Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

  The cafe and bookstore outside were pleasant enough, especially with the peacekeeping spells woven into them, but they looked bare and rough compared to this room, which was the heart and hearth of the sanctuary—the place from which all the peace and communion of the outer gathering places flowed.

  “What is this place?” Tez asked, breathless. The energy of the place was rather breathtaking, especially when you were new to it.

  “This is … to oversimplify, where Ayo keeps her research.”

  “In card catalogues?” he asked, still puzzled.

  “Yes, and files,” I said, pointing those out.

  “But where are the books?” He asked.

  “What books?”

  “The books … or, or … documents … where she keeps her research?”

  “Tez: her research is, basically, stories. And they’re kept here on the cards or in files.”

  “But … where does all this information come from? Is she just transferring this from books? Because, why not just keep the books? Or photocopy them?”

  I looked at him incredulously. “Do you not know how Ayo works?”

  He looked confused, and shrugged.

  “Tez, none of this information can be found in books. It’s all data—stories, tales, experiences—collected by Ayo directly from the source.”

  He still looked puzzled.

  “You made a deal with Ayo to get my help. What did you promise her?”

  He looked blank for a moment, and then his face opened in realization. “I promised to get her some … thing, but I also promised to tell her a story from my family. I hadn’t thought that part was important.” He looked around. “This is what she does with the stories?”

  “The story is the most important part of your deal with Ayo, not the least. This is her life’s work.” I swept the whole room with my hands. “This is how she connects us and helps us. The stories we tell are where folklore comes from. The stories passed down to us are our history. This is the intersection between human history, human folklore, and supernatural history. Ayo has collected these into a database, and here’s the database.”

  He absorbed this for a moment.

  I walked over to the card catalogues. “The information—the stories are on the cards,” I explained in my best hall monitor voice. “They’re organized by region” I pointed to one wall, “and by cultural tradition.” I pointed to the other two. Then I opened a drawer and pulled out a card at random. Like most of the others, it was filled with tiny handwriting. “For example, this one is a story from a bouda and the story itself is a variant of the Egyptian Rhodopis story. So it’s located in East Africa, and cross referenced with”—I pointed to the letter symbols at the bottom of the card—“Ethiopian folklore, Egyptian folklore, Greek history, and European fairytales, because the Rhodopis story is considered an early version of Cinderella.”

  I looked more closely at the card. “This card contains all the information. But some of the stories contained on the cards are longer, so the card will have a summary of the story and its significance, the cross-reference material, and then here”—I flipped through a drawer for an example—“at the bottom right will be an inventory number which will point to a longer document on paper in the filing cabinet.” I pointed to the cabinets.

  “So the Rhodopis story will have a similar card in Ethiopian folklore, etc.?”

  “Yes, or a more general card that points to several stories on several different cards in a different section.”

  “How are they organized within the drawers? Alphabetically?” He looked doubtful.

  I laughed. “Unfortunately, no. There’s no system for naming the stories, so you just have to look through according to region or cultural tradition, and look for key words. The key words are usually underlined on the cards, but not always. When you find something you think might be useful, pull it and bring it over to the table.”

  “How will you know where to put it back?”

  “We put it back in the front of the drawer that makes the most sense. So the cards move around the system a lot, and the cards at the front of the drawers are the ones that have gotten the most use. Which means we should start at the back, because Ayo has already pulled all the ones she can think of that have relevance.”

  “How do you find anything here?” he cried, throwing up his hands.

  “Magic!” I cried, then laughed again. “I don’t know what kind. It works somehow. Stoney and I are sort of like … extensions of Ayo’s mind when we’re in here, and we all understand how and where to place things. It’s a very mild kind of magic that draws from the power of books and paper and … stories themselves. It’ll make sense as you get into it.”

  “Why— ” he began, and I finished in sync with him “isn’t it digitized?”

