Kimberley, you should know, had long ceased taking me seriously. One more happy consequence of banging your employees: they know what you look like naked. For whatever reason, it’s hard to take naked men seriously. Personally, I blame the balls.
“What do you do around here, again?”
She sucked her cigarette to the nub then flicked it out the window. “The grunt work,” she said, exhaling. “You know, Ungh. Ungh.’”
“Har-har,” I replied, tossing my butt after hers onto the gravel and cracked asphalt outside. “Into the crowd,” Kimberley called it, because of the thousands of other butts out there. I stood.
“Going to Jitters?” she asked. I tried not to notice how beautiful her profile looked in the alley-choked sunlight.
“Ungh.”
She gave me her trademark lopsided snort. She knew the drill.
I had to start working on Dead Jennifer.
Jitters was the name of my favourite coffee shop. It was a haunt of mine, the place where I would be whacked if the mob ever deemed me important enough to merit a hit. It was just around the corner, the kind of shop that soaked in the idle and the hurried alike, from the local bums to the professionals-on-the-run to the maternity- leave moms. Like all the businesses on the street, it had its cycles, its consumer ebb and flow. Sometimes it would be packed and stuffy, an outrage to air conditioning. Other times it would be as empty and cool as a hockey arena on a Monday morning. I was lucky enough to catch an ebb.
I complimented Ashlan on her hair on my way in, placed my order with the owner, Michelle.
“Working a case, Diss?” Ashlan asked in her hectic yet affectionate way.
The girls regarded me with the wary affection people reserve for apparently dangerous animals that have been defanged and declawed. The worst I could do was gnaw on them. “About to …” I said.
“What is it this time?” Michelle asked, squinting at me over the rims of her glasses. “Another hooker with six toes?”
“No-no,” Ashlan exclaimed. “My favourite was the guy with the … the—what did you call it?—pustule on his thingy! Did he ever tell you—”
“Oh yah,” Michelle laughed. “The Case of the Nine Itches …”
From time to time I liked to scandalize the girls with stories about the more sordid cases I worked. I would give them names just to crack them up. Sir Conan Doyle meets porno.
“Nah,” I said. “Gotta real one this time, girls. Respectable, like.”
“And what’s it called?” Ashlan asked.
After pausing a moment to consider, I said, “How about The Girl Who Died at the End of the World?”
“Hmm …” Michelle said, frowning. “Sounds … serious.”
One of the perils of constantly playing the comedian, I’ve found, is that when the laugh track finally pops its spool—and it always does— people don’t know how to take you.
“Like I said, I got a real one this time.”
All, you know, respectable like.
I retreated with my coffee to the place’s most obscure corner, more than a little gooned by Michelle’s comment. Truth is, as much as I despise all the penny-ante cases I usually work, they tend to have very little karmic overhead. I once followed this guy for two weeks because his wife had caught the distinct whiff of feces on his dick. So I take all these photos of him leaving gay clubs, show them to her, and she starts crying—get this—with relief. Apparently she had always suspected he was gay, had always felt proud he had stayed with her against the grain of his sexual inclinations. Her real fear was that he was pounding chocolate with another woman! So tell me, what are the consequences of fucking up a case like that? A better question might be, is it even possible to fuck up a case like that?
No consequences means no responsibilities. And that’s the way I like to ride.
I mean, look at me. I’m what you would call a fuck-up, and if there’s one thing fuck-ups know, it’s that real people—you know, people who, like, read and shit—generally mean real trouble. Fuck-ups fuck up. That’s what they do. If you fuck things up for another fuck-up, you can be damn sure that they’ll fuck up as well—that, thanks to the almighty law of averages, everything will come out in the wash. This is why fuck- ups prefer hanging with other fuck-ups. Puking in Billy’s car ain’t so bad when Billy’s already shat in your boot.
But the Bonjours, they were real No car-puking. No boot-shitting. Just a wayward daughter having trouble finding her way home …
Fawk.
