Disciple of the Dog

by R. Scott Bakker

  She wept.

  And somehow I understood that I had become a memory for her, a trigger for that clutch in her stomach, that cold wave of horror that stopped her halfway through whatever. Somehow I knew she was already in the process of forgetting ...

  Healing.

  We talked for a couple of hours in that naked, languorous way. There was a heaviness between us, and a sorrow, as if we were a divorced couple who had wavered in our resolution to seek different genitals.

  She had been recruited out of Berkeley. Like Anson had, she went on and on about her initial skepticism. She had laughed out loud at first, but her Outreacher, Mohammed Kadri, had been so nice and so persistent. She really had no choice but to listen, and the more she listened ...

  It’s like we have this hand within us, a hundred million neurons shaped like a palm and clutching fingers. Something, it cries. Give me something to grasp. You mean nothing until my palm is full.

  Any old bullshit will do.

  She was first hypnotized, and first experienced the Frame, on November 27, 2006. Apparently they celebrated the date like a second birthday.

  “You have no idea, Disciple. No idea what it’s like. To have no body. To think at the speed of light. To remember everything ...”

  Like being an angel, she said.

  Apparently Baars himself had called her about a month ago. The Framers had been on red alert for quite some time, preparing for the earth’s imminent demise, so when the call came, she had dropped everything. He told her that they were planning to stage Jennifer’s disappearance, but that he could say no more because it was imperative that no one know Molly was one of them. It would compromise her credibility, he said. All she was supposed to do was keep working the story. The hook would catch soon enough. He said the media had a fetish for cults, that they packaged them into something called “atrocity tales,” stories that all cultures use to define themselves against outsiders.

  He should know: he used to teach the shit.

  “He told me not to waver,” she said, wiping her eyes with the bedsheets. “He said everything that happened, no matter how shocking or how bizarre, was simply part of the plan.”

  But believers always waver. Crisis is inevitable, which is why belief systems squander so much energy defining doubt—the hard road, and certainly the one less travelled—as a kind of weakness. God’s greatest trick was convincing the world that belief was hard. For Molly, the crisis came in the form of Jennifer’s fingers. That was when she caught her first real whiff of madman.

  “I almost told you, Disciple. I should have told you!”

  “But I thought you said the Frame was real.”

  She cried for a time. I talked the stupid talk I always rely on when I don’t know what to say. Gambling stories, mostly. A couple run-ins with the law.

  Her breathing was growing thick, so I asked before it was too late.

  “When is it supposed to happen? The end, I mean.”

  Just for curiosity’s sake.

  “Friday,” she said numbly, her lips moving behind a violet netting of hair. Her eyes did not open. “The world always ends on Friday.”

  Fawk. Vegas is so much more fun on the weekend.

  I wake up in the middle of the night. There’s a young woman beside me, red hair askew, pale and naked in tangled sheets. Her breath is deep and crisp and even.

  A crimson glow taints the windows. I get up, walk nude to the curtains, which I pull wide with hands that have ended lives. Red paints me, but for once it’s not blood. I shiver despite the heat.

  I stand motionless with patience. I so rarely see the sunrise, what with the weed and the women and the good times. I want to meet this goof they call the Dawn. I want to greet him with a knowing grin and an enigmatic wink. Say, “Some forms oflife flourish in the absence ofsunlight... “

  But even as I dream these thoughts, I know something’s wrong. The frequency. The geometry, maybe.

  The sun’s arc burns through the paper horizon, an incandescent wire that grows and grows, swelling with ruby brilliance, becoming a scimitar, a crescent smouldering with retina-burning wavelengths. It scores the horizon from end to end, drawing the sky away like a curtain, burning higher and higher above a mountain range of atmospheric processors, a heaven-wide holocaust that would have boiled away the atmosphere, made slush of the continental plates, had the earth not been transformed into a machine.

  A sky that was a sun. A sun that was a sky. Like staring up at a beach ball perched on the tip of your nose.

  And it seemed so obvious, standing there, cooking in my illusory skin. It seemed so obvious why so many of us would stay here, die here, rather than flee to the stars with the others. The Gods were long dead. All we had was emptiness, twisted into Mobius convolutions. And monotony.

  In the absence of any destination, why not worship our origins?

  Simulate the twenty-first century. Make a flag of our skin.

  She was gone when I awoke. I’m not sure what bummed me out more: the fact of her escape or the fact of my slumbering through it. Usually I’m such a twitchy sleeper. Makes me feel safe, the belief that I can be unconscious and alert.

  I sat naked on the corner of the bed and smoked a Winston, reflected on the difference between quiet and lonely. Smoke one hundred thousand and one, I realized with no little dismay. I hate missing milestones.

