Disciple of the Dog

  “You all think we’re fools,” Anson said with an impressive lack of bitterness. “I know, and part of me doesn’t really blame you. How can I, knowing what I know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Frame. When the whole point is to keep consciousness caged, how can we condemn you for defending your prison cells?”

  Something about the man glowed as he described those first, heady days living at the Compound. As the newcomers, he and Jennifer had become fast friends. Apparently they both loved to dance. And no, they had never been romantically involved.

  When I asked him why, Anson simply shrugged and said, “She’s with Xen.”

  I took the opportunity to probe him about Baars, hoping to mine the inevitable resentment women inspire in men. But if he harboured any ill will for the Counsellor, as they called him, he betrayed none of it. In fact his eyes, which had been sombre throughout his commentary on Jennifer, fairly lit up in admiration—adoration even.

  “I saw several hotties driving in ...” I said.

  “Are you asking me whether Xen sleeps with anyone else?”

  I was starting to realize this was part of the deal, being a Framer. Where most people talk around delicate issues, or clam up altogether, these guys simply said it how it was. I would have found it refreshing if it hadn’t made me feel like such a phony.

  “No ... Actually, I was wondering whether any of them were, you know ... single.”

  He shot me the nerd’s version of a give-me-a-break smile, like I had just asked him to explain the difference between an RPG and a first- person shooter. “This place isn’t what you think, Mr. Manning. Xen doesn’t seduce his students. Any of us can leave any time we want. It’s not some ticking tabloid headline ... “

  I thought about my conversation with Albert the previous night. If anyone could design a cult that didn’t smell like a cult, I decided, it would be Xenophon Baars.

  “Sure,” I said with a shrug, “but certainly, as Counsellor, Xen possesses certain powers, certain privileges.”

  “And?” he asked. The question made him obviously uncomfortable, so I decided to hit him with another.

  “And no one was closer to Xen than Jennifer, right?”

  “Yeah—so what?”

  “Seems like a recipe for jealousy and resentment to me. You can go on all you want about how egalitarian everything is here, but the bottom line, Anson, is that Xen is holding all the cards, and for whatever reason, he decided to deal Jennifer a special hand.”

  “They were in love! Who would resent that?”

  “Well, how about Stevie? The guy pretty much oozes homoerotic rage, don’t you think?”

  “Stephen worships Xen. He would never do anything to hurt him.”

  “And that would hurt Xen, losing Jennifer?”

  “Of course!”

  My neck was stiff, so I bent my head from shoulder to shoulder.

  “Well, the guy doesn’t seem all that cut up about it,” I said. “That doesn’t spook you? The fact that they were so close, and yet Xen carries on business as usual?”

  “Xen is the frst,” he explained. “Like Magellan—or Galileo, even more! Men like him don’t stop for the sake of grief—especially when they know what grief actually is. He’s the first to draw aside the curtain, to see what we really are ...”

  “The truth, huh?”

  “Thetruth of all truths!”

  Did I forget to mention that Anson was as fucking crazy as the rest of them?

  Thoroughly creeped out, I asked him to recount what happened the night of Jennifer’s disappearance.

  Nobody tells the same story twice.

  One of the many memory researchers I’ve endured, a guy called Robert Kunitz, told me about a study where subjects were asked to write accounts of where they were and what they were doing when the space shuttle Challenger fizzled into smoke and debris. When they tracked these people down years later and asked them the same question, apparently a sizable minority of them had completely changed their stories. Some even went so far as to accuse the researchers of falsifying their previous accounts, right down to forging their handwriting.

  “Unbelievable, huh?” Kunitz said in the strange-but-true tone that psychologists—perpetually tickled by the fact that they know people better than they know themselves—are prone to take. “It’s really that bad.”

  I disagreed, told him that I knew, with utter certainty, that things were actually worse.

  I could almost see the grant money reflected in his eyes.

  See, unlike me, you reconstitute the events you “remember.” Your whole life is quite literally a dramatization. You may be based on a true story, but you are not, by any sensible measure, true. You may earn an Oscar or two, but you will never snag a Pulitzer.

  So when I say that inconsistency in a suspect’s story is not necessarily a red flag for deception, understand that I speak from the standpoint of the sighted speaking to the blind. The sad fact is that variance between accounts doesn’t necessarily tell you anything. Your suspect could be a premeditated liar—or fuckhead, to use the industry term of art—but odds are he’s just another asshole.

  The biggest complication I faced was that Anson’s statement was paraphrased through the lens of Chief Nolen, whose skills at taking informal dictation were neither here nor there compared with the 161 other statements I’ve seen. The situation was even trickier because the statement was so recent. This meant Anson had two sets of coordinates to read from: his memory of the event itself and his memory of his official recounting of the event. The devil, if it were to be found anywhere, would be in the consistencies. This was the real reason I had asked Molly to read Anson’s statement in the first place: to find evidence of rote and rehearsal, stuff that innocent people generally do not do, simply because they believe they don’t have to, sweet fools that they are. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the truth will just as soon see you hanged as set you free.

