Disciple of the Dog

  Just another factory, I told myself.

  A guy appeared from behind a sun-flashing glass door. He looked like someone out of a pharmaceutical commercial—you know, middle- class good looks and an unflinching hope-for-the-future smile, only with crooked teeth. He wore a uniform—a white suit of some kind with no collar on the jacket.

  Not a good sign. A belief system with its own outfits. Fawk.

  He timed his stride to reach me the instant I slammed my car door. He shook my hand in a firm, dry grip, introduced himself as Stevie. I found him instantly irritating.

  I gave him my card, and while he struggled to read the print along the bottom of the giant iris and pupil I used as my logo (I fucking told Kimberley that nobody could read the print, but apparently I was the only one with vision problems), I explained that the Bonjours had sent me to investigate the disappearance of their daughter, Jennifer. Stevie nodded sagely, returned the card.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “I was hoping to talk to Baars … “

  “The Counsellor? He’s teaching a class.”

  “Cool. Would it be okay for me to sit in?”

  He blinked and smiled—like a Buddha listening to a child.

  “Have you crossed the Lacuna?”

  “Lacuna?”

  The fucker knew I had no clue as to what the Lacuna was, and yet he baited me with the question anyway.

  “Sorry. You’ll have to wait in the Clink.”

  For a second I pondered smacking him. Everything about the guy made me bristle. I understood immediately that he was one of those smug little pricks who could only laugh to himself—you know, laugh that insipid self-congratulatory laugh, either because he thought he had said something witty or because he thought himself clever for getting something witty said by someone else. Stevie. Cult member.

  What a fucking loser.

  All these people organizing their lives around an invisible world. I had an uncle who was a missionary, who would always probe me about my relationship with Jesus in warm, gentle tones, like I was the world’s last orphan or something. Then, late at night, I would hear him screaming at my mom, telling her I was damned to blister in hell.

  So I learned early on that when you’re with people, you’re never really with people—not simply, anyway. Not only do they tow their histories around with them, they carry their ideologies with them as well. You can’t serve pork chops to just anyone, you know.

  But then, this assumes it’s possible to organize your life in any other way. If you think about it, there really isn’t that much practical difference between things like Wall Street and Paradise: You believe that certain numbers in certain circuits will grant you life after labour—retirement— simply because you’ve diligently attended to these numbers. Because you’re one of the righteous.

  Not knowing shit and yet acting in all ways as if you do: this is the essence of human civilization.

  They’ve even invented a name for it.

  Trust.

  Either way, I was having none of it.

  The Clink, it turned out, was simply their nickname for the Compound’s waiting room. I was at once surprised and more than a little relieved that the Framers had some kind of sense of humour. Strange when you think about it, the antipathy between religion and humour, worship and ridicule. Ruthless ears on the one side, ruthless voices on the other.

  The Clink ran parallel to the south end of the parking lot, a long room with tinted plate glass along one wall and floor-to-ceiling mirrors across the other. Of course Stevie-boy planted me in a seat opposite the mirrored wall. I’m pretty easy on the eyes—dark with those avian features that so many women find irresistible—so that wasn’t a problem. But being stuck with your reflection is something altogether different. There’s the whole Taxi Driver thing, the slippage between being and posturing. Otherwise, there’s just something damn creepy about watching yourself watching yourself … Something wrong about seeing the guy behind the seeing.

  And confusing. I mean, really, just who was that good-looking, two- dimensional man?

  We may never know.

  My cell crunched out the riff to “Back in Black.” It was Kimberley, of course.

  “Where are you?” she asked in a higher than usual tone. I knew instantly that something was wrong.

  “At the hotel, checking in.”

  “Look …” A moment of cigarette-inhaling silence.

  “Look what?”

  I winced at my tone, as well as at the crash of recollections that followed. I have more than a few bad habits when it comes to managing women and their fears and expectations.

  “I just need to know what you meant when you said … “ Another draw on her cigarette, then a dead-air pause. “What you said.. ”

  I shot a questioning look at the guy in the mirror. He shrugged.

  “Said what?”

  I could feel the anger balling into fists on the other end.

  “You know … Love you, babe …’”

  Fawk.

  A head-scratching squint from the dude in the mirror.

  “Just an expression, honey,” I said. “You know, ‘Love you, baby!’ My way of saying, ‘Good work!’”

  “Good work,”she repeated in the voice of the undead. I’ve heard people talk about STDs with more enthusiasm.

  “Yeah … you know …”

  But the phone was already dead.

  Shiyit.

  “Mr. Manning!” someone called across the tiled foyer.

  Xenophon Baars.

  The guy was a physically impressive specimen: tall in that angular, Honest Abe kind of way, with a slight stoop that paradoxically suggested strength rather than infirmity. His face had a boyish air that no amount of aging could dispel, one accentuated by the long-banged unruliness of his hair. His eyes looked sharp behind the reflections gliding across the lenses of his glasses. He wore a white suit identical to Stevie’s in every respect save that it sported a red collar. Nice touch, that, I thought.

  Real Star Treky.

  “So what do you think of our place?” he asked.

