Little did I know. I still hadn’t really grasped the whole Eyes Only thing, how pervasive it was. I figured Dixon must have heard stories about the pet boys, like maybe his people had tracked down one of the neighbors from my old apartment building. I wasn’t expecting video.
But then somebody hit a dimmer switch on the overhead light, and suddenly this little back room became an amphitheater. You know that Sony Jumbotron screen they’ve got in Times Square, the one that’s like forty feet wide? Imagine that popping up on a wall in this space that you thought was maybe fifteen by twenty.
The wall lit up and started filling with this photo array of pet boys. All of them, even the one-night stands that I didn’t really consider part of the official count. The pictures were practically life-size, at least it seemed that way, and each one had a caption: MILES DAVIS MONROE, AGE 16—the 16 was flashing in red—JORDAN GRAHAM, AGE 17, VICTOR TODD, AGE 17, NICHOLAS MARTINESCU, AGE 16, et cetera, et cetera.
How many “et ceteras”?
Let’s just stipulate that it was a big frigging wall and leave it at that, OK? It took a long time to fill up, and meanwhile I was sucking down Coke, and my wristband, which was obviously some sort of lie detector, was tingling like mad, and I just knew that whatever I said next was going to be judged really severely. So I thought, and I thought, and I was still thinking when the last picture appeared, and finally I opened my mouth and said the exact wrong thing:
“How much trouble am I in?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Dixon. The overhead light came up again, and he was holding a big red book with the words CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE on the cover. “Unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 189 counts…Providing alcohol to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 131 counts…Providing illegal narcotics to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a felony…”
I started to do the math in my head, but then I was like, wait, he knows how many times I did it? And so I took another look at the picture array and saw that all the shots were framed the same way, with the pet boy sitting at the foot of my futon and the image angled like the person holding the camera was standing on the futon’s headboard, which you think I might have noticed at the time. Then the flashback ray hit me again, and I remembered that very first night with Miles, me handing him a fresh joint and then looking up at the wall above the headboard and winking, conspiratorially, at—
“My Marlene Dietrich poster.”
“Eyes Only,” Dixon said.
I was screwed. I was so screwed. I’d had that Marlene Dietrich poster since freshman year at Berkeley, it had hung on the wall over every bed I’d ever owned, and if Marlene was a narc for Panopticon—
“I’m screwed.” The Coke can was empty now; my head felt three sizes too big, and totally detached from my body. I said to Dixon: “So when are the cops coming?”
“Why would the police be coming?”
“Because…I’m a criminal.”
“Yes, you are,” Dixon said. “And if I were an agent of law enforcement, I’d be all too happy to see you locked away in a cell. But I work for the organization, and the organization doesn’t fight crime, it fights evil.”
“So you’re saying…this wasn’t evil?”
“It was reckless. And appallingly selfish. You were certainly old enough to know better. But you appear to have acted without malice, and inasmuch as it’s possible to judge such things objectively, most of these young men were unharmed by their association with you.”
I didn’t miss the qualifier: “Most of them?”
“Why don’t you tell me who I’m thinking of?”
I didn’t have to guess. I turned back to the photo array, to the picture in the bottom right-hand corner, my very last pet boy: Owen Farley.