“Consumed?”
I took the seat he offered—an iron-and-wicker thing. We were in another small courtyard, this one completely shaded save for an oblong of brilliance across the spikes and hostas. The air smelled of mint and earth cooling in the evening. Gleaming porcelain crowded the table: apparently we were about to have some tea—or as I like to call it, coffee with the balls cut off.
“Did you ever read Dick and Jane in public school?” Baars asked as he poured out two dainty cups of tea.
“Nah. For me it was Mr. Mugs.”
Another enigmatic smile. “Do you ever go back to reread Mr. Mugs?”
“Of course not,” I replied.
“Why?”
More games. “Because it’s stupid. Only retards and little kids can appreciate it.”
“Exactly!” Baars exclaimed.
The guy was baiting me. Usually this makes me ornery, toxic even, but like I said earlier, these people had organized their lives around an invisible world. At the moment, Baars was my only flashlight.
“I’m not following you … ”
He smiled. “Some forms of understanding require ignorance.”
“I’m still not following you.”
“Our lives, Mr. Manning. Our lives are like Mr. Mugs or Dick and Jane. They can only be appreciated from the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing … ”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
“That this, all of this, is … not quite real.”
“You mean like the Matrix?”
I must have used my here-we-go tone, because Baars roared with laughter. “No, not a simulation. Not quite. More like theatre, where the world is a prop, and the actors forget their identities to better inhabit their roles. We all have roles to play, Mr. Manning. Even you.”
I grinned in a heroic effort to twist hilarity into oh-ya admiration. “Like method acting taken to the absolute … ”
“Trust me, Mr. Manning, I know full well how mad I sound.”
This seemed as good a moment as any to sip my tea. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing and appreciating it.”
He grinned in eye-twinkling admission. “But really, if you think about it, I’m not actually saying anything new: only that there’s a world beyond what our eyes can see, a world more fundamental. So you tell me, honestly, what’s the difference between what I’m saying and what Christians or Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists say? If I sound mad, it’s simply because the beyond I describe has no tradition, no mass consensus, and therefore no social sanction.”
Fucking philosophy professors. There oughta be a law …
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Indeed. The ‘Occluded Frame’ is simply the name we give our more fundamental world.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re just another religious nut.”
Even as I said this, I knew it couldn’t be the case. He was saying that life—the very existence you and I are enduring this very moment—was wall to wall, top to bottom, a kind of ride at Disney World, only one where we had our memories wiped so that we wouldn’t know it was a ride.
Not all that religious when you think about it.
“Yes!” Baars cackled. I was really starting to hate the man’s laughter: it made me feel like a developmentally challenged kid hamming it up in life skills class. “Exactly!”
“So then what makes you special ?”
That knocked some seriousness into him. “Because I’ve been there, Mr. Manning. I’ve crossed the Lacuna. I have literally walked the Frame.”
Is that where he got his slogans? Johnny Cash tunes?
“Like I said, what makes you special?”
A long, appraising stare. No matter how much noise a man makes about being open-minded, a part of him will always out-and-out despise contradiction. “Nothing,” he admitted with a shrug. “I could be insane, like you think. I admit that possibility. I’ve even visited neurologists to investigate the possibility.” He tapped his temple, grinning. “No tumours, I assure you. So when it comes to your judgment and my experience, Mr. Manning, I will err on the side of my experience every time. Wouldn’t you?”
“Fawk, no. Are you kidding me? I know that I’m an idiot.”
Baars smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that says, Liar, not as an accusation but as a bemused observation. A classic not-so-different- than-me smile.
“Like a good skeptic, huh?”
I shook my head with mock seriousness. “Not at all. A skeptic suspends judgment. A cynic just doesn’t care.”
“A perilously fine distinction, wouldn’t you say?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever.”
Once again, Xenophon Baars roared with laughter, a minute-long ho-ho-he-fucking-he-he that forced him to take off his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes. Say what you will about the guy, he definitely dug my brand of humour. “The story is absurd, I admit, Mr. Manning. Claiming that the world is five billion years older than it appears, that our lives are a kind of spectator sport for an inhuman generation. Madness! It has to be. But if you think, if you really honestly consider, you’ll see that we’re not saying anything surprising at all. Only that we’re the ignorant children of ourselves, Mr. Manning.”
I couldn’t resist. “Cool name for a band.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ignorant Children of Ourselves.”
I could even see the album cover: I-C-O in giant golden letters across the top. Three angels smoking a joint below. A bag of weed leaning against a sandalled toe.
Because of the link between memory and sleep, my memory shrink sent me to this sleep researcher, Philip Ryle, who wanted to see whether there were any significant differences in the way you and I dream. Apparently not. But the guy was definitely one of the more interesting eggheads ever to stick pasties to my head.
You see, the thing about dreams is that they pretty much prove that the outside world is all in our heads. We have a “world generator” in our brain, which, when we’re both awake and sane, is anchored to the world-world through our senses. But when you fall asleep, your brain draws anchor, and your world generator drifts through time, place, and possibility. You dream the crazy-ass shit you’re afraid to tell your wife in the morning.
