Disciple of the Dog

by R. Scott Bakker

  The voices, though, they almost seem like sounds.

  “I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea!”

  “And what idea would that be, Mr. Bonjour?”

  “Jon slapped her,” Amanda Bonjour said in a tone meant either to demonstrate or to humiliate. “The last… fight we had. Jon slapped… her. “

  Her husband snuffled. “I… ah … I… I don’t know what to say …”

  My mind always plays this trick when I recollect emotionally intense moments. A reptilian coldness soaks the scene, a kind of psychic air conditioning, one that makes me think of museums for some reason. I’ve never quite figured out why.

  “Jonny blames himself,”Amanda said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault. “ I had no doubt that she believed what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, nothing mattered except finding her daughter. The question was whether her husband believed what she was saying. Where her agenda came across as arrow-straight and unrelenting, his seemed decidedly bushy.

  “I appreciate your honesty,” I said. Though I rarely gain any self-insight from these sessions, I am often nagged by a sense of foolishness, like hearing your voice on someone else’s answering machine. I’ve learned that no matter how thoroughly you think you’ve mastered the moment, everything is naivete in retrospect. Everything. “Mostpeople try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served ifthey come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth. “ I had leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. “You do understand that?”

  A twitch across the fat of his face. Anger, deep enough to rattle the hustings. “Of course,”he said. What was this? Pride? Was he simply the kind of man who resented others for witnessing his weakness? Or was there something more?

  “I have one last question, for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour. Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not?”

  “I’m not sure I understand. ”I had registered his shock the first time, the squint as he tried to remember whether he had told me he was a lawyer. What I had missed was the hunted look in his eye—the apprehension. He had come to me thinking I was a nickle-and-dime hack, that much was clear. But this … this made me think he needed me to be a fool.

  “Stuff like this … personal stuff with consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine … such stuff requires rust. Why wouldn’t you go to people you know?”

  “This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. The fact that she was the Prime Mover would have been significant if women weren’t so often the motivating force behind these visits. Men tended to bring the same macho reluctance to my office as they did to marriage counsellors. Hunting was a man’s job. Avenging even more so.

  “Even still …”

  Mr. Bonjour intervened—once again to explain himself. “No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather …jaded … “ The irony was just as thick the second time. Rich.

  “And?”

  “Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience. ” And what kind of experience would that be? Bonjour had the pudgy look of a divorce lawyer—a soft-skinned shark. Criminal attorneys tend to have more leather in their mien. They like to lean forward when they talk. Not Bonjour. He was a slumper: I suppose sucking mortgage payments out of broken marriages could do that.

  “But it’s not just that,” Amanda added nervously. “You see … Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are … well, more like you.”Why did this bug me so much, the fact that he had already pissed in the investigatory soup? You’d think I’d be used to cleaning up behind amateurs.

  “Like me?”As was so often the case during these rehearsals, I felt my face take on my past expression: a rueful smile. Apparently this was what had sparked the several complaints Michelle had received over the years: a crazy man making faces at his coffee cup. “You mean socio-economically disadvantaged.”

  “We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language. ”

  This struck me as a solid enough rationale, but there was something that nagged me—something too pat. It was as crisp as a legal brief. Even the delivery struck me as premeditated—I could almost see Bonjour coaching his wife as they circled the block looking for a place to park.

  “Remember, if he asks …

  “You don’t know these people like I …

  “You have to manage them, Mandy. Jesus! Stop being so fucking naive!

  “Do you want to find Jennifer? Huh?

  “Do you want to find our girl or not? Our baby girl.!”

  See, for you it’s all a mush, the past. It all fades into soup. This is why you wake up every morning feeling renewed. Not me, ever. Waking up is more like a clerical exercise. This is why other people come to you as a haze of implicit associations, some good, some bad—we humans tend to be a mixed bag. For me, others arrive like half-unravelled balls of chronological yarn. People are never simply … themselves.

  Either that or they’re more themselves than they know.

  If I knew you well, I quite literally would know you better than you know yourself. I could go on for days telling you stuff that you had forgotten about yourself. And I could make you cry with my observations.

  And this is the thing: where you see acts, I see repetitions, and where you see people—yourself included—I see repeaters. You really have no idea how much we repeat. Even when we manage to defy expectations, we’re like children: unpredictable in unsurprising ways. Those repetitions you’re aware of you call habits or routines, very human-sounding terms, connoting warmth and security, and in no way, shape, or form contradicting agency, the possibility of breaking free. But this is simply a trick of your limited perspective. Everything looks like insects if you pan back far enough—people included.

  And you wonder why I’m cynical. I’ve literally “seen it all before.” The truth is we all have, every single one of us past the age of, say, twenty-five. The only difference is that I remember.

  This is probably why the hook set so deep—why I fell in love with Dead Jennifer. This case was unlike anything I had seen.

  And like all addictive drugs, it promised something more profound than bliss …

  Forgetfulness.

