A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  Scowls in the fabric of his flesh.

  Caleb cleared his throat and stumbled for a question. Any question. “So, wow. All of these monkeys. There are so many of them.”

  “Yes. Many. Here, take another banana.”

  “I’m cool for now. What kind of breed are they all?”

  “Rhesus macaque. Very powerful. Strong. I saw one of them rip off a man’s finger. Pop!”

  “Jesus. Just like that, huh?”

  “Ah-huh. Very bad.”

  “One of these monkeys did it?”

  “One like it. A lot of these monkeys are…how to say? Natural.”

  “You mean, like, born here? Natural inhabitants?”

  “Yes. That’s it! ‘Natural inhabitants’, I will write it down later.”

  “But only some?”

  “Ah-huh. Some were brought in from mainland, long time ago. For tourists. Clever monkeys from special monkey shows and circus. That way they could be very entertaining for visit. But now they are…dumb.”

  Steamy wind blew off the ocean, slicing frothy shavings from the waves. Caleb thought he heard a melodic note from somewhere within the jungle, a noise that cut through the hiss of swaying trees. He couldn’t be sure. His arms threaded across his chest, a wounded gesture. He shook his head and tongued a filling at the back of his mouth.

  Oh, I see what’s going on here.

  “Take another banana, sir. Take another drink.”

  “I, um, don’t think I want to do this. I’ve read about tours like this. I’m sorry, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

  “‘A bad taste in my mouth’. Ha, that’s a good one. I will write it down too.”

  “I think I’m going to just go get my sister and we’ll wait in the boat.”

  “But you have to give them banana and drink. It’s their favorite.”

  “I said I don’t want to. Look at them all, Nikom. They’re all rotten and hungry and feral. It’s disgusting. Besides, if you load ’em up with this shit week after week they’ll forget how to hunt on their own. This is killing them; you know that, right?”

  “If you don’t give them what they want, they will get angry.” He leaned forward and chomped his jaws together. His pearly whites snapped against each other, making a bony clap that cut through the chatter of animals and tourists alike. Only then did Nikom’s eyes connect with Caleb’s. Excalibur striking stone.

  The cool of the jungle called to her, ran its fingers over her forearms until a skim of bumps rose. The wintry thrill of excitement. It was too strong to fight. Amity stepped into the clustered trees, into a world of vine and leaf and rich, loamy smells.

  The bottle landed in the sand between Tobias’s feet with a leaden thump. Glancing down, he saw the winking eye of the steel cap. A breath of light passed across the beach and then was gone, as though the sun were drowning beneath the ironclad clouds.

  The roller coaster ride was over. His stomach was back in its place. The fear had died away.

  A monkey scuttled forward, leaving behind a calligraphy of tail swirls in the sand, and reached for the Coke bottle. Fingers that appeared so humanlike and yet so strangely unrelated curled around the glass neck.

  Tobias bent down and snatched the drink from the monkey’s grip, sending it into a wide-mouthed cry that drew back its leathery lips, broadcasting rows of jagged teeth. “Gotchya, bitches,” said the man who looked like Tobias, but wasn’t.

  Caleb crossed the beach in upset strides, passing the Swedish newlyweds, who were encircled by monkeys of varying size and color—one of which was dressed in the tattered remnants of a tutu and was clapping, pleased with its bounty of sugared drinks and fruit. It locked eyes with Caleb. A sickening stab of alarm seemed to splinter his bones when he saw the makeshift rouge dabbed upon its cheeks—makeup drawn from dried, red earth.

  “Tobias!”

  His boyfriend was still fifty yards away.

  Why the hell did he wander so far? You’d think he didn’t want to hang out with me.

  A lump formed in his throat when he saw the Lebanese father on his left forcing his son to have his photo taken with a placid, silver-haired monkey. The child’s face was mutilated by fear, eyes wide. Teeming. The animal near his chubby legs was well rehearsed and now happily fed; it sat back on its haunches, drinking Coke straight from the bottle in a haunting pantomime of human behavior. It didn’t seem to care, or understand, that the child near it was afraid, or that its father was threatening it with a smack if it didn’t stand still and smile like a good little boy.

