Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

  Maybe his siblings … but how could he ask his siblings when they were so dependent on him, so used to him being in charge? They didn’t sound like they were much for bucking authority, and Tez was authority to them. I didn’t imagine that the idea of Tez—who was already in charge of their neighborhood—taking over the whole city would seem like much of a stretch to them.

  Ironically, the only person in his family or inner circle who might be able to advise him with a relatively clear head and without a personal agenda was Chucha. But then … that’s what I was doing here in the first place, wasn’t it? First I was Chucha’s conscience, and now that she was dead, I was Chucha’s proxy.

  The idea filled me with a sort of relief, combined with a terrible fear and guilt. But I had no choice. I had to do right by Chucha, and that meant being totally honest.

  Tez was waiting patiently, watching my face, which, I’m sure, showed every emotion through my monkey grimaces and pink flushes. “I have no idea what to think. The whole idea is so crazy … and so new. And it all sounds so …”

  “That’s the thing! Every other second, I see it, like, from outside the window, and it looks awfully random and crazy. But then every other other second, I see it from inside the ball of yarn, and it sounds completely right, completely woven together. … I mean, from the moment I first saw that thing”—he pointed directly, through the walls, toward where it was hidden in the apartment, without hesitating or looking—“I knew It belonged to me in some fundamental way. And I had this horrible feeling from the very first that if I let someone take It from me, the sky would fall … on me and just … in general. That’s where the paranoia comes from, you know.”

  “Tez, it sounds like you’re answering your own question. Or, at least, talking yourself around to it. Maybe we should be a little more programmatic here. Lay out the pros and cons.”

  “Okay. Pros: the power. Jesus, Maya, you have no idea. I can feel it already, although I don’t even know the extent of it. It’s calling to me through a floodgate. It’s … pulling at me, like undertow, but I don’t know what it will be like when I’m swimming in it. … Or drowning in it.”

  “Okay, that’s a con: possibly too much power to handle. Could be overwhelmed.”

  “But better me than Juice, or that shot caller from the 70s. I don’t have much training, but what I have is in responsibility, and balance, and taking care of people. If someone’s going to be swimming in too much power, better it be me, a trained lifeguard.”

  “Okay, then let’s call that a pro for everyone but you.”

  “And I get the feeling that it’s tied to the earth, somehow. That I would have the power to affect things that are tied to the earth. That could be pretty extensive.”

  “How far would its reach be, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe the entire city. Maybe the entire Bay Area.”

  “Maybe you could reverse gentrification?” I joked.

  He chuckled, then stopped. Then looked thoughtful.

  “Let’s call anti-gentrification power a possible pro,” I said.

  We sat for a few minutes in silence, turning the situation over.

  “Tez?” I asked, “How … bad is it? Not having the stick?”

  He thought for a moment. “My sibling Pronk is claustrophobic, but, ze says, ze can handle being in a small space as long as ze has access to an exit. It’s control over getting out of the space that’s the real issue. It’s like that for me. I’m thinking about and feeling that thing all the time, and more so when I’m not holding It. But I think as long as I can get my hands on It easily, and no one is getting between me and It, I can be fine, like I am now. I could live like this for a while, for a long time, even, but I don’t know if I would want to; just like Pronk wouldn’t want to rent an apartment with a really small bathroom.”

  “Would the pressure lessen if the stick was farther away? Say, if someone like me were in charge of it—”

  “NO!” he shouted, his face suddenly red and contorted. It took all my self control, but I didn’t respond in any way. I just watched, as blankly as I could, as he realized what had happened, and crumpled in on himself.