I mean, I date strippers for Christ’s sake.
So, for the first time in my oh so sketchy career, I made what my first shrink, Martin, used to call an “implementation intention.”
“Youcan change, Disciple,” he once chirped. “As easily as you change your underwear.” He was one of those perky fuckers who continually cooked up apologies for people then called it therapy.
“But they all have skid marks, doc. Every pair.”
“Well, then, you go commando!”
“What? And get shit on my jeans ?”
I’m not a big believer in change, as you might imagine. Even so, I sat at my table, took a deep breath, and resolved not to fuck this one up. That meant doing things by the numbers.
Ever been in a car accident? If so, then you know: life is quick—too quick.
The thing to realize is that every moment is a car accident; it only seems otherwise because the apparent regularity of things fools us into thinking we can intervene and take some measure of control. We have this abiding I-could-if-I-really-wanted-to feeling. And since we’re out- and-out addicted to this feeling, the true brevity of things tends to drop out of the stories we like to tell. It doesn’t matter if it’s the action hero’s slo-mo or the anti-hero’s angst-ridden reflection, everywhere you turn you see people having a hell of a lot more time than they actually have, able to scoop the gun from the gutter before the other guy squeezes the trigger, or to ponder the early days of Czech Communism between ironic barbs.
Exact same flattering conceit.
If you think about it, either we’re just gabbing away on automatic or we’re perpetually one step behind, fencing with the vague bewilderment of receiving change in a foreign country. The reason we think we have so much time, I’m convinced, has to do with the way we blur our after-the- fact reflections on given events into the events themselves. As soon as we zip-lock something in memory, it becomes static, something that we can run circles around. Considered from this standpoint, it really does seem that everything we do is fraught with decisions, as if every moment was a window onto thousands of future possibilities, instead of automatic and obscure.
Which is what they are—pretty much. You can sooner fish water back out of a flushing toilet.
This is why I do so much of my work downstream, so to speak.
As a kid, I was too cool for school—I mean this quite literally.
We had this biology teacher whom everyone seemed to love and who seemed to love everybody: Mr. Marcus. If Mr. Marcus didn’t like you, it meant that there was something wrong with you—as a matter of biblical certainty. Of course, I couldn’t stand him. That’s me in a nutshell. The guy who hates your favourite teacher.
Marcus was prattling on about photosynthesis, and Rosie Juarez, who was a total hottie, asked him about mushrooms: “Aren’t they a plant that grows without sunlight, Meester Marcoos?” The whole time, Tommy Bridgeman was wheezing and coughing in the back of the room, hacking mucus that seemed to snap like elastics in the back of his throat. I think everyone knows at least one Tommy Bridgeman. You know the type: fungal complexion, coat hangers for bones, a sheepish grin for most anything you say.
Marcus graced her with one of his eye-twinkling smiles. That was another strike against him: there’s nothing I hate quite so much as twinkling eyes. Save it for the cartoons, motherfucker.
“Well, Rose,” he said, “consider Bridgeman over there. He’s proof positive that some forms of life flourish in the absence of sunlight. Well, mayb
e not flourish …” And then he had to say it: “Coming to class doesn’t make you classy.”
Everyone roared with studio-audience clarity. Bridgeman just slouched his head low, wiped his nose, and grinned in a monkey-embarrassed way. Me? I was disgusted. I felt everything go smooth, the way it always does when something gets me really pissed. Suddenly, snotty little Tommy Bridgeman seemed like my kind of people, and Mr. Marcus’s joke became an outrage to the Geek Nation.
“Yes, Mr. Manning?”
Without even realizing it, my hand had shot up.
“Um, Mr. Marcus, why do you think that was so funny?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Manning.”
“Well, you’ve said that same thing now, like, twenty-three times so far this semester.”
I grit my teeth in joy sometimes, remembering the things I’ve said.
“I admit it’s an old trick of mine,” Mr. Marcus said—he was too cash to be anything but puzzled at this point. “But I hardly imagine I’ve said it twenty-three times. Please, Mr. Manning.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why don’t you think you’ve used it twenty-three times?”
