Disciple of the dog

THE BUZZ KILLERS

Monday… Knuckles on aluminum. Knocking. Persistent knocking, wandering into consciousness from the edges.

If I hadn’t known it was her, I probably would’ve just rolled over to the other side of the bed, planted my face in the cool pillow. Only cops were prick enough to roust you out of bed this early in the morning.

But it was Molls, of course, looking at once perky and exhausted in the morning light. Traffic roared behind her. “They kept me overnight for observation.”

“Perverts,” I replied, grinning.

It took her a moment, but she got the joke. So much had happened that it seemed weeks ago, that night she caught me staring at her in the dark.

“I should be pissed,” she said. “I kept asking myself what kind of guy saves the girl just to dump her off at Emergency.”

“And?” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“And I decided… well… I don’t know what I decided.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“As soon as you grow a backbone, I’m through.”

A breath of laughing air. She stepped across the threshold, no longer needing to be invited. Her arms clung. Her kisses came hot and hard. We lay in bed, beneath the warm glow of the sun smouldering through the discoloured curtains. Our smell filled the room, salty and mellow. Her head on my shoulder, she had been describing her short stay in the Meaford County Hospital, and the enormous 1,342-dollar-and-61-cent bill she had charged against her MasterCard-just to find out she hadn’t suffered a concussion. When I asked her whether she still wanted to press charges against Nill, she waved the thought away, saying that it would give her a stake in her story, compromise her journalistic independence.

Not because it could land me in the can or anything.

“Things are ramping up, Disciple… seriously ramping up. As big as the JonBenet Ramsey circus…”

“So what are you doing here with me?”

Something crept into her eyes. “Because we need to figure… to figure this out.”

“We have plenty of time to sort things, Molls.”

She bent her face down, away from my scrutiny. “What if we don’t have time?” she said strangely. “What if…”

“What do you mean?” I asked. She was little more than a mop of red hair against my shoulder.

She turned, climbed my chest to better match my gaze, let go an oh-my sigh. “I think… I think I’m falling for you.”

Fawk…

I tried not to swallow, but it was too late. “Don’t say that.”

“Say what? That I’ve never met a man like you? That I… I love you?”

Owich. Can you believe this shit?

“No.No, Molls. You can’t love me.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because I’m not safe…” I tend to become vague in exchanges like these. To leave room for future bullshit rationales, I suspect.

“But isn’t love about risks?”

“No. Not at all. If you can’t feel safe with the person you love, you spend your whole life on the run.”

Can you believe it? Instead of pulling out a can of whup-ass, I opened a club pack of Oprah.

Why do I do this? Why do I always make things so hard? For me. For them. Lying is always so much easier-so much safer. And yet I really only do it when things don’t matter.

What the fuck’s my problem?

“But I feel safe,” she said. “I really do.” A goofy little laugh, as short as a hiccup. Her left hand had settled on my chest. The pad of her ring finger pressed across my right nipple. “I’m not sure I’ve ever felt safer.”

“That’s because you only see a sliver of me,” I said. “The part that resembles something human.”

The whole of life, it sometimes seems, is just one long slow pan out, watching the details we’re born to slowly shrink into an ever-expanding vista. More, always more, scrolling in from unseen edges of our…

Frame. Huh.

“Well,” she said, “I like what I see.”

I licked my lips. Did my best to hold her gaze. “That’ll change. Believe me. You’ll glimpse the monster soon enough… “

My dick lay as cold as a fish fillet against my thigh. Man, I hate that.

“Disciple… You’re not a monster.”

Oh yes I am.

“You should get going,” I said brusquely. Fucked-up word, brusquely. Makes you want to clear your throat.

I paused-hesitated, more like. She felt so warm, so inviting, a gold- windowed cottage stranded in a winter world. I needed her at that moment. I needed the sanctuary men find in feminine pity, the safety of retreating into angelic intentions. I can be such a suck sometimes.

Suddenly I was up, sweeping my gauchies up to my waist.

Love.

What a buzz kill. I suppose she would have left either way: the Framers had scheduled a press conference at 2 p.m. that afternoon, something she simply could not miss. But it was better that she left hurt.

I lied, told her I would mosey on by later. And this brought back her words from several minutes before.

“What ifwe don’t have time? What if…”

I ignored them, banished them with a blink. I’m continually doing that, it seems, brushing away flakes of the past. I kissed her longer and deeper than I intended.

The click of the door behind her delivered her words again, this time with even fiercer clarity.

“What ifwe don’t have time? What if…”

Fear, I realized. She had spoken these words, not with the anxiety of uncertain relationships, but with real mortal fear…

Epiphanies are fucked-up things. I had this friend, Cochrane, whom I used to train with a few years back. We called him Three- Ball because he busted so many nuts at the gym we figured he had to have a spare. Anyway, he comes in this one afternoon saying that he had an “epiphany” the previous night, that he had-you guessed it- found Jesus. So I argued with him, pointed out how people the world over have these profound, life-changing experiences, finding whatever, everything from Krishna to Elvis. “I know you feel all special, all saved and shit, but feeling that way is common as dirt, Three-Ball. It’s you, not Jesus. You’ve saved yourself.”

