In a world of funhouse mirrors, it’s the straight reflection that deforms.
“Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community…”
Nolen was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones.
I peered across the world beyond my windshield, the world of Ruddick, PA, my thoughts crusting about the rim of innumerable memories. The sun was still high, so that the people I could see had only shadows beneath their brows-no eyes that could be seen. Something about them and the surrounding collection of little buildings, scrubby trees, and cracked sidewalks made me smile.
Fucking small towns, man. You gotta love them. Big enough to pretend. Too small to be.
I cranked the key, listened to my poor old Vee-Dub rattle to diesel life. As I pulled onto Kane Street, one last fragment of my conversation came floating back to awareness.
“No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”
“A gas mask, huh.”
Gas mask, indeed. It was time to meet the Framers. Track Five
THE LAW OF SOCIAL GRAVITATION
I’m guessing that when you pass a woman laughing with a clutch of children on the sidewalk, your heart smiles-or something like that. The sun abruptly shines, and your next breath feels like a lucky pull at the slots. This is because you see people as surfaces. Not me. For me, people are always the latest instance of a history. So where you see a smile hanging in the blank blue of now, I see a smile superimposed on a snarl, shriek, laugh, sneer-you get the picture.
I never see people-I see crazed bundles. Battered suitcases, stuffed to overflowing, cinched shut with belts and frayed twine.
An old girlfriend of mine, a visual artist named Darla Blackmore, once tried to convince me that the exact opposite was the case, that given the rarity of my condition I was likely the only person on the planet who saw “people.” Everybody else, she claimed, saw only thin slices of people, which they then mistook for the whole thing. They saw types, she said, not tokens. Apparently this was a big distinction among the philosophy majors she hung out with.
Now, I should have been flattered, but instead I was irritated. Not all repetitions are equal. Some, like sex for instance, never get stale, no matter how high I stack the pile. Sex is one of those things you always do for the first time, perfect recall or not. But others grate, and when I say grate, I mean grate.
Like when people call this curse of mine a fucking gift-as if it were a superpower or something.
So I told Darla that if people were in fact tokens, they would be better off being types, because what I see is ugly beyond redemption.
To which she replied, “Is that how you see me?”
I should have seen it coming. Maybe that’s what made me so angry- angry enough to speak the truth, which is to say, too angry. I told her she was a chorus of Darlas, a cacophony of lyrics sung simultaneously, with only one sweet note to redeem her.
“And what note is that?”
Of course I had to be honest a second disastrous time. “Your-”
That was October 26, 1993. Another bad day. The Framer Compound was an old horse farm a mile or so outside of downtown-on the edge of a largely abandoned industrial park. It’s funny the way movies fuck up your imagination. You begin to see Drama everywhere you look, little particles of it waiting to be taken up in this or that narrative arc. Everything I glimpsed while driving became a crime scene. A series of concrete cylinders, beached among thronging sumac and grasses: that’s where Jennifer was assaulted, where she screamed her last breath. A collapsed outbuilding, its aluminum siding buckled like discarded clothes: that’s where he watched and waited, holding his binoculars with one hand while rubbing his cock with the other. A swath of open ground, brown and ragged, where the toxic buildup prevented everything but the hardiest weeds from taking root: that was where she ran, trying to scream past sobs of exhaustion and terror. And the dead factories themselves, bland and imperturbable save where missing panels afforded glimpses of pitch interiors: that’s where she tried to hide, tripping through the whooping dark, gasping air that smelled of rust and residual hydrocarbons.
On and on, everywhere I looked…
A million and one places to hide a Dead Jennifer.
The Compound had that well-heeled rural manse look, everything prim and oh so agricultural, only with an inward Waco air. Us against the world-you know. The iron gates stood ajar. I clattered down the lane in my old Vee-Dub, craning my head this way and that to get a sense of things. Gravel popped loud through my open window. Two monstrous willows swayed their skirts in the summer breeze-a whiff of paradise in that, I suppose. The original farmhouse towered grand over a series of white-brick additions. Despite the obvious age of the original structure, everything about it had that tight, buttoned look- like new windows nailed down. Wood chip gardens sprawled around the foundations, bright with flowers. The lane hooked around, opening onto a lot hedged on two sides by long, low barns that had been renovated to house human livestock. The place was huge, I realized. At least thirty thousand labyrinthine square feet. Maybe more.
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.