And most importantly, reminding. That the borders of his fiefdom were small-small-small. That he was just another me-me-me dope like the rest of us.
I leaned back in my seat, blinked while soaking in the stone. At the same time I strolled with Baars down a hardwood hall, Agatha and her humming apparatus behind me.
“Imagine,” Baars was saying. “Imagine a society that has evolved beyond things like meaning and purpose, where nothing matters because anything can be done. Imagine a society that treats the modalities ofhuman experience, everything from the exremes of rape and murder to the tedious mainstays of snoozing and shitting, the same way a gourmand regards items on a restaurant menu … As things to be consumed. “
Of all his monologues, only this one really tingled … but for reasons that had precious little to do with the case. I replayed it in my imagination again and again, mooned over it like a kid with a nudie picture.
A number of questions to ask during the follow-up interview occurred to me. I was especially interested in the details of this Crossing the Lacuna thing. Just what did they use to induce their hallucinations? Did it involve drugs of some kind? Baars had some kind of Timothy Leary thing going—like, totally.
A cloud passed over the sun, and in the momentary gloom I suddenly glimpsed the room—an office of some kind—beyond the plate glass window opposite my car. I saw Stevie sitting behind a grand and paperless desk, leaning back in ergonomic repose, watching me with the intensity of a starving owl.
The evil henchman.
Matching his gaze, I sucked my roach to the nub then flicked it out the window. I started the Golf, then, grinning, shot the guy a quick finger.
Prick.
Track Six
ONE POTATO CHIP AT A TIME
She stepped into the restaurant and I saw the whole porno.
Her name was Molly, Molly Modano, and she did not belong. California girl—immediately and obviously, even in an age when geographical identity claims have been pretty much scrambled into white noise. I would have bet my Volkswagen on it.
It was early evening, and I had risked the roaring four-lane traffic to try out the small diner across from my motel. Hard to look cool scrambling across a busy road—almost as hard as looking tough queued up for airport security. The diner sported the name Odd-Jobs in lightless neon tubing across the front, but it was the Day-Glo quip on the port- a-sign that caught my attention: Eat or be eaten. I was just sitting at a booth, pretending to study the menu, swirling my coffee with a clinking spoon, and then there she was, tits on a stick.
Just so you know, there’s always a girl with me. You could say I’m like Hollywood that way. Always hunting for a fresher face.
I didn’t waste time—I never do. I was standing up just as she was sitting down. The key, I’ve found, is to beat the waitress to the punch ... Or maybe that’s just a superstition of mine.
“Mind if I join you?”
She looked up as if startled and simply said, “Eew. “
“Eew?” I exclaimed. “I haven’t even unbuttoned my trenchcoat yet!”
All hotties have routines specifically designed for contingencies like me. Some just tell you to go fuck yourself, literally. Others, the ones who are genuinely evil or who just desperately want to be nice, find more creative ways to tell you to go fuck yourself. I actually had one chick offer me change like I was a bum or something!
Molly desperately wanted to be nice. “Sorry, but ... I don’t even know you.”
“Apparently you know me well enough to be grossed out.”
“I just got this thing about first impressions.”
I certainly wasn’t complaining from my end: narrow hips and a flat abdomen. High breasts beneath a largely ceremonial bra. A boyish athleticism rounded into feminine allure, like a red-headed Mia Farrow or Gwyneth Paltrow—which simply made it seem all the more appropriate, given that I was a combination of Brad Pitt and the Devil.
“Here I thought first impressions were the only thing I was good at.”
Believe me when I tell you that I have a winning grin, the kind that can shrug away even the most determined ill-willing. She looked at me as though assessing my planetary credentials, then laughed a girlish in-spite-of-her-better-judgment laugh ...
“A martyr, huh?”
“Depends on the cause,” I said, sliding into the seat opposite.
Just so you know, I’ve been called a sexist pig exactly sixty-nine times. Coincidence? I think not.