  No; the monkey just sat and stared. It had the prize it had emerged from the jungle to claim.

  “Tobias,” Caleb called again, drawing nearer. “I want to get back on the goddamned boat!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Matt

  1

  Matt opened his eyes, Coke bottle in hand. The monkeys were around him. He’d been watching as he always watched, waiting as he’d always waited, and fighting as he’d always fought. So much time had been spent in that other place, and he was never satisfied. Every minute was a minute spent scratching for the surface.

  In the dark, he often fidgeted with his ukulele, but he knew, as any sane person would, that random chords do not a life make. They can’t. He was now and always would be active by nature. Tobias, on the other hand, Tobias was the passive one, despite his strong clasp on The Body.

  Tobias had to defy himself to trust others, to not assume that everything was dangerous. Despite what the others would like to think, The Body never would have embarked upon all of this travel if it hadn’t been Matt doing the pushing.

  Matt was a balls-to-the-wall thrill junkie. “God, walking on the wire’s about as good as pussy,” he would often say as he chewed on his trademark lollipop stick. “Danger’s dope to guys like me,” was another one of his well-used self-descriptors. But the attitude—from his swagger to the way he dressed in 1950s-inspired leather jackets, even the way he greased his fringe into Tin Tin-esque quiff—was all icing on the proverbial cake. The menace was in his blood, and nobody, no queer black brother was ever going to exorcise it from his veins.

  “You get only one go at this life,” he’d say to the children. “One chance. You got to ride the rap, you know? ’Cause one of these days they’ll drop the bomb and we’ll all go Rocky Mountain high! You’ll all be burned away, just like me. Nothing but ash’ll be left.”

  It didn’t take a goddamned rocket scientist to see that Tobias wasn’t a good guardian, and Matt often wondered why Tobias insisted he stay inside and remain in charge of the children. Wouldn’t it be better for them all if they traded places? At least Matt could admit that he wasn’t alone.

  Besides, he was a far better driver of The Body.

  Even though Matt had tired of the music he sometimes plucked into existence, it kept the children happy. Without the music, they had a tendency to wander. One day, they would grow strong enough to climb The Tree and make their way to the surface. Until then, his calloused fingers had to keep plucking at nylon polymers that never broke or went out of tune. Over and over.

  His little lullabies.

  He could still remember the first time he’d broken through, that time on the roller coaster. Born of fear as they plunged. Matt’s baptism was the screech of a carriage along rickety metal treads that twisted and turned without warning. He’d been dragged back into the dark again by the time the ride had come to an end, but in those moments Matt had seen and felt what had been denied to him for so long, and he would never stop hungering for it.

  The second time he’d made it to the other side was on a day that Tobias had been left to look after The Ugly Thing. The creature who looked like a human and who seemed to think it was Tobias’s brother—but who was neither.

  I’m his brother. Something so ugly and stupid can’t be like us.

  That’s why he had picked up their father’s work boot and smashed it across The Ugly Thing’s face, and why he’d laughed when the blood had started t
o pour. But it wasn’t a victorious laugh, more the kind of nervous giggle people sometimes make when they hear bad news. He’d been shocked by how red that blood had been.

  And how The Ugly Thing had screamed.

  Teeth knocked in, pierced up through its slanted mouth. Stupid pig eyes glaring.

  I can’t believe it didn’t see this coming. If it weren’t me who did him in, it would’ve been someone else. Everyone wants someone to hate.

  Even the children didn’t like The Ugly Thing, but of course he’d had a lot of influence over them. Matt spent a great deal of time in the dark, whispering in their ears as they played among the tentacle-size roots of The Tree they hoped to someday ascend.

  Thrashing the boy had made Matt feel alive. It was addictive, though short-lived. As soon as the steel-capped boot had thumped against the floorboards beneath The Ugly Thing’s feet, he’d been dragged back into the dark. And he’d even felt a little bad about leaving Tobias alone in the room with the pulpy mess, whose cries echoed down The Tree’s branches. Matt got over it.