  “The magic here comes from keeping the information in ink, on paper, in wooden containers. There’s something about physically handling the words and ideas that puts you into a kind of frame of mind. It makes you … receptive. Being in this room, being around these papers and cards and objects somehow … enhances your ability to … use this information—find information, understand information … in a way that you can … I dunno, I guess serve the clients of the sanctuary. Did that make any sense?”

  He shook his head, not in denial, but in awe.

  I always knew the room was there; it was a warm place in my heart, and it drew me in. I’d spent many happy hours in Ayo’s room, doing research for her, or looking for stories about myself. It meant so much to me to share this room with Tez.

  Tez, unconscious of the effect his presence had on me, decided to start with the geographic files, which worked well for me because I liked to go through the cultural tradition files. He started with Mexico, and I started with the Aztecs. He started out reading everything and moving slowly, but quickly caught on to the system and eventually nearly matched my speed. We each pulled out several cards we thought might be relevant, and eventually collected a small stack on the table; but direct references to sticks, walking sticks, staffs, cudgels, or other power objects in that cultural realm eluded us.

  After some time I noticed that Ayo had come in. She was standing at the table looking over the cards we’d pulled. A moment later, Tez also noticed the change in the room’s continuum and looked up. Ayo smiled at him and held out her hand.

  “Let me see the Huexotl.”

  I could hear the power in her voice, and I saw Tez struggle for a moment; but he generally was not in a resistant mood, and he handed the stick over to her relatively smoothly. It was cane-sized again, and Ayo’s eyes seemed to come to life as she handled it. But after a few moments, without any appearance of discomfort, she placed it carefully on the table and withdrew her hand. Huh.

  “What does it do?” she asked him, power in her voice again.

  “Really?” I asked her, exasperated in spite of my feelings of well-being in this space. “You’re the one who had the instructions!”

  The utterly blank look Tez gave me now reminded me that I’d never told him—

  “I told you,” Ayo said. “I got the package, which was just a sealed envelope, and gave it to him. I didn’t look inside.”

  “What instructions? Why didn’t you tell me It had instructions?” Tez demanded, truly bewildered.

  “Are you kidding me, Laughing Boy? I wanted you away from that thing, not bound closer to it!” Tez looked angry and chagrined at the same time. I took the fact that there was any chagrin in the mix as a win.

  “Where are they now?”

  “I got them for Juice,” Ayo said quietly, which calmed him down somewhat.

  “How did you know about them in the first place?” Tez asked me, already knowing the answer. But he had a look on his face … he wanted to hear someone talk about her. He broke my heart.

  “Chucha told me about it,” I said gently. “She didn’t get to see them either, but she said she didn’t need to because the … Huexotl … told her what to do with it.”
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br />   “So, Tez?” Ayo asked. “What does it do?”

  “I … don’t really know. It makes me stronger and faster. It … calls to me. It makes me feel … powerful and … happy—no, not happy. It makes me feel … high, I guess.”

  “It also changes size and shape a bit,” I put in, “depending on who is holding it, maybe? Or what use they want to put it to?”

  “What does it do for you, Maya?”

  “Not much,” I said, and Tez looked at me in surprise. I guess he really had thought I wanted it for myself. “Not that I’ve had much of a chance to play with it. Chucha barely even let me put a finger on it. It makes—made—them both super-possessive. And … it makes Tez extra aggressive.” He winced. “I don’t know if it did the same for Chucha.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “I can feel its power, though. When I touch it I get a distant sense of being connected to a much larger source of power. But it feels alien to me. Not wrong, exactly. Just … not of me.”

  Tez shook his head, a rueful smile appearing briefly on his lips. “Wow,” he said. “It’s the complete opposite for me. It feels like … home, to the nth degree, like … like driving west over the Bay Bridge at sunset, after a long road trip … like … as long as I have it, wherever I go, I’m home. That connection to the larger source of power? It’s not a connection, the source is right there for me, right under my feet, right in my hands. I don’t know how to use it, exactly, but it’s there. I’m like … drowning in pool of it … no, not a pool, an ocean.”

