“You don’t take notes, do you?” Baars asked, eyes still closed.
This gave me pause. I decided to ignore it. I also decided to ignore the fact that no mention had been made of the severed finger Nolen had found.
“So that got me wondering whether there was anyone in Ruddick who didn’t like you-I mean really didn’t like you. You know, vandalism, threats, harassment in town, that sort of thing. I have it on good authority that cults… or, ah, new religious movements like yours, experience their fair share of bigotry and, well… discrimination.”
I assumed from the way Baars lifted his head to regard me that I had garnered his attention. Most everyone likes to think they’re persecuted. Almost everyone jumps at a woe-is-me opportunity…
“Where do you think your remarkable memory comes from, Mr. Manning?”
For the first time, I revealed the hard eyes of my suspicion.
“Don’t look so shocked,” he said with a good-natured chuckle. “You googled me, didn’t you?”
I shrugged. I had to admit, Xenophon Baars was a hard man not to like. All that charisma. I wondered if he was, like, the Obama of the cult world.
“Bet you thirty bucks my hit count is higher.”
Baars laughed. “I’m sure it is! From the looks of it, there are more than a few researchers who would love to make a lab rat out of you.”
“Yeah, well. Those days are over.”
“But your memory remains the same, doesn’t it? In the New York Times piece, one researcher described it as ‘miraculous.’ Is that what you think it is? A miracle?”
“No more than any other aberration.”
“Ah, a happy deformity, then. Is that it?”
“I prefer to think of it as a ‘joyous birth defect.’”
His sun forgotten, Xenophon Baars fixed me with a peculiar gaze. The shadow of his nose fell across his lips, and for the first time I realized how ridiculously small his mouth was.
“No system is perfect, Disciple. The law of unintended consequences applies as much to our future as it does to what you call ‘now.’ And with so many billions of people-”
“So… I’m like in a pod or a vat, somewhere, is that it?”
A sad smile. “No. In point of fact, you are a machine. A kind of quantum computer, dreaming of its mammalian past.”
“We’re dreaming, huh.”
I tried to imagine him eating a hamburger-couldn’t do it.
“Hallucinating would be a more accurate term. This is the real world, only systematically skewed to simulate the way things were roughly five billion years ago. Think of the way schizophrenics incorporate elements of the real world into their psychotic delusions.”
I blinked. How do you reply to something like that? Fawk. I reminded myself that Jennifer was the only point here, not Baars’s whacked dogma. Discipline, Disciple.
“So what does this have to do with my miraculous memory?”
“Because sometimes, Disciple, our true selves leak through, shine as inexplicable gifts-gifts like your memory-given our ignorance otherwise. We see only slivers of the Frame, so like psychotics we continually misinterpret, claim to see ghosts or to remember past lives or to talk to God or to attain enlightenment. The list goes on, I assure you!”
That was the ninth time he had said, “I assure you.”
I found myself wondering whether anyone had bothered to count up all the ways people can make stupid sound smart, when, like a bolt, I grasped the out-and-out genius of Baars’s little story. It quite literally contained nothing spooky. Using it, he could pretty much rationalize anything paranormal, anything that seemed to signal some beyond, in mundane terms. A little technology and a lot of time was all it took…
“Transcendence,” I heard myself murmur. This old girlfriend of mine, a philosophy student named Sasha Lang, used to blab on and on about how humans hungered for transcendence, for something beyond the miserable circuit of their existence. I would just say something glib, like how Cheerios were more filling.
But Baars, the clever boy, had invented a way at once to feed that hunger and to explain it away.
The man fairly erupted in gleeful laughter. “Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” In an avid rush he explained how he used to teach classes on Transcendence back in his Berkeley days, how he even wrote a book on the topic before his “awakening.” After pondering the issue for more than fifteen years, he apparently realized that the best way to understand paranormal experience was to look at normal experience, not as some kind of baseline, but as a diminution of a much broader spectrum of possibility. It was exploring this insight through hypnosis that led to his discovery of the Frame, the true present, where humanity had become indistinguishable from its technology.
It all came down to shrinkage.
“The world we see is but a sliver! But because it’s all we know, we confuse it for the whole!”
I sat back and soaked in it: the stink of someone smoking his own ideas.
He must have caught a whiff of my disgust in my expression, because he caught himself, eventually. “You must forgive my enthusiasm,” he said, beaming like someone who had asked for the letter E on Wheel of Fortune.
“No worries,” I replied. “It’s just us stoners.” The guy was a fucking first-class wanker, no doubt about it. The weird thing was that the more he talked, the more harmless he began to seem, the more my suspicion began to wane. Sure, I wanted to grab him, shake him, scream, Are you fucking kidding me?
But…
He had convinced me he was a believer. Albert’s drunken revelation from the previous night, that he had taught a course on cults at Berkeley and so knew too much about cults to honestly participate in one, had me convinced the whole Frame thing was nothing more than a self-serving fraud. So the enthusiasm which should have implicated him-the man, after all, had just learned that his missing lover was in fact dead-actually had the opposite effect. Xenophon Baars was a true, talk-you-blue-in-the- face believer.
And if he was a believer, then he really thought she had gone to a better place.
I was losing perspective. I could feel it. Leave it to Baars to give me a reality check…
“I could show you,” he said. “Hypnotize you… “
“I was sexually assaulted by a hypnotist as a kid,” I said, thinking of Jennifer and her father and not liking it one bit. “I’m sure you’ll understand if I pass…”
I’ve known more than my fair share of psychologists-certainly enough to know that suggestion is the cornerstone of hypnotic trances. Suspicion of murder aside, there was no way in hell I was letting Baars muck around with my head.
“Of course,” he said, frowning, knowing that I was lying and not knowing how to deal with it. “Tell me, Disciple. What do you think about this? I mean, really think.”
I studied him for a moment. Given my memory, I had become acutely aware over the years of all the small cues that establish hierarchies between individuals. I knew by now that Baars, for whatever reason, had accorded me the status of an equal. That he respected me.
What I couldn’t figure out was why this made me feel gratified..
“She’s with Xen…”
“What do I really think?” I shrugged and made my favourite face: a crooked smirk that said whatever, and eyes that asked if it was bedtime yet. “Honestly? I think you’re a fraud. I think you’ve used your talent for sincerity to hook these people, and your training as a philosopher to reel them in. Now you’re living the high life, a miniature king of a miniature religion, filling young minds with ancient horseshit, and tender pussies with old cock-which is pretty much what this is all about, isn’t it? Living out your guru-porn-star fantasies.”
Baars leaned forward in his wicker chair as if winded. “Oh, my…” he gasped.
“You asked,” I said, leaning my face back to soak in the sun.
“You really think-”
“You say my memory’s miraculous?” I snapped without looking at him. “Not half so miraculous as the consistency of old perverted pricks like you. You a// invent a religion of some kind, don’t you? Something to cover your horny old asses. A cult of misogyny. A cult of beauty. A cult of privilege. But somehow, magically, miraculously, it all comes back to fucking… ”