  I found myself staring across Jitters in a blinking stupor. Somehow ebb had become flow without me even noticing: the place was buzzing with patrons. Four old ladies next to me were laughing so hard that two of them were pawing their purses for tissue. Something sly and embarrassed in their expressions shouted dirty joke. I stood, squeezed past three young men who had to be Mormons—they were too squeaky clean otherwise. I felt like asking them what the trick was, believing in things that made archaeologists sigh and look to heaven.

  I paused outside the entrance, imagined what the sky would look like if all you could see was bloated sun. I grabbed my Zippo, lit a cigarette. I savoured the smoke: blue slipping in, grey piling out. I wondered at that, the change in colour. I thought of the blue soaking into my lungs, swirling into my bloodstream, saturating my brain.

  Beautiful blue. Like a second lens, it always had a way of drawing things into sharper focus.

  Something was up. There was something slippery about Jonathan Bonjour, something that utterly eluded his wife.

  I know it sounds implausible. Memory tricks aside, how could I detect something in a single sitting that Amanda Bonjour had never glimpsed in years of marriage?

  It’s just the way. It’s not simply that familiarity blinds—and it does, catastrophically—it’s a Mars—Venus thing as well. The bulk of the male and female bandwidths may overlap, but there’s always a small range of gender-specific frequencies, things that only men can pick up in other men, and that only women are sensitive to in other women.

  Jonathan Bonjour had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. I was almost certain of it.

  Or maybe it was just an excuse to ligh
t another smoke. I slipped on my shades and began walking. It made me feel smart, wringing the blue out of the smoke.

  I was just a few packs away from one hundred thousand cigarettes. Happy times.

  Track Four

  MONKEY CHILDREN

  Tuesday …

  Some prick driving one of those big-ass SUVs cut me off about an hour or so outside of Ruddick. I had just answered a call from Kimberley, so I apologized to her and rolled down the window—one of those manual cocksuckers. The wind dragged hot and oily across my face. I leaned on the horn to secure the guy’s attention—he was little more than a forehead over the rim of his passenger door—then shouted a friendly, “Dirty-mother-fucker!”

  Now in the good old days, he would have rolled down his window and shouted back, something about my after-tax income, perhaps. Instead, he welded his eyes forward and gunned his behemoth. Anyone crazy enough to pick a road fight while driving an ancient Volkswagen Golf, he probably reasoned, had to have a gun in his glove compartment.

  Which I did: an illegal Colt .45 automatic taped beneath a false bottom—a government model, no less. But still I found myself resenting the assumption.

  “You’re driving?” Kimberley said when I picked the cell back up. “I thought you said you had stopped at a diner. ” Despite the roar of the road, I heard her draw on a cigarette.

  “Are you smoking in the office?”

  “No. I’m in the copy room. ”

  “There’s no phone in the copy room.”

  Another draw—nothing communicates impatience quite like a cigarette. “I’m. In. The copy room,”she repeated with Don’t-you-dare- start-with-me obstinacy.

  I didn’t. I wanted to—I had told her precisely eleven times how alienating non-smokers found the smell of cigarettes, how she was literally driving away business. Each time she just shrugged and said, “I don’t smell anything.” Amazing really, when you think about it, how much you’ll put up with for a piece of ass.

  So instead I asked, “What do you want?”

  Another puffing pause. “That Chiefthing-a-ma-jingi called for you.”

  “Nolen called?”

  “Yup.”

  “What did he want?”

  “You. He wants you to come to his office as soon as you get into town.”

  The Bonjours must have gotten busy with that list I gave them. Real people are like that.

  “Cool … Love you, babe.”

  I tossed the cell onto the passenger seat, rubbed the bridge of my nose beneath my shades. In my mind’s eye I could see the frustration in Kimberley’s look, the anger and the hurt as she sat all alone in the office. Solitude weighs heavier on strippers than most. I shook away the image simply because I breeze past things I don’t like. I make like everything is popcorn, knowing that few things are more powerful than a relentless good nature. I hurt people, knowing they will hide that hurt simply because the gag must go on.

  Still, I knew I had to do something—and soon. She was in love with me. Like, totally.

  The drive into Ruddick was interesting. The first curious thing I noticed was that the speed limit dropped about a mile or so before you would think it should. Cracked sidewalks trimmed either side of the road, and side streets divided it at intervals you would expect in a circa-1950s subdivision, but there were no houses, only overgrown lots staked here and there by the odd lonely tree. The place was starting to remind me of Detroit.

  I saw a dead squirrel, a shiny yellow toy knotted in weeds, a kid pounding dirt with a hammer. I even saw some small-town graffiti, FUCK UP NOT DOWN, scrawled across a houseless foundation. Things I needed to forget yet would always remember. You have to be prepared for the sudden onslaught of physics while driving—I know this better than most people—and yet my eyes perpetually flick this way and that, scoping out ass and other oddities.

  Part of the U.S. military’s retirement package.

  I passed a bustling Citgo, an abandoned GM dealership, and finally the white frame Church of the Third Resurrection before making it into the town proper.

  What a dump, I thought. And I live in fucking Newark.

