Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  But I couldn’t. I stood there moving the twisted metal just slightly as Perez made his way towards the bright-faced, child-innocent monkey, a pole with a wire loop on one end angling steadily for the monkey’s dark neck, invisible in the green night of the jungle. Because I depended on Perez for my survival. I depended on Perez to help me find my daughter Ceelie somewhere in this tepid sea of blues and greens. I didn’t have the words for this place. Ever since the trip had begun I’d piled word upon word trying to define for myself this place that held my daughter. But the words just increased my nausea. My own words were fuzzy, imprecise, overwrought from my anxiety. I depended on Perez for the words. And if it meant sitting still as this monkey was slaughtered, if it meant eating the remains of that slaughter, then that’s what I would do.

  The monkey’s face suddenly appeared to swell. Its eyes grew larger. It made a sound like a small child and my second skin of sweat turned to chill.

  Then it disappeared into that dark heat, just as my daughter had disappeared.

  My long series of mistakes with Celia first began when I concluded that her mother, my ex-wife, was no longer capable of taking good care of her. I had some reason to think that at the time, or at least I tell myself that now. She’d been drinking again, leaving Ceelie with neighbors, relatives, that kind of thing. But not enough, I knew, for me to get a change of legal custody. Marge was too smart for that; she’d always been able to pull herself together long enough to make a favorable impression on whatever authorities were involved. I knew. I’d been very favorably impressed myself at one time.

  Talking to her wouldn’t do any good either; I’d stopped trying that. Whatever was left of our mutual attraction had become hopelessly twisted by now. We didn’t speak the same language anymore; the same words had different meanings and you never knew which ones were booby trapped. Every other word sounded vaguely like an insult.

  That part of it was just as much my fault as hers, I knew. She’d been a wonderful human being at one time and something in our life together had damaged that. But I just couldn’t get past the feeling that Ceelie was no longer completely safe with her. And that became my overriding concern. I didn’t want to hurt Marge, but if I had to in order to keep my daughter safe I wasn’t going to worry too much about it.

  So at the time the best thing seemed to be just to drive up to Atlanta one day, pull up in front of the school, and take Ceelie away.

  I was a well-reasoning, well-intentioned, stupid fool. And Ceelie hadn’t wanted to go. I’d never expected that. After all, I was her father.

  I’d pulled up alongside the school about 3.25, just as the first kids were leaving the building. Sprawling on the lawn, wrestling, tumbling. “Yard apes.” My father used to say that, whenever we passed a crowd of kids. “Look at all them yard apes!” If we were walking he’d go up to one or two and tousle their hair, slap them on the back. Just a little too hard. Yard apes. As if they weren’t quite human yet. And watching them, I’d almost thought that myself—the sounds they made, the strange behavior, the awkward, too-rough play.

  By 3.30 the front lawn of the school was crawling with yard apes. Curtain climbers. Linoleum lizards. Rug rats. A swarming mass of brightly colored shirts and trousers engaged in mindless, animal-like activity. Again I could see that. But Ceelie was different. Ceelie’d never been anything like that.

  Ceelie had always been quieter than other children. Subdued. As if she was too busy watching what the other children—and the adults—were doing to attend to her own activities. She took in everything around her. With dark, serious eyes, her face a Halloween mask of the “Good Child”.

  That passivity had always bothered Marge. I guess she’d been a real hellraiser as a kid. I understood it—I’d been a quiet kid myself. But not that quiet; I’d never met a kid that quiet.

  Finally I saw her coming through the front door of the school. I knew Marge’s schedule—a neighbor lady Marge was always manipulating into favors picked Ceelie up every day for free babysitting, but she had two kids in junior high she had to pick up first. So I had at least fifteen minutes.

  I made my way down the sidewalk through a mass of apes, lizards, and rats. Their little hands clawed and grabbed for my trouser legs. As if I were everybody’s daddy. The feeling appalled me. I was Ceelie’s daddy. Even that was almost too much for me.

  Ceelie stopped when she saw me, staring at me with this confused look, as if she didn’t know who I was.