“Because …”—he paused ominously—”that would make me rather dull and unoriginal, don’t you think?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” I replied cheerfully.
“Excuse me?”
And that’s when I started, working my way backward from snotty little Tommy Bridgeman. I just hit replay in my psyche and it all came out, down to the cadences of the voices and the looks on the faces. Twenty- three of them in a row. He never interrupted me, not once, just stood there like someone mesmerized—believe me, the truth can be a big scary stick. I imagine it must have been as spooky as all hell listening to me, watching me, but the way I did it—I tell you, I had them. Not one of my classmates could have recalled even a fraction of what I replayed, but their other brain, their unconscious one, remembered it well enough: everyone in the class recognized each of the incidents I was recreating. People nodded, brandished their fists when they recognized themselves. Others shouted out the count. “Twenty-ONE!” The whole class roared and roared. A hundred laughs for Mr. Marcus turned into a thousand laughs against him.
I broke the poor bastard over my knee.
And of course got myself expelled. Apparently the administrators loved Mr. Marcus too.
That was February 22, 1982. A bad day.
But still, pretty cool.
Time. It all comes down to time. If you have a memory like a court stenographer, like I have, then you have all the time in the world to deliberate. This is probably why my romantic life reads like cover copy for a splatterpunk novel: I sit in perpetual judgment.
Not something that chicks dig particularly.
According to the doctors, I suffer from something called “hyperthymestic syndrome.” You can pretty much ignore the “hyperthymestic” part—the real word to pay attention to is “syndrome.” It means the doctors have no bloody clue what the hell they’re talking about. Take “irritable bowel syndrome,” which my father suffers from (though he always insisted that Mom and I refer to it as the more palatable “IBS”). For some unknown reason, he bloats and cramps up, then farts and shits all day long—the most wretched-smelling things, too. Demonic.
Hyperthymestic syndrome is simply irritable bowel syndrome of the head: where my dad can’t dump his dumps properly, me, I can’t dump my memories properly.
I retain all the crap.
Usually I grab the USA Today when I work at Jitters, more for appearance’s sake than to read, but the paper rack was empty. So I stared into my coffee like a knob—for some reason the shining black circle ringed in white porcelain calmed and centred me. Like my dingy version of a seaside horizon.
I stared, and it all came back to me with the ease of a daydream.
“She’s not a runaway,” I had said, looking up to meet the Bonjours’ gaze. “What is she? Nineteen? Twenty in this photo?”
“Nineteen,” Amanda replied in a small voice.
“And that would make her?”
“Twenty-one. She’s twenty-one now. “
I paused to take a sip. I noticed the deliberate way her voice walked around “would be” language when she talked about her daughter. Amanda Bonjour was a woman sustaining herself through resolution, and resolution alone. She had seized hope by the throat and wrestled it to the wall.
But this struck me as obvious. If there were nuances to be drawn out, they lay elsewhere.
“They call themselves the Framers,” she said.
“Never heard ofthem. What do they believe?”
The funny thing is that I rarely, if ever, catch the deeper nuances of my own words. I like to think that this is because I understand myself to the very bottom, but I know that this is what everybody thinks. After all, how can people mean things they don’t mean? It sounds paradoxical, I know, and yet we do it all the bloody time: these rehearsals would be exercises in futility if this weren’t the case.
“That the world,” Amanda replied, “this world, isn’t really … real.” Something in her tone suggested the eternal coincidence of stupid beliefs and stupid people.
Which was probably why my subsequent question, “Isn’t that religion in general?” touched a raw nerve.
“You explain it,” she said crossly to her husband. “Jon has a philosophy degree…”
Amanda Bonjour was religious. Even more, she had spent many an infuriating evening suffering her philosopher-husband’s bemused contempt. Jonathan Bonjour was not a believer. Could this have been a factor in their daughter’s subsequent defection? A mother fretting over her eternal soul, a father calling her stupid in a dozen indirect ways … Had Dead Jennifer simply been seeking the subversive in-between, the point guaranteed to maximally dismay both her parents?
