On Phoebe's second day working at The Museum, she fell victim to the Chinese Food Bandit. The day before, her new boss, Carlotta, had taken her out for lunch as a
welcoming gesture. It had been a difficult lunch, taken up with Carlotta explaining why she never went to the movies anymore.
 
"You have to sit by strangers and they breathe on you. They smell like garlic or fish. They mumble. They bring plastic bags full of illegal food. I finally told my husband, look, install a home theater."

Phoebe felt a headache coming on and, when their server asked if they needed boxes, she quickly answered in the affirmative. So did Carlotta. "If I eat much more of this MSG, I'm going to go into a coma."

Once back at the museum for an afternoon devoted to sitting at her desk rereading The Museum's website, Phoebe put her Chinese food in the refrigerator of the
staff kitchen.

"That takes care of lunch tomorrow," she said to a blonde women with large reading glasses pushed up onto her head.

"That's what you think," the blonde woman said and walked out with her cup of green tea.

The next day, Phoebe waited until noon to stop reading The Museum's website and retrieve her Chinese food. She planned to spend her lunch hour eating and browsing through the latest copy of Harper's Bazaar. When she opened the refrigerator, however, she found that her box of Chinese food was missing. She searched through all the contents of the refrigerator, then the freezer. She looked in the wastebasket. There was no evidence of the box ever existing.

Later in the day, while learning about her responsibility to photocopy and distribute all
newspaper articles from around the world that mentioned The Museum (a job Carlotta referred to as "Clippings"), she asked Carlotta about the food. "I should  have warned you. You can't put any leftover food from a restaurant in the fridge. It will be gone the next day. If I go out for lunch, I bring my leftovers home for the night and bring them back the
next day."

"But why?"

Carlotta leaned in. "It's the guy in the cave. Down there." Carlotta pointed to the ground. "The guy who monitors the video footage. He gets hungry and comes upstairs and goes through all the refrigerators. Won't touch stuff people bring from home but eats anything
from a restaurant. One time he ate all the chicken out of my kung pao and put the rest back."

"But why do we allow this?"

"Because we can't catch him. We're not here at night, are we? And he controls the cameras. Turns off the ones that would catch him going in or out; turns them back on when he's done. I've tried to trap him many times, believe me."

"What's his name?"

"I have no idea. I call him The Mole."

Phoebe thought about this for the rest of the afternoon, as she stood over the copier and montitored for paper jams as she made 20 copies of each article referencing The Museum from papers as varied as the Birmingham Post-Herald to Luxembourg's Tageblatt. For three hours she was largely uninterrupted, except for a moment when, at 3:24, the copier simultaneously jammed and the door to the copying room, really an old closet, swung open. A young man with shaggy hair and glasses poked his head in. Phoebe saw that he was carrying a stack of papers.

"Copier's broken!" She waved him off.

"Oh, well, do you need--"

"No, I'm fine but I've got a lot of copying to do here, so if you don't mind going to use another one--"

The man looked at her, perplexed. "I'll come back."

"Come back tomorrow."

The man turned around and left.

After she'd cleared paths A, B, C and F in the copier, Phoebe put her hands to her flushed cheeks. She had no idea why she'd been so rude.

installment #2