Ryle was always going on about how this meant dreams and waking life were of a piece—two versions of the same thing. He was a big fan of something called lucid dreaming—you know, where you wake up in your dream, realize that your dream is a dream, then take control. One of his grad students told me Ryle had this Playboy Mansion dream that he was able to replay at will. The kid could have been joking, but I was inclined to believe him. I’ve never met anyone who loved his sleep quite as much as Ryle.
But Ryle was also a believer in what he called lucid living. In the same way you could develop “metacognitive awareness” of your dreams and take control of them, you could also develop metacognitive awareness of your waking life—and so take control of it. This, he liked to say, was pretty much what meditation and “enlightenment” were all about. Unlike dreams, you couldn’t control what happens, but you could control how things happen, and, more importantly, whom they happen to.
He liked to claim that he could dissolve his “self” at will, and simply become the “raw space of existence.” Sometimes he would say crazy things like, “Yeah, sorry, Diss, I’m not here right now.”
I always wondered what it was like for all those dream Bunnies screwing a “raw space of existence.” I suspected it felt an awful lot like banging a dirty old man.
What Baars was saying was that the world generators in our heads had been hijacked to make it appear as though we were living in the early twenty-first century, when in fact we were living in some absurdly distant future. And in a curious sense, he was advocating a kind of lucid living not so different from the one recommended by crazy old Philip Ryle. Like the song said, we needed to party like it was 1999??
?give or take five billion years.
Either way, I could give a flying fuck. Here and now, baby. Dream or not, this is where the bad stuff happens. This is where beautiful young women like Jennifer Bonjour vanish, and this is where they are found.
Besides, I got the feeling my paycheque would bounce in the Frame.
I drained the last of my tea. “I gotta ask … You don’t think that Jennifer, you know, has … crossed over, or something … do you?”
“That depends,” Baars replied, his eyes troubled beneath the glare of his glasses.
“Depends?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about my favourite brand of diapers.
“On whether she’s dead, Mr. Manning.”
Thanks to Baars’s little explanation, I now knew the Framers were every bit as crazy as they seemed. But thanks to Albert and his phone call, I knew this meant jack shit, simply because everybody believed in some kind of madness. Except me, of course.
Convinced I had a handle on the kooky dogma, I walked the Professor through the wonky events the night Jennifer vanished. He claimed he knew something was wrong the instant Stevie told him that Anson had called to check on Jennifer.
“I never approved of their forays,” he said. “The dancing I understood. She was … young. Very young. But they insisted on walking for some reason. I always told them it wasn’t safe … “
I could hear it in his voice, the let’s-move-on hesitancy. Even though Baars wielded absolute authority, he was still accountable to his past. He couldn’t make it up as he went along—at least not the way I did. Power turns on legitimacy, and legitimacy—to the chagrin of more than a few tyrants—turns on consistency.
What could he say, really? It was all a simulation, wasn’t it? Dead factories. Abductions. Rapes. How could the almighty Xenophon Baars tell anyone to be afraid of “worldly” things?
Perhaps this was the motive for her recklessness. Perhaps she had resented Baars’s domination even as she surrendered to it. Perhaps making him worry was one among a dozen ways to get even …
Perhaps Baars had had enough.
When I asked him whether she was sexually involved with anybody in the Compound, he said, “Yes,” without missing a beat. “Jennifer and I were lovers.”
A clipped response, and the one I expected. Perhaps Jennifer’s dancing— and not the walking—had been his real concern all along. A cult leader is one thing. But a jealous cult leader? The first thing this business teaches you is that there’s nothing more murderous than ambitious genes.
“Another undergrad infatuation, huh?”
“On the contrary,” he said. For the first time he looked almost offended, which was amazing considering the number of zingers I’d laid on him so far. “I’m quite convinced that … that this level of me, at least, is in love with her … Yes. Quite in love.”
Fawk … This level of me?
Mad as a fucking hatter. What would it be like to be at once in love and to look at that love as a kind of gift shop curiosity—like a snow bubble from Montreal or something?
I have to admit, I was getting excited, not in the woody way, though given who I am and what I suffer, it would have been more than understandable. This was utterly—almost over-the-top—new. Totally unlike any case I had ever worked. So even though I was shocked, even bewildered, by what Baars had said, I sat there smiling my fucking- bootiful smile. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried!
“Tell me, Dr. Baars. Does anyone get … you know, impatient ?”
“I don’t follow.”
“You know. Like the Jains in India. Or the Cathars in medieval France. When you make death a virtue, when you make this world some kind of perversion, moral or whatever, you have an incentive to die, don’t you? Take you guys. For the Framers, death is a kind of waking, a supreme form of enlightenment, isn’t it?”
A hard look. “Are you suggesting she committed suicide?”
I wagged my head in a big naw. “Look. I’m big on circumstances, on the ways they warp the stakes of things. I don’t think about bad apples so much as bruising bushels. The fact is, Dr. Baars, at a basic level there’s precious little that distinguishes your lot from the rest of the planet. You guys are at least as fucked up as the rest of us—at least. Add to that the fact that death doesn’t carry the same cold water for you as it does for someone like, say”—I shot him a big cheesy grin—”me.”
