Christmas Trees & Monkeys

by Keohane, Dan

OK, you’ve had a couple of heavy stories to suffer through. Time to get weird with a story that I came up with while sitting on the toilet.

  Remember in my “Monkey...” discussion I mentioned a couple of magazines that deal exclusively in “surreal fiction?” Neither is around anymore that I know of - one was called The Urbanite. The Urbanite liked to have theme-issues, and one day while reading the magazine I learned that the next theme was “Zodiac”. Hmm, thought I, a surreal story dealing with the Zodiac. I thought of stars, then the constellations, then I had to go to the bathroom.

  Sitting upon the Daily Throne, I pondered the constellations (I didn’t have any reading material at that moment). What came to me was an image of a man standing in his back yard with a spoon. The constellations were pouring out of the night sky into this spoon. Well, I had to finish up what I was doing, and thought nothing more about this tale until I next sat down — to write, that is. I took the scene, and began writing in stream of consciousness. That means I wrote whatever came to mind, with only one rule - I wanted twelve sections, one for each of the zodiac signs. There really isn’t any relation between the twelve Signs of the Zodiac and what happens in each section, aside from what I might have snuck in during later drafts of the story. I just wanted twelve sections. Call me shallow, go on.

  And, here it is.

  Ptolemy

  I.

  Capricorn dripped into the spoon like black syrup. The silver plating sparkled; reflected the stars. Adam lowered his arm, terrified of the act and the thought he might spill. Digging under the grass with his free hand, he lifted a handful of dirt and poured the constellation into the hole.

  He replaced the mound of earth. Small stars flowed around the edges as the black ether spread under the weight. Slowly, as if drowning, the pinpoints faded into the backyard. The pure and horrible understanding, which had gripped him ten minutes earlier and sent him running into the house for the spoon and gun, did not abate. Adam cried, seeing in his periphery the remaining stars swirling above, as if gently stirred by the spoon. The utensil was no longer in his hand, however. It lay beside him on the ground, dark, reflecting only the light from the kitchen window.

  Adam pushed the revolver’s barrel to the roof of his mouth. He pulled the trigger, freeing the flame and smoke into his frightened brain.

  II.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Camden opened his eyes. The dreamless, swirling vortex of sleep burned away under the harsh glare of sunlight streaming in from the window. He looked around the room, trying to remember. Her leg protruded from behind the couch, tinted blue in the daylight.

  He remembered. Mostly. At some scattered point after last night’s violence he must have simply lay down on the red-spattered carpet and slept. Why would he do that? Perhaps he’d fainted.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  The words belonged to the woman. Though she could no longer speak, her nervous, apologetic voice echoed in his skull as if his brain’s only remaining thought. Originally spoken last night, before he pushed his way in, intent on salvaging some tattered remnants of pride lost to those three words.

  Now, laying on her living room floor, he couldn’t even recall the woman’s name. Couldn’t quite hold on to the reasons for his original obsession.

  Camden stood slowly. His hands were still wet. What time was it? He smeared the blood across his tee-shirt.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “You’re sorry. Fine. I get it. It wouldn’t have worked out anyway.”

  He looked around the small apartment. Though her body was out of sight from his new vantage (had he put her there?…yes, he thought so…), her blood was all over the room. Camden looked despondently at the broken statuette on the rug. His heart seemed to stop, then start, sputtering like a neglected engine.

  When he finally found the mobility to turn and leave the apartment, he yelled behind him, “Why did I come here, anyway?” He waited for the elevator. The apartment door hung open. He did not go back. Instead, he let himself be carried down to the basement.

  III.

  “Get him out of here, now!” As if swatting away bugs, the police sergeant waved at the two EMTs. They remained standing, one at each end of the gurney and its bleeding occupant. They watched the night sky fall, draining like bath water towards a single point in the lawn. The portable flood lights dimmed respectfully to the blinding stars, which twisted and compressed into the earth beside where Adam’s body was found.

  “Ralph, please! The man’s dying, for God’s sake.”

  Ralph looked down. Adam’s broken skull was tightly bandaged, but blood still leaked onto the gurney. The EMT made a concerted effort not to look skyward as he lifted one end. The action broke his partner’s spell. For the moment they ignored the sight above and carried the bleeding man to the ambulance. Behind them followed Adam’s son, home from college the week before and who had been immersed in laundry when his father pulled the trigger.

  Ralph hit the emergency lights as he got behind the wheel. His partner and the son secured the gurney in the back as the ambulance pulled out of the driveway. Ralph stared ahead, eyes riveted on the flashes of trees in the headlights.

  Standing in the backyard, the police sergeant watched the night sky. From all points, stars drifted and coalesced above him. They crashed down with dizzying size and velocity, contracting into a single brilliant line burrowing without sound or fanfare into the ground at his feet.

  Something moved in the grass. The sergeant watched numbly as a garden snake melted into the light, dripping with the cosmos into the dying man’s lawn. Below his shoes the ground rippled like water.

  IV.

