The chicken-finger platter that has just been placed before Justin Bieber is like something out of a children’s book—an illustration from a story about a boy who becomes king, whose first and last royal decree is that it’s chicken-finger time. The dish is so massive that in order to accommodate it, a metal urn filled with enough ice and soft drinks to sustain a pioneer family on a trek across Death Valley is moved to an adjacent table. Tenders are not even listed on the menu of this restaurant; its offerings are confined to ideas like “parsnip purée,” “pomegranate gastrique,” and “dill.” The fingers have been conjured, unbidden, out of the invisible fabric of the universe for Justin Bieber, who is not eating them.

It is an early-January afternoon, and Bieber and I are sitting in a private open-air cabana on the rooftop of the hotel in Beverly Hills where he now lives. Bieber moved into this hotel almost two years ago, after he sold his six-bedroom Calabasas mansion to Khloé Kardashian, following numerous clashes with neighbors and police. (His skate ramp was removed.) He is slight, with rashes of tattoos spreading down both arms. His hair, cropped close on the sides but long enough on top to be tied in a short bleached ponytail, is tucked under a gray Supreme beanie. His feet are snuggled into a pair of café au lait Yeezy Boosts. He is wearing what could be anywhere from two to 41 black sweatshirts of various lengths, layered, and distressed leather pants that retail for $2,590. Everyone else by the pool is wearing clothes; he is wearing fashion. When he arrived just a few minutes ago, he was escorted by a Def Jam executive for the five-second walk from the elevator to this cabana.

“Are you Justin?” I asked.

“I must be,” he replied.

If someone asked you to list the ten worst things you have ever done in public, you would probably have to rack your brain to come up with a list even half that long. Justin Bieber has an encyclopedic knowledge of his public fuckups. He could recite his list off the top of his head, because he is asked to revisit its contents every time he is interviewed. He treats the list of things he has done wrong as assumed knowledge. We know pi is 3.14; we know Justin Bieber was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Miami (a charge dropped as part of a plea deal); we know he abandoned a monkey—a young monkey—in Germany.

One year ago, for all these sins—and presumably for many more that we will never know about—Bieber embarked on a whirlwind public-apology tour. He sat down for a chat on Ellen (bearing flowers for her birthday) and then uploaded a poorly lit cell-phone video to Facebook saying he felt awkward during the interview and expressing remorse for his behavior over “the past year, year and a half.” He was the subject of a Comedy Central Roast organized by his management team, which, unlike the roasts of beloved comedians, filled the air with an acrid smell, as if a witch were being burned at the stake. (Hannibal Buress: “I don’t like you at all, man. I’m just here ’cause this is a real good opportunity for me.”) He smoldered on the cover of Seventeen alongside the statement “I Was Disappointed in Myself.” He bought dinner for cops. And then, last fall, Justin Bieber did the most prudent thing he could possibly have done to earn the world’s forgiveness: He released an album of face-melting bangers.

Purpose achieved for Justin what years of wearing saggy pants could not: It made people regard him as an adult artist capable of appealing to people old enough to rent a car. Suddenly, everything was going mostly right. Collaborations with EDM maestros Skrillex and Diplo earned sterling reviews from music critics. The album produced an unbroken string of hits. “Grown men now love Justin Bieber’s music, too,” reported the Associated Press somberly. As 2015 drew to a close, if you thought Justin Bieber’s music sucked, you were worse than snobbish—you were uninformed. People were even beginning, experimentally, to enjoy Justin Bieber the person.

In October, Bieber released the single “Sorry,” in which he apologizes to an unnamed girl for the three catchiest minutes of your life. Many interpreted the track as a winking mea culpa for the sum of his wrongdoings—the capstone to his year of penance.

Today, Justin Bieber says it was not.

“People ran with that—that I was, like, apologizing with the song and stuff. It really had nothing to do with that.”

It wasn’t meant to be an apology?

“No. It was about a girl.”

I point out that for much of the past year, he’s been seeking forgiveness. He tells me it was more about “acknowledging” past mistakes. Not I’m sorry I broke your vase but, rather, Man, I broke your vase—that’s on me—I admit that.

“Everyone, when they start growing up, realizes, ‘Man, I did some dumb shit when I was younger.’ It’s not just me.… If I could go back, I wouldn’t really change much. I think it’s all my journey. That stuff made me who I am.”

