“Exactly!” Baars exclaimed.
The guy was baiting me. Usually this makes me ornery, toxic even, but like I said earlier, these people had organized their lives around an invisible world. At the moment, Baars was my only flashlight.
“I’m not following you… ”
He smiled. “Some forms of understanding require ignorance.”
“I’m still not following you.”
“Our lives, Mr. Manning. Our lives are like Mr. Mugs or Dick and Jane. They can only be appreciated from the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing… ”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
“That this, all of this, is… not quite real.”
“You mean like the Matrix?”
I must have used my here-we-go tone, because Baars roared with laughter. “No, not a simulation. Not quite. More like theatre, where the world is a prop, and the actors forget their identities to better inhabit their roles. We all have roles to play, Mr. Manning. Even you.”
I grinned in a heroic effort to twist hilarity into oh-ya admiration. “Like method acting taken to the absolute… ”
“Trust me, Mr. Manning, I know full well how mad I sound.”
This seemed as good a moment as any to sip my tea. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing and appreciating it.”
He grinned in eye-twinkling admission. “But really, if you think about it, I’m not actually saying anything new: only that there’s a world beyond what our eyes can see, a world more fundamental. So you tell me, honestly, what’s the difference between what I’m saying and what Christians or Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists say? If I sound mad, it’s simply because the beyond I describe has no tradition, no mass consensus, and therefore no social sanction.”
Fucking philosophy professors. There oughta be a law…
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Indeed. The ‘Occluded Frame’ is simply the name we give our more fundamental world.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re just another religious nut.”
Even as I said this, I knew it couldn’t be the case. He was saying that life-the very existence you and I are enduring this very moment-was wall to wall, top to bottom, a kind of ride at Disney World, only one where we had our memories wiped so that we wouldn’t know it was a ride.
Not all that religious when you think about it.
“Yes!” Baars cackled. I was really starting to hate the man’s laughter: it made me feel like a developmentally challenged kid hamming it up in life skills class. “Exactly!”
“So then what makes you special?”
That knocked some seriousness into him. “Because I’ve been there, Mr. Manning. I’ve crossed the Lacuna. I have literally walked the Frame.”
Is that where he got his slogans? Johnny Cash tunes?
“Like I said, what makes you special?”
A long, appraising stare. No matter how much noise a man makes about being open-minded, a part of him will always out-and-out despise contradiction. “Nothing,” he admitted with a shrug. “I could be insane, like you think. I admit that possibility. I’ve even visited neurologists to investigate the possibility.” He tapped his temple, grinning. “No tumours, I assure you. So when it comes to your judgment and my experience, Mr. Manning, I will err on the side of my experience every time. Wouldn’t you?”
“Fawk, no. Are you kidding me? I know that I’m an idiot.”
Baars smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that says, Liar, not as an accusation but as a bemused observation. A classic not-so-different- than-me smile.
“Like a good skeptic, huh?”
I shook my head with mock seriousness. “Not at all. A skeptic suspends judgment. A cynic just doesn’t care.”
“A perilously fine distinction, wouldn’t you say?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever.”
Once again, Xenophon Baars roared with laughter, a minute-long ho-ho-he-fucking-he-he that forced him to take off his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes. Say what you will about the guy, he definitely dug my brand of humour. “The story is absurd, I admit, Mr. Manning. Claiming that the world is five billion years older than it appears, that our lives are a kind of spectator sport for an inhuman generation. Madness! It has to be. But if you think, if you really honestly consider, you’ll see that we’re not saying anything surprising at all. Only that we’re the ignorant children of ourselves, Mr. Manning.”
I couldn’t resist. “Cool name for a band.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ignorant Children of Ourselves.”
I could even see the album cover: I-C-O in giant golden letters across the top. Three angels smoking a joint below. A bag of weed leaning against a sandalled toe. Because of the link between memory and sleep, my memory shrink sent me to this sleep researcher, Philip Ryle, who wanted to see whether there were any significant differences in the way you and I dream. Apparently not. But the guy was definitely one of the more interesting eggheads ever to stick pasties to my head.
You see, the thing about dreams is that they pretty much prove that the outside world is all in our heads. We have a “world generator” in our brain, which, when we’re both awake and sane, is anchored to the world-world through our senses. But when you fall asleep, your brain draws anchor, and your world generator drifts through time, place, and possibility. You dream the crazy-ass shit you’re afraid to tell your wife in the morning.
Ryle was always going on about how this meant dreams and waking life were of a piece-two versions of the same thing. He was a big fan of something called lucid dreaming-you know, where you wake up in your dream, realize that your dream is a dream, then take control. One of his grad students told me Ryle had this Playboy Mansion dream that he was able to replay at will. The kid could have been joking, but I was inclined to believe him. I’ve never met anyone who loved his sleep quite as much as Ryle.
But Ryle was also a believer in what he called lucid living. In the same way you could develop “metacognitive awareness” of your dreams and take control of them, you could also develop metacognitive awareness of your waking life-and so take control of it. This, he liked to say, was pretty much what meditation and “enlightenment” were all about. Unlike dreams, you couldn’t control what happens, but you could control how things happen, and, more importantly, whom they happen to.
He liked to claim that he could dissolve his “self” at will, and simply become the “raw space of existence.” Sometimes he would say crazy things like, “Yeah, sorry, Diss, I’m not here right now.”
I always wondered what it was like for all those dream Bunnies screwing a “raw space of existence.” I suspected it felt an awful lot like banging a dirty old man.
What Baars was saying was that the world generators in our heads had been hijacked to make it appear as though we were living in the early twenty-first century, when in fact we were living in some absurdly distant future. And in a curious sense, he was advocating a kind of lucid living not so different from the one recommended by crazy old Philip Ryle. Like the song said, we needed to party like it was 1999-give or take five billion years.
Either way, I could give a flying fuck. Here and now, baby. Dream or not, this is where the bad stuff happens. This is where beautiful young women like Jennifer Bonjour vanish, and this is where they are found.
Besides, I got the feeling my paycheque would bounce in the Frame.
I drained the last of my tea. “I gotta ask… You don’t think that Jennifer, you know, has… crossed over, or something… do you?”
“That depends,” Baars replied, his eyes troubled beneath the glare of his glasses.
“Depends?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about my favourite brand of diapers.
“On whether she’s dead, Mr. Manning.” Thanks to Baars’s little explanation, I now knew the Framers were every bit as crazy as they seemed. But thanks to Albert and his phone call, I knew this meant jack shit, simply because everybody believed in some kind of madness. Except me, of course.
Convinced I had a handle on the kooky dogma, I walked the Professor through the wonky events the night Jennifer vanished. He claimed he knew something was wrong the instant Stevie told him that Anson had called to check on Jennifer.