  He was hungry. Camden looked up between the cliffs of the buildings. The late morning sky was tinted orange, the constant haze of smog impervious to dispersion, save from the occasional typhoon. He emerged from the alley. The sidewalk was crowded, many people either standing immobile, portable radios pressed to their ears, or looking skyward as if waiting for some divine sign to help them make it to lunch. Camden did not bother contemplating the reasons for their behavior. These people no longer existed in his world, anymore than he in theirs. Like a nagging headache, an inner voice asked why he did it; what he would do now. Camden buried it, mentally grinding the voice into the concrete until, at last, the questions were as dead as his life.

  His existence up until now had been pointless. He understood that more than anyone. Throughout the years he held to some vague illusion of hope. Someday he could rise from the ditch he had dug since childhood, change his life. No longer. A wall, eternal in height and thoroughly unscalable, rose in his future. It was the last wall in the maze, too late to realize the path was wrong. In a few minutes the swarm of police, who he imagined were closing in at this very moment, would push him against this wall. Life would end.

  He was still hungry. Wong’s Diner offered itself before him. The lunchtime horde hadn’t crammed themselves through its doors yet. It would have to do.

  V.

  Adam squeezed his son’s hand. Benjamin barely felt it. The siren screamed like professional mourners come a bit too early.

  “Why did you do it?”

  Keeping his eyes open took too much energy, so the dying man let them fall closed. He thought about the question. Benjamin’s grip didn’t waver. When he spoke, Adam’s voice was no more than a scratch on a blackboard.

  “They were right.”

  Benjamin leaned closer to his father’s mouth. “What? What did you say?”

  “I have a hole in my head. I made a hole in my head....”

  “It’s OK. Don’t talk. We’re almost there.”

  “We’re the center of the universe.” He licked his lips, sending a line of blood down his chin. “Everything revolves around —”

  One of the monitors beeped wildly, then settled back to a steady rhythm. As the technician checked his father’s pulse, Benjamin watched the bandages slowly turn crimson.

  “Why i
sn’t he dead?”

  The ambulance surged upward like a ship riding a wave. It settled back, on course as before. The technician turned to face the driver. “What the hell was that?”

  The ambulance heaved once more. A storm brewed at sea.

  Benjamin looked at his father’s face. Adam stared back at him.

  VI.

  The chicken was dry. Camden absently plucked a hair from the skin. Sitting in the darkest corner of the restaurant, he lifted the plate. The yellow place mat sported a circle with elaborate renderings of animals. ‘Zodiac’ sprawled across the top, the characters almost unreadable, implying a long-lost Asian alphabet. The circle was divided, pie-like, into twelve groups of years. Camden squinted in the dim light, searching for the year of his birth, the beginning of the proverbial line.

  “What the hell is it all about?” A question posed not to him but to an invisible expert standing among four or five drunken customers. When Camden first arrived they’d been riveted to the television. As far as he could tell they had not left their swaying vigil. He ascertained nothing from the snippets of conversation drifting by his ear. It didn’t matter. The world for him was completely contained in this dark corner, among the flakes of chicken skin and the greasy piece of paper depicting his life as a snake.

  If you were born in one of these years, the text within his pie explained, you were born in the Year of the Serpent. Camden thought that was appropriate. He licked from his lips what juice could be sucked off a bone then read on. You are a clever individual, crafty in matters of bumpy, oh here we go hang on tight family is not as important as with some —

  Camden closed his eyes, opened them, stared at the shadows in the corner. He eventually looked back to the horoscope and tried to read it from the top. The characters swirled within the borders of his pie slice. They grouped into words, broke off, bounced off the lines separating the serpent from the rat.

  The booth surged, slid under the wall which folded over him like a wave, then all was still. The wall rose beside him, straight as before. Nevertheless he gripped the edge of the table, and slowly turned his eyes to something rolling towards him in his peripheral vision.

  VII.

  They ran atop the wave but did not fall. In fact, the vertigo Benjamin felt as they raced along the hospital corridor was more visual then physical. It seemed as if the walls and ceiling bent naturally with the rolling of the floor. The people contained within their writhing confines did likewise. He wanted to be frightened, to scream. His father bled atop the gurney, and the son knew this was no time for such considerations. Benjamin accompanied the EMTs into the operating room. They spouted details to the doctors who ran alongside. No one noticed him. Everyone was busy watching the walls expand and contract.

  The dying man’s stare pulled Benjamin to him.

  “Are we moving?” Adam’s voice was stronger, but Benjamin took no solace in the fact.

  “Dad, it’s OK. We’re at the hospital.”

  “...or is the Universe rearranging itself?”

  “What?”

  “Excuse me, sir. You need to leave right now.” The nurse gripped Benjamin’s arm and pulled him backwards. The dying man looked at the ceiling and opened his mouth. The bandages fell loose, too heavy with blood and brain. It was the last Benjamin saw of his father before the funeral.

  VIII.

  Somewhere deep in the belly of Wong’s Diner, employees yelled to each other in Cantonese. After the floor twisted and writhed for a second time, the congregation standing before the television parted, screaming towards their own alcohol-infused havens.

  Camden released his grip on the table. The third wave rolled towards the booth, curving the floor tiles, raising the table like a boat in its moorings riding out a storm. Not knowing what else to do, he reached for another piece of chicken. And watched his spoon.

