Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

I looked at the guy. He tugged at his earlobe, which was pierced with a monogram earring that had the letters OMF in gold. I gave him my NC gun. He tucked it into his apron and brought out a yellow elastic band that he slipped around my wrist. The wristband was tight and had some sort of metal contacts on the inside, and right away it started my skin tingling. While I was still adjusting to that, the guy slapped an ice-cold can of Coke into my other hand. He pointed to another sign: FREE SODA WITH SURRENDER OF WEAPON. Then he nodded towards the rear of the arcade and said, “He’s waiting for you.”

I started back. The Coke can was freezing my hand, so to warm it up I popped the tab and took a big gulp. It was like drinking liquid nitrogen; my whole mouth went numb, and when the Coke hit the back of my throat I spiked an ice-cream headache that made my eyes water.

The arcade seemed to go on for miles. Every time I reached the end of a row of machines, there’d be another one, and as I went farther in, things started to get strange. The kids manning the joysticks were replaced by gnomes, blond gnomes with pebble glasses and leather trench coats. The machines changed too, Virtua Fighter 3 and Dance Dance Revolution giving way to games with more of a Seven Deadly Sins theme. And the images on the screens…Let’s just say, the Concerned Parents Association wouldn’t have approved.

Finally I came to a door marked EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS. I took another sip of Coke, knocked, and went in.

Dixon’s office had a single overhead light fixture, like a search lamp mounted in the ceiling—the bulb was like a thousand watts or something, and if it had been angled at the door instead of aimed straight down, I’d have gone blind on the spot. A long folding table had been set up in the cone of the lamplight. The left side of the table was piled with paper, mostly old-fashioned computer fanfold printout. The right side was reserved for a sleek laptop, its screen flickering with a cascade of green figures.

Dixon stood with his back to the door, flipping through a sheaf of printout and pretending he hadn’t heard me come in. I took this for a standard interrogation tactic: he wanted me to speak first, to establish that he was the one in charge. Instead I drank more Coke, slurping it. The belch at the end seemed to get his attention.

“It’s 8:09,” he said. “I told you to be here at eight.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me about the walk in from the street. How long is this building, anyway?”

He turned around. Some sort of device had been attached to his glasses: a tiny arm extended from the top of the right lens, dangling a clear plastic rectangle a half-inch in front of it. The rectangle flickered, green, in tandem with the flickering of the laptop on the table. It was completely geeky, but it was also kind of hypnotic.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Dixon asked.

Another interrogation tactic: get me to guess what I’d done, and maybe I’d volunteer something he didn’t know about. I shrugged and played dumb. “True thought it might have something to do with my background check. So what, did you find some unpaid parking tickets?”

“Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a saying we have in Malfeasance. Not as pithy as ‘Omnes mundum facimus,’ but it serves us.”

“Well don’t keep me in suspense. What does it mean?”

“It’s an observation about human nature,” Dixon said. “One difficulty we have in running these background checks is that our information-gathering apparatus is so effective, we end up drowning in data. Of course we have technology to help sort through it, but even machines have their limits, and a brute-force search of an entire life—particularly one that hasn’t been all that well-lived—eats an enormous number of computing cycles. So we try to find clues to help us narrow the search space…Loosely translated, Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch means that people are most deeply offended by moral failings that mirror their own. The minister who preaches a tearful sermon against fornication: he’s the one you’ll find sneaking out of a brothel at midnight. The district attorney who crusades against illegal gambling: look for him at the track, betting his life savings on Bluenose in the fifth.”

“If you’re trying to say that people are hypocrites, that’s not exactly a newsflash. And what’s it got to do with me?”

“Who told you to search John Tyler’s office?”

“No one.”

“You just intuited somehow that there was something to find?”

“No, I was just being nosy. I’m like that.”

“How many other offices did you search?”

“Well…none.”

“What about the nurses you’ve been having breakfast with? Did you go through any of their purses?”

“No.”

“What about their lockers?”

“No, but—”

“So you’re not that nosy. Why single out Dr. Tyler?”

“I thought he was cute, OK?”

“Oh. So you were stalking him?”

“No! I was just checking him out…I mean, I don’t know, maybe I did get a vibe off him.”

“A vibe.”

“Yeah, like you said, an intuition. That there was something not right there.”

“But then what about the nurses?”

“What about them?”

“Two of them have been stealing painkillers—shorting their patients’ dosages—and giving them to their boyfriends to sell. Strange you didn’t get a vibe about that. Maybe if they were taking the drugs for personal use, your intuition would have picked up on it…”

“Look, where are you going with this? You think I zeroed in on Tyler because I’m like him?”

“Are you?”

“Hey, if you’re worried I’ve got my own collection of magazine clippings, you’re welcome to search my apartment.”

“We already did.”

“OK…So you know your schlecky-affa-whatever theory doesn’t hold water.”

“It’s often a related transgression, rather than the exact same one,” Dixon said. “Just to be thorough, I ran a check of your reading history to see if there were any signs of inappropriate sexual interest.” He held up the batch of printout he’d been looking at when I came in. “That search was more fruitful. Tell me, do you recall stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library when you were twelve years old?”

It was such a left-field question I almost laughed, but the funny thing was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said, “Do you recall,” it was like my brain got zapped with some kind of flashback ray.

And what was he talking about? What was the book?

Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Moon’s mother had a copy, and Moon and I used to read it to each other during sleepovers. Eventually I decided I wanted a copy of my own, and hooking it from the library was easier than shoplifting it.

“How do you know about that?”

“Library Binding,” Dixon said.

I thought he was talking about the anti-theft strip: “But I didn’t take it out the front door.”

“No, you tossed it out of the second-floor girls’ bathroom window. That branch of the library lost a lot of books that way.”

“OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean, Delta of Venus is smut, but it’s literary smut.”

“It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider wholesome erotic entertainment?”

“I don’t remember that story.”

“Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”