by John Warner
“But I am innocent,” I told the monkey.
“Don’t overdo it,” the monkey said. “It’ll get stale.” The monkey hitched his thumbs under his rainbow suspenders and hoisted his cutoffs above his jutting hip bones. “And leave the creature here,” he said, pointing at the dog. “I don’t know how you can stand the smell.”
As I pulled my coat off the rack, the monkey clambered up my leg to the top of the stand and grabbed a baseball hat that he jammed onto my head and low over my eyes. “We don’t need anyone recognizing you,” he said.
I opened the door and the monkey craned his head through the opening for a couple seconds. “Follow,” he said.
And I did. What can I say? He was a very persuasive monkey.
In the car, driving the tollway, I scanned for police heading the other way. The monkey sat boosted on the hatbox and fingered the cheap plastic beads dangling from the review, baubles showered on Constance for flashing her breasts at a street fair.
“These are nice,” the monkey said before letting go the beads and placing his paw on my leg.
I never particularly liked displaying them there, given how they were procured, but Constance insisted, saying I shouldn’t be jealous since I was the only one who got to do more than just look.
Or not, if this monkey was right.
As we approached the tollbooth, I fished in the ashtray for the appropriate change, but the monkey grabbed my hand, then stood briefly and from the hatbox pulled a metal slug with a string tied through the hole. I rolled down the window, the monkey fired the slug into the basket, waited momentarily, then yo-yoed the slug back into his paw.
The light flashed green, the toll gate rose, and the monkey gave me a look that said, “What are you waiting for?”
We pulled slowly through. I looked around, but nobody said a word. We accelerated back to speed.
This monkey was creeping me out. He was obviously some kind of con monkey, but on the other hand, he’d been right about more than a couple of things. I’d never been entirely sure that Constance felt about me the way I felt about her, which was a kind of soul ache, a desperate helplessness every time I thought about her. When I would mention things like cohabitation, even marriage, she would laugh, not a mean laugh, necessarily, but her teeth would flash and there would be something in her eyes asking if I was kidding, implying that I was only temporary, that an attempt to move closer would push her further away like two magnets turned to the same poles.
I had a test of my love for Constance. When she was not there, I would sit on my couch and turn on the cable news and wait for the first report of a tragedy (it usually didn’t take long), a plane crash in Phuket, an overturned trawler in the Bering Sea, brushfires, E. coli, West Nile, car bomb, falling into the polar bear enclosure at the zoo, what have you, and I would imagine it was Constance on that plane or ship, or hospital bed, or hanging from a polar bear’s jaws being dragged, unconscious and limp, into its den, and as I imagined this, her face pained and confused, her body battered, I would search my feelings and feel only devastation. I would literally wish to trade places with her, at the bottom of icy ocean, or in a million bloody pieces spread across a road, or again, what have you, and in those moments I knew for sure that what I felt for Constance had to be love.
Once, after we had made love, I had turned to Constance and stroked her sweat-matted hair out of her eyes and asked what she would do if I died and she said, “I’m sleepy.”
* * *
“You know, of course,” the monkey said, “that you and I share 98 percent of our genetic material.”
“I guess so.”
“Ninety-eight percent!” he practically shouted. “That precious dog of yours, 60, 65 percent tops, yet he is treated like royalty. You and me, we’re almost the same, virtually identical, and look what you do to us? You keep us in cages. You rub cosmetics on our skin to see if we break out in welts. You inject us with medicines to see if our hearts explode or our kidneys shrivel or our stomachs ulcer. You enclose us in plexi-glas and give us ropes to swing on and a deflated soccer ball to kick around and you watch and point and giggle as we make sweet monkey love to each other, and yet you wonder why we fling our poop back at you and screech and beat our chests. You strap tiny cymbals on our paws and demand that we clap along with your stupid three songs, all of which are in goddamn waltz time and for that we are fed cat food and sleep in a drawer. Can you imagine the rage? Can you?”
I could see that the organ-grinder’s monkey was not observing safety protocol and wearing his seatbelt. He was standing excitedly on the hatbox and banging his little fist against the dash to punctuate his words. I eased my foot deeper into the gas pedal and pictured throwing on the brake and watching his body launch through my windshield, a monkey missile that I might or might not drive over as I passed.
“Don’t do it,” the monkey said.
“What?”
“What you’re thinking; don’t do it.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
The monkey idly scratched his wrinkled ballsack through the leg of his cutoff shorts. He looked at me intently, batting his long monkey lashes. “Don’t fucking do it,” he said. “Don’t even think it. You need me.”
He sat back down on the hatbox and for a while we were both silent, until he raised his arm and pointed.
“Look, up there, in the distance,” the monkey said. “Look at how narrow the road is, like a sliver could not slide through, yet, as I approach, it widens, opening itself to me.”