  “Ceelie,” I said. She walked a little closer. “I’m driving you today, Ceelie.”

  Her face was solemn. “The neighbor lady drives me,” she said definitely.

  “She can’t come today. Something … last minute. I have to drive you.”

  Ceelie backed up a step. “Mom told me I can’t ever go with you.” She looked about to cry.

  I was beginning to panic just a little. I didn’t know what I’d do if she started to run. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want Ceelie scared, or running or crying either. “I know, but things are better. I talked to your mom. It’s really okay.”

  Ceelie began walking towards me slowly, but still with this half-scared look on her face, as if she were wondering whether she was about to get into trouble. For the first time since our break up I was honestly feeling a small stab of hatred for Marge, the way she’d got Ceelie to be afraid of me like that. We’d always been so close; she used to run into my arms whenever I came home from work.

  I reached out my hand to Ceelie. I’d almost touched her shoulder when the bright orange Nova stopped across the street and began honking. Ceelie looked over and gasped, then stared up at me as if I’d murdered her favorite pet. “You lied, Daddy!” As if struck, she exploded into tears.

  I should have turned and left right then, or found a way to apologize somehow, but everything was racing around me, Ceelie screaming and all those brightly clothed little beasties jabbering and yammering around me, crawling over my legs, grabbing at my clothes, the neighbor lady running across the street and teachers pushing past kids at the front door, and all I could think of was what Marge might be able to do with something like this, and how could I possibly defend myself, so I just picked up my screaming baby and ran for the car, scattering crying apes and rats and monkeys all over the grass and sidewalk. Ceelie didn’t fight me. She just pushed into the corner by the door and covered her head, sobbing as I pulled away from the curb. The crossing guard at the corner grabbed her door handle, then fell tumbling as I made the sharp curve.

  Ceelie kept as far away from me as possible, cowering like a small animal. I knew then I was never going to be able to forgive myself for this.

  The monkey was tough, but edible. I didn’t want to show Perez any weakness—I didn’t think I could afford to. But I was also very hungry. I had barely been able to eat our last meal; searching for a missing child will do that to you. So far, Perez hadn’t shown any diminution in appetite.

  I wondered, again, how such a man had risen to such a position of trust with my father. It wasn’t so much that Perez was so primitive in his actions and instincts—my father admired a little animal cunning in his associates. It was, simply, that he was so native. Beneath his stained white hat his face looked no bigger than a coconut. An ancient, blackened coconut, the skin wrinkled almost beyond belief, split here and there for eye holes and nostrils, and one too-large hole containing a few rotted, corn-like teeth. My father had been the most thorough bigot I’d ever known. “Little monkeys,” he called them, whatever their specific third world nationality. I couldn’t imagine what might have happened to him down here in the jungle to trust one of them with the supervision of his oil and trade businesses.

  “Good, eh?” Perez grinned, strands of rare-cooked flesh caught between his teeth.

  “Yes. Oh yes, sure,” I mumbled, trying not to open my mouth too wide for fear that the pungent jungle air would add to my nausea.

  I didn’t think I dared keep Ceelie in the States. I figured either Ceelie would say som
ething—although she had refused to talk about it at all since the day I snatched her, kidnapped her—or I would let something slip out some night when I’d had too much to drink. And too much drink had become a habit with me since I took my daughter and ran.

  Although I hadn’t seen my father in over ten years, and despite the fact that his prejudices and his questionable business dealings had always bothered me, I knew he could provide a place for me outside the country. He’d been headquartered in Caracas the past twenty years, and doing quite well according to other members of my family.

  The connection had been a bad one; distortion squealed and chittered into my ear.

  “So sorry … señor,” were the first words to precipitate out of the distortion. “Your father … dead two weeks now.”

  I sat silently as the funnel of static poured through my head, attempting to kindle some feeling, some thought, anything. I took no pride in my lack of feeling.

  “You need something, señor? Your father … his last wish was that I take care of you.” That followed by a small explosion of distortion. A cough, or a laugh? “Little monkey,” he say. Little monkey he always called me. “Little monkey, take care of my son.’”