  You gotta move on, man. Keep on truckin’.

  Suffice to say, there were no more surprise carnival trips for the Schubert’s idolized boy. Matt had risen twice since The Body had arrived in Thailand. The first was in that tailor’s back room, when the dope had been laid out on the table, when the machete had been within reaching distance. He’d almost snatched it up. It would have been so fun to swing it around, to hear the blade whistling through the air. But no; Tobias, a regular Captain Sensible, had decided then to shake off his passiveness and take control again.

  Dude, I was about to go apeshit.

  It’d been a long time since he’d gotten high, not since he was a kid. It had been with a girl who only liked to fuck when she was doped, but hey—that was just the times. Hell, they might have even been ahead of the curve on that one… Longing was easy. Being desperate for the past was easier still. It hurt to let go.

  Drugs he could live without, which was why he hadn’t driven his fists into The Tree over and over again, as he sometimes did when the thrill was yanked away from him. It was sex that he missed the most—and what blue-blooded guy wouldn’t? The edgy excitement that courting brought on, of wooing hard-to-pin tail wrapped up so nicely in a pair of apple-bottom jeans. Not much compared to the buzz of fucking, and doing it a little too hard, plunging a little too deep. Pain was power, and there was no better place to enforce it than between the sheets, when you’re doused in each other’s sweat and she really doesn’t expect it. She thinks she has your trust; you have, after all, got this far, and then bang. And while she’s a-thrashin’ you put your lips to her neck and sink your teeth in—not enough to bleed, of course, but enough to hurt.

  Matt had almost climbed The Tree when Tobias had been with Caleb, back on the morning when they had been so rudely interrupted. He’d almost risen, fought through, and sunk his jaws into Caleb’s shoulder. That’d teach him good. The commie queer. No, Matt was not too keen on the idea of man-on-man action; yet another reason to fight for control of The Body.

  And just as Matt had persuaded the children to dislike The Ugly Thing, he’d also whispered to them about the perils of Tobias’s sexual proclivities.

  “Brother above’s borrowing time, don’t you know it?” His voice was a purr. “Sinners end up in hell. When you’re all grown, you’ve got to help me take back The Body, to save it. Because if Satan reaches up and takes Tobias, he takes us too. Innocents burn just as fast in hell as they do under the bomb.”

  The children had been shocked. All seven of them.

  There was Mariama, age eight, a young African girl with AIDS, a disease that didn’t make sense to him. There was Joe Mccormack, a white Australian of ten years who insisted on being called by his full name, and his twin brother Gus, who peered with identical sets of dim-witted eyes. There was Apolonia, Polish, also age eight, who spoke in a language Matt couldn’t understand, though he sometimes thought she was making up all of those funny-sounding words on the fly. There was Uwe, who was five and German too, but who was always scared and often pissed himself. Uwe was closest to Maëlle, a French twelve-year-old whom Matt suspected had several other personalities clamoring within her skull, only one of which seemed to enjoy her own company. Finally, there was Paw-Paw, a two-year-old who never spoke and was always dressed in a soiled Spider-Man onesie, whose ethnicity was a mystery to them all. Paw-Paw, like Matt, was a biter.

  2

  And just as he had stood over them all, now here he was, standing above a crowd of feral monkeys. Matt laughed; he couldn’t help it. “I can’t goddamned believe it!”

  The monkey roared at him, or seemed to. Though its mouth was wide and snarling, that guttural screech wasn’t coming from it. No; that sound was coming from the other monkey. The one shooting out from between the trees, tearing up the sand, ruffling its silver fur. Matt was taken aback by its speed, let alone its size. He saw its short, pendulum breasts flicking back and forth as it skidded into a pounce that shot it through the hot, humid air. Toward him.

  Must be the darn thing’s momma. Hey, everyone’s gotta have one, even the filthy, diseased Ugly Things of the world—

  This train of thought never had the opportunity to run its course, or to journey into the incriminating sentence he’d intended, vomiting up and out of The Body’s flaccid lips. Just as there was no time to pull his hands away or to drop the Coke bottle of his own free will.