  He covered his face with his hands and then, to my horror, I heard a gasp that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

  “I can’t stand this, Maya. I can’t stand it,” he said, amidst more sobbing gasps. “My Dad always emphasized control and I’ve never …” He stopped and breathed through more gasps, until his breath slowed down. “I’ve always known I was capable of violence, but I’ve always been able to control it before. Just now, I wanted to hurt you. I really really wanted to …”

  I slid over and put an arm around his shoulders. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been delighted by the fact that his shoulders were too broad and muscular to make this easy. But just now, making him feel held was my only concern, and that was a problem. I slid my hand up to his neck and just held the back of his neck with my hand. Somehow, that had always made me feel better. It seemed to work on him, too.

  “Should we call that a pro?” I asked, as gently as I could. “Making this instability go away?”

  He nodded, and wiped his eyes.

  “Okay, maybe we should focus on cons.”

  He nodded again. I didn’t say anything. He was still upset and he needed to be the one to say these things. I waited, and stroked his neck. His skin was incredibly smooth and silky, and he was very warm. I could feel his whole body’s warmth radiating towards me— Okay, Maya, eyes on the prize here.

  He got up abruptly, and walked rapidly out of the room. Damn, was I giving him too much of a pheromone bath? Damn, Maya, did you have to smear your hormones all over this situation?

  But after a few moments of banging doors and drawers down the hall, Tez came right back in and sat down next to me—if possible, even closer this time. He spread a map out on the coffee table, and stacked another few maps next to it. It was a map of the world, all marked up, with routes and notes in six or eight different colors of ink.

  “When I was a kid, there was this British guy named Michael Palin on the BBC and he did this amazing travel show called Pole to Pole where he chose a longitude, and then traveled from the north pole to the south pole along that longitude, all on the surface of the earth, no flying. It hit Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and Eastern Africa—including this incredible stop in Sudan. My Padrino Mike taped it for me, and I watched it about a hundred times. It was my … what’s the opposite of a security blanket?

  “Ever since, I’ve been wanting to do that: pick a latitude, or a longitude, and travel around the world along it. I got several routes.” He pointed to the stacked maps. “But this one,” he gestured to the map laid out in front of me, “is the one. The one I finished in college, before my mom died. I haven’t changed it since then, not because I haven’t had time, but because it’s perfect.”

  He pointed at a red line that meandered pretty far north and south, but tended inexorably east. “You see, right here, in San Francisco, we’re almost exactly between 30 and 45 degrees north. And this whole route goes back and forth in the zone between those latitudes. And, I mean, talk about the garden path! Most of the interesting stuff we learn about in history classes—because they skip over the sub-Saharan African and Latin American stuff of course, which is a lot—happens in this zone: the North American nations, the American revolution, the entire Mediterranean rim, including the Iberian Peninsula—the Spanish Civil War!—Carthage, Rome, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Suez Canal, the tip of the Persian Gulf, all the ’stans—you know, the Great Game!—the Himalayas, pretty much the entire Silk Road, the Mongol hordes! China, Korea, Japan … it’s all here! I mean, there are so many other routes and places, but if I had to choose only one, this is the one!”

  His voice had gotten louder and warmer throughout.

  “The original plan was to finish college, work for five years to build college funds for th
e kids, and then spend two or three years on the hoof. I planned that during the dot com boom, and I was absolutely positive that I’d graduate, work for five years, and then sell my dot com for a few hundred million dollars and be set for life. But I did have a contingency plan.” He looked at me ruefully. “I would sell my stock options in the dot com I worked for for a couple of million and send the kids to school and go traveling for a few years.”

  I smiled at him, it felt like, with my whole body. He looked around the room. “I was supposed to be cruising by now. Manny would be starting his last year at State. Pronk would be in zeir second year somewhere—maybe Cal. Chucha would have graduated early and taken a year off to intern for some Chicano state politician, and would now be getting ready to go, full ride, to Yale … or Brown.

  “I’d leave the kids in the city to take care of Mom with their summer jobs and internships, and Chucha and I would fly off in the car—I’d have some fancy Detroit muscle car by now, of course—and we’d get our kicks on Route 66, you know. Of course, we’d argue the whole way, but that would be the fun of it. Then I’d drop her off at school, ivy in her hair, with the car to take care of—did you know she’s—she was—a great mechanic? She would study systems engineering and art; she can—could—draw too. Or maybe poli-sci. Then I’d fly out of New York like fucking Superman and she’d see me off.”