  I took a wrong turn at some point, because I somehow found myself in the industrial park peering at all the dead factories. The first was one of those rambling windowless affairs that made me think I was looking at mismatched container boxes from a distance. The second was a stripped skeleton of rust-burned I-beams. I felt vaguely disappointed: I had been hoping for something more crowded, more bricked and rotted—more Dickensian—not pastel cubes in a patchwork of vast industrial lots. Fucking modernity, man. Even our decadence and decline have become generic.

  I turned around on some service road, backtracked. The downtown made me feel more at home. Someday someone will eulogize the strip mall, and I for one will shed a real tear. The way I figure it, humans have always lived and worked in aesthetic abominations. The people I saw looked stupid—walking or talking or gazing with an insolence I reflex- ively attributed to generational inbreeding. More urban chauvinism, I know, and the fact that I think everybody looks stupid. I see people the way I imagine animals must see me: nice head of hair, ape-boy, but what the fuck happened to your face?

  I found the police department in a building surprising for its size. Later I would learn that in its manufacturing heyday, Ruddick had been three times bigger, population-wise. This little demographic fact would figure largely in what followed, as it so happened.

  Nolen was out, of course, so I hunkered down in the vestibule with nothing more than a paunchy desk sergeant to keep me company, the kind of guy who ages watchful, if you know what I mean. Eyes so bulbous it seemed impossible he could ever shut them—entirely. A great look for a cop, actually. He was positively freaking me out, so much so I was actually relieved when my cell twittered to the riff from “Back in Black.”

  “Manning,” I said in lieu of a hello.

  “Hey, Disciple! This is Albert. Not catching you at a bad time, am I?”

  “Naw. Just aimlessly wandering the aisles of Walmart, you know …” I winked at the glaring sergeant.

  Albert Fellows was one of my bookworm buddies, a social psychologist over at New York University—one of a number of relationships I had cultivated over the years. I had called him the previous night while researching the Framers online, left a message. Since I only remembered everything people said, I continually sought people who could tell me what I needed to know. In exchange, I would score them a bag of weed here and there. You have no idea just how many academics are hard up for weed. And because they live lives so tragically insulated from crime, they tend to be almost comedically grateful.

  Apparently Albert had never heard of the Framers, though he was positively giddy about the opportunity to learn more about them. He said he just wanted me to know that he was “on the case,” but I could tell he had really called out of curiosity—that he just had to know what I was up to this particular lap around the track. So I filled him in—with a good dose of my own commentary.

  “Come on, Albert. Five billion years? Could something like that be for real?” I winked at the cop once more, and finally the fucker looked away. “I mean, who would fall for that kind of shit?”

  A long cellphone ha-ha. “Look, Diss. The assumption is that there’s gotta be something wrong with cult members. You know. Stupid.. Weak-minded.. What have you. But the fact is, they tend to be better educated and have higher IQs than the general population—”

  “Whatever,” I interrupted. “You still gotta be crazy to believe what these guy—”

  “And why’s that? There’s bloody good reason why psychology and psychiary have such a hard time defining things like ‘irrational beliefs.’ Outside the realm ofpractical common sense, pretty much all human beliefis irrational. All of it! What we believe typically comes down to how the issue is framed and who gets to us first. ”

  I already knew this in my peculiar way. One of the big bonuses of diehard cynicism is the ability to take heart in bad news
.

  “We believe things willy-nilly,” I said.

  “Unto death, my friend. Unto death. ”

  I hung up thinking about Dead Jennifer’s photo in my wallet. I found myself blinking at the desk sergeant, who of course had resumed his slack-faced reverie from behind the desk, staring at me like I was a stain in the wallpaper. I couldn’t resist.

  “What? You run out of hay or oats or something?”

  “Huh?”

  That was when Chief Caleb Nolen came striding in.

  Rule one of private investigating is to kiss official ass—you know, Bugs Bunny—style: muh-muh-muh-muh- muh!—unless the official happens to be female, in which case you lick boots. Contrary to what you may believe, cops generally like private investigators. We make them feel superior, for one, the way I imagine a rock star feels talking to a roadie—as the “be” to their “wanna.” And some of us—especially the handsome, edgy ones like me—make them feel like they’re in a movie, which means they choose their roles accordingly. Who would you rather be in a flick, the wry veteran or the obstructionist asshole? If there’s one thing Hollywood is good at, it’s giving us roles to play. Everyone loves to pretend they’re in a movie, no matter where you go in the world. Good thing, too. If it wasn’t movies, then it would be some psychotic legend from the Middle Ages—or worse yet, Scripture.

  Even so, Nolen had this sour look on his face as I took the seat opposite his desk, as if I were the druggie cousin who kept hitting Grandma up for money. That was when I realized I was wearing my I WOULD RATHER BE MASTURBATING T-shirt.

  Fawk.

  I glanced at my chest then looked up at him helplessly. “Um … Shit …”

  No wonder the desk sergeant couldn’t stop staring. When you remember as much as I do, you end up overlooking more than a few crucial details.