Let’s note before we go too much further that Justin Bieber is not easy to talk to. A linguist would say he violates backchannel norms. That is, he withholds those subtle signs—short verbal cues like “mmm-hmm,” “right,” and “yeah”; quick head nods—that indicate an engaged listener and that encourage the speaker to continue. You perform these signs countless times a day; it’s something humans do whether they speak English, Hungarian, or Farsi. There are a number of reasons why Bieber might have developed this irregular habit. Perhaps it was drilled into him that two people talking at once makes for poor audio quality on talk shows. Maybe he was warned that a stray “yeah” to demonstrate you’re paying attention could, in the wrong hands, turn into an on-the-record affirmation that Bush did 9/11. Maybe he wants to be unsettling.

Whatever the reason, it is unsettling. It’s unsettling to share a personal story, or ask a long-winded question, and be met with Justin Bieber’s silent, cool-eyed stare the entire time you’re talking. Justin Bieber makes eye contact like a person who has been told that eye contact is very, very important.

He can be difficult to talk to in other ways, too. He generally does not respond to irony. He speaks more quietly than a mouse that’s asleep, so you frequently have to ask him to repeat things. (More than once, sensing my anxiety that my recorder cannot detect the minuscule sound waves of his speech, he moves it closer to him, assuring me, “I got you.”) His responses to most questions are short, often monosyllabic—until you hit upon a topic he is comfortable discussing, such as his fans (who delight him) or God’s opinion of man, in which case he will talk without ceasing for nearly 1,000 words.

Justin Bieber’s Personal Decoder for His Many, Many Tattoos Explaining his ink, from math-geek symbols to faded ex-girlfriends

Bieber speaks about God with the easy superfluity of someone who knows how to read the Bible between the lines, who is confident he has correctly assessed its true meaning. God’s love helps him to be a good person and to recognize the cosmic value of being a good person, but God’s love is also available to him even when he doesn’t act like a good person. Unlike employees, friends, and family members, God never disappoints—and is never disappointed in—Justin Bieber. In conversation, Bieber alludes often to the fallibility of those closest to him: “I’ve had people that burned me so many times”; “If we invest everything we have in a human, we’re gonna get broken.” God is probably the only person in the universe Bieber can really trust.

“I feel like that’s why I have a relationship with Him, because I need it. I suck by myself. Like, when I’m by myself and I feel like I have nothing to lean on? Terrible. Terrible person. If I was doing this on my own, I would constantly be doing things that are, I mean, I still am doing things that are stupid, but… It just gives me some sort of hope and something to grasp onto, and a feeling of security, and a feeling of being wanted, and a feeling of being desired, and I feel like we can only get so much of that from a human.”

Bieber tells me that dwelling on negativity is “exactly what the Devil wants. He wants us to not be happy. He wants us to, you know, not live the life that we can truly live.”

If that’s true, then the Devil must be livid right now, because Justin Bieber is on top of the world.

I ask him to tell me everything about the monkey.

Here’s what we know. In March of 2013, Justin Bieber suffered every animal lover’s worst nightmare: confiscation of his pet by the German government. His capuchin monkey, OG Mally, was seized by customs officials when Bieber landed in Munich for a tour stop. The exact reason is a matter of dispute, but in any event, OG Mally was placed under quarantine. Officials gave Bieber until May 7 to reclaim him, with proper paperwork. May 7 came and went. By August, Germany was demanding nearly $8,000 in fees related to the monkey’s relocation to a zoo.

Almost as soon as it broke, the OG Mally story took on a mythic quality. The primate, a pet owned by noblewomen in Renaissance art, and by Michael Jackson, became a symbol of Bieber’s excess. His loss of it was indicative of irresponsibility. His failure to reclaim it marked Bieber as uncaring: the father no monkey deserved.

But as best I can tell, he really loved that monkey.

When I bring up Mally, I mispronounce his name—I had assumed it was pronounced Mal-ee, like “rally”—and Bieber immediately corrects me. “It was Mally,” he says, pronouncing it Maul-ee, like having properties characteristic of or similar to a mall.

OG Mally, he says, was named after a human man named Mally, who gave him the monkey as a birthday present, because Bieber had always wanted one.

“It wasn’t like I went looking for a monkey or anything. It just kind of fell in my lap.”

I ask if it’s true that Bieber didn’t have the papers required to transport the monkey across international lines.

“I had the papers.”