“I never approved of their forays,” he said. “The dancing I understood. She was… young. Very young. But they insisted on walking for some reason. I always told them it wasn’t safe… “
I could hear it in his voice, the let’s-move-on hesitancy. Even though Baars wielded absolute authority, he was still accountable to his past. He couldn’t make it up as he went along-at least not the way I did. Power turns on legitimacy, and legitimacy-to the chagrin of more than a few tyrants-turns on consistency.
What could he say, really? It was all a simulation, wasn’t it? Dead factories. Abductions. Rapes. How could the almighty Xenophon Baars tell anyone to be afraid of “worldly” things?
Perhaps this was the motive for her recklessness. Perhaps she had resented Baars’s domination even as she surrendered to it. Perhaps making him worry was one among a dozen ways to get even…
Perhaps Baars had had enough.
When I asked him whether she was sexually involved with anybody in the Compound, he said, “Yes,” without missing a beat. “Jennifer and I were lovers.”
A clipped response, and the one I expected. Perhaps Jennifer’s dancing- and not the walking-had been his real concern all along. A cult leader is one thing. But a jealous cult leader? The first thing this business teaches you is that there’s nothing more murderous than ambitious genes.
“Another undergrad infatuation, huh?”
“On the contrary,” he said. For the first time he looked almost offended, which was amazing considering the number of zingers I’d laid on him so far. “I’m quite convinced that… that this level of me, at least, is in love with her… Yes. Quite in love.”
Fawk… This level of me?
Mad as a fucking hatter. What would it be like to be at once in love and to look at that love as a kind of gift shop curiosity-like a snow bubble from Montreal or something?
I have to admit, I was getting excited, not in the woody way, though given who I am and what I suffer, it would have been more than understandable. This was utterly-almost over-the-top-new. Totally unlike any case I had ever worked. So even though I was shocked, even bewildered, by what Baars had said, I sat there smiling my fucking- bootiful smile. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried!
“Tell me, Dr. Baars. Does anyone get… you know, impatient?”
“I don’t follow.”
“You know. Like the Jains in India. Or the Cathars in medieval France. When you make death a virtue, when you make this world some kind of perversion, moral or whatever, you have an incentive to die, don’t you? Take you guys. For the Framers, death is a kind of waking, a supreme form of enlightenment, isn’t it?”
A hard look. “Are you suggesting she committed suicide?”
I wagged my head in a big naw. “Look. I’m big on circumstances, on the ways they warp the stakes of things. I don’t think about bad apples so much as bruising bushels. The fact is, Dr. Baars, at a basic level there’s precious little that distinguishes your lot from the rest of the planet. You guys are at least as fucked up as the rest of us-at least. Add to that the fact that death doesn’t carry the same cold water for you as it does for someone like, say”-I shot him a big cheesy grin-”me.”
A long sour look, followed by a quick glance at his gold watch. I think I’m kind of like Lenny Bruce that way: my routine tends to wear down even the most expansive sense of humour.
“Sorry, Mr. Manning,” he said, recovering something of his original charm. “I have another seminar coming up in a few minutes.” A glum, c’est dommage smile. “I’m certain we’ll find time to speak again…” He stood in that way that suggested I should stand and follow him-crazy, when you think about it, the haze of monkey-see imperatives that surrounds even our simplest actions. “But in the meantime, when you find yourself thinking that it’s always the crazy lover behind these sorts of things, please keep in mind that Ruddick is a… complicated town.” What do you make of a conversation like that? I mean, fucking really.
The guy simply had to be crazy. And the creepy thing was that he seemed to know it. I’ve known quite a few genuinely crazy motherfuckers in my day-I’ve even been told what it feels like to have wings crack and snap out of the bones of your arms. And almost without exception, crazy motherfuckers are convinced they are as sane as sane can be, as well adjusted as the First Lady. But Baars. He seemed to know he was crazy- worse, he seemed to revel in it, as if it were another stage on his quest to blow the great spirit load.
The more I thought about him, the scarier he became.
And if that wasn’t enough, he seemed happy. Happy people make me sick, especially when their lovers have gone missing.
He escorted me back to my car, careful to fill the silence with more observations on their recent renovations. Oak banisters and all that bourgeois bullshit. Everything was local artisan this and local artisan that-leading me to remark that Ruddick must have quite a cool flea market scene.
Even though he said nothing, his smile was pure fuck-you.
Once in my car, I cranked back my seat and sparked another joint-a pinner this time. Though I remember the transcript perfectly, I find that the circumstantial details don’t… decompose, you might say, at the same rate if I run through a conversation immediately after having it.
I gazed out the windshield, saw poor Agatha crumpled in her hospital bed.
“Something wrong, Mr. Manning.?”
“No…”
The Agatha stuff, I decided, was far more than the object lesson Baars made it out to be. He wanted me to understand him and his beliefs, sure, how they might lead outsiders to mistake their complacency for guilt. Baars knew that he would have to fess up to a sexual relationship with Jennifer, knew that this would automatically make him the primary suspect-especially once you factored in his bizarre, detached attitude. Agatha was his way of throwing a towel over the alarm bell just before the fire drill.
But it was also an example of how Baars went about recruiting: confront emotionally vulnerable people with troubling things, disturbing things; get them telling small lies to conceal their discomfort-like I had-then use this as a way to pry them open to his ideological freak show. This guy didn’t simply believe the world was five billion years older than it was, he had managed to convince a group of otherwise intelligent people of the same thing. Something to remember…
He was, like, an evil mastermind or something.
I leaned back, puffing my joint, savoured the oily burn across my tongue. I closed my eyes to better allow my subconscious to present its case. You notice so many things without noticing-you have no idea. I saw steaming tea and sun-sharp porcelain across the backs of my eyelids.
“Do you ever go back to reread Mr. Mugs?” Baars asked.
“Ofcourse not:,” I replied.
“Why?”
“Because it’s stupid. Because only retards and little kids can appreciate it. “
“Exactly!” Baars cried.
This was his primary tactic, I decided: leading you by the nose to answers only he understood. I wondered whether this was a charismatic cult leader thing or whether it was peculiar to Baars.
“I’m not following you, Mr. Baars…”
He smiled-of course, given that this confession was what he had been fishing for all along. “Some forms ofappreciation 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 fom the standpoint of not knowing certain things, not seeing… “
“So what are you saying?”
“That this, all of this, is… not quite real. “
Fawk.
I pinched the joint between thumb and index finger, sucked smoke through kissy lips. At the same time, I sat on a wrought iron chair in the Compound courtyard, fixing Baars with a bemused stare.
“That’s what you mean by the ‘Frame,’ isn’t it?”
There was something wary about his nod, I decided. Up to this point I had come across as merely clever, a good practice partner for the verbal sparring he so obviously loved…