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.
And what did you hope to accomplish by doing that?
Christ, talk about a Bob True question. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish; I just did it, OK? But because of Eyes Only, Panopticon knew I’d done it, and I’m sure they told True, and if it wasn’t bad enough to count as strike three, still, I’d disobeyed a direct order. So I figured the lack of assignments might be True’s way of punishing me: unofficial suspension.
Meanwhile, Dixon kept dropping hints that he was still on my case. I got another floor-sweeping gig at this office building on the waterfront. It was a lot quieter than the nursing home, just me and a security guard, which should have been great: no boss, whole place practically to myself, plus the vending machine on the top floor had this glitch where if you hit the buttons just right, you’d get two sodas for the price of one. But I started getting creeped out. The company that owned the building imported bobblehead dolls from Taiwan, and those freaking things were everywhere, not just watching me but nodding at me. It got so I couldn’t go more than half an hour without running down to the security station to calm my nerves.
One night I went in there and the guard had his TV on. The Graduate was playing. Not just any part of The Graduate, either—the first thing I saw coming in the room was Anne Bancroft putting her stockings on for Dustin Hoffman. So I’m like, “Can I change this?”, and the guard shrugged and said sure, so I flipped channels, into the middle of another bedroom scene: Bud Cort lying next to Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude.So I flipped channels again, and it was a commercial, and I was like, OK, but then the announcer’s voice said, “Coming up next on A&E, The Mary Kay Letourneau Story…”
And you thought this was Dixon’s way of taunting you? By manipulating the TV schedule?
If it had just been the once, I might have put it down to coincidence. But after that, whenever I got near a television…I mean, I know they like to repeat stuff on cable, but how many times can they cycle through the same handful of shows?
And it wasn’t just TV. I started noticing little digs in the radio playlist, too. I’d be in the shower, singing along with KFOG, and all at once I’d be like, oh, “The Kids Are All Right,” are they? And if it wasn’t the song itself, it was the band…The Pet Shop Boys. Remember the Pet Shop Boys? They dropped off the charts, what, a decade ago? But suddenly they were in heavy rotation again.
Michael Jackson too, I suppose.
Don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson. If I never hear “Billie Jean” again in this life…