The monkey gripped my hand as we walked toward our historic downtown. “Look both ways,” he said as we crossed the street. Ours is a good downtown, clean, gentrified but still charming, cobblestone streets and gas lighting mixed with shiny boutiques and restaurants with white tablecloths. Our steel drummers and Pan flautists and organ grinders are licensed and bonded, and apparent stranglings are not even a semi-regular occurrence. As we neared the center square I could see orange cones with yellow tape stretched between them cordoning off the area where Giuseppe was found, his usual spot. A group of people knotted at the scene, sharing shrugs. I started to walk toward them, but the monkey tugged me away.
“You don’t want to return to the scene of the crime,” he said. “Very suspicious.”
“But I wasn’t there to begin with.”
“Once again, I remind you of the thumbprint, not to mention the slip of paper in his back pocket with your address and phone number on it. Clearly you two had a connection. Now you need some money. Thank God you got your wallet back.”
The monkey tugged me over to a street ATM and gestured toward the screen. The machine sucked my card inside, and I blocked the monkey from the keyboard as I punched in my code, but as I glanced over my shoulder I saw that he wasn’t even looking at me and instead scanned the street, lightly hopping from one foot to the other.
“Hey,” the monkey said as I slipped the money into my wallet and reclaimed my card. “I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes at.”
I looked down at my shoes, nondescript brown loafers, bought at Constance’s insistence that I, for once, spend more than thirty dollars on shoes. I remembered the day, her squeezing my arm in encouragement as I flipped my credit card across the counter. They were great shoes, comfortable. Durable. Swedish. Available just about anywhere.
I’m not stupid. I was suspicious. “How could you possibly know where I got my shoes?”
“I just do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Do you not believe me two hundred bucks’ worth?”
I was already out seven bucks and a potential murder rap to this monkey. I was Constanceless. What else was there to lose, other than a couple hundred bucks? “You’re on,” I said.
“You got them on your feet,” he said.
“What?”
“Your feet—you got them on your feet.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
The monkey cupped his elbow in one hand and used th
e other to massage his temple. “I said, ‘I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes at,’ and you said, ‘You’re on,’ for two hundred bucks, no less, and I said, ‘You got them on your feet,’ which is 100 percent true, which means you owe me the double c-note.”
I’d had just about enough of this monkey. “That’s stupid, and I’m not paying.”
“Too late,” the monkey said, snapping his fingers and flashing a roll of twenties. I pulled out my wallet and looked inside. All the money I’d withdrawn from the ATM was gone. “That was three hundred.”
“Interest,” the monkey said, grabbing my arm and once again tugging me down the street toward wherever we were going next.
“Now,” he said, speaking as we walked, or rather I walked and he waddled along next to me, bowlegged, shambling. “This next part is going to be hard for you, but it’s a sort of bad news, good news thing and I’ve really already told you the bad news.”
“Which part was that?”
“The part that Constance is not right for you and that she’s already moved on to someone else. That’s true, and you’re about to be confronted with incontrovertible evidence of it, which will likely be painful because you humans are irrational creatures who hold onto beliefs despite all signs to the contrary. The irrational belief in this instance being that Constance might have ever loved you, just in case I’m not being clear.”
I was getting pretty fucking tired of this monkey. This was a seriously annoying monkey. I understood that pound for pound, monkeys are many times stronger than human beings, but as he shuffled beside me, in my hand, he felt weightless, like with a single movement I could spin like a discus thrower and hurl him far, far away. “What’s the good news?” I said.
“The good news is that you are about to be a witness to her own heartbreak as she is about to be rejected by the one she chose over you.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know it because I know it, and I know this also: that when you see Constance having her heart broken you will know yourself whether or not you really did love her.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see,” he said, letting go of my hand and pointing at a restaurant window across the street. Constance was there visible through the window, sitting alone at a table for two like she was on display. She wore the blue dress. A single candle enclosed in glass flickered from the middle of the table. There was a bottle of wine with two glasses, one empty, hers half-full. My heart leapt into my throat and merged with the rising bile. This felt like love to me. Was this what the monkey was talking about?
The monkey skittered toward the restaurant door. Constance peered out the window and looked right at me and smiled. She raised her hand and waved her fingers, but I could see her eyes were tracking something other than me.
As the monkey approached the door, the hostess swung it open and the monkey skipped through, disappearing briefly before clambering up onto the chair across from Constance and then all the way to the tabletop. Constance offered her cheek, and the monkey pecked at her with his lips. A waiter appeared and poured wine into the empty glass. The monkey gripped it in both hands and took an overlong swallow. Constance beamed at him. I’d never seen her look so beautiful.
The monkey squatted, perched on his edge of the table, and did almost all the talking, whatever he was saying briefly punctuated by single words from Constance. Even from a distance I could see her grow flushed and agitated, her bottom lifting off the chair as she stood to protest the monkey’s message. The news was clearly not good, and she wasn’t having it. I’d never seen her so worked up, but after a few final words from the monkey she slumped backwards, grabbing the wineglass and draining the last of it before reaching for the bottle and refilling her glass to the top. The monkey moved to her side of the table and touched his hand briefly to her cheek, wiping away what I imagined was a tear. He flipped a trio of twenties onto the table before hopping back down, and out the restaurant door, recrossing the street toward me. Constance stood and pressed her face and hands to the window, watching the monkey retreat. She pounded against the glass and shouted, “Come back! Wait! Come back!” until a waiter pulled her away. The monkey never turned around, even when he arrived at my side. My fists clenched and pulsed.