  Justice is just a fluke that occasions way too much art and backslapping.

  He started with a discrepancy, a small one to be sure, in the time he and Jennifer had left the Compound to walk into Ruddick: 8:25, a number specific enough to prick my interest but round enough to preclude outright suspicion, had become 8:30 or so, which was far more in line with the haphazard way people keep time—gulps and swallows, not sips. This suggested not only the absence of rehearsal but the absence of guilt as well. Had Anson been involved in Jennifer’s disappearance, he would have obsessed over the details of his story, since it was pretty much the only way for him to influence the outcome of events.

  But the rest of his story followed Nolen’s paraphrasing to the letter. Well, the imagined letter, to be more precise, since it takes more than a little imaginative reconstruction to see the actual phrasing through the paraphrasing. Either way, the problem was that I could see Nolen composing precisely the same statement given what Anson was telling me. But what did that mean?

  Fucking hints and innuendoes, man. There’s nothing to do but to file them and move on.

  Besides, what could a kid like this, one who by all reports was Jennifer’s dearest friend at the Compound, have to do with something that resulted in severed fingers?

  I decided to press things in a different direction.

  “What about Jennifer’s parents?”

  A hesitant pause. “What about them?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck with a hooked paw. That motel bed was taking its toll. And here I thought the entire hospitality business had embraced the pillow-top mattress. Fawk.

  “Did she ever talk about them?”

  Anson shrugged. “Sure. Who doesn’t talk about their parents?”

  “You know what I mean. Did she ever talk about them?”

  “Yuh.”

  By now my curiosity was piqued. “Why the reluctance, Anson?”

  “Nah ... Just feels weird, you know.”

  “She swear you to secrecy?”

  A stiff
nod followed by, “Yuh.”

  “The circumstances have changed, don’t you think?”

  “Yuh.”

  “Things couldn’t be any more radical.”

  He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then said, “Suppose.”

  “So?”

  He just gave me a blank, helpless look. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how high you pile the reasons. To be honest, I already had that gnawing sense of doom that always accompanies moments like this ... moments of stumbling upon the Uglies, as I call them. The truths that no one wants to know.

  “Anson, look. We have two different angles on this situation, you and I. The puzzles you see and the puzzles I see are completely different. You have

  a piece, a fact, that fits a certain way into a certain set of moral obligations. But here’s the thing: when people swear you to secrecy—that’s almost as real as it gets. The puzzle I’m working on ...” I watched him watch me.

  “Is real,” Anson said, nodding.

  “As real as it gets. Frame real.” I wince at recalling this because it was so stupid.. In the course of impressing the tragic stakes of the situation on him, I had essentially reminded him it was all a video game.

  Even still, he told me about a morning-light confession, about how Jennifer worried that she was failing Xen, failing the Framers, because she simply could not let go of this one night when she was thirteen, the night she could not sleep and happened upon her well-fed father in the basement—drinking and watching porno.

  “Come here, sweetie ... It’s nothing to be fightened of... It’s completely natural.”

  Anson talked, alternately staring at his palms and at the walls to either side of me. I watched him without expression because this is what I do: collect and interpret all the little atrocities we suffer and commit.

  Then shelve them in the mad library that is my mind.

  “You said she thought she was failing because of this?”

  “Xen ...” Anson explained with an apologetic hitch of his shoulders. “He teaches us that we’re here to learn from all these ...”—he swallowed— “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.”

  His long-lashed eyes finally fixed mine.

  “Not with her fucking father, anyway.”

  Incest—the plugged toilet of the investigative world. Christ, I thought as Stevie led me away from the consultation room, Christ Almighty.

  I sometimes think people have the same basic electrical service when it comes to their morals, that the real thing that distinguishes them is the way they use that power. Some people fritter away their moral amperage on all the little night lights and clock radios life offers: personal hygiene, sexual orientation, dinner table innuendo. You know, the Who-does-that- bitch-think-she-is? kind of bullshit. Others, the kind that join the Peace Corps or volunteer at their local women’s shelter, channel their juice into big-ticket items, the stoves and central airs of the ethical universe. And me? Yeah, sure, my breaker box is all fucked up ...

  My scruples are few and far between, I admit. But they draw a lot of power.

  Too much for my line of work, truth be told.

  Stevie’s brisk stride carried me back to the same courtyard where Baars and I had taken tea on my previous visit. The table had been moved from the shadowed portico into the sunlight. Tea steamed from two freshly poured cups. Xenophon Baars sat on the far chair facing the entrance, his expression as avid as before, his white suit fairly incandescent in the sunlight, which also dazzled the assortment of porcelain across the tabletop.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Manning,” Baars said, coming to his feet to greet me.

  “I’d ask you to call me Disciple,” I said, staring directly at Stevie, “but I’m afraid you would find it confusing.”

  Baars laughed—the guy always seemed to be laughing. “I would never confuse someone as singular as yourself, Mr. Manning. Not even in my dotage ... Come. Join me for some tea.”

