstration. There was more to me than could be easily scavenged by her journalistic eye. I could even glimpse it every once in a while, shining in her wayward looks ...

  Respect.

  We discussed our day at the diner that evening, weary and footsore. Exhaustion tends to clear the workbench of communication, at least when it doesn’t clear everything away altogether. You can sit and talk like Vulcans, always on topic, always moving forward, without the baggage of lust and hurt. We had our pious moments, sure, where we congratulated ourselves for being thin or urban or intelligent—but then that’s simply par for the human course, being better than everybody else.

  “So what do you think?” I asked while still blinking at the fluorescent lighting.

  “Creepy.”

  “Creepy? How so?”

  “I kept pricking my ears at, like, every house we went to, thinking I would hear a moan or a ... a cry or something. I kept telling myself that she had to be in someone’s basement somewhere. Every place. It was like a compulsion or something. I just couldn’t stop.”

  What she described sounded like a typical reaction, a natural way for an average imagination to screw with a normal head. Since insults were the rule when I encountered natural, average, normal things, I kept my mouth shut.

  “What about that Phil the Pill guy?” she asked after an awkward moment. “What did you think of him?”

  “Besides the pictures of Rush Limbaugh taped to his underwear?”

  She graced me with a weary grin. “You know what I mean. Pogroms? Please. A guy who believes in rounding up whole populations is certainly capable of rounding up a lone woman, especially one, you know ...”

  I knew what she was talking about. I had a couple of memories from the Gulf War that I would pay good money to scrub if I could. This one guy in our crew—Wendeez we called him, because he always smelled like hamburger—took the “forces” in Special Forces a little too literally, way back when. Funny how the young and the pretty so often find themselves singled out for punishment.

  “Naw,” I said, doing my best to blink the memories away. “I don’t think Phil’s a concern. Any time a dude tells you his nickname, you can be pretty certain he’s insecure. Whoever grabbed Jennifer—if that’s what in fact happened—you can be reasonably certain he has some kind of ice in his veins. Goofballs like him just don’t have what it takes.”

  “Some do, Disciple. Trust me.”

  This had the smell of a college sob story.

  “Besides,” I said, “you’re looking at this the wrong way ...”

  “How so?”

  “The point of canvassing, at least the way I do it, isn’t to find your suspects, Molls. Suspects are rare creatures, not easily found. All we’re trying to do is get a sense of his natural habitat.”

  That earned me a long, appreciative look, but little else.

  We parted ways with the awkward sense of unresolved matters. I caught a glimpse of pale abdomen as she raised her arms in a faux yawn, noted the twining of green rising from the rim of her blue jeans: barbed wire.

  I thought about the way tattoos seem to peek from every feminine hemline: the plunging decolletage, the sagging sock, the T-shirt tag, and of course the hip-riding orbit of their pants and shorts. Little mementoes to mysteries unseen. Bruises to a glimpse. Invitations to a gaze.

  If men were going to stare—and let’s face it, they were going to stare—then you might as well give them something to read. The best candy comes with labels—all the rest is bulk.

  “Good night, Molly.”

  “Night.”

  I’ve heard people say their brains are stuck between radio stations enough to know that it’s a popular metaphor for the kind of mental static the Forgetful are prone to when they’re stressed or burned out. The feeling I get—or I should say, the feeling I live with—is nowhere near as linear. It’s more like being stuck between a// channels simultaneously, cable and satellite, military and commercial. I’ve been asked by friends and researchers whether it gets worse as I get older and the reel of my memory gets fatter and fatter, and I want to say, “Yes, definitely,” but the fact is, I really don’t know. It’s kind of like treading water in the middle of the ocean that keeps getting deeper and deeper—more and more abyssal. You have this sense of drowning depths yawning ever more profoundly below you, but still, there you are, bobbing like a cork, peering this way and that, trying not to hum the theme to Jaws.

  Anyway, one of the things I love about my post-conversation reveries is the way they silence the multi-dimensional rumble. In my case, the best way to avoid drowning is to flee the dappled surface and swim down, down into the cerulean dark.

  Follow the sparks of the past as they dwell within me.

  I was never meant for the Now—I know that much. I sometimes think I’m a creature of the Ages, shoehorned into the slot you call waking life. As mangled and twisted as oversized mail.

  Amazing, really, the way they’re all still in there, in me, the voices and the people. More than a little spooky, the way they never stop talking, saying what they said over and over and ove
r and over and over ... Makes me feel like a cannibal, sometimes, the eater of momentary souls.

  Lying on my bed, I sorted through channels looking for a baseball game. Baseball, I find, is far and away the best sport to not watch on TV. Since pretty much nothing happens outside what you see on SportsCenter, you can be an expert without seeing a single game. The ability to pass judgment without work or research has got to be the coolest consumer good since the invention of philosophy.

  I closed my eyes while a vacuum-tube voice recited statistics—when everything’s slo-mo, you have plenty of time to measure and tally. The world somehow faded away without really going anywhere. I was stretched out, my clothes soaking up the air-conditioned cool, and I was standing on yet another porch in Legoland, raising an arm to wipe the sweat from my cheek and brow ...

  “Yeah-yeah. We heard about that. We’re brand spanking new. ”

  This was Jill Morrow speaking at around 2:38 EM. She was an attractive-ish woman in her mid-thirties who lived at 371 Edgeware Street—a white-brick bungalow with a real estate sign swaying in the hot-sun breeze. I really wasn’t surprised that she had found her way to the front of the queue. I had already decided I would call Nolen later that night, suggest he drive out to interview her.

  She and her husband Eddie had moved to Ruddick just a couple of weeks previously, something which, what with the empty boxes, the bare walls, and my estimable powers of deduction, I had failed to realize until she told me. The thing was, when I handed her the flyer with Dead Jennifer’s image in the top left corner, she recognized her.

  This marked Molly’s one and only verbal intervention. “Really? From where?”

  This was when it dawned on me how much it had helped having her tag along. I don’t sleep well, so I generally have this perpetual brooding, strung-out look. And even when I dress like a prep, there’s something about me that just doesn’t wear Christian clothes well. If I were a television show, I would sport a transparent box in the corner containing L N V D. Language, Nudity, Violence, Disturbing content—you name it.