  “Looks like a juvenile detention centre.”

  Not very diplomatic, I suppose, but something about the guy suggested that my peculiar brand of cynical honesty would be appreciated. He was a former philosophy professor, and I have enough egghead friends to know that cynicism is their favourite way of hiding hypocrisy in plain view.

  We spent a couple of minutes commiserating about Jennifer before he led me deeper into the Compound. She was well loved and sorely missed and all that ya-ya crap. I got the sense that her room, wherever it was in this labyrinth, had already been “repurposed.” Baars himself, at least, didn’t seem all that sentimental. I found myself thinking of Amanda Bonjour crying while she tied her shoes. The inaudible tap-tap of tears across cracked and raised lineoleum.

  “I suppose,” he said, his manner as brisk as his pace, “that you want to ask all the usual questions. Who sleeps with who. Who despi—”

  “To be honest, this whole cult thing is kind of a curveball. I like to start from the outside and work my way in. I think I need to understand you first.”

  He turned to me with an appreciative look. “Perhaps we should begin with a tour—you think?”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  Obviously the guy had a script he wanted to follow.

  So we toured the Compound, my eyes darting this way and that as he described the history of the Framers from their beginnings in southern California to the purchase and renovation of the buildings around me. The place was a veritable maze, possessing, in addition to the seminar rooms and the dormitories, a small gym, a library, a games room that he called the “activity centre,” and even an indoor garden. Despite the thoroughness of the renovations, a kind of spiritual lurch and jar haunted the structure, inexplicable steps, zigzag halls, the ceilings claustrophobic one moment, agoraphobic the next—what you typically find when an architect imposes drastic new uses across an
cient floor plans, only writ large.

  Bad as the human brain.

  “At first we considered buying one of the abandoned factories you passed on your way out here,” Baars explained, “but we ran into considerable … resistance, you might say, from city council.”

  “Hard to zone silly,” I replied.

  He smiled as if I were the kind of asshole he could appreciate.

  We had come to a corridor with doors set at hotel intervals. Without warning or explanation, Baars pressed one open, gestured for me to join him. Several seconds passed before I realized I was looking into Jennifer’s room.

  “The police have already been through—as you can see.”

  Tossed or ransacked would have better described it. Either that or Jennifer Bonjour was a pathological slob.

  The room was larger than I expected, with a double bed and night table crowded in one corner, and a small sectional arranged opposite an entertainment centre in the other. Despite the mess—strewn books and magazines, cushions piled like rubble, blankets balled like cabbage— it all seemed so suburban in a consumer credit kind of way. I guess I was expecting something more monastic. Say what you will about the Framers, self-denial was certainly not part of their creed.

  I had rooted through the rooms of several missing persons by this time, so I was accustomed to the sense of spookiness. But her room troubled me more than usual for some reason. It was almost as if Jennifer’s sheer normalcy—down to the bloody Twilight books and DVDs—made her disappearance all the more tragic.

  But in investigative terms, this was little more than a sneak preview— for me, anyway. In the movies, the dick always roots around and finds a decisive clue. Either a bona fide lead, like a pack of matches with a water- damaged phone number. Or a cipher, something that initially makes no sense whatsoever, like a gob of chewing gum in a condom, say, but eventually unlocks the entire case. But these are just narrative conceits. In reality, everything can mean anything—abject ambiguity is the rule, and if you go in blind, you will sure as shit read things wrong.

  Jennifer’s room was what you would call a primary text, and I was just getting started on the secondary sources. Going in now would be like deciphering hieroglyphics using a tourist phrase book.

  I needed to learn the grammar of the situation.

  At least that was what I told myself at the time.

  I turned from the entrance into his quizzical gaze. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  Baars smiled and nodded as if I had slipped the noose of one pet theory only to confirm a second.

  He led me back into the maze, yapping the whole way.

  His tale was a familiar one: boy meets New Age revelation; boy builds end-of-the-world bunker. I could tell he had told it many times before, and that he never tired of repeating it. And why not, when it made him the Moses of the Modern Age? Conviction, whether religious or otherwise, requires a certain hunger for repetition. And flattery makes everything taste sweeter.

  “It’s taken a lot of commitment,” he said, “and even more hard work, but the Framers are here to stay …”

  “Until the world blows up.”

  A patient smile. “Do you really think we’re that simple, Mr. Manning?”

  “Define ‘simple.’”

  Baars laughed like a teacher finding evidence of his genius reflected in a pupil. “‘Simple,’” he said, “is to follow the path of least social resistance, to go with the flow and believe what most everyone believes. In that sense, Mr. Manning, we Framers believe against the law of social gravitation.”

  After so many smartass girlfriends, I knew this game. “But what if gravity is simply belief in general instead of this or that dogma? What if real courage consists in resisting belief altogether?”

  Baars simply laughed harder. “Spoken like a true ironist!” He turned and fixed me with a look I found far too canny. “I imagine cynicism is a hazard of your trade—yes? The crazy parade of crazy people, everyone bent on justifying this or that petty transgression. It would be difficult not to take a dim view of people and their beliefs.”