  And so it was that I was to bring Ceelie to Venezuela and work for one Emmanuel Perez, my father’s “little monkey”. Work for him, certainly. But the man promised to take care of me, and he did. There was no will; there seldom is with men like my father. In any case, most of his holdings and other valuables either did not exist on paper or existed only in the most disguised fashion. Perez intended to maintain that disguise. My background in accounting would prove most helpful, he told me. “Despite their reputations, accountants are much better at creating paper trails than hiding them,” I told him.

  The distortion grew hot in my ear. His laughter, I concluded. He told me to come anyway, and to bring my daughter. He would find something for me to do. So I bundled up my fear and my guilt and we took the first plane down.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Perez muttered in a sing-song as he pushed us along with the pole.

  The bottom of the sky had dropped out again, the hard rain beating its rhythm into my brain. Otter, tapir, ocelot: I could see their grey shadows huddled along the banks. I could see all the grim monkeys gathering in the trees, gazing after the moviola of the dark old Venezuelan ferrying his fool to nowhere.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the man with the shriveled black head chanted, turning his face and grinning his ape grin at me. I suddenly felt as fat and useless, as bigoted as my father. “This is the way, yes!” Perez shouted above the beat of rain. “Your daughter was taken down this very path! We are lucky, you and I! So many paths down the Baria, and we choose the correct one!”

  “How do you know?” I shouted. I trusted him, certainly. At this point I trusted Perez implicitly. But I still wanted some hint to his secrets, some way into the rapport he had with damp and jungle, and all those grim monkeys out there.

  “In here,” he said, tapping his darkened, spoiling skull. “Those monkeys paddle the river in here,” he said, and laughed like a child.

  “My daughter, the Yanomami took her, right?” The rain had slackened, relieving some of the numbness it had driven into my body. Now I could feel the heaviness and thickness of the liquid in my clothes, in my skin. I turned chilled and febrile at the same instant.

  “No. No, I once think so, same as you, but I know this not to be true now. No Yanomami. No ‘Fierce Ones’, you call them? No. But related. Monkeys. Sad monkeys, play monkeys, all. I know. I be a monkey too, OK? Your father say all the time, OK? ‘You monkey you,’ he call me. You call me monkey, too?”

  I stared at him through the rain, trying to divine what someone like him might be thinking, hiding. But I had never had much luck figuring out what anybody thought.

  So now I served Perez, one of the natives, one of the children. One of all those grim monkeys. We’d find Ceelie or not—it was all at his discretion. And now through the small silver spears of rain he laughed at me through a monkey’s mouth full of dark.

  At first I’d thought Caracas was going to work out for Ceelie and me. Beautiful seventy-degree weather year round, ninety miles of coast within the city limits, and just about anything you’d want in an ultra-modern, contemporary city. Living there was going to be far from roughing it, and yet you could still get a taste of the old, the traditional: peasant-garbed street vendors, flaking adobe buildings, beautiful dark women walking with their duenna. And Perez always had some small job for me involving paperwork or correspondence—whose purpose was rarely clear to me—to semi-justify the overly generous salary he gave me.

  But Ceelie never quite broke out of the silence she brought with her from the States. If anything, it grew worse. Her sentences grew shorter; replies to my questions were soon reduced to but one or two words. If there was a reply at all.

  “How about the Patinata today, Ceelie?” It was a roller-skating rink up on the roof of the Centro Commercial Chacaito shopping center. Ceelie used to love to skate, once, a long time ago.

  Nothing. I waited. Sometimes her replies just required a little waiting for. And she did look at me. Eyes rounder, somehow, than I remembered them. She stared up at me like a mute, or someone who didn’t know the language.

  After about ten minutes I said, “Esta bein, eso es. Fine—okay, that’s the way it is.” Still nothing. She looked at me. I knew she heard me. “Perdoneme, claro. De nada. I beg your pardon, of course. Don’t mention it.”