“I ought to kill you,” I said.
“Why?”
Why, indeed? Why for the second time in a few hours was I thinking about how I might kill this monkey, how I could quite possibly grab one arm and one leg and pull as hard as I could, rending him into pieces? “You took her from me.”
“Is that really why?”
“Yes.”
The monkey sighed and shook his head sadly. “Then you never loved her either, my friend. That’s not love; that’s possession. If you loved her, you would want to kill me because I’ve just broken her heart and you would not be able to bear that.” The monkey jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Constance, who had broken away and angrily waved the near-empty bottle of wine at the waitstaff that now surrounded her table. Sirens began softly calling in the distance. The monkey’s ears pricked.
“Time to go,” he said.
We drove toward the shipping-terminal offices, but the monkey couldn’t manage to be quiet. “About that DNA business,” he said, “they always talk about the monkeys’ share of human DNA, like you all are the ideal and we are the simulacrum. But why can’t it be the other way around? Why can’t it be that humans have 98 percent of monkeys’ DNA?”
“Maybe because monkeys didn’t discover DNA,” I replied. I was still pissed at this monkey, maybe even more pissed than before, since I was starting to feel like he might’ve been right about me and Constance. I drove fast, recklessly, steering toward potholes, feeling the tires spin in the air as we’d launch over the bumps. The monkey took no notice. I considered turning off the headlights to see what that might be like, if a surprise telephone pole might crop up in front of the car’s grille.
“Seriously,” he said, “think about it. You have something we don’t, the whole opposable thumb thing, but in return we have things you don’t, our own 2 percent.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Of course it’s true.”
“OK.”
“And I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”
“What?”
“What we have that you don’t.”
“What’s that?”
The monkey stared out the window. I could see his reflection in the glass, his eyes flicking across the rows of trees that lined the road. “You’re not going to believe me.”
“No,” I said, “probably not.”
“I deserved that,” he said. “You’re mad, and I don’t blame you. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, but I think someday you’ll realize that this is all for the best.”
“Hmph.”
“You know,” he said, still gazing out the window, “I’ve never climbed anything higher than a coat stand. I’ve never caught or picked my own food. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to eat.” His voice trailed off, and I thought maybe he was going to shut up for the rest of the ride to the depot, but then he cleared his throat with a loud hack and started in again.
“I’m a wild animal who’s barely been outside! First the lab, then Giuseppe… but here’s the thing. I do know what it’s like to climb hand over foot, sixty feet up into the canopy, and make the blind leap from one tree or branch or vine to another, just knowing without really knowing that something is going to be there to grab on to. I can feel it in every part of me. If you gave me a tree and some vines I could do it, just like that.” The monkey tapped his knuckles against the glass to emphasize the last three words. “Though I never met her, I know my grandmother’s smell and her mother’s smell, and so on and so on, back and back. I’ve never done it, but I’m certain I could comb the mites out of another monkey’s fur with my fingers. I’m pretty sure that there’s someplace where the night sky is so clear that when you look up there’s so
many stars that it looks cloudy. I think that after a rain you can suck the water from the grass, and you’ve never tasted anything so pure.”
Even in the car window’s reflection I could see the tears running down his cheeks.
“There’s a lot of time to think when you’re chained to an organ grinder with nothing to do but clap your tiny cymbals together and steal the occasional passerby’s wallet, and what I’ve come to realize is that within me I carry everything of my ancestors, that I can feel every last bit of them, that I am the sum total of each and every one of them, all the way back to whenever it was that we were all together— your kind and my kind—and some of us thought it would be a good idea to stand upright and leave our genitals open to attack. Anyway, I think that’s what’s different between your kind and mine.”
The monkey snuffled and rubbed his arm across his nose.
“What is it that you want?” I said.
“I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is. Do you know where that is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Africa?”
The monkey mouthed the word, Africa, as though he were tasting it. “I don’t think we call it that, but it sounds right. Send me to Africa.”
We used the last of the money I’d taken from the ATM to buy provisions out of the depot vending machine. I wrote FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP on each side of the shipping container and punched air holes in the sides. I placed the sodas, candy, chips, and boxed sandwiches inside. “That should be plenty,” I said. The monkey set the hatbox on the floor and stepped out of the cutoffs and rainbow suspenders. Carefully he folded the clothes and put them back inside the hatbox before handing it to me.
“Won’t you get cold?” I said.
“I think,” he said, “when it gets cold we huddle together for warmth. I’m looking forward to that.” The monkey extended his paw to me, and I shook it before he climbed inside the container, his head just barely poking out of the top.
