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 ancient 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.