  Funny how I started thinking about what a beautiful child she had become right about then. More and more beautiful since the day we’d left the States, even as she became more and more resistant. The Venezuelan sun had baked her, scorched her, smoked her. Her complexion darker with each passing day, her black hair shinier, until on that afternoon on the balcony where we had our little one-way dialogue when her hair seemed almost incandescent.

  And yet I could no longer communicate with this beautiful thing who had once been my daughter. I could not guess her language. “Muchas gracias,” I said sarcastically, with an exaggerated bow, and left her to her silence.

  In my dreams, disease had come into our sunny house in Caracas: dysentery and cholera, typhoid and hepatitis. I had brought my daughter, kicking and screaming, into a nightmarish, dangerous country. Chagas’ disease, where the assassin bugs defecate next to the puncture wounds they’ve made. River blindness, where worms live in the eyeball. Human botflies eating my sweet baby from within, leaving her in the form of inch-long grubs. Fer de lance and bushmaster entwined within her dead body.

  Sometimes I woke up with shadows dancing in the corners of my eyes, as if I’d taken Yoppo, the hallucinogen the Yanomami use. Short bodies with malformed, rotted faces, eyes that were human and not human. Rug rats and yard apes. Chattering and screeching to each other in a tongue I could not follow. Dancing in the shadows.

  And then there was the day Ceelie’s silence did break.

  I’d taken her to a public garden to look at some flowers and flowering trees. She’d always loved flowers before, and back in the States there was nothing to compare with these. Rose of Venezuela, red flower sunbursts so bright it was as if the stems were in flames. And the redder still Arbol del Fuego, red as blood. The purplish red Bougainvillea, the orange cockscombs on the Bird of Paradise blossoms.

  But still she said nothing. She smelled too closely, she tried to taste—like a two-year-old, I thought, who can keep nothing out of her mouth—until I pulled her away. I could almost see her as some poorly trained pet.

  Then some native kids came along. Dark and dirty, barely dressed. Their Spanish a dialect completely unrecognizable to me. They screamed and yammered, smacking their lips and popping their tongues in a cacophony of strange sounds. But their faces seemed unusually ardent as they made these strange sounds to one another, their blackened cheeks and foreheads glowing with sweat. Ceelie was drawn to them almost immediately.

  I couldn’t stop her. She pulled out of m
y hand with a strength I hadn’t thought possible. She circled the small band of dark children, making yaps and sharp staccato cries and little guttural noises much like their own, and soon they were chorusing her, taking the lead away from her and then following it again, until the garden was filled by the strange, multi-part song.

  Passers-by gathered around the show, and after a few minutes I had a difficult time seeing Ceelie and the other children. In a sudden panic, I pushed my way through the mass of native people, ignoring their obviously angry but unintelligible whispers and mutterings.

  But I still couldn’t see Ceelie. The distorted song was louder than ever—it felt as if there were wet, hot waves of it washing over my body—but I couldn’t make out Ceelie’s individual voice in all of that boiling noise. The surrounding grown-ups pressed closer to me. I looked into each of their dark faces, but there wasn’t a feeling or a thought or even an expression I could quite recognize. As they pushed closer I felt as if I were in the middle of a stampede, the herd singing at times a dirge for me, at times a battle cry. The dark faces grinned, but even their teeth showed no lightening, no contrast, so that it was a further darkness which greeted me each time they opened their mouths to sing.

  And at the edges of the crowd, at the hallucinogenic peripherals of my vision, were the natives. The Fierce Ones, the savages in their loincloths. Tattooed bodies and dark looks and painted spears. Grim monkeys, every one.

  I haven’t seen Ceelie since that time. I spent hours searching the gardens, the surrounding streets, calling and screaming, finally yammering and jabbering in a crazed attempt to duplicate their song. But my Ceelie never answered.

  Finally the local police took me away; they thought I was crazy. Somehow Perez had me out in less than an hour and put me to bed.

  Again, I dreamed of shadows dancing. Ceelie dancing with all those grim monkeys, singing a challenge.

  “You’re sure these aren’t the Yanomami,” I asked Perez.