“They’re one of those New Age, human potential things,” Jon Bonjour said. “What’s called a charismatic cult.”
His contemptuous incredulity seemed clear enough now.
“The leader’s name,” he continued, “is Xenophon Baars. “ Was there a note of personal hatred here? Had he met him on the trip to Ruddick his wife mentioned? If so, why wouldn’t he say as much? Most people put a premium on personal impressions.
That’s the thing about my business: everyone, but everyone, thinks they can do it themselves—until they try, that is. This isn’t to say that private investigating is brain surgery, but it’s more involved than your average home renovation project, if not in terms of the skills you need, then in terms of the consequences of your mistakes. Sure, most people are capable of foundation work, but if they get it wrong, the problems are nothing short of monstrous.
“What do you mean by ‘extreme’?”
“They think the world is about to end,”Jonathan Bonjour said.
“And?”
“Five billion years from now…”
“You mean when the sun swallows us up?”
“Exactly. This Baars has convinced his followers that the world is more than five billion years older than it is. And that it’s about to end.”
I would have to do some research. The Bonjours’ suspicions were clear enough, and for obvious reasons. Xenophon Baars was crazy—there could be no doubt about that. But what was more, he was a liar who was wholly invested in his lies. Not only did he have the capacity for murder, he could very well possess the incentive as well. Any number of scenarios suggested themselves: jealousy run rampant in the fucked-up sexual economy of the Framers’ compound, a lunatic sacrificial offering to some great X-that-must-be-appeased, threats to go to the authorities over a glimpsed weapons cache, a sexual assault, a prior conviction … These people believed the world was five billion years older than it was— who could say what kinds of crazy acts would fit the mad puzzle of their beliefs? Who could say what they considered sinful?
Or how they punished sinners.
Once, during a particularly nasty figh
t, an old biology undergrad girlfriend of mine, Sandra Ho, accused me of thinking I was the next phase in human evolution, something which has never been true, not then, not now. If anything, I think I’m an evolutionary throwback, proof positive that all humans have the capacity to remember most everything, a capacity that evolution has since shut down. Too many hominid suicides, perhaps. Either that or too many hominid arguments with hominid girlfriends—who knows? I told her as much. She accused me of lying to make her feel small. I accused her of accusing me of lying to make her feel small to make me feel small. And so it goes.
That was May 19, 1998, around 3 P.M. A bad day.
The relationship didn’t last. None of them do. Could you imagine trying to argue with someone who could actually remember who said what when? Or who could always remember, perhaps even especially remember, all the hard things we say on the hateful fly?
There’s no forgiveness without forgetting, trust me.
The fact is, the longer I know someone, the more difficult I find it to talk to them. Part of it has to do with distraction: it’s bloody hard to juggle a conversation with a thousand pellets of memory.
I much prefer the company of strangers.
Or the dead, like Jennifer.
“How would you characterize your relationship?”
“What do you mean?” Amanda had asked. I could see now that this was simply a bid for time to formulate a response.
“Your relationship with Jennifer. Was it loving or, ah … troubled?”
“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” Jon Bonjour said to his wife. This time around I clearly heard a Remember- what-we-d,iscussed tone. And just like that, I realized how anxious he was to police his wife’s responses.
“Troubled,” Amanda said. “Troubled. ”
“Not abusive,” Jon Bonjour interjected. “There’s troubled and then there— ”
“I’m sure Mr. Manning re— ”
I paused, trying to get a fix on her expression. It would be wrong to think of these rehearsals like video replays, because they aren’t. In fact, they’re almost impossible to describe. It’s not like there’s a little me reviewing it all in a little theatre in my head—how could there be when I’m both the screen and the audience? I mean, the memories are imagistic in a sense, a very fleeting sense—but they’re more like a kind of raw knowledge, things I just know.