  No time.

  The bottle had landed on the sand, so pent up with carbonated energy that the cap shot off in a squirt of brown lather. Blood among bubbles.

  The smaller monkey, the one he’d teased, was now wailing at the sight of its mother with its jaws latched to Matt’s arm. He wondered if its cry was fueled by terror or pleasure. He didn’t know. The only thing he was certain of was that being in control of The Body came with certain responsibilities, including the ownership of its nerve endings. This was the kind of pain that only biting could bring. Matt was familiar with it, even if he had never gone quite this far. It was the kind of biting that made people bleed. The kind that hurt.

  Chapter Twelve

  Red against White

  1

  A ripple of energy—screams and the smell of blood—crossed the beach, stirring every monkey on the sand. A pulpy beat of silence followed, in which every furred head rose as if on cue. Their eyes were wide and wet.

  That stench, those sounds…they grew as solid as the rocks against which the monkeys sharpened their teeth. This solidity was a key that unlocked a door. On the other side of that door was an impulse for which the human brain had assigned a corresponding word, though of course semantics meant nothing to these animals. Those among them who had been trained and burned and beaten by their two-legged masters on the mainland were well beyond remembering the barks demanding they dance or juggle knives.

  But a word it was. And it unchained them, united them. Made them fearless.

  ATTACK.

  2

  Three adult monkeys scaled Judit. Their needle-pointed claws dug deep, hooked beneath her skin, and dragged. The weight was incredible, impossible to fight against, and pulled her to her knees. They stunk of shit and soil and rich, untreated wounds. Pus. Slit-open scabs.

  She cried in Swedish—random words and exclamations—as one of the animals wrapped a muscled arm around her neck, throwing her off balance. It leaped from her shoulders, screeching shock, as Judit tumbled backward, arms outstretched before her. She landed on the porcelainlike spears of a giant conch shell that had been buried just below the sand’s surface.

  White-hot light. No agony. Just the sense of her body tensing up.

  A memory cracked open, spilling good times with her husband and their friends, back in their apartment. Rolf had brought home from work a four-person Lightning Reaction game that some sicko had given him as a birthday gift. It required the participants to place a fingertip on a little flashing pad, which, as in a game of Russian roulette, would rand
omly give one of the four people a minor electric shock. It would beep, beep, beep at them, the flashing lights flashing slower and slower until they all knew that at any minute now—any second—one of them would be yelping.

  She had been the first to be zapped, and as it turned out; her Lightning Reaction skills were not quite up to par. Everyone had laughed into their glasses of wine and she’d slapped Rolf’s arm, telling him that she hated him for bringing the stupid game home in the first place.

  Judit wished she’d never said that.

  It had been the expectation of the shock that had hurt the most, not the shock itself. Looking back, it hardly hurt at all. The sensations of the shell spikes in her brain were very similar, in a way.

  That white-hot light began to fade, and through the glare Judit watched the monkeys crawl her length.

  They were fast and armed with wide, foaming maws—so many rows of scalpel teeth.

  This can’t be happening. Not to someone like me.

  I’m married. I’m happy. I’m young.

  My mama is pressing my bouquet as we speak. It’s going to be framed and will hang in the wall of our apartment. Our bed is just down the hall from there, off to the left. Our new mattress is waiting for us to come home and throw ourselves against it. There’s nothing like coming home and lying down on your own bed after a long trip, don’t you think? After a great adventure.

  A monkey scuttled up to her throat and looked her in the face. It inserted its spider-fingers into her mouth and grabbed either side of her lips, as though they were the bars of a prison it was desperate to break into.

  This can’t be me. This isn’t my life.

  In a burst of strength that no man, woman or child on that beach could have predicted, the wiry animal ripped the skin from the lower half of Judit’s face. There was a pinkish spray of blood; it flecked the white sand. She rolled onto her side, arms flailing, misaimed punches swiping at nothing.