“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?”

We All Make the World

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.

Yeah. I almost didn’t, I mean I thought about not taking the scholarship, but Phil convinced me I’d be an idiot not to.

You were in contact with your brother?

By then, yeah. The first couple years in Siesta Corta I didn’t hear from him, but on his thirteenth birthday he came out to see me. He stole a page from my old playbook: told Mom he was staying at a friend’s place for the weekend, then hitchhiked out to the Valley. I came home from working at the store one afternoon and found him playing with the cats on the front porch.

At first I was pissed about the hitchhiking: “Do you have any idea what kind of psychos are out on the road, Phil?” But he just laughed and said I was the pot calling the kettle black, and anyway he was big enough to take care of himself. And the truth is, he was; he’d gone through this major growth spurt, so even though he was barely a teenager, he had the height and weight to make a bad monkey think twice.

It ended up being a good visit. The same time he’d become more like me, I’d become more like him, so we were able to sort of meet each other halfway. Turned out we actually liked each other. So from then on we kept in touch, and when he could he came out to see me. He had a knack for showing up when I needed advice, like about the scholarship.

What about your mother? Did you and she ever reconcile?

No. I thought about going to visit her once I was back in S.F. I talked to Phil about it—I figured he’d be all in favor—but he thought it was a lousy idea. “You know you’ll just end up fighting with her, Jane. Why would you want to do that?” So I put it off. When she died in ’87, I still hadn’t seen her.

I’m sorry.

No, Phil was right. There was no love lost there, and no sense pretending, either.

Tell me about Berkeley. What was your major?

Christ, that question…Which one do you want to hear about first? I had like five.

You had trouble deciding?

I didn’t think I needed to decide. Look, there are basically two reasons people go to college. Some people actually go there to learn something, something specific I mean, a trade or a vocation. Other people—like me—just go for the experience. I was like one of those starving-artist types, people who convince themselves back in grade school that they have a destiny to become actors or musicians or writers. For them, college is a place to mark time until their destiny kicks in.

And you believed that you had a destiny…to become Nancy Drew with a lightning gun?

See, when you say it that way it sounds crazy. It was never that explicit. I didn’t even know what the organization was at that point, so it’s not like I ever thought to myself, “One day I’m going to join the fight against evil, and here’s how.” It was a lot more subtle than that, just this general sense that I was covered—I didn’t need to make a plan for my life, because the plan already existed, and eventually it would come clear to me.