His tale was a familiar one: boy meets New Age revelation; boy builds end-of-the-world bunker. I could tell he had told it many times before, and that he never tired of repeating it. And why not, when it made him the Moses of the Modern Age? Conviction, whether religious or otherwise, requires a certain hunger for repetition. And flattery makes everything taste sweeter.
“It’s taken a lot of commitment,” he said, “and even more hard work, but the Framers are here to stay…”
“Until the world blows up.”
A patient smile. “Do you really think we’re that simple, Mr. Manning?”
“Define ‘simple.’”
Baars laughed like a teacher finding evidence of his genius reflected in a pupil. “‘Simple,’” he said, “is to follow the path of least social resistance, to go with the flow and believe what most everyone believes. In that sense, Mr. Manning, we Framers believe against the law of social gravitation.”
After so many smartass girlfriends, I knew this game. “But what if gravity is simply belief in general instead of this or that dogma? What if real courage consists in resisting belief altogether?”
Baars simply laughed harder. “Spoken like a true ironist!” He turned and fixed me with a look I found far too canny. “I imagine cynicism is a hazard of your trade-yes? The crazy parade of crazy people, everyone bent on justifying this or that petty transgression. It would be difficult not to take a dim view of people and their beliefs.”
“Ironist…” I said. The fucker was trying to turn the verbal tables. “Huh?”
“You think you wander a world filled with self-righteous morons, don’t you? Conceit. Vanity. Envy. Greed. You’ve seen it all, so now that’s all you see. But don’t you worry, Mr. Manning? I mean, ‘moron’ is simply a version of ‘sinner,’ isn’t it? A word we use to make ourselves feel superior. What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing?”
Condescending prick. This is generally what I think of people who say things that fly over my head.
“But I do wander a world filled with self-righteous morons.”
Exactly, the man’s smile replied.
Usually, I feel sorry for ultra-self-conscious people-people like Xen Baars. They just spend so much of their time pretending. They sit in coffee shops forcing the kinds of conversations they think people like them should have. They laugh from the top of their lungs. And in the seams of their patchwork timing, you can always glimpse panic, like drummers too sober to keep the beat. Living is work for these people. An endless tour of performances with no spectacular failures to redeem them.
But this guy had taken the pantomime to an entirely different level. Inventing worlds behind worlds to redeem the artificiality of his existence. What could be more spectacular than that?
Without explanation, Baars turned to press open a heavy oak door to our right. He ushered me from the sun-bright hall into a low, dim room that reeked of bedpans and astringent. I grinned as my eyes sorted shapes in the gloom: because I remember everything people say, I have a bad habit of cracking myself up while others are talking. Obnoxious, I know.
But what I saw slapped the grin off my face. A hospital bed, illuminated by a single reading light, set in a semicircle of gleaming devices and spectral readouts. And a woman, impossibly frail, swaddled by blankets, wired into so many tubes that it seemed she would hang suspended if the bed were kicked away. She was more than old, she was ancient, withered not only by time but by some deep, internal trauma. Her mouth hung half open, as if her lower jaw were slowly shrinking into her neck. Her eyes were little more than black perforations at the bottoms of her sockets.
Then the reek hit me. Indescribable, really, like death in diapers.
“Her name is Agatha,” Baars said from beside me. “She suffered a mid-cerebral arterial stroke some five weeks ago. Since she’s one of ours, we decided to let her die here, among us.”
I tried not to breathe, swallowed out of some reflex. Fawk. It seemed I could actually taste her dying.
“Hello… uh, Agatha.”
What was he up to?
“Something wrong, Mr. Manning?”
“No…” I lied, knowing (without knowing) that this was exactly what Baars hoped I would do. The scene reeked of unwelcome object lessons.
“Troubling, isn’t it? To turn a corner and find all your concerns breaking about some fact of tragedy.”
I shot him a hard look. “ Your concerns seem pretty intact.”
“Yes,” he said, glancing down to his shining toes then out to Agatha dying in her pale pool of light. “But then that’s the point.”
This was when the disgust hit me. Unlike you, I remember all the little ways in which I’ve been manipulated, verbally or otherwise. I simply gazed at him in my flat-faced way.
“I’m sure the Bonjours told you that we seemed… relatively… unconcerned with Jennifer’s fate.”
“On the contrary. They said you had been very co-operative. They hate you, of course. They think all of this… is, well… some kind of monstrous con, but… ”
I let my voice trail into the sound of Agatha drawing a mechanical breath. I felt vaguely nauseous.
“You need to understand us, Mr. Manning, really understand us, because if you don’t, you will suspect us. And if you suspect us, you will waste time and resources investigating us, time and resources that I fear Jennifer Bonjour desperately needs.”
I wasn’t buying any of it. Rule one of all private investigating is that everyone, but everyone, is full of shit. You know that niggling instinct you have to nip and tuck your reality when describing this or that aspect of your life? Add an inch to your dick here, shave a year off your Corolla there? That temptation pretty much rules the roost when you have something real to hide.
I grinned as best I could manage. Shrugged. “Blame the weirdo, huh? Is that what you think I’ll do?”
“Why not? People can’t help themselves, Mr. Manning.”
“Don’t I know it.”
A canny look and smile. “This is why I wanted to introduce you to Agatha… to help you understand how something so obviously tragic from your frame of reference could be cause for celebration from ours.”
This was where I got that sinking feeling… like finding a crack pipe in your nephew’s rucksack.
“Cause for celebration, huh.”
“I know how it sounds,” Baars said, gesturing for me to leave the room. “But I suspect you, Mr. Manning, know precisely what I’m talking about… ”
“And what would that be, Professor?”
“Not feeling what others think you should.”
Owich. I was beginning to appreciate the fucker’s power, I give you that. If he could give me the itch, cynical cocksucker that I am, then his followers need not be the morons I had assumed they would be. Albert had told me as much already, I suppose.
“Imagine,” Baars said, leading me down the hall. “Imagine a society that has evolved beyond things like meaning and purpose, where nothing matters because anything can be done. Imagine a society that treats the modalities of human experience, everything from the extremes of rape and murder to the tedious mainstays of snoozing and shitting, the same way a gourmand regards items on a restaurant menu…” He pressed open a glass door that led onto a small terrace with a single table. “As things to be consumed.”
“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.”