The fact is, I am a sexist, in the sense that someone who plays cello all the time is called a cellist. I. Love. Sex. All things being equal, I will choose getting laid pretty much every time. And just so you know, when I say “love,” I don’t mean the snuggle-with-your-wife-on-the-couch variety but the real deal—you know, the kind only crackheads and junkies can know.
The love that keeps you coming back.
An old girlfriend of mine laid it all out for me once. She was a systems analyst named Joyce Pennington, but everyone used to call her Jimmy for some reason. No fewer than 7 of those 69 accusations belong to her—a whopping 11 percent. (She’s also responsible for 9 out of the 19 times I’ve been called a narcissist, but that’s another story.) The first four times she called me a sexist I just shrugged it off—prick a guy with the same insult long enough and he becomes numb. But the fifth time I blew my stack for some reason. So in the calm voice I use to package all my outrage, I gave her the little spiel I gave you above. It was fucking biology, for chrissakes. Was hunger a sin? How about shitting? Was voiding my bowel yet another fascistic exercise?
“And murder isn’t biological?” she replied. I swear her laugh lopped two inches off my dick. You know, that cruel feminine chuckle you hear so often on Sex and the City, the one that says (with pious charity) that, sure, men are all half retarded, but we love them anyway, don’t we? The kind of laugh that men reserve for Labrador retrievers. Bad boy. Bad.
“Oh, Diss,” she continued. “How can you treat women equally if you see them as accessories to your dick?”
I stared at her wordlessly.
“Well?”
So I told her my dick was the only thing I was proud of ... that for as long as I could remember I used my sexual prowess as a crutch, a way to limp around the fact that I was too much of a loser for anyone to love. Nobody lubs me. Boo-hoo.
Whatever it takes to get laid.
She figured it out eventually, of course. 2002. On the fourth of July, no less. Jimmy was one smart chick.
Patriotic too.
See, the thing is, I score large. Since I was fourteen, I have slept with at least 558 different women, probably more if you count the nights I’ve blacked out from drinking. I think this is pretty impressive, given that I’m not a rock star. So this is my dilemma: how can I stop seeing women as accessories to my dick when so many of them so obviously want to be?
Seriously.
Look, I know it’s a problem, a vice even. I know it shuts down the possibility of a mature relationship with a certain percentage of the world’s population: the hottie demographic. I know the older I get, the more debauched and pathetic I become. If I were completely honest, I would admit that when the Bonjours handed me that photo of Dead Jennifer, my first thoughts were almost entirely carnal—that when I trolled her Facebook page on the Web afterward, I secretly hoped to find photos of some drunken lingerie party.
But I can’t help myself. Even my second therapist said I have bigger fish to fry.
Like the fact that I think nobody loves me.
So we talked, Molly and me.
She had this narrow, birdlike intensity, with a look that avoided yours with push-pin concentration, as though you were part of her game world but perpetually fixed just to the right of the cursor. It was a strange tick, one of those little wrinkles that never gets ironed out of a personality, like hiding your teeth when you smile.
I found it intensely erotic.
She was a journalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or the ?
??PG” as she continually referred to it. Well, she was actually more of a stringer than a real journalist, and she was hoping to break into the biz by writing an in-depth story on—you guessed it—the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour.
Score. So much meaningless shit happens that coincidences are bound to abound. Sometimes the world is so small it can only be grand.
“Opportunity of a lifetime,” I said.
She made a pained face. “It’s horrible, I know. But I figure it can’t be all that bad if I help ... you know, find her ...” She trailed as though unconvinced.
“The dead don’t sweat,” I said, grinning. “Neither should you.”
There’s such mystery in meeting a woman for the first time. I knew she had a life, that behind her scenes there were scads of people—friends, family, lovers—and to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck. I know that sounds bad, like banging her was all I cared about. But the fact of the matter is probably worse.
Remember, I don’t forget. This makes me pretty much impossible to get along with, simply because the longer I know a person, the less they seem a person. Remember, I see all the ways you people repeat.
