“Like the new suit,” I called out as I approached the glass door. He was wearing the identical white uniform of course. He scowled but said nothing as I ducked past him into the air-conditioned interior.
“What’s with the crowd out front?”
“Sometimes Xen likes to teach out of doors…” He glanced at me with those cold, superior eyes of his. “Beneath the sun… the real sun.”
“Huh,” I replied. “Tell me, can you get an invisible sunburn from an invisible sun?”
Stevie ignored the question. Rude prick.
“I suppose you have invisible sunscreen for that… “
This time he led me around a bend and then down a long hallway that sported windows with melancholy glimpses of the far, shadowed side of the Compound, and a series of doors labelled Consultation Room 1 and so on. Expressionless, Stevie asked me to take a seat in Consultation Room 4.
“So the SPF must be, like, a million or something,” I said.
He left, teeth clamped tight behind a phony smile. I sat humming a Whitesnake tune I heard on the drive, wondering where Baars found all his money…
What’s the overhead on New Age cults these days?
Anson Williams wasn’t long in arriving. “Is it true, what they say? That they’ve found one… one of her fingers?”
Like pretty much everyone I had met so far, Anson defied my expectations. His face was broad, his gaze at once direct and friendly. He was tall, though somewhat pudgy through the middle, nerdy despite the cropped dreads twigging his head. After five minutes of listening to his meek and smoky voice I knew he had nothing to do with Jennifer’s disappearance. He was the kind of guy who felt guilty cleaning out his friends in poker. One of those good-looking putzes.
“They’ve found a severed human finger,” I replied, “most likely female. Otherwise, nothing’s for sure.”
“But…” He trailed off, fixed me with a look I had seen twenty-seven times before, one peculiar to the bereaved: a kind of horrified-sorting- through-sensations look, as though trying to locate a bullet wound with your hands tied.
“Look, Anson, I’ve done this before. Sometimes things are straightforward. Sometimes they go sideways. The best way to move forward is to simply stay on course. Wait until the facts come in.”
He bit his lip and nodded. I started with my questions, sensitivities be damned.
Like Jennifer, Anson had come to the Framers by way of the internet. At first he had laughed at the claims, but after listening to Baars’s podcasts he became more and more intrigued. At any given point in time, he explained, some six or seven full members toured the country, meeting with longdistance associates, giving seminars to potential recruits, and offering, via hypnosis, a glimpse into the Frame-the world as it really was five billion years from the present. Outreachers, they called them. Evidently the Compound was more than a retreat; it was a base of operations as well.
Anson was hypnotized by an Outreacher named Cassie Guerin on January 11, 2005. Three days later he withdrew from all his courses at TSU and, to the enduring dismay of his parents (both of whom worked for NASA down in Huntsville, Alabama), moved into the Framer Compound to study with Baars.
“You all think we’re fools,” Anson said with an impressive lack of bitterness. “I know, and part of me doesn’t really blame you. How can I, knowing what I know?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Frame. When the whole point is to keep consciousness caged, how can we condemn you for defending your prison cells?”
Something about the man glowed as he described those first, heady days living at the Compound. As the newcomers, he and Jennifer had become fast friends. Apparently they both loved to dance. And no, they had never been romantically involved.
When I asked him why, Anson simply shrugged and said, “She’s with Xen.”
I took the opportunity to probe him about Baars, hoping to mine the inevitable resentment women inspire in men. But if he harboured any ill will for the Counsellor, as they called him, he betrayed none of it. In fact his eyes, which had been sombre throughout his commentary on Jennifer, fairly lit up in admiration-adoration even.
“I saw several hotties driving in…” I said.
“Are you asking me whether Xen sleeps with anyone else?”
I was starting to realize this was part of the deal, being a Framer. Where most people talk around delicate issues, or clam up altogether, these guys simply said it how it was. I would have found it refreshing if it hadn’t made me feel like such a phony.
“No… Actually, I was wondering whether any of them were, you know… single.”
He shot me the nerd’s version of a give-me-a-break smile, like I had just asked him to explain the difference between an RPG and a first- person shooter. “This place isn’t what you think, Mr. Manning. Xen doesn’t seduce his students. Any of us can leave any time we want. It’s not some ticking tabloid headline… “
I thought about my conversation with Albert the previous night. If anyone could design a cult that didn’t smell like a cult, I decided, it would be Xenophon Baars.
“Sure,” I said with a shrug, “but certainly, as Counsellor, Xen possesses certain powers, certain privileges.”
“And?” he asked. The question made him obviously uncomfortable, so I decided to hit him with another.
“And no one was closer to Xen than Jennifer, right?”
“Yeah-so what?”
“Seems like a recipe for jealousy and resentment to me. You can go on all you want about how egalitarian everything is here, but the bottom line, Anson, is that Xen is holding all the cards, and for whatever reason, he decided to deal Jennifer a special hand.”
“They were in love! Who would resent that?”
“Well, how about Stevie? The guy pretty much oozes homoerotic rage, don’t you think?”
“Stephen worships Xen. He would never do anything to hurt him.”
“And that would hurt Xen, losing Jennifer?”
“Of course!”
My neck was stiff, so I bent my head from shoulder to shoulder.
“Well, the guy doesn’t seem all that cut up about it,” I said. “That doesn’t spook you? The fact that they were so close, and yet Xen carries on business as usual?”
“Xen is the frst,” he explained. “Like Magellan-or Galileo, even more! Men like him don’t stop for the sake of grief-especially when they know what grief actually is. He’s the first to draw aside the curtain, to see what we really are…”
“The truth, huh?”
“Thetruth of all truths!”
Did I forget to mention that Anson was as fucking crazy as the rest of them?
Thoroughly creeped out, I asked him to recount what happened the night of Jennifer’s disappearance. Nobody tells the same story twice.
One of the many memory researchers I’ve endured, a guy called Robert Kunitz, told me about a study where subjects were asked to write accounts of where they were and what they were doing when the space shuttle Challenger fizzled into smoke and debris. When they tracked these people down years later and asked them the same question, apparently a sizable minority of them had completely changed their stories. Some even went so far as to accuse the researchers of falsifying their previous accounts, right down to forging their handwriting.
“Unbelievable, huh?” Kunitz said in the strange-but-true tone that psychologists-perpetually tickled by the fact that they know people better than they know themselves-are prone to take. “It’s really that bad.”
I disagreed, told him that I knew, with utter certainty, that things were actually worse.
I could almost see the grant money reflected in his eyes.
See, unlike me, you reconstitute the events you “remember.” Your whole life is quite literally a dramatization. You may be based on a true story, but you are not, by any sensible measure, true. You may earn an Oscar or two, but you will never snag a Pulitzer.
So when I say that inconsistency in a suspect’s story is not necessarily a red flag for deception, understand that I speak from the standpoint of the sighted speaking to the blind. The sad fact is that variance between accounts doesn’t necessarily tell you anything. Your suspect could be a premeditated liar-or fuckhead, to use the industry term of art-but odds are he’s just another asshole.