  Stevie withdrew with a fluid, oriental air that I found menacing. I don’t much care for imperturbable people—my job pretty much depends on rattling cages.

  Baars had leaned back to sun his face. The lines of reflected light made him seem a plastic mould of himself. I wanted to say something clever or, failing that, something snide, but part of me was still humming the squalid notes Anson had struck just moments before ...

  “He says we’re supposed to affirm ...”

  Rules. With belief come rules. But more on that later.

  “Tell me, Mr. Manning. When you stare into the sky, what is it you see?”

  “Sky.”

  He smiled a blind beach smile. “I see the sun.”

  I imagine he was hoping this would be a Zen moment, profound for its one-hand-clapping simplicity. I just thought it was stupid. I almost told him he should start a show on the local cable access channel, call it Zen with Xen.

  I stuck to the stubborn point instead. “So I’ve been canvassing,” I said. “Going door to door, looking for scraps regarding Jennifer. The Framers don’t seem to be very popular ...”

  “You don’t take notes, do you?” Baars asked, eyes still closed.

  This gave me pause. I decided to ignore it. I also decided to ignore the fact that no mention had been made of the severed finger Nolen had found.

  “So that got me wondering whether there was anyone in Ruddick who didn’t like you—I mean really didn’t like you. You know, vandalism, threats, harassment in town, that sort of thing. I have it on good authority that cults ... or, ah, new religious movements like yours, experience their fair share of bigotry and, well ... discrimination.”

  I assumed from the way Baars lifted his head to regard me that I had garnered his attention. Most everyone likes to think they’re persecuted. Almost everyone jumps at a woe-is-me opportunity ...

  “Where do you think your remarkable memory comes from, Mr. Manning?”

  For the first time, I revealed the hard eyes of my suspicion.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” he said with a good-natured chuckle. “You googled me, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. I had to admit, Xenophon Baars was a hard man not to like. All that charisma. I wondered if he was, like, the Obama of the cult world.

  “Bet you thirty bucks my hit count is higher.”

  Baars laughed. “I’m sure it is! From the looks of it, there are more than a few researchers who would love to make a lab rat out of you.”

  “Yeah, well. Those days are over.”

  “But your memory remains the same, doesn’t it? In the New York Times piece, one researcher described it as ‘miraculous.’ Is that what you think it is? A miracle?”

  “No more than any other aberration.”

  “Ah, a happy deformity, then. Is that it?”

  “I prefer to think of it as a ‘joyous birth defect.’”

  His sun forgotten, Xenophon Baars fixed me with a peculiar gaze. The shadow of his nose fell across his lips, and for the first time I realized how ridiculously small his mouth was.

  “No system is perfect, Disciple. The law of unintended consequences applies as much to our future as it does to what you call ‘now.’ And with so many billions of people—”

  “So ... I’m like in a pod or a vat, somewhere, is that it?”

  A sad smile. “No. In point of fact, you are a machine. A kind of quantum computer, dreaming of its mammalian past.”

  “We’re dreaming, huh.”

  I tried to imagine him eating a hamburger—couldn’t do it.

  “Hallucinating would be a more accurate term. This is the real world, only systematically skewed to simulate the way things were roughly five billion years ago. Think of the way schizophrenics incorporate elements of the real world into their psych
otic delusions.”

  I blinked. How do you reply to something like that? Fawk. I reminded myself that Jennifer was the only point here, not Baars’s whacked dogma. Discipline, Disciple.

  “So what does this have to do with my miraculous memory?”

  “Because sometimes, Disciple, our true selves leak through, shine as inexplicable gifts—gifts like your memory—given our ignorance otherwise. We see only slivers of the Frame, so like psychotics we continually misinterpret, claim to see ghosts or to remember past lives or to talk to God or to attain enlightenment. The list goes on, I assure you!”

  That was the ninth time he had said, “I assure you.”

  I found myself wondering whether anyone had bothered to count up all the ways people can make stupid sound smart, when, like a bolt, I grasped the out-and-out genius of Baars’s little story. It quite literally contained nothing spooky. Using it, he could pretty much rationalize anything paranormal, anything that seemed to signal some beyond, in mundane terms. A little technology and a lot of time was all it took ...

  “Transcendence,” I heard myself murmur. This old girlfriend of mine, a philosophy student named Sasha Lang, used to blab on and on about how humans hungered for transcendence, for something beyond the miserable circuit of their existence. I would just say something glib, like how Cheerios were more filling.

  But Baars, the clever boy, had invented a way at once to feed that hunger and to explain it away.

  The man fairly erupted in gleeful laughter. “Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” In an avid rush he explained how he used to teach classes on Transcendence back in his Berkeley days, how he even wrote a book on the topic before his “awakening.” After pondering the issue for more than fifteen years, he apparently realized that the best way to understand paranormal experience was to look at normal experience, not as some kind of baseline, but as a diminution of a much broader spectrum of possibility. It was exploring this insight through hypnosis that led to his discovery of the Frame, the true present, where humanity had become indistinguishable from its technology.