This makes falling in love pretty much radioactive. The pain is stacked high enough as it is, and with me it never, ever goes away. So the way I see it, this means either I become celibate like a priest or I womanize like a hound dog. What would you choose?
“And you?” Molly asked. “What brings you to the booming metropolis of Ruddick?”
I shot her my best whisky-ad grin: rueful, infinitely assured. The kind that says, Oh, yes, I will be laid tonight. Teeth are a window on our genes, and my pearly-whites positively gleamed.
“An opportunity of a lifetime.”
If my ragged good looks were the hook, then Dead Jennifer was the bait. I knew it the instant I finished describing the Bonjours and their piteous request: I was Molly Modano’s first break. Her initial Oh-no-not-another-one wariness dissolved into avid interest. After about five minutes of relentless questioning I began to wonder who was catching whom. I also realized that I almost certainly wasn’t going to score that night. In Molly’s eyes I had made the miraculous transition from being another asshole to being a possible night of fun in the sack to being a resource, something that required cultivation and rationing. I cursed myself for not lying at the outset, certain that somewhere in some journalism textbook stuffed in the back of her closet there was a rule that said, “Do not, under any circumstances, bang your sources.”
Codes of professional conduct. Fawk.
I felt my eyes glazing. “Woo,” I said, expelling a lungful of specious air. “I. Am. Bagged.”
“What time you think you’ll be up for breakfast?” she asked.
Knocks on my motel room door always unnerve me. The great thing about motel versus hotel rooms is the way they open up onto the world—like home. But this also means they’re exposed—like home. Hotels give you a controlled environment within a controlled environment. The really good ones make you feel like you’re in a Faberge egg or something. The world is reduced to soundless motion behind tinted glass.
Just one more gorilla exhibit.
I thought about grabbing my gun from my overnight bag, but decided against it. I knew who it was.
“Hi, Molly,” I said, pulling open the door. The light across the motel frontage was haphazard at best, so that my room light provided her only illumination. Her face stared up at me, bright and warm. My shadow fell across her body. Then I noticed ...
There were tears in her eyes.
Fawk.
“Look,” she said hesitantly. “I know ... I know how this works ...”
“How what works?” The lack of interest in my voice shocked me.
She swallowed and blinked. She wiped the tear that fell from her left eye so fast that it almost seemed like a magic trick. Sean O’May, my old hand-to-hand trainer, among other things, would have been impressed.
“I mean, I know ... know what you were ... expecting, and um ...” Her eyes were bouncing all over the place, but I could tell they had glimpsed my bed.
“What’s wrong, Molly?”
She tilted her head to the weight of her hair, flashed the kind of embarrassed smile that had duped me into thinking I was in love more than once.
“The funny thing is that I probably would have, you know? I mean, you’re ...” She swallowed once again. “... handsome enough. And it’s been ... well ... a long time, you know? And I—”
“Molly,” I said on the edge of forceful and gentle. Kind of like the way I am in the sack.
“So now,” she continued babbling, “now I’m like ... like—”
“Molly.”
“What?”
“Would you like to, ah, accompany me tomorrow?”
Any deal you strike with the media is going to be Faustian through and through—something I learned during the war. Good in the short term, disastrous in the long run. You see, if you’re successful, you get the whole circus except the ringmaster, hundreds of very clever and generally unscrupulous (because let’s face it, nothing justifies fucking people over quite so conveniently as the truth) journalists all feverishly working their own manic angles. It’ll tear you apart, even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about things like honour and reputation or have a career that’s remotely political. Media attention incites mobs, and mobs have the bad habit of looking for goats.
And the sad fact is, just about anyone will do.
Molly made a show of scrutinizing me—as if any con man worth fearing had ever been sussed out in a single glance. Finally she gave me one of those phony shrugs and said, “Sure,” in a little sister’s voice.
