The thing to remember about me is that I don’t forget…
Anything.
Ever.
It all comes back, endlessly repeating, circumstances soaked in passion. Love. Terror. Disgust. A life crushed in the wheels of perpetual reliving.
Write about it, my therapist says. Writing gives you “distance.”
Distance. Fawk.
A great thing, not forgetting. Makes writing real easy.
Almost as easy as going crazy. I get this sense sometimes, typically when things get real weird, that I remember the future as vividly as I remember the past. In Iraq I swear I once dove before the mortar round landed. Good for me. Bad for two other absent-minded fools. Either way, I know that I looked at my cellphone where it sat artfully poised in relation to spilled change and crumpled receipts the instant before it began buzzing.
I’m sure Baars would have had an explanation.
“Disciple! Where are you? “
It was Molly, sounding as shrill as her skin had been smooth.
“Already at the airport, baby. Getting as far away from you crazy fuckers as I can.”
A strange noise, a kind of coughing, sobbing… A sharp intake of breath.
“Disciple! Disciple, please! I know you’re lying. I know you’re still at the motel. Puh-pleaase! It-it’s horrible! I didn’t know! I swear I didn’t know! There-there’s no way I would’ve… there’s just no fucking way! This is crazy! Please, Disciple. You have to tell me what’s going on. What’s going on?
I believed her, instantly and utterly. Baars had only told her enough, nothing more, nothing less. “A media hoax,” he called it. A way to wring enlightenment out of the instruments of mass delusion. Molly had been a conspirator, sure, but she had also been the biggest dupe of all.
It was a genuine moment of wonder for me. How long had it been since my ears had been so simple?
“Sorry, Molly. Big security guy, telling me to shut down my phone. You know how they are when it comes to security.”
“No! Disciple! Dis-”
I snapped my cell shut, set it across the loose change and coffee mug rings. I’m really not sure why I hung up. Just seemed safer that way.
Besides, back in my day, when you burned your ass, you sat on the blister. I left the door slightly ajar so that it would simply swing open when she came knocking.
“I’ve been there,” she said, sobbing. “You have to believe me, Disciple! I’ve been there!”
The Occluded Frame.
“There’s no such thing, Molly.”
Her eyes are swollen and so am I.
“No. No. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
Rather than speak, I encircled her in my arms, brought her in from the summer cold. We made love because that was the basis of our relationship, our HQ, the place you retreat to when the mission goes wrong. I will relive this, I thought as she dipped and heaved above me, searching for a bliss that was long in coming. I will relive this a thousand times.
“You have to believe me, Disciple.”
She whispered this to me, as though armed patrols scoured the streets, as if floodlights streamed through the room’s windows.
“Baars,” I said. “He made you into a blank tablet. You know how hypnosis works… “
But I knew my words were useless. She believed, just like you-like everybody.
It’s an instinct. Like fucking.
Afterward, we simply lay breathing, me on my back, her on her stomach. There was this sense that we had done all that could be done, here, in the shadow of a setting world. I imagined this was what critters do when their habitat collapses around them. Indulge and impregnate. Another litter to pick through the trash.
She wept.
And somehow I understood that I had become a memory for her, a trigger for that clutch in her stomach, that cold wave of horror that stopped her halfway through whatever. Somehow I knew she was already in the process of forgetting…
Healing.
We talked for a couple of hours in that naked, languorous way. There was a heaviness between us, and a sorrow, as if we were a divorced couple who had wavered in our resolution to seek different genitals.
She had been recruited out of Berkeley. Like Anson had, she went on and on about her initial skepticism. She had laughed out loud at first, but her Outreacher, Mohammed Kadri, had been so nice and so persistent. She really had no choice but to listen, and the more she listened…
It’s like we have this hand within us, a hundred million neurons shaped like a palm and clutching fingers. Something, it cries. Give me something to grasp. You mean nothing until my palm is full.
Any old bullshit will do.
She was first hypnotized, and first experienced the Frame, on November 27, 2006. Apparently they celebrated the date like a second birthday.
“You have no idea, Disciple. No idea what it’s like. To have no body. To think at the speed of light. To remember everything…”
Like being an angel, she said.
Apparently Baars himself had called her about a month ago. The Framers had been on red alert for quite some time, preparing for the earth’s imminent demise, so when the call came, she had dropped everything. He told her that they were planning to stage Jennifer’s disappearance, but that he could say no more because it was imperative that no one know Molly was one of them. It would compromise her credibility, he said. All she was supposed to do was keep working the story. The hook would catch soon enough. He said the media had a fetish for cults, that they packaged them into something called “atrocity tales,” stories that all cultures use to define themselves against outsiders.
He should know: he used to teach the shit.
“He told me not to waver,” she said, wiping her eyes with the bedsheets. “He said everything that happened, no matter how shocking or how bizarre, was simply part of the plan.”
But believers always waver. Crisis is inevitable, which is why belief systems squander so much energy defining doubt-the hard road, and certainly the one less travelled-as a kind of weakness. God’s greatest trick was convincing the world that belief was hard. For Molly, the crisis came in the form of Jennifer’s fingers. That was when she caught her first real whiff of madman.