  My whole smiling body ached with longing for this alternate version of reality, even if it was one in which I had never met him, never met Chucha.

  He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. “I was with this girl in college, Tiana. We met sophomore year and I was just, you know, ‘awake forever in a sweet unrest,’ for the next three years, right? We were, like … I couldn’t go 24 hours without seeing her.” He didn’t seem aware that he’d been half of an “it couple,” although I was pretty sure Tiana had been. I felt the smile leave my body; not just at the mention of that beautiful young woman I could never compare to, but at his tone: that something bad was coming.

  “I spun a lot of fucking cotton candy about our future together, but for some reason, I never showed her the maps. After Mom died, and I blew away enough fog to figure out that I’d be years repaying the medical debts, not to mention raising the kids and saving up for their futures, Tiana thought we should get married, and she’d get a job to help pay off all our debts and get the kids into school. And it would have been, like, the one light in that whole, dark time. I think Chucha would have done a lot better if Tiana had been there, in the house, for her, keeping an eye on her and giving her a role model. The kids loved Tiana.” And his face contorted for a second.

  “All I had to do was flip the switch. But I told her that I wouldn’t let her give up her dreams for me. I told her that we’d end up resenting each other, and rightfully so. That it was inegalitarian for a man to expect a woman to do all this, blah blah blah. She found it all very moving, and we broke up in a storm of tears, and she went off to New York and dances for Alvin Ailey like fucking Kali, like a goddess of growth and destruction. And she tells all her friends what a great guy I am and how I’m the one that got away.”

  I braced myself.

  “But the real reason I dumped her was that I knew if we got married she’d just get pregnant earlier than planned and I’d be stuck here forever. As if she were a block of hardening concrete, and not the fucking love of my life. Even after Mom died, I still knew I could go fly. It would just take longer. It took me two years to go on a date again, and I haven’t had a serious relationship since—but… she didn’t care about freedom, and my freedom took precedence.”

  I wasn’t surprised, but still couldn’t say anything for a moment. I refused to parse the “love of my life” comment.

  “That’s one hell of a con, Tez,” I said, finally.

  “I can still go,” he said. “Manny’s at State and can finish in two years—two and a half realistically. Pronk’s only just starting, but once Manny finishes and gets a real job …I don’t have to wait for Pronk to launch. I’ll be thirty, but I can just go.”

  “It sounds totally doable.”

  He sighed deeply, and let his head slide onto my shoulder. “You ever think about traveling?”

  I sighed too. “It’s different for me, Tez. I didn’t ever have anywhere I belonged. I was always being pushed out. So my childhood dream was to be in one place, a place that belonged to me.” I leaned my head against his. “I was a restless teenager, but I was never moving to get anywhere. I just needed to feel the air rushing past me, to feel my legs or my wings working. I needed the feeling of freedom. But the meaning of the places I went to, their history, the stories behind them, I never thought about that. I always felt like I could just keep going and going, if I wasn’t so afraid of losing contact with my parents, or losing touch with the human world—losing my chance at a place that belonged to me.”

  I settled in more comfortably, and let my neck relax.

  “Maybe you should go with me, preciosa,” he murmured.

  “Maybe I should,” I said, with a little shiver. “I’d be in charge of transportation. Oh my god, imagine the thermals over the Himalayas! That would blow your cloud up! And you’d be in charge of touristy things once we got to where we were going.”

  “I know all the great hostels,” he said. “I keep up with them. I have a list.”

  “And we could mostly go hunting to feed ourselves, so we could save money on food, and only eat at terrific restaurants.”

  “We could sleep in fur, actually, save money on hostels.”

  “We could go on forever that way.”