I began closing the door, leaning forward so that my face remained squarely in the gap. “I’ll meet you for breakfast at ten ...”
I never was a morning person.
That night I dreamed. Generally I smoke too much dope to dream: though the Lord’s Leaf is in no way neurotoxic, it does change the way blood flows through your bean, and this, apparently, affects a chronic user’s sleep patterns. A welcome side effect, in my case.
What made this dream positively kooky was that I woke up convinced I was as awake and as alert as a goaltender in overtime. I bolted from my pillow and there he was, watching me through a haze of cigarette smoke, my old war buddy, my mentor in all things violent: Sean O’May.
I’ll save his story for another therapy session.
He sat in the chair next to my room’s small table, slumped back, with his snakeskin boots kicked out, one to either side of a black hockey bag. His hair was dyed orange and slicked back like the old days. His eyes were sharp as always, so small they glittered perpetual black. His trademark cigarette hung from his trademark Mickey Rourke grin. For as long as I knew him, he was loath to reveal his teeth—probably because they were so freakishly small, like baby teeth.
“Soooo ...” he drawled. “What are you saying, there, Disciple?”
I sat blinking at the sheer impossibility of him.
“You’re dead,” I finally managed to cough.
He snorted through his nose, sucked his cigarette bright. “Yah,” he rasped, raising two fingers to pull his smoke from his mouth. “Well, you know how it is ... “
“How what is?”
That was when I noticed his cigarette was glowing from both ends. I watched with a kind of blank wonder as he closed his lips about the burning inner tip. It seemed I could smell his lips sizzle.
“There’s dead for me,” he said, “and then there’s dead for you.” I sat paralyzed while he watched me with those fucking he-he eyes of
his.
“What’s that?” I finally asked, looking down at the hockey bag.
“Good question.” He leaned forward, smiling at me, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette as he grabbed the zipper and tore it open. He peered into the dark maw, shook his head with a Southerner’s slow- motion disgust. Sean had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he had started
drinking Jack Daniel’s (where his father worked) at the age of nine.
“Aw, hell,” he said, shaking his head in a blue-stringed haze of smoke. “She’s all busted up.”
“She ...” I repeated in horror.
“Shiyit. What a nasty piece of work.”
“Who?” I cried.
He had this way of frowning, as if wincing at a pain that was all yours.
“Yah, you know. Dead Jennifer.”
Her name still comes up in my dreams, rare as they are. Dreams of doom—as bad as anything from the war. Without exception I bolt from my blankets, grope the night table to palm my Zippo and cigarettes. I smoke in the dark, watching that orange jewel hover above the shadow of my hand.
And I wonder what it would be like, burning the world from both ends.
Wednesday ...
Pretty much everyone loves spring, except those winter-loving mutants who are generally too cheerful not to die of cancer at some point. I love spring as well, but for reasons peculiar to me. Most people love the retreat of the snow and cold, the dawning of things green and alive. Me, I love the way the thaw exposes all the hidden garbage, from soggy coffee cups to pockets of dog shit.
Winter is a season of forgetfulness. Spring is a kind of remembering, in all its splendid ugliness.
And so spring reminds me of me—the one thing guaranteed to bring a smile to my face.
What does this have to do with Ruddick in the dry height of summer? Because for me, anyway, the town was locked in wintry silence. It needed to be thawed.
My breakfast with Molly was uneventful. She tried to strike up conversation, but I’m too much of a prick in the mornings to trust myself with small talk. Coffee-coffee-coffee—need I say more?
I didn’t so much explain my MO to Molly as demonstrate it. I had her feed me directions from my town map as I rattled around in my Vee-Dub diesel. Once I got a feel for the communities adjacent to the Framer Compound, I began canvassing. I grabbed the flyers that Kimberley had printed for me using the photo of Dead Jennifer that the Bonjours had provided. I parked on a strategic corner, then, with the quizzical redhead in tow, began going door to door with an official-looking clipboard and envelope held like an accountant’s ledger in my arms.