  I shaved to the image of my face floating behind SORRY scrawled in cherry red lipstick. I pondered my age, wondered how many more Mollys would love and leave me. The only things wrinkles flatter are poets and their plots. I packed up my shit and loaded my Golf. I could already feel the buzz building on the horizon, the scramble of souls ducking for cover beneath the sweep of the National Spotlight. The media clowns would be out in force, cramming Ruddick into as many small-town cliches as they could think of, and searching for inside angles, for material witnesses they could lionize or implicate.

  Either way, me and my bag of weed were no longer welcome in this town.

  There’s a profound peace in the monotony of a road already travelled, a been-there-done-that security that lets the mind wander paths not quite of its own making. Novelty, I had decided, forces you to fucking think, and I had had enough of that. The summer roared hot through my open windows. I daydreamed to the rattle of my diesel, pondered taking the first exit to Atlantic City and to the inexhaustible allure of dice, booze, and poon.

  Instead, I found myself popping open my cell and calling Kimberley.

  “Hi, babe,” I said with phony cheer.

  “Where are you? “

  “Arrivals at JFK.”

  “You don’t say. Where did the crime take you this time? “

  “Tahiti, baby.”

  A snort, packed with amusement and exasperation, as only a woman is capable. “I watch TV, you know, Disciple. Every once in a while my thumb slips and oops! there’s CNN. “

  “Yeah, well, you know me. Plugging the toilet no matter where I go.”

  Something in my tone must have tagged her, because she paused. “Is everything okay, Disciple? “

  No.

  “Sure. But I was thinking ... “

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I was thinking I haven’t been so ... good ... to you. You know?”

  That wasn’t entirely true. At the strip club where I first met her, I was the guy holding twenties in my teeth when everyone else chewed dollars or fives. But still, true enough.

  “Something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice. “

  “No. Not at all. I just ... ah ... thought it might be nice if we went out on a ... you know, date or something.”

  “Date?” She fairly barked with laughter. I could almost see the smoke blowing out her nose. “Weed’s pretty good in Ruddick, huh? “

  “No. Seriously, Kim. I want to take you out. Seriously.”

  A long and wary pause. Strippers tend to be at once cautious and confident when dealing with men—kind of like animal trainers that way. “Okay ... “she
said with a heavy What-the-hellsigh. “Iactually have Friday night off for a fucking change. You know, I tod Jimmy. I sa—”

  “Make it Saturday,” I interrupted, savouring the sluice of hot air over my face and scalp. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, driving a car without an air conditioner.

  That was Tuesday, August 18, 2009. Good. Bad. Another day to be remembered ...

  Whether I wanted to or not.

  Acknowledgments

  As a writer I spend my days swapping souls, imagining this or that perspective, deciding who gets sharpened and who gets dulled when they scrape up against one another.

  Which is just to say that I bullshit for a living.

  The best way to bullshit, of course, is to surround yourself with bullshitters, so I’ve gradually become one of those coffee shop writers. Disciple of the Dog was almost entirely written in a wonderful little place called The Black Walnut. If you’ve been there, then I owe you my thanks, one bullshitter to another.

  Specifically, I need to thank Michele Lenhardt, Roy Cook, and Rhia Baines, for putting up with me and my geeky sense of humour, and for brewing the best damn coffee south of Toronto. I especially need to thank Ashlan Potts, for being one of those exceptional people who forge families wherever they go.

  I need to thank the usual suspects, Adrienne Kerr at Penguin, Eric Raab at Tor, Jon Wood at Orion, and of course, my agent, Chris Lotts, who I’m convinced has a better sense of character and story than the bulk of his clients, me included. I should also thank Dan Mellamphy for our conversations on the ways memory impacts experience, my brother,Bryan Bakker, for carrying the tune when I sang out of key, and my brother-in-law, Rick O’Brien, for innumerable drunken, dirty-minded gems.

  This has been a big year for my wife Sharron and I. After almost twenty years of student living, we have finally settled down, and welcomed a little baby girl into our life ...

  Ruby.

  The one soul I’ve made, but did not imagine. My first true creation, and far and away the most beautiful.

  Thank you, Sharron.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Track One A real winner

  Track Two Dead Jennifer

  Track Three One hundred thousand cigarettes

  Track Four Monkey children

  Track Five The law of social gravitation

  Track Six One potato chip at a time

  Track Seven You people

  Track Eight Shrinkage

  Track Nine Mr. Dinkfingers

  Track Ten Forty things we share

  Track Eleven The three immobilities

  Track Twelve The whatever factory

  Track Thirteen The buzz killers

  Track Fourteen One more atrocity tale

  Acknowledgments