  Ayo stared at it some more. We all did.

  Then she looked up. “Well? Keep researching! I’m just looking. If anything interesting happens, you’ll be the first to know.” She waved us off and we went willingly back to the cards. After a while, the energy in the room shifted slightly again, and I knew that Ayo had joined us in looking through the cards, also in the geographical section. Clearly Ayo and Tez were thinking along the same lines. But Ayo knew to range further afield. It was often creatures—people—from very different cultural traditions who heard the stories that you were looking for in this cultural realm (since she got these stories all from real people, who often met other real people in their travels.) And, in fact, after several hours of hard searching, that’s where Ayo found a real clue.

  “Look at this,” she said suddenly, and her voice held a controlled excitement. “This is a story about a stick from an Aziza who dwelt in Oakland for many years, but had also traveled through Latin America and central Asia for decades. He told me many many stories. Problem with Azizas is that they don’t have a good sense of space or geography. Where they are is where they are, so he couldn’t identify places very well. So in this story he said he met a shaman or medicine man who was tied to the earth through a magical staff. It made the man more powerful, but he couldn’t leave his territory.”

  Tez rushed over to look at the document over her shoulder. Apparently, he discovered that it wasn’t written in a language he could read. He huffed and walked away like an offended cat, and stood at the bank of card catalogue drawers, but didn’t open any.

  She swished through pages of the document for a few moments, and Tez grew restless.

  “When was this?” he asked, testily.

  “Azizas aren’t too good with time, either. I’m guessing this was about at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, but it could have been much earlier or much later. This guy was an absolute font of good stories—all he asked in return was really pure tobacco and occasionally a foot rub—but the stories came out in a jumble, and for some of them I have no idea when or where they took place.”

  She flipped through the pages and held one up. “These are just notes, mind you. It says Ritual for binding medicine man to earth. Wouldn’t specify details of. Something about alignment of stars. Made staff of wood from tree from original home. Enabled them to draw power from land wherever they went. Partner—apparently the medicine man or shaman or whatever he was had a partner from within the clan, a ceremonial position. This partner seems to have been a storyteller, a keeper of the histories of the clan, and I think this means the storyteller was also responsible for memorizing the form of the rituals and passing them on to the next generation. This dude was the medicine man’s advisor, and he was expected to confer with the storyteller before making any major decisions. And that’s pretty much it. This is all from questions I asked about the storyteller, not the story itself.”

  “What’s the story itself?” I asked. Well someone had to.

  “Oh, just about ill luck that happened when the shaman didn’t confer with the storyteller/consigliere guy, and some humorous havoc that ensued. I’ll write out a translation for you, Tez, but I don’t think it’s relevant. He might have been talking about naguals. He might not have been.”

  We both looked at Tez and only then noticed that he was frozen in shock.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Amoxtli,” Tez whispered.

  “Amoxtli?” Ayo said. “That’s Nahuatl for ‘codex’ or ‘book.’ Are you thinking of the storyteller role? Yes, it’s true, it might have been a codex, or a series of codices, instead of a man. They kept the years and seasons, the days and feasts, the dreams and omens, the naming of children, and the marriage rites. Maybe this medicine man conferred with codices instead of another person.”

  “No, Ayo, Amoxtli, Tez’s family friend, is a person. That’s his name. You know him.”

  She shook her head.

  “He referred me to you,” Tez said, just as I was saying: “He’s the one who was asking for the stick’s …” I trailed off as I heard what Tez had said. “… instructions …” I finished, realizing. He’d referred Tez to Ayo. And instantly I knew that was the “secret” he’d made Ayo keep from me. Dammit!

  “Oh, you mean Amo? I didn’t know that was his full name. That’s … interesting …”

  “You kept his connection to Tez a secret from me, Ayo. But didn’t it occur to you that Amo asked for the instructions because the Varelas are connected to the stick?”

