So like I said, I counted myself lucky, and moved on. I tried to forget it had ever happened, you know? But Panopticon never forgets. They miss stuff, or misfile it, but if they know about it at all, they never really forget…And when the truth finally comes back around, all those excuses you thought were so clever end up sounding like the bullshit that they are.

So I finished my story and stood there staring at the video wall—it was all just Owen Farley’s picture, now—while I waited for Dixon to pass final judgment. But Dixon was waiting too, looking my way but focused on a point a half inch in front of his right eye. The little computer screen flickered like mad, and my wrist was tingling so much my hand had gone numb.

And so finally I just blurted it out: “Did I kill him?”

“Kill him?” Dixon said. “That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“It’s the right choice. You said it yourself, I was reckless. I knew better. So if he’s dead, it’s on me. If he’s in a coma somewhere, or locked up in a psycho ward, that’s on me too. I accept responsibility, OK? No excuses…Whatever you’re going to do to me, just do it.”

Seconds ticked by, and I felt another tingling, at the back of my head. I thought: that’s where he’s going to shoot me, the other Bad Monkeys operative who’s sneaking up behind me even now, waiting for Dixon to give the nod. I tried to brace myself.

And then a cell phone rang, breaking the spell. Dixon pursed his lips in annoyance and slipped the phone from his pocket. “Yes?” he said. “Oh, it’s you…I didn’t realize you were monitoring the session…Yes, I’m looking at the results now. I’d have to call them inconclusive, but I was going to…Really…Really…Is there some factor here that I’m not aware of?…Really…Well, it would have been helpful to know that before…Yes, I understand…Of course it’s your call, but for the record, I still don’t think it’s wise to…Yes…Yes…As you wish…”

He snapped the phone closed, and then, turning, pressed a single key on the laptop. The computer screen went dark. The video wall went dark, too.

“You’re free to go,” Dixon said.

“What? But what about…You never answered my question.”

“Owen Farley is alive. No thanks to you.”

“Is he OK, though? What happened to him? Is he—”

“Don’t push your luck,” Dixon said sharply.

“OK…But when you say I’m free to go, does that mean…Am I in the clear on this? Am I still in Bad Monkeys?”

“For now,” Dixon said. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless you have something else you’d like to confess.”

“No.” I hooked a finger under the wristband and popped it loose, then started massaging the feeling back into my hand. “No, that’s OK. I’m done confessing for now.”

“Then get out. And Jane?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be seeing you…”

white room (v)

“INTERESTING,” THE DOCTOR SAYS.

“What is?”

“In addition to my duties here, I sometimes conduct interviews at a facility called Red Springs, out in the desert. It’s—”

“A jail for sex predators,” she says, her cheeks coloring. “I know. I saw a sign for it on my way into Vegas.”

“Violent sex predators,” he says, but the correction does nothing to soothe her indignation. “I’ve spoken to over a hundred of them now, and they break down into two main categories: sociopaths, and a second group I like to think of as malefactors.”

Still flushed, she says: “Sociopaths are the ones who don’t feel guilty.”

“Very good. Most people think that sociopaths are the ones who can’t tell right from wrong, but of course that’s not true. They know the difference—enough to understand they have to hide what they do—they just don’t care about it.”

“Bad monkeys.”

“Oh, the malefactors are bad monkeys, too—and in some ways, they’re harder to take. Sociopaths are like Martians: their moral indifference is very strange, but at least their behavior is consistent with it. Malefactors, on the other hand, possess a normal sense of conscience. They experience guilt, and are capable of remorse. But they don’t let any of that stop them.

“Which brings me to my point,” the doctor says. “Another way of distinguishing sociopaths from malefactors is through the types of lies they tell. Sociopaths lie to other people. Malefactors do that too, but first they lie to themselves. In order to justify their actions, they often construct very elaborate fantasy scenarios…”

Her ire finally dissipates. She snorts. “So this is your new theory? I dreamed up the organization to help cope with my repressed guilt about the pet boys?”

“You think it’s a silly idea?”

“That Dixon was some kind of enabler? Yeah, I do think it’s silly. If you’d met him, you’d know why.”

“He did clear you.”

“No, he didn’t.” She starts to get angry again. “Did you not get the point about the phone call? Dixon didn’t clear me. Dixon wanted to burn me. At the very least he wanted me kicked out of Bad Monkeys, and if he could have sent me someplace like Red Springs, that would have made his day.”

“But that isn’t what happened.”

“Because Cost-Benefits overruled him.”

“So you were cleared. By very smart, well-informed people.”

“But why would I do it that way? If I were just imagining the whole thing to ease my guilt, why would I put myself through the wringer? Why not just have Dixon say, ‘Hey, so you crossed a line, it’s no big deal.’”

“Because you don’t believe that,” the doctor says. “You think it is a big deal. And before you could accept absolution, you wanted—needed—to be taken to task for what you’d done.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

“Not all. By your own account, your involvement with the organization goes back long before your involvement with the pet boys. And while you may have been carrying a significant amount of guilt over what happened to Owen Farley, I doubt that incident alone was enough to give rise to such an elaborate coping mechanism. It’s too little, too late. So that leaves me with the same question Dixon had: Is there something else you’d like to confess?”

“No,” she says firmly, and then again: “No.” She leans back in her chair and looks away; her lips move as if to shape the word “no” a third time.

But what actually comes out—after a long pause, and in tones so low as to be barely audible—is: “Not yet.”

Scary Clowns, Shibboleths, and the Desert of Ozymandias

AFTER MY RUN-IN WITH DIXON, I didn’t get another Bad Monkeys assignment for almost three months. I knew from what Annie had told me during training that that kind of downtime wasn’t necessarily unusual, but under the circumstances I couldn’t help worrying about it.

Did you think you’d been fired after all?

No, I knew it wasn’t that—I could still get Catering on the phone anytime I wanted, they just didn’t have anything for me. Then when I asked to speak to True, they kept telling me he was unavailable, and so from that I got the idea that maybe he was upset.

About what? The pet boys?

More likely this other thing I’d done. Back at that rooftop buffet meeting, right before he left, True had warned me not to take Dr. Tyler’s case into my own hands: “I know you’ll be tempted, especially once your Malfeasance interview is out of the way, but don’t do it. Julius Deeds was strike one; Annie Charles was strike two; I trust I don’t need to tell you what happens after strike three.”

Of course this meant I had to quit my job at the nursing home. Maybe I’m the biggest hypocrite in the universe, but I just didn’t trust myself to rub shoulders with that sicko every night and not do something. So I quit, but then during my last shift I broke into Tyler’s office again and found that Catholic school-uniform catalogue he kept hidden in his filing cabinet, and left it on his desk. It wasn’t anything that’d get him into trouble if someone else saw it, but I knew that he’d know that somebody was on to him.