“But I know,” he replied, saying what they all say. “I know that I know!”

Sad story, really. He suffered from bipolar depression, stopped taking his medication. “There’s no pill for the devil,” he told me. He electrocuted himself in his bathtub on October 4, 2005. Another shitty day.

That’s when I realized: the insights or revelations that make you feel like you know are simply not to be trusted.

Epiphanies-true epiphanies-leave you sucking on the tailpipe of your own stupidity. And I could feel it, my mental retardation, buzzing like a palpable thing. I lay there in my boxers, pinned to the mattress, my arms and legs stretched out, while I leaned back in my chair in Consultation Room 4 listening to Anson Williams say, “Sure. Who doesn’t talk about their parents? “

“You know what I mean,” I replied. “Did she ever talk about them? “

“Yuh,” he said.

Why? When he seemed relatively calm when it came to discussing Jennifer’s disappearance, why the hell was he so nervous about this?

“Why the reluctance, Anson? “

“Nah… Just feels weird, you know. “

“She swear you to secrecy? “

“Yuh,” he said, nodding.

“The circumstances have changed, don’t you think? “

“Yuh.”

“Things couldn’t be any more radical. “

He chewed on his lower lip. “Suppose. “

Suppose? What the hell? At the time I assumed he had been filtering events through some Framer bullshit.

“Xen…” Anson explained moments later. “He teaches us that we’re here to learn from all these…”-a reflexive swallow-” things, you know? Sins, crimes… What we suffer is secondary to the fact that we suffer, the meaning we take away from having endured. And because of this, he says we’re supposed to affirm, to affirm our lives in their entirety, to realize that not a moment, not a breath has been wasted… And she… Jennifer, just… couldn’t… do this. “

Couldn’t… That wasn’t what he had been about to say. He had hesitated because he had caught himself… Because he had almost said can’t. Jennifer just can’t affirm what her father did to her.

Was he still holding out hope that she was alive?

“Nah… Just feels weird, you know. “

Or did he somehow know she was alive?… More life-after-death Framer bullshit?

I lay motionless across sex-tangled sheets, the centre of a slow-twisting pinwheel world. In the Compound courtyard I heard myself say, “She’s dead, Baars. You know that. “

“No, Mr. Manning. Quite the contrary… What I know-know, Mr. Manning-is that mankind conquered death long, long ago. “

This time I focused on his eyes… And there it was, the twinkling look of an inside joke.

He was playing me. He had been playing me all along. He knew all right, and not the way Three-Ball knew Jesus. He knew the way I knew my gun was at the bottom of the river…

That was the joke.

Then it hit me. The crushing sense of failure and stupidity…

The epiphany.

Dead Jennifer wasn’t dead. Christ, she wasn’t even fucking missing… That was why Anson had been so reluctant to say anything about her being molested by her father: because he found himself pinched between theatrical and living obligations.

Because Jennifer Bonjour was in the next room.

The sun burned white through the curtains. The smoke from my cigarette piled like hair toward the ceiling. A pang clawed into my throat. Even though I lay on my back, I hung there, hooked through the trachea. Then, click. The puzzle came together.

All of it. The fingers and toes. The Thirds. The papers. Even fucking CNN…

Which was to say, Molly.

I lay in bed with a sheet sprawled across my midsection, and laughed long and hard. I laughed at my stupidity, at my heartbreak…

I laughed at the sense of doom sponging through my veins. He’s weak, sometimes, Disciple Manning.

He has his buttons like everyone else, triggers that get pulled now and again, by women, by failure, and by bad fucking news most of all. The clicks they make are the same, but the booms tend to be bigger.

So he has this kit stashed in the upholstery of his shitty car. Not much really. A Slurpee straw. A fold of tinfoil pouched by a few crystalline flakes. Rocks.

He sits hunched like a little boy on the corner of his bed. Kicks his Zippo with his thumb. Draws deep on the sizzling of joy and relief… Score.

Fuck it, he tells himself, grinning as he sinks back. The mattress doesn’t seem so hard anymore.

Fuck it, he tells himself, smiling his famous sneering smile, laughing at his thoughts.

Look at Holmes…

He fucking injected that shit. So there I sat soaking in relief and gratitude-transcendental gratitude. Renewed-I felt renewed, even if it was a drug-induced crock of shit. The biggest misconception squares have about drugs is that the highs have this poisonous taint, like the faint odour of rot in frying bacon. Not so.

Dopamine is dopamine, whether the brain has forgotten how to recycle it or not.

I studied the charcoal reflections in the television screen. A bulbous man sitting on the corner of a bed. A fish-eye motel room. Funny, I thought, all the ways reality reproduces itself. Monotonous, really.

I don’t remember picking up the remote control-sometimes my attention wanders, as I said. I thumbed my way through the gaudy parade of channels-ShamWow! and Obama commemorative coins and sports utility vehicles-and there it was, the ticker tag line of the minute, as real as CNN…