A long sour look, followed by a quick glance at his gold watch. I think I’m kind of like Lenny Bruce that way: my routine tends to wear down even the most expansive sense of humour.
“Sorry, Mr. Manning,” he said, recovering something of his original charm. “I have another seminar coming up in a few minutes.” A glum, c’est dommage smile. “I’m certain we’ll find time to speak again …” He stood in that way that suggested I should stand and follow him—crazy, when you think about it, the haze of monkey-see imperatives that surrounds even our simplest actions. “But in the meantime, when you find yourself thinking that it’s always the crazy lover behind these sorts of things, please keep in mind that Ruddick is a … complicated town.”
What do you make of a conversation like that? I mean, fucking really.
The guy simply had to be crazy. And the creepy thing was that he seemed to know it. I’ve known quite a few genuinely crazy motherfuckers in my day—I’ve even been told what it feels like to have wings crack and snap out of the bones of your arms. And almost without exception, crazy motherfuckers are convinced they are as sane as sane can be, as well adjusted as the First Lady. But Baars. He seemed to know he was crazy— worse, he seemed to revel in it, as if it were another stage on his quest to blow the great spirit load.
The more I thought about him, the scarier he became.
And if that wasn’t enough, he seemed happy. Happy people make me sick, especially when their lovers have gone missing.
He escorted me back to my car, careful to fill the silence with more observations on their recent renovations. Oak banisters and all that bourgeois bullshit. Everything was local artisan this and local artisan that—leading me to remark that Ruddick must have quite a cool flea market scene.
Even though he said nothing, his smile was pure fuck-you.
Once in my car, I cranked back my seat and sparked another joint—a pinner this time. Though I remember the transcript perfectly, I find that the circumstantial details don’t … decompose, you might say, at the same rate if I run through a conversation immediately after having it.
I gazed out the windshield, saw poor Agatha crumpled in her hospital bed.
“Something wrong, Mr. Manning.?”
“No …”
The Agatha stuff, I decided, was far more than the object lesson Baars made it out to be. He wanted me to understand him and his beliefs, sure, how they might lead outsiders to mistake their complacency for guilt. Baars knew that he would have to fess up to a sexual relationship with Jennifer, knew that this would automatically make him the primary suspect—especially once you factored in his bizarre, detached attitude. Agatha was his way of throwing a towel over the alarm bell just before the fire drill.
But it was also an example of how Baars went about recruiting: confront emotionally vulnerable people with troubling things, disturbing things; get them telling small lies to conceal their discomfort—like I had—then use this as a way to pry them open to his ideological freak show. This guy didn’t simply believe the world was five billion years older than it was, he had managed to convince a group of otherwise intelligent people of the same thing. Something to remember …
He was, like, an evil mastermind or something.
I leaned back, puffing my joint, savoured the oily burn across my tongue. I closed my eyes to better allow my subconscious to present its case. You notice so many things without noticing—you have no idea. I saw steaming tea and sun-sharp porcelain across the backs of my eyelids.
“Do you ever go back to reread Mr. Mugs?” Baars asked.
“Ofcourse not:,” I re
plied.
“Why?”
“Because it’s stupid. Because only retards and little kids can appreciate it. “
“Exactly!” Baars cried.
This was his primary tactic, I decided: leading you by the nose to answers only he understood. I wondered whether this was a charismatic cult leader thing or whether it was peculiar to Baars.
“I’m not following you, Mr. Baars…”
He smiled—of course, given that this confession was what he had been fishing for all along. “Some forms ofappreciation require ignorance.”
“I’m still not following you.. “
“Our lives, Mr. Manning. Our lives are like Mr. Mugs or Dick and Jane. They can only be appreciated fom the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing… “
“So what are you saying?”
“That this, all of this, is… not quite real. “
Fawk.
I pinched the joint between thumb and index finger, sucked smoke through kissy lips. At the same time, I sat on a wrought iron chair in the Compound courtyard, fixing Baars with a bemused stare.
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
There was something wary about his nod, I decided. Up to this point I had come across as merely clever, a good practice partner for the verbal sparring he so obviously loved …
Anything but a threat.
“Indeed,,” he replied. “The ‘Occluded Frame’ is simply the name we give to our more fundamental world. “
There it was. The shift in intonations. The narrowing of his gaze.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re just another religious nut. “
“Yes! “ Baars cackled. But the laughter was forced. I was certain of it. “Exactly!”
“So then what makes you special?”
“Because I’ve been there, Mr. Manning. I’ve crossed the Lacuna. I have literally walked the Frame. “
“Like I said… “
So I worried him. It could mean he was involved in Jennifer’s disappearance, but it could also mean that I had tweaked him with my snide remarks—I have this way of snapping people’s elastics. In the Compound, he was both king and pope, and here I come waltzing in, challenging, questioning, dismissing …