“I almost told you, Disciple. I should have told you!”
“But I thought you said the Frame was real.”
She cried for a time. I talked the stupid talk I always rely on when I don’t know what to say. Gambling stories, mostly. A couple run-ins with the law.
Her breathing was growing thick, so I asked before it was too late.
“When is it supposed to happen? The end, I mean.”
Just for curiosity’s sake.
“Friday,” she said numbly, her lips moving behind a violet netting of hair. Her eyes did not open. “The world always ends on Friday.”
Fawk. Vegas is so much more fun on the weekend. I wake up in the middle of the night. There’s a young woman beside me, red hair askew, pale and naked in tangled sheets. Her breath is deep and crisp and even.
A crimson glow taints the windows. I get up, walk nude to the curtains, which I pull wide with hands that have ended lives. Red paints me, but for once it’s not blood. I shiver despite the heat.
I stand motionless with patience. I so rarely see the sunrise, what with the weed and the women and the good times. I want to meet this goof they call the Dawn. I want to greet him with a knowing grin and an enigmatic wink. Say, “Some forms oflife flourish in the absence ofsunlight… “
But even as I dream these thoughts, I know something’s wrong. The frequency. The geometry, maybe.
The sun’s arc burns through the paper horizon, an incandescent wire that grows and grows, swelling with ruby brilliance, becoming a scimitar, a crescent smouldering with retina-burning wavelengths. It scores the horizon from end to end, drawing the sky away like a curtain, burning higher and higher above a mountain range of atmospheric processors, a heaven-wide holocaust that would have boiled away the atmosphere, made slush of the continental plates, had the earth not been transformed into a machine.
A sky that was a sun. A sun that was a sky. Like staring up at a beach ball perched on the tip of your nose.
And it seemed so obvious, standing there, cooking in my illusory skin. It seemed so obvious why so many of us would stay here, die here, rather than flee to the stars with the others. The Gods were long dead. All we had was emptiness, twisted into Mobius convolutions. And monotony.
In the absence of any destination, why not worship our origins?
Simulate the twenty-first century. Make a flag of our skin. She was gone when I awoke. I’m not sure what bummed me out more: the fact of her escape or the fact of my slumbering through it. Usually I’m such a twitchy sleeper. Makes me feel safe, the belief that I can be unconscious and alert.
I sat naked on the corner of the bed and smoked a Winston, reflected on the difference between quiet and lonely. Smoke one hundred thousand and one, I realized with no little dismay. I hate missing milestones.
I shaved to the image of my face floating behind SORRY scrawled in cherry red lipstick. I pondered my age, wondered how many more Mollys would love and leave me. The only things wrinkles flatter are poets and their plots. I packed up my shit and loaded my Golf. I could already feel the buzz building on the horizon, the scramble of souls ducking for cover beneath the sweep of the National Spotlight. The media clowns would be out in force, cramming Ruddick into as many small-town cliches as they could think of, and searching for inside angles, for material witnesses they could lionize or implicate.
Either way, me and my bag of weed were no longer welcome in this town.
There’s a profound peace in the monotony of a road already travelled, a been-there-done-that security that lets the mind wander paths not quite of its own making. Novelty, I had decided, forces you to fucking think, and I had had enough of that. The summer roared hot through my open windows. I daydreamed to the rattle of my diesel, pondered taking the first exit to Atlantic City and to the inexhaustible allure of dice, booze, and poon.
Instead, I found myself popping open my cell and calling Kimberley.
“Hi, babe,” I said with phony cheer.
“Where are you? “
“Arrivals at JFK.”
“You don’t say. Where did the crime take you this time? “
“Tahiti, baby.”
A snort, packed with amusement and exasperation, as only a woman is capable. “I watch TV, you know, Disciple. Every once in a while my thumb slips and oops! there’s CNN. “
“Yeah, well, you know me. Plugging the toilet no matter where I go.”
Something in my tone must have tagged her, because she paused. “Is everything okay, Disciple? “
No.
“Sure. But I was thinking… “
“Uh-oh.”
“I was thinking I haven’t been so… good… to you. You know?”
That wasn’t entirely true. At the strip club where I first met her, I was the guy holding twenties in my teeth when everyone else chewed dollars or fives. But still, true enough.
“Something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice. “
“No. Not at all. I just… ah… thought it might be nice if we went out on a… you know, date or something.”
“Date?” She fairly barked with laughter. I could almost see the smoke blowing out her nose. “Weed’s pretty good in Ruddick, huh? “
“No. Seriously, Kim. I want to take you out. Seriously.”
A long and wary pause. Strippers tend to be at once cautious and confident when dealing with men-kind of like animal trainers that way. “Okay… “she said with a heavy What-the-hellsigh. “Iactually have Friday night off for a fucking change. You know, I tod Jimmy. I sa-”
“Make it Saturday,” I interrupted, savouring the sluice of hot air over my face and scalp. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, driving a car without an air conditioner.
That was Tuesday, August 18, 2009. Good. Bad. Another day to be remembered…
Whether I wanted to or not.