They all squint: this is universal. Almost all of them clear their throats-the sludge of not talking. Most are wearing something comfy and informal, though you would be surprised how many people get dolled up to do nothing. Lots of stubble on lots of chins. A couple of hairy female armpits. The odd whiff of reefer. The glimpse of Nintendo on pause in the living room. Some are pleasant. Some are gruff. Some are indifferent, while others are actively hostile. One guy actually had his rifle hugged to his chest, which was alarming in its own right. When combined with his Are-you-an-earthling? peer, it was nothing short of terrifying.
The next time you drive through your neighbourhood, take a look around, remind yourself of all the fucking lunatics living in your midst. Seriously. Unlike that cocksucker Baars, I have no clue whatsoever what we humans are up to as a species. I only know what we aren’t.
Like healthy, for instance.
Molly was particularly surprised by how many people had heard nothing whatsoever about Jennifer Bonjour. I had expected it. I’d learned from earlier expeditions-different people missing in different ways- that a good proportion of the population pay no attention whatsoever to what happens locally. If they crawl out of their video-game-soap-opera- horror-movie world at all, they typically sit vegging to Fox or CNN, soaking up abstract enormities to the exclusion of the struggles next door.
Same as me, actually.
She seemed scandalized, whereas I was torn-well, not torn (I would have to give a shit for that), but “of two minds,” let’s say. Speaking to them was a waste of time, of course, but they did tend to make larger than average “contributions,” and I had expenses to cover, like the ten skins I had lost in Atlantic City a couple of weeks previously, not to mention my long-standing massage parlour addiction. Fucking vampires.
Tragic news is kind of like Twinkies that way: better fresh.
I imagine someone like Molly would say that you “meet all types” or some such after doing this for a while. Not me. The thing that always strikes me is just how alike people are-variations on a theme, no different than their yards and their houses. I know there seems to be an enormous difference between a morbidly obese housewife, her jowls caked with cover-up, and a string-bean teenager with a fading hard-on, but only if you can conveniently forget all the transitional species in between-which I cannot. I tend to see people with the eye I imagine a dog breeder must take to canines: sharp enough to discriminate the fine- grain differences, broad enough to see them as expressions of the same basic set of genes.
Humans. Fawk. Whether it’s the environment or a hand-washing OCD, their concerns pretty much all amount to the same thing: saving their asses.
The only people I spent any length of time talking to were those who claimed to have seen Dead Jennifer before she went missing. There was this cashier at the local Kroger who checked her groceries several times when the Framers came in for their once-a-week communal shop. “To be honest, I always thought she had, you know, airs about her.” There was the rickety old Jehovah’s Witness who had tried to save her soul one morning at the Waffle House. “You know what she told me?” the stingy old bitch said, handing me a quarter that gleamed a sinister digestive-tract green. “She told me man had outgrown salvation. OutgrownP There was the war vet who used to ogle her at the wheelchair-accessible library. “I like to think if I had a daughter…” Several of them in all, and no matter how much they tsk-tsked, you couldn’t shake the feeling that they were secretly thrilled to have landed a glancing blow on a real honest-to-God mystery.
Small towns. You gotta love them.
Just about everyone asked me about the investigation. I uniformly lied through my teeth, told them I knew next to nothing except that everyone seemed to suspect the Framers. The responses were predictable, ranging from “Yeah… What is it they believe again?” indifference to bald-faced declarations of bigotry. This one guy, Phil “the Pill” Conroy of 93 Inkerman Street, asked me if I had heard of pogroms before. “I tell ya,” he pronounced in a liquored grunt, “that’s what we need-what this country needs. Some kinda reckoning.”
The prick didn’t give me a dime, of course.
The consensus seemed to be that the Framers were a symptom of things gone wrong, a disease of the body social, as if America had rolled out of bed one morning to find boils marring its clear white skin. Where was the ideological Clearasil? Fawk. There was also the implication that we had lost our nerve more than our way. Of course, not one of them could tell me what the Framers actually believed-only that they believed wrong. And even though I knew that these kinds of judgments were simply the brain’s version of the gag reflex, something compulsive and inevitable, I found myself nodding and then nodding some more.
Siding with the simple and the confused.
Suddenly I understood why Baars had taken me to see old Agatha. He knew full well what he was up against. He knew he would be swimming against the tribal tide.
Heretics are doomed to be burned. In the fires of the imagination, if not otherwise. Molly fairly radiated disapprovaclass="underline" she was put off by all fraud, apparently, even when as petty and as ingenious as mine. But I could tell she had been chastised by my earlier demonstration. There was more to me than could be easily scavenged by her journalistic eye. I could even glimpse it every once in a while, shining in her wayward looks…
Respect.
We discussed our day at the diner that evening, weary and footsore. Exhaustion tends to clear the workbench of communication, at least when it doesn’t clear everything away altogether. You can sit and talk like Vulcans, always on topic, always moving forward, without the baggage of lust and hurt. We had our pious moments, sure, where we congratulated ourselves for being thin or urban or intelligent-but then that’s simply par for the human course, being better than everybody else.
“So what do you think?” I asked while still blinking at the fluorescent lighting.
“Creepy.”
“Creepy? How so?”
“I kept pricking my ears at, like, every house we went to, thinking I would hear a moan or a… a cry or something. I kept telling myself that she had to be in someone’s basement somewhere. Every place. It was like a compulsion or something. I just couldn’t stop.”
What she described sounded like a typical reaction, a natural way for an average imagination to screw with a normal head. Since insults were the rule when I encountered natural, average, normal things, I kept my mouth shut.
“What about that Phil the Pill guy?” she asked after an awkward moment. “What did you think of him?”
“Besides the pictures of Rush Limbaugh taped to his underwear?”
She graced me with a weary grin. “You know what I mean. Pogroms? Please. A guy who believes in rounding up whole populations is certainly capable of rounding up a lone woman, especially one, you know…”
I knew what she was talking about. I had a couple of memories from the Gulf War that I would pay good money to scrub if I could. This one guy in our crew-Wendeez we called him, because he always smelled like hamburger-took the “forces” in Special Forces a little too literally, way back when. Funny how the young and the pretty so often find themselves singled out for punishment.
“Naw,” I said, doing my best to blink the memories away. “I don’t think Phil’s a concern. Any time a dude tells you his nickname, you can be pretty certain he’s insecure. Whoever grabbed Jennifer-if that’s what in fact happened-you can be reasonably certain he has some kind of ice in his veins. Goofballs like him just don’t have what it takes.”
“Some do, Disciple. Trust me.”
This had the smell of a college sob story.