  “Forever.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sunday, October 23, 2011

  Mission Bay, San Francisco

  We were awakened somewhat slowly by the sound of “Ooh Child” by the Five Stairsteps. It took me a moment to realize that I was lying, half-length, on top of Tez, who was lying full-length underneath me. I lifted my head from his chest, then immediately regretted it, because the movement woke him and he began to sit up … before noticing me splayed out all over him, and freezing in place.

  I sat up quickly and fumbled around in my purse for my phone. The time said 7:12. I was hyper-aware of Tez, mostly behind me, but with legs on either side of me (how had that happened?), and his musky man/cat smell all around me. He stayed prone, and I felt him watching me. I had let myself fall asleep on him. No one is that unaware. But then I had really really slept. Oh god, did I drool on his shirt?

  I managed to hit “answer” before we stopped walking in the rays of a beautiful sun.

  “What is it, Ayo?” I asked, more for Tez’s benefit than hers.

  “There’s been another killing,” she said.

  I glanced at Tez, and he nodded to say he had heard.

  “Did you ever meet Maral?” she asked.

  “Maybe …?”

  “She was that Armenian Nhang? Lived in Mission Creek and led the community there?”

  I grunted; I remembered her.

  “She was working in the city planning office and getting her masters. She came to me for potions to help her control her blood lust. She was doing really well …”

  “Was it the shadow thing again?”

  “Probably. I haven’t seen the body yet. Can you get down there and secure the area?”

  She told me the address and we hung up. I was sitting in an awkward position and couldn’t get to my feet without putting a hand down for leverage, but everywhere I was surrounded by Tez. Not looking at him, I put my hand on his chest to push myself up … but he grasped my wrist, gently, and held my hand to his heart for a moment. I felt his hand with my whole body.

  I couldn’t look at him, but couldn’t not. His eyes were so dark, I couldn’t see a thing in them. His heart was beating slightly fast into my palm, and his chest rose and fell faster than it had. I felt a little dizzy.

  Then, as if moved by the same impulse, he let go my wrist and I pushed myself up.

  Tez dro
ve me there without us discussing it.

  The body had been found in the garden at Mission Bay, a green strip next to the anchorage for a line of houseboats that lived on Mission Creek. Most of the river was underground, but it came out around 7th St. and flowed past the ball park to empty out in the Bay. These houseboats were the last of their kind in the city, and I knew most of them were inhabited by supernats. How else would they have convinced city officials to protect their little community: on a waterfront, in a gentrifying part of San Francisco, where high-rise, luxury condos with a view of the Bay were being built? It was one of those contradiction-in-terms neighborhoods where the pressure of change made the Spirit of the Bay feel particularly squeezed. It felt like the Bay was in the houseboats, and the construction sites were an interloper; it felt like the Bay was a child, being hugged by a noxious uncle, and looking at me for release.

  We parked in the labyrinth of blocked streets, empty lots, and construction fencing spreading from the creekside outward. Gareth, a mostly mild-mannered selkie with very red hair and a very red face was waiting for us. Gareth was a decades-long member of the houseboat community and hung out at Sanc-Ahh a lot. I thought he had a crush on Ayo—not that it wasn’t a fairly common affliction. But I also thought that the otherwise ordinary-looking Gareth kinda slayed her with his thick Scots accent. He kinda slayed me, too.

  “Hi, Gareth,” I said, as we came up.

  “Ah, Maya, look at this. It’s a very sad day.”

  I introduced Tez to a distracted Gareth, who led us over to the garden. Maral was lying in a jerry-rigged flower bed. Gareth, always considerate, had put some long, golden, giant kelp leaves over her face. She was almost entirely in human form, except for some wicked looking crocodile teeth poking through the leaves and distorting her lips; and she was entirely naked. (Most beast shifters don’t have the same ideas about modesty that humans do, and Gareth probably hadn’t thought of covering her body.)