Disciple of the dog

XENOPHON BAARS MAKES STATEMENT

That was when he pulled the gun from beneath his white jacket. A Glock.

Cool. Now that was a statement.

The cameraman fell backward in his scramble to escape the gun, but to his credit he managed to capture Baars, who suddenly seemed statuesque stretched across the open summer sky. The Glad Garbage Bag Man about to reveal the truth of human existence: certainty and stupidity are one and the same.

He moved with the grace of milk-it was quite remarkable really. He stretched out his left hand to the camera, as though holding back the ethereal hordes, while swinging the automatic in his right laterally, toward Jennifer’s joyous face.

They were on something, I realized. Some kind of drug-no different than me. Drugs have a way of recognizing each other.

The cameraman managed a haphazard zoom on the gun and the girl. I saw her lips move: “Elephant sh-”

I couldn’t hear the report because screams had overloaded the mike. But I saw it all, one thumping heartbeat: the flash, the puncture, the blowback of blood, even the shock wave rippling through her lips-all of it CGI-seamless.

I saw Xenophon Baars shoot his lover in the face.

Dead Jennifer.

Baars raised the automatic to his temple.

“All of us are here because we have chosen to stay,” he said, his voice background-noise thin yet somehow dreadfully clear against the ambient shouting. Everyone hears the man holding the gun. “All of us have chosen to die with our world… “

The frame wobbled as the cameraman shimmied backward on his ass. You could hear the correspondent gasp, “You getting this? “ followed by a gravelly grunt in the affirmative.

“But some of us…” Baars said with a beatific smile. And there was nothing frantic, nothing strained about his tone. He spoke the just-the- facts way cops do when they find themselves dragged onto the witness stand yet again. “Some of us do not want to die in our s/eep.”

The weapon popped-a pathetic sound, really. The screaming came through real clear, though.

Even still, the sound guy should have been canned. The end was nigh, the eons-old machines preserving earth from its bloated sun were giving out, and Baars simply wanted to give everyone a chance to make peace with their existence. From his standpoint, he had done nothing more than take a surprise messianic turn in a video game… A first-person shooter.

A part of me wanted to slip into the morgue that night and shake his dead hand. I mean, there was the Frame and then there was the frame. Brilliant, utterly insane, Xenophon Baars had managed to turn the world into his fucking bullhorn.

It was nothing short of ingenious. A missing hottie? A cult cold war?

Rock for the great media pipe. Pure. Uncut. This was Jim Jones without the body count. Heaven’s Gate on a hundred live feeds…

I could see them plotting, Baars and a select group of his followers. I could hear Baars chastise the others for taking pleasure in the destruction of the Thirds at their enlightened hands. “They are simply exploring a different life,” he would say-some bullshit like that. I could see Jennifer cutting across the brownlands, sneaking into the Compound from the rear. And I could see that fucker Stevie, ever faithful, driving through town with his collection of little cages, a single wooden cross, and of course a zip-lock bag filled with Jennifer’s fingers and toes.

With material this sexy, all Baars needed was to catch the attention of a single editor to start his conflagration. All he needed was Molly Modano…

“At the very least,” I had said, Amanda Bonjour needs to know her husband is a scumbag, don’t you think? “

She said nothing at first. Managing the truth required consideration.

“Disciple… You can’t say anything. “

Because Jennifer was more than her “big break.” Jennifer was her friend. Her fellow Framer. And you don’t screw with the personal lives of your friends, do you? Not even at the end of the world.

“What if we don’t have time? What if…”

And me?

Well, Judge, you see, it was like this…

I was framed. I retrieved the photograph that Mandy had given me that day in my office: young Jennifer, innocent and sun-smiling, thumbs and fingers spread wide in a ta-da pose. I wedged it in the corner of the television screen, my own boxed insert-the only headline that mattered. I hit the mute button, listened to the traffic shivering through the walls. We stared at each other for a while. She did not blink.

“Dead,” I whispered, saying the word the way kids say “bad” to household pets.

Dead Jennifer. Track Fourteen