Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

“Are you sure the newspaper didn’t screw up the date?”

He slides the last evidence pile across the table. “The sheriff’s report on David Konovic’s abduction. The date matches. And when the boy’s body was recovered, he was found to have been tortured and strangled in the same manner as all the other Angel of Death victims. So what does that tell us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Jane.”

“You want me to say that Whitmer couldn’t have been the Angel of Death, is that it?”

“Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable conclusion?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was the Angel of Death.”

“Well if that’s the case, how do you explain this last victim?”

“I don’t.”

“You mean you can’t.”

“It’s a Nod problem,” she says.

“An odd problem?”

“A Nod problem. You know, the land of Nod, east of Eden? In the Bible?”

“I know the reference, but…”

“Cain kills his brother Abel,” she says, “and God sets him wandering in the wilderness as a punishment. Cain ends up in Nod, where he settles and gets married. Which is a problem, logically, because Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people on earth, and as far as we know, Cain and Abel are their only children. So where did this wife come from?

“Now, people who don’t believe in the Bible tend to think the Nod problem is a big deal. Like for example, there was this guy my mother dated one time for a couple months, Roger, who was this totally rabid atheist, and he used to pick on Phil—”

“Your brother was religious?” the doctor asks.

“In a little-boy kind of way. My mother was raised Lutheran, and even though she didn’t really believe, she took us to church because she thought it would be good for us. I stopped going as soon as I was old enough to say no, but Phil really got into it. Said his prayers every day, the whole bit. So along comes Roger, and he’s constantly razzing Phil about inconsistencies in Scripture. ‘Hey Phil, it says here in the Gospels that Judas hanged himself because he was sorry for betraying Christ. But it says in Acts that Judas wasn’t sorry, and he died when his stomach exploded. How come there are two different versions of the story?’ Or, ‘Hey Phil, if all the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, how did Matthew know what Jesus said in his prayer?’ The Nod problem, though, that was his favorite: ‘Hey Phil, it says that God put a mark on Cain to warn other people not to harm him. What other people, Phil? His parents? The same ones who didn’t listen when God told them not to eat the fruit?’”

“And how did Phil respond?”

“Well like I said before, Phil was a big-time nitpicker himself, so at first he kind of got into it. He tried to play along, only Roger wasn’t playing. Roger would shoot down every explanation Phil came up with, until finally Phil had to admit he didn’t have an answer, and then Roger would say, ‘So does that mean you’re going to give up this Bible nonsense?’ and Phil would say, ‘No,’ and Roger would say, ‘That’s because religion makes people stupid.’”

“What did you think of that?”

“Oh, I definitely think religion makes people stupid,” she says. “But Roger was still a hypocrite.”

“Why a hypocrite?”

“Because the Nod problem didn’t have anything to do with him being an atheist. If the Bible had been perfectly consistent, he still wouldn’t have believed a word of it. His mind was made up, and pointing out contradictions was just a way of being smug—and meanwhile, he completely missed where Phil was coming from.

“Phil did believe in the Bible. Part of believing that the Bible is true is believing that any problems in the text have solutions. Actually knowing what those solutions are isn’t important. It’s like, just because I can’t tell you what killed the dinosaurs doesn’t mean they aren’t extinct. And so to Phil, looking at it from that perspective, it was Roger who was being unreasonable. So Phil didn’t know where Cain’s wife came from. So what?

“And it’s the same with this.” She waves a hand at the papers in front of her. “Don’t pretend this is some kind of objective inquiry for you. You’ve already decided what you believe. All you’re doing now is looking for a club to beat me with until I agree to see things your way.”

“Jane…”

“But that’s not going to happen. I know my story is true. If something about it doesn’t add up for you, we can discuss it, but don’t try to blow a little discrepancy out of proportion. It’s just a Nod problem.”

“Well, you’re putting me in a difficult position,” the doctor says. “If I can’t question inconsistencies in your account—”

“You can question them. I just said we can discuss it.”

“But you’re unwilling to entertain any real doubt.”

“Which makes us even,” she says. “Just like Phil and Roger.”

The doctor frowns.

“Sorry to spoil your game plan. Does this mean you don’t want to hear any more?”

“No, I still want to hear the whole story.”

“Good. Because it would make you a liar if you didn’t. I mean, you’re already a liar for saying you’d keep an open mind, but if you bailed on me now you’d be a double liar.”

“Well I wouldn’t want to be that,” says the doctor. “So after you killed the Angel of Death, what happened next?”

I GREW UP.

I lived in Siesta Corta until I turned eighteen. It wasn’t supposed to be for that long, but my mother refused to take me back, and not even my aunt and uncle could come up with a way to make her.

Were you upset about not going home?

No. Before the incident with the janitor, I would have been, but after…My perspective on pretty much everything was different.

I can understand that.

I’m not sure you can. I mean yeah, I’d been through a life-and-death experience, I’d killed someone, but in hindsight, it wasn’t the shooting that most affected me. It was hearing that voice say my name on the phone. It’s like, imagine if God called you up one day, not to give you a message but just to let you know He existed. Imagine how you’d feel right after you hung up.

You thought the voice on the phone was God?

No! But it was like that: like I’d been in contact with something big and mysterious, and the fact that it was out there made the whole world more interesting.

So it was like a conversion experience.

I suppose. Only not bullshit—it really happened, and I had the coin to prove it. And that was another thing: the fact that they’d left me even that tiny bit of evidence told me it wasn’t over. I’d be hearing from them again.

You saw that as something positive.

Sure. Why not?

I think many people, having been through the experience you describe, wouldn’t be eager to repeat it.

Well yeah, but those people wouldn’t have even gotten the first phone call. Not everyone is cut out for Bad Monkeys, and that’s OK. But for me, once the initial shock wore off, of course I wanted to go again. I mean, Nancy Drew with a fucking lightning gun, what’s not to love?

So with that to look forward to, living in Siesta Corta wasn’t such a drag anymore. You can wait for a bright future pretty much anywhere, right? And while I was waiting, just in case it mattered, I cleaned up my act. I never became a model citizen, but I did cut out most of the bad-seed crap. I gave up trying to outsmart my aunt and uncle, and at school, I actually applied myself—enough so that when I finally graduated, I was able to get a scholarship to Berkeley.

So you ultimately did go back to San Francisco.