  “Ironist …” I said. The fucker was trying to turn the verbal tables. “Huh?”

  “You think you wander a world filled with self-righteous morons, don’t you? Conceit. Vanity. Envy. Greed. You’ve seen it all, so now that’s all you see. But don’t you worry, Mr. Manning? I mean, ‘moron’ is simply a version of ‘sinner,’ isn’t it? A word we use to make ourselves feel superior. What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing?”

  Condescending prick. This is generally what I think of people who say things that fly over my head.

  “But I do wander a world filled with self-righteous morons.”

  Exactly, the man’s smile replied.

  Usually, I feel sorry for ultra-self-conscious people—people like Xen Baars. They just spend so much of their time pretending. They sit in coffee shops forcing the kinds of conversations they think people like them should have. They laugh from the top of their lungs. And in the seams of their patchwork timing, you can always glimpse panic, like drummers too sober to keep the beat. Living is work for these people. An endless tour of performances with no spectacular failures to redeem them.

  But this guy had taken the pantomime to an entirely different level. Inventing worlds behind worlds to redeem the artificiality of his existence. What could be more spectacular than that?

  Without explanation, Baars turned to press open a heavy oak door to our right. He ushered me from the sun-bright hall into a low, dim room that reeked of bedpans and astringent. I grinned as my eyes sorted shapes in the gloom: because I remember everything people say, I have a bad habit of cracking myself up while others are talking. Obnoxious, I know.

  But what I saw slapped the grin off my face. A hospital bed, illuminated by a single reading light, set in a semicircle of gleaming devices and spectral readouts. And a woman, impossibly frail, swaddled by blankets, wired into so many tubes that it seemed she would hang suspended if the bed were kicked away. She was more than old, she was ancient, withered not only by time but by some deep, internal trauma. Her mouth hung half open, as if her lower jaw were slowly shrinking into her neck. Her eyes were little more than black perforations at the bottoms of her sockets.

  Then the reek hit me. Indescribable, really, like death in diapers.

  “Her name is Agatha,” Baars said from beside me. “She suffered a mid-cerebral arterial stroke some five weeks ago. Since she’s one of ours, we decided to let her die here, among us.”

  I tried not to breathe, swallowed out of some reflex. Fawk. It seemed I could actually taste her dying.

  “Hello … uh, Agatha.”

  What was he up to?

  “Something wrong, Mr. Manning?”

  “No …” I lied, knowing (without knowing) that this was exactly what Baars hoped I would do. The scene reeked of unwelcome object lessons.

  “Troubling, isn’t it? To turn a corner and find all your concerns breaking about some fact of tragedy.”

  I shot him a hard look. “ Your concerns seem pretty intact.”

  “Yes,” he said, glancing down to his shining toes then out to Agatha dying in her pale pool of light. “But then that’s the point.”

  This was when the disgust hit me. Unlike you, I remember all the little ways in which I’ve been manipulated, verbally or otherwise. I simply gazed at him in my flat-faced way.

  “I’m sure the Bonjours told you that we seemed … relatively … unconcerned with Jennifer’s fate.”

  “On the contrary. They said you had been very co-operative. They hate you, of course. They think all of this … is, well … some kind of monstrous con, but … ”

  I let my voice trail into the sound of Agatha drawing a mechanical breath. I felt vaguely nauseous.

  “You need to understand us, Mr. Manning, really understand us, because if you don’t, you will suspect us. And if you suspect us, you will waste time and resources investigating us, time an
d resources that I fear Jennifer Bonjour desperately needs.”

  I wasn’t buying any of it. Rule one of all private investigating is that everyone, but everyone, is full of shit. You know that niggling instinct you have to nip and tuck your reality when describing this or that aspect of your life? Add an inch to your dick here, shave a year off your Corolla there? That temptation pretty much rules the roost when you have something real to hide.

  I grinned as best I could manage. Shrugged. “Blame the weirdo, huh? Is that what you think I’ll do?”

  “Why not? People can’t help themselves, Mr. Manning.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  A canny look and smile. “This is why I wanted to introduce you to Agatha … to help you understand how something so obviously tragic from your frame of reference could be cause for celebration from ours.”

  This was where I got that sinking feeling … like finding a crack pipe in your nephew’s rucksack.

  “Cause for celebration, huh.”

  “I know how it sounds,” Baars said, gesturing for me to leave the room. “But I suspect you, Mr. Manning, know precisely what I’m talking about … ”

  “And what would that be, Professor?”

  “Not feeling what others think you should.”

  Owich. I was beginning to appreciate the fucker’s power, I give you that. If he could give me the itch, cynical cocksucker that I am, then his followers need not be the morons I had assumed they would be. Albert had told me as much already, I suppose.

  “Imagine,” Baars said, leading me down the hall. “Imagine a society that has evolved beyond things like meaning and purpose, where nothing matters because anything can be done. Imagine a society that treats the modalities of human experience, everything from the extremes of rape and murder to the tedious mainstays of snoozing and shitting, the same way a gourmand regards items on a restaurant menu …” He pressed open a glass door that led onto a small terrace with a single table. “As things to be consumed.”