  The pinpoint of light, which had appeared moments before in the center of the spoon’s belly, was now abnormally bright. It seemed to Camden that the light emanated from the soiled metal rather than reflected by it, since no light hung overhead. He considered picking it up, licking the light like a last drop of pudding. He did not.

  The light’s intensity grew, as did the frequency of the waves. As soon as his invisible corner of the world began falling back into normalcy it would rise again with the preternatural tide. The light from the spoon reached the ceiling, spilled along the cardboard tiles like smoke. Camden watched the tendrils reach along the surface, then whip back and through the ceiling, as if some breach had been attained somewhere far above. This done, the light widened, oscillated dark to light. He looked around. The restaurant was gone.

  IX.

  The waves lessened in intensity. Benjamin stood in the parking lot, surrounded by abandoned cars and spectators. Together they looked at the starless night above. He thought of how, when lights are dimmed, moviegoers fall silent in expectation. Benjamin sensed that not only here, but across the world the crowd had hushed.

  The pavement rippled for a moment then stilled. Benjamin wanted to think about what had happened, if even to plan his father’s funeral. He could not. With the silent, chain-smoking crowd around him, he watched the sky and waited for the final chord to strike. All eyes slowly looked to a bright glow spreading quickly across the eastern horizon.

  X.

  His booth hung in an ocean of black, the depth of which seemed endless. Racing from every direction, a swirling mass of stars coalesced into rivers. These tributaries of light came together under the table, rose as one towards what was once the ceiling. The sky above swam with the tide of a thousand billion stars racing on a predetermined course into the abyss of space.

  Camden reached for the geyser before him. Instantly, his physical self merged with the metaphysical river. His arms, legs and head spread atom by atom through this corner of the universe. His soul rose in glorious splendor above the table. Then it stopped. What was once Camden Lee spread along the water-stained ceiling tiles, absorbed into their fiber. He tried to speak, tried to look. But he was broken into basic particles, fused into the panels, physical only in the sense of this new environment.

  No sound could reach his mind, no light. Time stretched out, unseen, reaching everywhere at once. Camden wondered if his mind truly existed anymore. He wondered if he was hovering above the booth, a blind, invisible spirit. He wondered if he would ever die.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  The voice drifted past, settled back atop him. It repeated, over and over. And he could not scream.

  XI.

  “…Mister Mitchell, I really don’t think this is a good time for political double-speak. What the hell happened?”

  “Larry, honestly, I haven’t got an answer for you. Everything on the planet is the same as it was. But —”

  “But everything up there,” the host said, pointing up, “is definitely not the same. We deserve to know what happened.”

  Kenton Mitchell sat lower in the chair and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “We’re trying to get a bearing on our exact location.” He stopped, realizing the line he’d just crossed.

  “Our exact location,” the host echoed. “Are you saying the Earth moved?”

  “We’re not saying anything at the moment. We need to —”

  “Oh come on. For God’s sake….excuse me, folks. That sun setting outside our studios is not ours. It’s bigger and it’s red. We should have been able to see the Big Dipper last night but personally I couldn’t find it anywhere. In fact, I couldn’t find ANY constellation. Not that there aren’t any stars. Oh, no. There’s lots of those. I’m no astronomer, Mister Mitchell. But something up there is very, very different.”

  The other man offered a slow, deliberate sigh. “Listen. The God’s-honest truth is we don’t know what’s going on. We’ve got theories, the strongest of which is that we passed through some kind of....” He looked down, searching for some rational set of words for the million souls listening. “We think we passed through some ki
nd of hole in space.”

  A pause, then, “You mean… a black hole. Something like that?”

  “Or something. There are any number of possible phenomena. All theoretical, mind you. Perhaps a black hole, or what’s commonly known as a worm hole. Something.

  “Like I said, until now they’ve been mostly theory. Whatever it was, we seem to have drifted in, then cast across the universe to where we now orbit a red giant star. The moon appears to be our own, and obviously no man-made satellites were lost, based on the simple fact everyone’s watching us on television right now.” He knew that by morning he would be out of a job.

  “We seem to have come as a package deal.”

  XII.

  Benjamin sat on his father’s porch, half-listening to whatever snippets of the CNN interview drifted through the window. The other half of his mind listened to the sounds of men and woman scouring the backyard under a myriad of floodlights, looking for something most knew in their heart would never be found.

  “It’s kind of strange,” the police sergeant said, taking another sip of beer. “Why weren’t we all burned up or frozen? It seems kind of odd we materialized the exact distance from that monstrous sun to keep so many things the same.”

  Benjamin didn’t reply. The man sitting beside him arrived at the house after the funeral, and never left. In a way, he was looking for answers just like the scientists and military folk on the grass below, only he sought them through quiet conversation and a beer. Above them, fighting for attention over the spotlights, the stars shone more brilliantly than either man could remember.

  As the night progressed, the pinpoints of light rose over the house, then dropped past the trees as the planet rolled on its axis. Benjamin couldn’t tell much of a difference in their appearance, but knew that what he looked at, prior to the events of the last two days, had never been seen by human eyes.