  “No, I didn’t, because he gave me a good cover story.” Which she couldn’t tell me, even now, being sworn to silence. Sigh.

  “Wait a minute,” Tez said, “What did you say about the stick’s instructions?”

  I was still combing through my tangled thoughts. “Your … uh … Amoxtli came in and asked Ayo to find him a particular piece of writing, written in ballpoint pen on a sheet of torn out notebook paper. He didn’t say what was on it, but Chucha had just told me that same day that Juice had instructions for the stick written in ballpoint on a sheet of notebook paper, and Ayo told me she’d been the one to get the instructions for Juice. We assumed it was the same thing, and I was going to ask him about it but …”

  Tez nodded absently and chewed his lip. “Where did you get the instructions from, Ayo?”

  She shook her head. “We’re way ahead of you. I got it from a Chinatown contact in no way connected.”

  There was more silence, as we all churned this over.

  “He’s a storyteller,” Tez said, finally, in a wondering tone. I knew he meant Amoxtli. I could see Ayo narrowing her brows, almost see her grind her teeth in frustration at the stories she hadn’t gotten from him. “He’s a fucking bookshelf. He knows all the stories of our family. My dad told me once that he was a distant relative, that we were the same clan. Maya!” he turned to me, “My dad never made any big decisions without talking to Amoxtli first!”

  “And he told me the history of your family while I was waiting for you yesterday. And he referred you to us. And he was asking for the stick’s instructions. And …” I said, emphatically, “I asked about magic sticks before you came back the other day and he gave me a look.”

  Tez looked shocked for a second, and then his look hardened.

  “If there’s really nothing more in that story,” he looked sternly at Ayo, who shook her head, “then I know where to go now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

/>   Saturday, October 22, 2011

  Outside Sanc-Ahh Café, Oakland

  Tez’s determined look stayed on his face, even as he was offering me a ride home.

  He went out to start the car while I finished closing (the cafe had closed while we were in the back) and got my things. But when I stepped outside, I didn’t immediately see him: his Civic was sitting there, dark and quiet. I looked down the sidewalk, but no one Tez-shaped was nearby. Then I looked in the other direction—

  Tez was lying flat out on the sidewalk in the darkness between two streetlamps, a few dozen yards away. He was twitching and jerking and … something was crouched over him … it looked like a black panther … no it was a shadow … It was the shadow creature! Eating him!

  My monkey brain took over and I slid into monkey form just in time to slam into the shadow creature, which I was … relieved? to discover was solid enough to slam into. That meant: solid enough to take a beating, although its solidity felt like a brick shithouse had decided to grow foam rubber skin. It gave a little, and then it didn’t, much to the detriment of my shoulder joint. Whatever it had been doing to Tez, it stopped, and, although, as before, I couldn’t see a head or any features on it, I felt its attention turn entirely to me.

  I couldn’t suppress a shudder, although Monkey was in charge and calculating while screeching in fear. I checked its legs—it didn’t have any. In fact, I couldn’t tell if it was anchored to the ground, or floating, or—

  WHAM! It hit me in the face with its … I don’t know what it hit me with, it felt like a shockwave, not any body part, but I took it full in the face and flipped 360 degrees backwards, landing flat on my back.

  Was it just me, or was it hitting me harder than it had the last time? Or was I just weaker? Yes, I was weaker, I was weak. I was …

  The creature seemed to come closer to me—it was hard to tell, since it was all shadow and smoke, and transparency. But I could feel it hovering over me, and the hairs rose all over my body.

  I reached up to grasp it and pull myself up onto its body—one of my signature moves that never failed to disorient an opponent—but, although it was more solid than air and pushed back against my fingers, I couldn’t find any contours to grab a hold of. I couldn’t get my elongated fingers around any part of it. It was like trying to grab a jellyfish. A really hard jellyfish. It pressed me down all along my upper body, although, again, I couldn’t feel any hands or body parts, only irresistible pressure.